No Limits

by Alison Kent

The other woman nodded briskly, her razor-cut hair swinging as she began to unroll the gauze. “Sure. To say hi to. Mrs. Callahan always gives me tomatoes and cukes from her garden. I pay Mr. DuPont to mow since the yard is so big and he has a tractor.”

  “I’m sure Terrill has questioned them already, but do you think they’d talk to me if you introduced me? Lisa and I went to school together. She’s been my best friend for years.”

  Paschelle looked up. Her eyes widened. “And you might think of something to ask that Terrill hasn’t?”

  “It’s a dumb idea, isn’t it? I mean, either they saw her leave with someone or alone, or they saw someone take her.”

  “Assuming they saw anything at all.”

  “Like I said, dumb.”

  “Not necessarily. Mr. DuPont has been visiting his daughter in Houston since Monday morning. I’ve been collecting his mail. It’s late, but if you want, we can walk it over and see if he saw Lisa that day.”

  Micky was already reaching for the scissors and the long length of gauze. “You finish Simon’s omelet. I’ll patch up my arm. If we could find something that would help…”

  She couldn’t even put what she was thinking, what she was feeling, into words. “Just cook. Go. Cook.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Paschelle said with a smile.

  Thirty-three

  T he omelet helped, but Simon had just about run his last lap for the night. Out of the dozen boxes, they’d knocked back six filled mostly with documents related to Bear’s business as a land man. They’d run across a few newspaper clippings, too—most were stories detailing cases over which he’d presided while on the bench and had been dropped down loose inside—but nothing seemed out of the ordinary or rang anyone’s mystery dinner theater bells.

  Simon pushed up from his chair and stretched. King had headed for the kitchen and another beer twenty minutes ago. Simon decided he’d better grab one for himself before they were all gone, and offered to bring one back to Terrill.

  “No, I’m good,” the deputy said. “I’d like to finish up a couple more boxes, and at this point even one brew’s liable to do me in.”

  Simon glanced at the clock on Paschelle’s sound system. Midnight-thirty. He was so close to being done in that no amount of beer was going to make any difference. “I’ll be back to give you a hand in a few.”

  Terrill waved him off without looking up from the files. Simon made for the kitchen, finding it empty, and frowning as he pushed open the screen door onto the porch, where he found only Kingdom. No Micky. No Paschelle.

  “Where are the girls?” he asked, not worried, but not exactly thrilled to find them gone.

  “The women walked over to one of the neighbors’ houses to take him his mail Chelle’s been picking up. I expect they’ll be back in a few.”

  Kinda late for visiting neighbors, to Simon’s way of thinking. “Is that what you’re doing out here? Waiting?”

  “Seemed more productive than digging through boxes thinking any of Bear’s shit is going to help Terrill find his wife.”

  That much they agreed on. “No, the boxes aren’t helping. At least not yet.”

  “You’d probably get a quicker answer to what Bear’s been up to if you sweet-talked Lorna Savoy. And you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty. Now your dick’s another matter,” King said, gesturing with his empty longneck. “Unless you’ve found it a good home with your Ms. Ferrer.”

  Simon wasn’t about to discuss sex or Micky with his cousin. That wasn’t part of making amends. “Hearing what Lorna has to say isn’t a bad idea.”

  “I’ve been known to have a few good ones.”

  “The orchard was a good one,” Simon said, an olive branch, a peace offering.

  It took King several moments to respond, as if he were weighing Simon’s intent. “That was a tough loss. The trees were just up to producing a good amount of the Satsumas when Rita blew through. Damn hurricanes. It’ll take the new trees a while to get up to speed, and then all we can do is hope no more bad bitches pick Louisiana to come ashore.”

  King had said we. All we can do is hope. And not a smart-ass remark in his short speech. Maybe he was as tired as Simon was of their war. Maybe one battle at a time they could end the thing for good.

  “Funny when you think about it,” King said. “Me wiped out by Hurricane Rita, Chelle by Katrina the month before. And here we both still are.”

  “Humph. I didn’t know about Paschelle and Katrina.”

  King nodded. “She was a bartender in New Orleans. And now she’s answering phones for Lorna.”

  “She doesn’t like it?”

  “It’s not about liking it. She needs a career. Doing interior design or whatever it’s called. Hell, she needs her own television show. Like Martha Stewart. Or Raechel Ray.”

  Simon snorted. “You a fan?”

  “This from the man who has Buffy DVDs in his truck? At least my Rachel can cook. Your girl fights monsters. Though a slayer might come in handy for taking care of the judge.”

  Ridiculous or not, Simon wasn’t going to argue. They needed something. “If it turns out Bear is responsible for whatever has happened to Lisa, someone’s going to have to straitjacket Terrill to keep him from doing damage to the old man.”

  “I say let him. Son of a bitch has ruined more lives than he’s turned around, if he did any turning at all during his days on the bench. And Terrill being his son, I’d say that gives him more rights than most. Especially if this Lisa thing goes south.”

  All Simon could think about was how it could have been Micky, how he would never have known her, how he wouldn’t have been here to save her if he hadn’t picked this week to get over himself and grow up.

  He would never have suffered Terrill’s worry, but he would have missed out on the pleasure of Michelina Ferrer. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the trade-off. “Let’s hope it doesn’t. That we turn up something before it’s too late.”

  “Are you guys talking about Lisa?” Micky asked, trudging across the yard with Paschelle. “Because we learned something from Paschelle’s neighbor, though I’m not sure how much help it’s going to be.”

  The relief that washed through Simon at hearing her voice left him reeling. And it wasn’t the news she’d delivered. It was nothing that simple; it was the complexity of knowing that she was safe, that while she’d been out of his sight, no one had rushed up behind her and rammed her off the road.

  King was the one who stepped into the awkward silence as the women climbed onto the porch. “What did the old guy have to say?”

  Paschelle moved to his side. “Mr. DuPont left for Houston Monday morning and said he nearly backed his car into Lisa’s. There’s hardly any traffic during the day, so he wasn’t looking at the street as much as he was the pollen on the back window of his car.”

  “Pollen?” Simon prompted, as if making the effort to get back in the game hadn’t cost as much as it had.

  “It’s nasty and yellow this time of year, cuz. Or have you been gone long enough to forget?”

  Simon ignored King’s dig—if it was one—and said, “I remember. I was just trying to make the connection between Lisa and pollen.”

  Micky came to stand in front of him, placed her hand at his waist. “He said he was thinking that he needed to stop and clean the window before leaving town, and he backed out of his driveway and into the street and didn’t even see Lisa’s car until she swerved to miss him.”

  “And she was leaving her house?” Simon asked, adding after Micky nodded, “What time?”

  She looked from him to Paschelle. “He said ten, right?”

  “Between ten and ten-thirty,” the other woman responded.

  “And what time did Terrill or anyone last talk to her? Before that? Do we know?”

  “You’ll have to ask him, boo,” King said, nodding toward the deputy sheriff as he pushed open the screen door.

  Simon started to, then stopped when he saw the look on the other man’s face and the yel
lowed newspaper clipping in his hand.

  “I don’t think this is what Lisa found, but it might have something to do with someone—maybe even Bear—wanting to get you away from the bayou.” His expression grave, Terrill handed the article to Simon.

  It was from a small newspaper published in another parish, one that didn’t have much of a circulation, one he wouldn’t have paid attention to at eighteen had he been home to see it. He scanned it only briefly, taking note of the date.

  He didn’t need to see more. He needed time, space. He needed a crowbar and five minutes alone with Bear Landry to get at the truth. If this crime, this betrayal, this…violation was the judge’s doing—and he had very little doubt about that—the bastard had just made things as personal for Simon—and King—as for Micky, Lisa, and Terrill.

  He let Micky pull the clipping from his hand. Then she walked to the far end of the porch beneath the overhead fan, where the light made it easier to see, and read the text out loud.

  “‘The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Department is asking for the public’s help in identifying a man whose body was found on the banks of the Sabine River. The man was approximately forty years of age, six feet tall, one hundred seventy pounds. His primary identifying marker is a tattoo in the center of his chest that resembles two Bs.’”

  Her voice shaking, she stopped there, though the story went on to offer details about the distinctive wound from the blow that had killed the man. It was information that cut Simon to the quick, that nearly doubled him over.

  Behind him, he heard Paschelle ask, “Is that ‘bees’ like insects, or ‘Bs’ like letters of the alphabet?”

  This was one answer Simon had. One he wished he hadn’t found this way. One he wasn’t sure he’d wanted to find at all. He turned back to the others. He and King were the only ones still alive who’d ever seen the tattoo, hidden as it was beneath a mat of dark chest hair.

  “One B is for Benoit, my mother’s family name,” he finally said. “The other is for Baptiste.”

  Micky gasped, and before King was able to get his hand on her shoulder to stop her, asked, “You know who this is?”

  He nodded. “My father.”

  Thirty-four

  I t was close to two a.m. by the time Micky and Simon made it back to his house and up the stairs to bed. Paschelle had offered them her guest room. Terrill had offered the same. King didn’t have a room to spare in his trailer-for-one but had given Simon his hand and pulled him into a hug that both men seemed reluctant to break.

  Terrill had chosen that moment to head home. Paschelle had gone inside to clean up the kitchen, telling Terrill the boxes in the living room were up to him. This time, Micky hadn’t had the strength to give the other woman a hand but had walked out to Simon’s truck to wait.

  He’d joined her ten minutes later, looking as if he wanted to bite off her head for the way she’d disappeared. She’d braced herself, but he quickly shut down, seeming totally spent. She imagined that he was, that he didn’t have the energy—emotional or physical—to do more than fly on auto.

  He remained silent for the entire drive, and once upstairs, he barely grunted when she tugged away the sleeping bag he’d been prepared to crawl into and pushed him toward the bed. She refused to let him sleep another night on the floor.

  They’d been as physically intimate as possible. Sharing a bed, both of them fully clothed and wrapped up in sleeping bags, wasn’t a problem. Not tonight when so many others demanded their attention and time.

  Side by side in the dark, the night breeze cooling the room, the light from the moon sneaking in to sweep the shadows from the corners, they were both beyond tired, both in desperate need of sleep, yet not surprisingly both still wide awake.

  And since she didn’t see that changing before morning came, she turned to face him, laid a hand in the center of his chest, feeling his heart beat through his sleeping bag and into her palm. “I’m so sorry you had to learn about your father that way. That was so wrong. So unfair.”

  He released a deep sigh. Her hand rose and fell with the motion. She left it where it was, wanting even that tenuous connection of knowing he was there beneath her touch, of knowing he couldn’t deny her presence.

  “He disappeared right after graduation. That wasn’t a surprise. He’d told everyone he’d had enough bad luck to last any man a lifetime. My mom, she’d died three years before.” Simon cursed softly. “She didn’t die. She killed herself. She couldn’t take her sister, her twin, King’s mother, not being with her anymore. Left the rest of us to deal with her suicide on top of losing King’s parents in an auto accident two years before.”

  Micky couldn’t speak. It was beyond words, beyond even a whisper, her ache at what he’d told her. What was going through his mind, as he relived the pain? What had gone through his mind then, as a boy of eighteen, barely a man, the loss of his parents so senseless?

  “I knew he was dead. He’d been declared dead legally, but I knew we would eventually find out what had happened to him. It was so long ago, that’s the thing. That’s what’s so hard.” He shook his head on the pillow of his wrists where he’d raised his arms and crossed them. “I guess I wanted to think he was out there keeping tabs on me, making sure I didn’t get into more trouble than I already had.”

  “The fire?”

  “Yeah. That was the big one. I enlisted only because it was that or spend four years in the pen with King, and that would never have worked. There was so much hate between us. Neither one of us would have made it out alive. Until today, I’d always thought he’d been the one to set it.”

  She propped up on her elbow to see his face, wondering about all the things the two men had said today that she hadn’t been able to hear. “But you don’t think that anymore?”

  “We were there at his house, both of us. It was graduation night, and we’d hit all the local parties. None were worth hanging around any longer than we did, so we went home to get wasted. Out of the blue, Lorna showed up.”

  Irrational or not, Micky wasn’t liking where this was going already. “Was she in your class?”

  “She’s older. A couple of years,” he said, pulling one hand from beneath his head and rubbing at his eyes. “She went off with King. I bunked down in the extra room. Next thing I knew, she was crawling up between my legs and taking me out of my shorts with her mouth.”

  Really. Having met the other woman, Micky could have gone the rest of her life without knowing that.

  Simon went on. “I don’t remember all of it. But I do remember waking up hearing her screaming that the house was on fire. I ran outside with my dick wagging and didn’t stop to put on my pants until I was halfway across the pasture.”

  “And you thought King set it.”

  “He went to jail for it. Didn’t deny it. Never said a word.”

  This wasn’t really a good time to play devil’s advocate, but…“Maybe he thought you set it and didn’t want to rat you out.”

  “Yeah. Like I didn’t want to rat on him.”

  So he had considered the possibility. “Could it have been Lorna?”

  “It doesn’t make sense. I mean, I can’t think of a reason, but she was the only other one there.” He paused, staring at the ceiling, blinking as he thought. “I don’t know that it matters, really. Not anymore.”

  Micky was done with the advocate thing. Now she was going to nag. “It matters because it’s been a thorn between you and King all this time. And with your father gone, really gone, isn’t King the only family you have left?”

  Simon didn’t respond.

  She pushed. “Isn’t that why you loaned him the money?”

  His brows came together in a frown. “I thought you couldn’t hear us talking.”

  She pushed again, harder, refusing to be distracted. “Isn’t it?”

  “He told me that the money was for a workover of the well our fathers used to operate. Nothing he’s tried to do with the place has paid off, or given him enough of an income to
put the cash aside himself.”

  “If there’s still oil there, then you had to have believed he could do it. You took a chance on your cousin, he let you down, that’s that. It’s not the end of the world. Or a reason to cut him out of your life.”

  He didn’t say anything right away, as if his thoughts had gone elsewhere, to the oil, to his cousin. She didn’t have a clue, so he surprised her when he finally said, “That’s what it means, you know. Le Hasard. It means chance.”

  Apropos, she supposed, considering he’d come to own the place because of a poker game played long ago. And he’d taken one on his cousin. So why couldn’t he take a chance on the two of them?

  He could lose her to a reckless driver—one with no ulterior motive or evil intent—any day, out of the blue, no warning. Wouldn’t their time together be more precious because of knowing that?

  “I’m glad you gave him one,” she finally said. “He seems so…lost.”

  “What’s lost is my ninety thousand dollars,” he said with a snort.

  Uh-uh. She didn’t believe this was about the money. The money was a diversion, keeping him from dealing with the fact that getting rid of what stood between him and King would cost him even more.

  “What did he do with it?” she asked.

  Again with a snort. “He didn’t tell me. I could find out if I really wanted to know, but it stopped being important. It doesn’t matter.”

  He didn’t want it to be important. He didn’t want it to matter. He didn’t want to face the possibility that his estrangement from his cousin had been a mistake. “Seriously. You don’t want to know,” she said.

  It took him several seconds to respond. “About the money, no. But I do want to know if that’s all you plan to do with your hand.”

  He was being a man. Changing the subject. And for the first time to sex instead of away from it. “You told me that this afternoon was all we could have,” she reminded him, wanting to hear him argue his way out of a trap he’d laid. “That you didn’t want to risk us becoming more deeply involved.”