Voodoo Woman

by Devon Marshall

  Flynn nodded a thank you, then headed quickly upstairs.

  As soon as she saw Dana, asleep in a massive double bed, buried beneath a sea of blankets, all of the anger and the sadness she’d felt leaving the body of Ariel Rousseau to burn in the temple, drained away, replaced by relief that this woman was alive. Flynn perched on an edge of the bed, gently laid a hand on Dana’s cheek, surprised to feel how feverish she was. The reporter’s breathing came in shallow, rapid bursts.

  “Leon said she might run a fever for a couple hours.”

  Heavy curtains had been drawn across the windows, and the only, illumination came from a small ornate glass lamp on a table by the curtained windows. Erin Krueger sat at the table, a magazine spread open in front of her. “He doesn’t seem to be too concerned about it,” she added with a shrug. “He and his assistant cleaned her up some when I brought her in. All that Voodoo shit painted on her—did you know they used fucking rooster blood? God knows how I’m going to get that shit out of my jacket lining. Anyway, there toothbrushes and toiletries in the bathroom, and that Chan kid makes some pretty decent coffee.”

  In her sleep, Dana’s facial muscles twitched and contracted spasmodically, her eyes darting back and forth beneath her closed lids as though she were dreaming. At length, Flynn stood up reluctantly from the bed and went to join Erin at the table.

  “Y’all handled yourself pretty well back there.” She leaned scrubbed both palms over her face, smiled between her fingers at the agent.

  Erin tilted her a modest look. “I’ve seen worse things than tonight’s little drama. But it’s going to take a toll on your reporter friend there. ” Flynn nodded weary agreement. “She may need to talk to someone. If so, I can guarantee this guy’s discretion—” Erin reached into her pocket, removed a white card from it, held that out across the table.

  Flynn took the card and turned it over to read the name and telephone number printed on one side.

  “Dr Goldman deals with people who may have experienced traumatic events but whose, um, careers prevent them from talking to ordinary professionals,” Erin explained.

  “Thanks.”

  “And you’d better have this back.”

  Erin took the Beretta from her jacket, slid it across the tabletop to Flynn. She pocketed it to be disposed of later.

  “Eventually someone might figure out that there were two different weapons involved in temple shootings,” Erin pointed out.

  Flynn shrugged. “Maybe. But it’ll take a good long time.” She gave a wry smile to the agent. “New Orleans ain’t exactly in a hurry, in case y’all hadn’t noticed that.”

  “I have noticed, yes.”

  There was a knock at the door and Chan entered, smiling and carrying a tray laid with two bone china coffee cups and a silver coffee pot. The houseboy smiled his way to them and continued to smile as he poured coffee for both women. There was sugar and creamer on the tray which he left for them. “Anything you need, please fetch me,” he said.

  Erin stayed to drink her coffee and afterwards, as shrugged into her jacket, she told Flynn that she would be in touch… “about that favor you owe me.” Erin paused, and looked speculatively at the reporter asleep in the bed. “You must care about her a great deal to have taken the risks you did tonight.”

  Flynn nodded. “I guess I do.”

  “The Agency taught us that love was dangerous because it could compromise us as operatives.”

  “I’m no longer an Agency operative. Neither are you.”

  Erin allowed a brief enigmatic smile to cross her lips, then she cracked the door and stepped out of the room. The door closed softly behind her. Flynn poured more coffee for herself, and settled in to keep watch on Dana through the night.

  Despite the adrenalin and the coffee sloshing through her system, Flynn must have fallen asleep because she woke suddenly, struggling up from the chair and blinking in the sudden glare of the lamp. Dana was still deeply asleep, but she felt less feverish to the touch and her face now wore a peaceful expression.

  Flynn went into the bathroom and there she took the pages from Ariel’s journal from her pocket, holding them over the sink as she lit the corner of the paper with her lighter. She waited, holding the edge between thumb and forefinger, as the paper burned. When the last piece had crumbled, she ran the faucet to wash the ragged, blackened specks away. Then she sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and made a call to Pierce Boudreau.

  The detective sounded equally relieved to hear from her, and irked about the protracted absence of communication. “Where in hell have you been, Flynn? I’ve been calling you all fucking day and night,” she stormed.

  “I’ve been with Dana Jordan,” Flynn told her.

  Boudreau’s tone took on an instant hint of suspicion. “Yeah? And where is the gallant reporter? Her car is still outside of Voodoo Realty, but there’s been no sign of her, nor of Ariel Rousseau.”

  “I don’t know about Ariel, but Dana’s fine. She had a migraine and had to leave her car in the alleyway. She called me to come pick her up and baby-sit her.”

  “Uh huh. You’re turning into a regular Florence Nightingale, ain’t’cha?” Boudreau remarked. She was quiet then for a moment, at length asking if Flynn knew anything about a fire had broken out at a North Rampart property last night?

  Flynn raised a glance to her own reflection in the mirror above the sink, took a silent breath in before she told the next lie to her friend. “Nope. What happened?”

  “Some property owned by Helen Dufresne caught on fire. There were three people inside. Fire Department didn’t get there in time to save any evidence, so we’ll likely never know if the blaze began accidentally, or if it was set deliberately. Interesting thing is, two of the bodies appear to have suffered gunshot wounds, and one was stabbed.”

  “Oh my. Any idea who the bodies belong to?”

  “Right now it looks like Antoine Camber, and Helen Dufresne were the shooting victims…” Boudreau hesitated long enough to clear her throat. “We think the third might be Ariel Rousseau. I’m sorry, Flynn.”

  Flynn said nothing. She listened to Boudreau breathing down the line. Then the detective said, “You’ve been with Dana Jordan all night, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Migraine, huh?”

  More silence poured down the line. Flynn pictured Boudreau on the end of that silence, the way the detective would be frowning and gnawing on her lower lip as she mentally worked through what she was hearing, and then tried to match it to something in reality. “Someone fired up the garbage grinder and fed three people down it tonight,” Boudreau said finally, “but I think you’re telling me that you had nothing to do with that, right? Dana Jordan was never anywhere near Voodoo Realty. She never had anything to do with this situation. You had nothing to do with it either because you were with Dana Jordan all night. Is that how you want to play it?”

  “That’s how it is, Pierce.”

  “Fine. But just one thing—?”

  “What’s that, Pierce?”

  “I fucking told y’all not to trust that green-eyed bitch Ariel Rousseau, didn’t I?”

  A smile tugged at Flynn’s mouth. “That you did, Pierce. That you did. And I should’ve listened to y’all.”

  Boudreau grunted. “Yeah. Well, you be careful, Flynn. I’ll call you later, let you know what the Fire Department and the coroner find.”

  “Okay.”

  Flynn hung up. She knew what the Fire Department and the coroner were going to find—exactly what she had left for them to find. She closed the phone and returned to the bedroom where Dana still hadn’t stirred beneath her nest of blankets. Watching her for a moment, Flynn realized that she didn’t much care if she had to lie to Boudreau, or to anyone else, to protect this woman.

  The first light of dawn had begun seeping into the sky, reducing the night to a thin smokiness when Flynn got up to switch off the lamp and crack the curtains a couple inches. Things always looked better in
natural light, even if it was wan and still edged with a chill. As she slipped back between the covers, Dana groaned awake fully for the first time.

  Flynn smiled down into the sleepy dark eyes. “Hey. How y’all doing?”

  “Feel like I’ve been asleep for days—” Dana frowned. “How long have I been here?”

  “A few hours.”

  “God, I’m so thirsty.”

  With Leon’s warning about not allowing her to drink too much too fast in mind, Flynn helped Dana to sit up and to take a few sips of water. Despite the inauspicious circumstances, she couldn’t help but notice Dana’s nakedness as the blankets fell away from her. She had to force herself not to stare. Now was definitely not the time for that. She also noticed the wound again. The edges of it were slightly puffy, a pale reddish shade, and smeared in some antiseptic lotion. Flynn’s gut churned with the knowledge that she had helped to bring this situation about.

  “More,” Dana panted. But Flynn shook her head.

  “Doc says you have to take it slow, or you’ll be sick.”

  “Fuck him. I’m dying of thirst here.”

  “No way. Dr Leon’s orders. I ain’t cleaning up whoop either. Not even for y’all.”

  Dana laid back down. “Seems like you’re always rescuing me from something, Flynn,” she said, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips.

  Flynn shrugged. “All part of the service.”

  “And I can’t believe you saw me naked. That’s something for me to be embarrassed about for the next twenty years or so.”

  Flynn chuffed a quiet laugh. “Would it help if I told you that I didn’t look?”

  Dana considered this, then shook her head, her smile widening. “Actually, I think I would be even more offended if you hadn’t looked. And forget what I said about being embarrassed. The hell I am.” She stopped smiling then, and flicked a concerned look at Flynn. “What happened to Ariel? Did you—kill her, too?”

  Flynn shook her head. “Ariel killed herself. She stabbed herself with the dagger they were going to use on you.”

  Dana turned away. Misinterpreting the gesture as one of disappointment or disgust, Flynn felt her heart begin to crack. “Would you rather that I hadn’t killed them?” she asked in a low voice.

  Dana looked around at her again, frowning but with a softness and puzzlement in her dark eyes. “No. No, God help me, but I’m glad you did what you did. I don’t know what it says about me—I don’t like to think about it either—but I was so scared, Flynn. On that slab—altar—whatever the fuck it was, I thought I was going to die, for sure. All I could think about was how I’d die before I could tell you that—” she broke off and shook her head. “I didn’t want to die and for it to be left between us the way it was.”

  Flynn swallowed, her heart hammering as she wondered what Dana been about to confess. She watched a shudder wrack its way through Dana’s body, then two fat tears squeeze out from beneath her dark eyelashes. Flynn reached up and wiped them away with her fingertips. “It’s over—” she began, but Dana shook her head again, raising a hand to halt Flynn’s words.

  “Listen to me,” the reporter said firmly. Her dark eyes implored Flynn, who swallowed and nodded. “I know that we all have a bit of bad in us, that we all have the capability of doing what we know isn’t right, and then finding a way to justify it to ourselves. Doesn’t matter what we tell ourselves otherwise—it’s still going to be there, buried beneath all the civility and goodness—that primal part of us capable of killing another human being. It can get out easily if we find ourselves, or someone that we care about, in danger. But that isn’t all we are. It isn’t all you are, Flynn. There’s so much that’s good in you. Yes, there’s also violence, and that makes me nervous. I won’t lie to you about that. But there’s a whole lot more to you. Those are the parts I want to get to know better.”

  Her voice made thick by emotion, Flynn said, “I guess my primal brain is just a little closer to the surface than most. I spent a long enough time relying on it to survive, so I shouldn’t be surprised that it comes back so easily even now. Ariel said something to me—she said that you could never be with me. That you would never be able to reconcile the two sides of me.”

  “Yeah, well, Ariel Rousseau was not exactly what you’d call a stable and reliable judge of matters.” Dana tilted a curios look at Flynn. “Ariel told me that you killed your father…was he the first person you killed?”

  Flynn swallowed, nodded.

  “You made a deal with Agent Krueger for her help last night. She told me about it when we arrived here—before that crazy little doctor guy gave me something to make me sleep. You put yourself in her debt for me. I don’t take that lightly. Erin Krueger isn’t someone whose debt I would like to be in. But you did that for me, Flynn. And now Krueger knows about you.”

  “Erin isn’t going to be a problem.”

  “She’s an FBI agent. How can you be so sure?” Dana frowned.

  Flynn twitched a shrug. “I don’t know. I just—we’re not so unalike, Erin Krueger and me. Trust me on that.”

  Dana began to question this, but Flynn only shook her head. “Later. I’ll tell you about it later,” she promised. “For now just trust me that Erin is not going to suddenly decide to arrest me.”

  “I hope not, Flynn, because I’d hate to lose you now that I’ve finally got you.”

  Flynn felt her face grow hot and tight. Heat prickled at the backsides of her eyelids, too, and her heart clamored in her chest as though it were a small creature trapped in there, trying to find a way out. She swallowed hard. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good,” Dana murmured. She pushed the blankets back. “Hold me, Flynn, please?”

  With only a momentary hesitation, Flynn stood up and toed both of her shoes off before slipping between the blankets. The sudden nearness of Dana, the feel of her warm, naked skin, almost stopped Flynn from breathing. She wrapped both of her arms around Dana, pulled her close until she could feel the hard buds of the reporter’s nipples brushing the underside of her arm.

  “You okay? You feel kind of tense.” Warm breath blew softly against Flynn’s neck.

  She bit her lip, drew in a shuddering breath. “You have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now.”

  “That would be kinda inappropriate timing, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would be sucky timing. Doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it though.”

  Dana laughed quietly. Then she did something quite unexpected. She raised her face to Flynn’s and kissed her. The warm, wet urgency of the reporter’s mouth on hers sent a surge of desire through Flynn so strong that she suspected it might’ve knocked her on her ass if she hadn’t been laying down already. Heart racing, Flynn slid her hands down Dana’s back, tracing the outline of her ribcage, her hip, the outside of her thigh. Even from there, she could feel Dana’s heat radiating from between her legs.

  “Don’t stop there,” Dana sighed, pressing closer and opening her legs to allow Flynn access. Her fingers slid into the short hair at the back of Flynn’s head.

  It would have been so easy to just make love to her right then, and really, it was all that Flynn wanted to do. But she was aware that Dana was still groggy from the drugs, and emotional from her experience, and for those reasons it would have felt too much like taking unfair advantage. With a groan then, she disentangled herself from the reporter.

  “I can’t. Not right now.” Desire made her voice hoarse. She shook her head, smiled down at Dana’s confused expression. “It wouldn’t be right. I want it to be right.”

  “Oh God, now you decide to be romantic!” Dana groaned, but she kissed Flynn again, a chaste little peck on the cheek this time. Then she snuggled into the crook of her arm. “What I would really like to do right now is take a shower. For about, oh, eight hours,” she added wryly.

  “There are some toiletries and things in the bathroom. Make yourself at home,” Flynn told her.

  “Mm. You sure you can survive w
ithout me for a little while?”

  Flynn felt one of Dana’s legs twine around her own and she tensed, jerking a wide-eyed look at the reporter, who gave her a teasing smile.

  “Oh , you’re that sort, huh? Likes her women naked and submissive.”

  “You’re delirious,” Flynn muttered.

  “I know you said that you want it to be right—”

  Flynn nodded, scared to speak because she was sure she’d say Screw right!

  “Well, sometimes ‘right’ is all well and good, but it just isn’t right,“Dana added and then she kissed Flynn again. This time, when Flynn tried to pull away, the reporter held on hard. “You’ve strung me along for five years, Willie Rae,” she murmured against Flynn’s lips, her breath tickling there. “I don’t want to wait another five fucking minutes. If you don’t make love to me as soon as I come out of that shower, I’m going to kill you.”

  “Y’all have threatened that before.” Flynn started to laugh, then gave a mock yelp as Dana swatted her on the shoulder. She also unbuttoned Flynn’s shirt, let her hands linger over the PI’s small but form breasts and the flat hardness of her abdomen.

  “Just be naked when I get back,” Dana ordered her.

  Flynn shook her head, affecting a shocked expression. “Now who’s being all dominant?” she joked.

  “Oh, you better believe it.”

  Flynn’s heart hitched, and then thumped hard again. She lay, feeling slightly dazed but unusually happy, and watched Dana walk into the bathroom, enjoying the sight of the reporter’s naked body. She felt her lips tingle where Dana’s had touched them, a sensation she wished would never stop. You can try to fool yourself all you like about this, Willie Rae, she told herself, but the truth is that you’re in love with her.

  “Oh boy,” Flynn muttered to the ceiling.

  Dana re-emerged from the bathroom—not eight hours but still a good thirty minutes—with a fluffy pink towel wrapped around her middle and her hair still damp. She was greeted by the very welcome sight of a naked Flynn sitting on the side of the bed, and she paused for a moment to let her gaze drift appreciatively over the PI’s lean, hard-muscled body. Flynn was really too handsome to be called any of those traditionally feminine words. She was possessed instead of a faintly masculine beauty that made Dana a little breathless. Five years, she thought. Five years I’ve been waiting for this damn woman. There had been other women during those years, none of the dates startling successes, and there’d been only one with whom it had gotten to the physical stage. That had ended abruptly, and unhappily.