by Alison Kent
“Then we’ll spook him again,” he said, waggling both brows like he was in junior high and getting ready to hijack the school’s public-address system.
She rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help thinking his being a jerk was mostly for show. “You like this, don’t you? Stirring up trouble. Running people off the road.” She pointed behind them toward the town they’d just left. “Did you even hear those cars honking?”
He rolled his shoulders in a careless shrug. “They’d honk at me if I was driving to church. That’s how they are, how this place is.”
Or his behavior deserved such reactions. “Then why do you stay?”
“Are you kidding? He laughed, a wicked sound of enjoyment. “With good ol’ cuz paying the taxes on the land and not charging me a dime in rent?”
She faced forward, crossed her arms, glad he wasn’t the cousin she’d fallen for. His recklessness scared her. “He needs to charge you rent.”
“Oh-ho. I see whose side you’re on.”
“It’s not about sides.”
“Then what’s it about, chère?” he asked, his voice silky. “You just met the both of us. He just happened to be the first one to get in your pants. If you hadn’t run out that night at Red’s, I can guarantee you wouldn’t be sitting all the way over there hugging that door right now.”
“I’m hugging the door so you don’t kill me with your driving,” she said, ignoring his cocky cheek.
“Whatever you say, chère.”
“What about Paschelle?”
“What about her?”
“I don’t think she’d like me sitting any closer than this.”
“Aww, Chelle and me, we’re just friends with benefits.” He cast her a dangerous glance. “And a man can’t have too many friends.”
He was so full of shit, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he was using that shit to cover up things he’d never told Simon. Micky had met Paschelle. A cute girl, but one smart enough not to be taken in by a man who looked like King. She had to see something more.
Micky wanted to know what it was. Not for herself, but for Simon. She wanted this thing between the two men to go away. She wanted the two of them to have each other, to know each other, to be family. To not be alone.
Papi was everything to her. Her mother had gone away so long ago that she was nothing but a collection of memories. But Papi. Micky’s chest tightened. She knew she was holding on too tight, using him to keep men at a distance because he loved her for herself, just the way she was.
“Well, what have we here?” King asked, and Micky returned from her musings to look up.
They’d driven onto what she assumed was Judge Landry’s property, but they hadn’t stopped at his house. King had kept going, and all Micky saw was fields.
Fields, and the tree line beyond edging a plot of uncleared acreage. Fields, the tree line, a plot of uncleared acreage…and a vehicle driving through the first, toward the second, and into the third.
King looked at her. She looked at him.
“You game?” he asked.
“Why not?” she answered.
So they followed Bear into the woods.
Thirty-seven
B ear pulled his International Scout up to the tarpaper shelter that squatted on the edge of Snickers Bayou. He’d sent Lorna to the parish library’s Abbeville branch to get the Landry family Bible held there on display, and he couldn’t do what he needed to do until she got here. He cut the engine to wait.
Lorna had argued that the Bible was considered reference material. It could be viewed only on the premises. It was not to be removed. He’d told her to get it anyway, dumb bitch. If he’d had any idea of its true value, he would never have made the donation, and that made him just as dumb.
Unless he was psychic, he couldn’t have anticipated the hunt for the treasure would heat up as it had. And though Lisa had wound up at the center of it all, he had never wanted her hurt. What he’d expected was that she’d tire of having very little water and even less food and eventually tell him what he wanted to know. She hadn’t come close.
Once he’d revealed to her his part in her kidnapping and what her freedom would cost, she’d said she’d die before she’d tell him a thing. Said she knew he’d be forced to kill her anyway. Said she wanted to enjoy thinking about him living the rest of his life still searching.
He hadn’t told her he’d been doing it since his childhood. Bear’s father had told him the treasure story—though like his grandfather before, his old man had written off the tale of the treasure as legend. Bear hadn’t been so quick to do the same.
Finding something that incredible was a dream. He’d been an only child with nothing much to do and acres to roam. Bayou Allain had not even been the speck on the map then that it was now. There hadn’t been any boys in school who lived near enough to be regular playmates. He’d played soldiers and cowboys and pirates with his imagination instead.
Harlan Baptiste’s coin was the first bit of evidence proving the treasure’s existence. After seeing the piece for himself, Bear had no doubt that the cache was buried on the land Zachary Benoit had won from Ross Landry in that poker game decades before.
Until Lisa started her genealogy project, Bear hadn’t realized he’d been holding on to a piece of the puzzle for years. He’d found the slip of paper in his father’s effects. It was old, brittle, and looked as if it had been used to record Morse code. He’d thought the markings meaningless. They weren’t meaningless at all.
He’d come close to suffering a stroke the day Lisa had asked him to meet her at the main branch of the parish library. He’d always liked the girl, didn’t mind indulging her whims, so had driven to Abbeville to meet her for lunch.
She’d taken him to see the Bible afterward. It had originally belonged to one of his forefathers, had been passed down through generations and lost—only to be unearthed when he’d razed an old barn on his property.
What Lisa had found in the binding made the cost of tearing down the structure and having the rubble carted off worth every penny. The letter hidden between the back parchment and the leather cover explained the purpose of the markings. And to think how close he’d come to throwing the doodlings away.
After he’d fed her the story about his never having taken the rumors seriously, so never sharing the legend with his son, she’d suggested they work together to find the gold and surprise Terrill and the town. And since she had her own reason for keeping the secret and wouldn’t have to be coerced into silence, he’d gladly gone along.
During one of their afternoons at the library, she’d asked him what he knew about Harlan Baptiste. That wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t also shared her theory, showing him both the article about a body being found in a western Louisiana parish and the photo of his own father holding the cane Bear still used every day that appeared to have made the markings on the dead man’s face.
How she’d made the connection between the article, the photo, and the missing Harlan Baptiste, he’d never know. What he did know was that he was not going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. At that point, with what he’d thought covered up all these years unraveling and the treasure finally so close, there’d been only one thing he could think of to do.
Get her out of the way.
He’d arranged for the kidnapping, and once she’d been secured in the shelter, he’d paid the man he’d hired half the promised amount. The rest of the money would be delivered and Lisa set free as soon as he had the gold coins in hand and was safely out of the country.
He knew he’d be implicated, accused, even indicted in both the kidnapping and the murder. For that very reason he’d chosen to make his new home on an Indonesian island with no extradition treaty or agreement.
Lisa was never supposed to know he was involved. It was only when he’d grown stumped working the codes on his own that he’d become desperate enough to reveal his involvement. He’d needed her help. She’d refused to give it, leaving him
no choice but to raise the stakes.
Having tired of waiting for Lorna to show, he now grabbed the gun from the seat beside him, climbed down from the Scout, and headed for the shack’s door. It was time to finish what had been started.
When he shoved the door open, Lisa squinted against the sudden assault of light and scrambled up from where she was lying on the cot to sit in the corner and lean on the flimsy excuse for a wall.
He stayed where he was, keeping the light in her eyes, his shadow to the side. “I thought you might like to know that a friend of yours came to visit. She’s still here, actually, thinking she has a hope of finding you.”
“Who?” she croaked out.
“Michelina Ferrer,” he said and watched her eyes widen slightly, the pulse in her neck jump, her throat flex as she swallowed. She showed no other emotion and said nothing, brave little soldier that she was.
He went on. “I’ve decided that if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll kill her instead of you. Then I’ll kill your parents.”
She sucked in a shallow breath, grated out one word. “No.”
He gestured with the barrel of the gun. “You can be responsible for those three deaths, or you can forget about the death of a man you didn’t know.”
“I won’t be responsible for anything you do.”
“Of course you will. You’re the one with the means to stop me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. I guess I thought that you’d come to your senses, that the threat on your life would be enough.” He paused, watched her use her shoulder to brush her hair from her eyes, added the final bomb. “I suppose I could add Terrill to the list.”
“He’s your son.” She stopped, coughed, tears spilling from her eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
She didn’t know what he was capable of. “I would.”
She pushed her way to the edge of the cot, wobbling as it creaked beneath her. “Once you get a taste for murder, it never goes away, is that it?”
He knew what she was talking about, what had started all this. He glanced down the rutted trail, looking for any sign of Lorna. Seeing none and growing impatient, he glanced back. “Harlan Baptiste was an accident. I never meant it to happen. It was self-defense.”
Lisa shook her head. “It can’t be both. And I doubt his son or his nephew would see it as either considering what you did with the body.”
He didn’t owe her an explanation, but they had time; he offered one just the same. “I had just sentenced his boys. He came to the house that night. He’d been following the trial, had seen the news that they would be going away. He came to beg me to reconsider, but it was too late.”
“You wanted the boys off the property, didn’t you?” She cleared her throat, coughed again, but she never asked him for water. “With Harlan having made it clear to the entire town that he wasn’t coming back, Simon and King were the only thing keeping you from having free run of Le Hasard. You were probably responsible for the fire, too.”
“That land should have been mine,” he told her, tightening his fist on the stock of the gun. “It was lost to that family in a poker game. They didn’t know anything about oil. That well they drilled? A waste.” He’d seen the geological surveys. He knew what pooled beneath the land. “The gold is the least they owed me for that oil.”
She glared, her eyes narrowed to slits, her bound limbs shaking. “You’re insane.”
“Maybe. But you’re sitting there, and I’m the one who’s going to make sure you have no family left.”
She was silent for a minute, and he saw the surrender that washed over her before she said, “I need the Bible. There’s no other way.”
“Lorna is bringing it,” he said, feeling a thrilling rush of blood through his veins.
“And you’re going to kill her, too?”
He ignored the question. “Are you going to show me how to read the markings in the Bible?”
She nodded.
That was all he needed to know. He could take it from here. He had no need of Lisa, of Lorna, of anyone. Once he had the Bible in hand, he’d be on his way to living the rest of his life as he pleased.
Yes, he had money, he had power, but he also had obligations weighing him down—not to mention the murder of Harlan Baptiste twenty years ago now rearing its ugly head. Unlike complicity in arson, there was no statute of limitations on murder.
He wasn’t taking any chances.
“It’s about time,” Bear muttered to himself, relieved at hearing Lorna arrive. Or at least he was relieved until he realized what he was hearing was an engine more powerful than the one in the truck Lorna drove.
Thirty-eight
M icky glanced at the small shack that was nothing but four walls and a roof covered in tar paper. There were no windows on either of the sides she could see from where King had stopped the truck. She couldn’t see the third at all, though she doubted it was designed any differently, and she assumed the door was on the fourth, facing the water.
“This isn’t someone’s house, is it?” She wasn’t so entitled that she knew nothing of poverty, but this…no one should live like this.
The shake of King’s head brought relief. “It’s for hunting. Not room for much but a cot and a lantern, but I just don’t think that’s what Bear’s out here to do. Or all that there is inside.”
They were idling close enough on the rutted trail that anyone in the place would be able to hear them, but they hadn’t known they’d come up against this sudden dead end. “If Lisa’s there, and he knows we’re here…” She didn’t want to think what the judge might do, what might be happening even now.
“He knows,” King said, letting off the brake and rolling slowly forward. “We might as well say hello.”
Micky’s stomach pitched up and fell down with every bump King hit. She knew it wasn’t the ride as much as the anticipation of what they’d find—and what would happen when they came face-to-face with Bear.
She doubted Simon would have sent her off with his cousin if he’d thought for a minute this was where she’d wind up, at the terminus of what was no more than a rutted dirt path heading into the unknown.
Once King had pulled up beside Bear’s vehicle, he shifted into park and left the engine running. A shock of his hair, golden brown where Simon’s was black, fell over his forehead and into his eyes. He shook it back with a cocky movement, reached for his door handle, stopped.
Micky wasn’t sure what to do. She was taking her cues from him, trusting his instincts—this was his turf, his bayou—but even he seemed hesitant to move. “Do we go in? Wait and see if he comes out?”
“This is feeling even more wrong than I thought it could,” he admitted, sending her stomach tumbling again.
They didn’t have a phone to reach Simon or Terrill, and though Simon knew they were off to find Bear, she couldn’t imagine he’d know about this place, to come looking for them here if he had news, or to find out what they had learned. No one would think to come looking for them here.
No one had thought to look here for Lisa.
Micky wondered if she was the only one wishing they’d taken the time to figure out a way to keep in touch. Then she noticed the radio beneath the dash of King’s truck. She gestured toward it. “Please tell me that works.”
He nodded. “It works.”
“Do you have a gun?”
Another nod. “Under the seat. A shotgun.”
She wasn’t sure if any of this was making her feel better. “Should we take it?”
He glanced over. “I’m not so sure we’re going anywhere.”
She met his gaze. “To see if Lisa’s inside? We can’t just sit here.”
“I’m thinking we can. He knows we’re out here. We know he’s in there. It’s like a game of chicken. Whoever gives in first, loses.”
“That might work. If this was a game.”
“Life’s a game, chère. We’re just the pawns.”
Just what she needed. A Cajun philosopher. Eyes cl
osed, she took a deep breath, then rolled her gaze toward him. “Could you at least get your shotgun out from under the seat? In case we need it?”
“Oh, we’re going to need it, but I think it’s too late.”
At that, she turned to look through the windshield. The judge walked toward them, holding a gun that looked more like something she’d expect to see in the hands of a Marine on patrol in Iraq. She started to wonder if Simon had such a gun but found herself cringing as Bear began waving it around.
“Turn off the truck and get out!” he shouted, his face an unhealthy beet red. “Both of you! Now!”
The windows were up. His voice boomed that loudly. She opened her door. King opened his. They climbed down at the same time, forcing Bear to switch his attention back and forth. She followed King and his lead, walking two steps behind him, walking slowly, slowing even more and hoping he was using the time to plot and plan, because she was fresh out of ideas.
Just as she realized they could have seriously made use of the sort of expertise—legal or not—Simon had, they rounded the front of the cabin. She’d been right about the location of the door. It was standing open—and Lisa was inside!
Micky gasped, rushed forward, ran into the barrel of Bear’s gun. That didn’t stop her from calling out, “Lisa! Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
The light inside was dim, but it was enough to see that Lisa wasn’t okay. She was sitting on the cot King had guessed would be there, her knees drawn up, her ankles and wrists bound.
She wasn’t bloody or bruised, not that Micky could see, but she was so obviously exhausted and haggard that Micky couldn’t stand what she was seeing, or help what she did.
She swung. On Bear.
Arms flailing, she struck out, screaming. “You bastard! You monster! I’m going to kill you! I swear—”
Bear swung back. With the gun.
He caught Micky in the ribs, flung her by the arm through the door. This time when she screamed, it was from pain. She crumpled to the shack’s dirt floor, aware of Lisa behind her coughing as she tried to speak.
