Blood on the Bayou

by Stacey Jay

  “As someone nearly taken out by a shrimp muffin, I have a different opinion.” I tug open the dishwasher, hoping the dirty dishes might offer up a clue.

  “But that was a rare, severe allergic reaction,” Hitch says. “What are the chances both of these men had the same—”

  “Wait a second.” I pull out the top rack of the washer, and pluck a teacup from inside. I lift it up and sniff, wrinkling my nose against the familiar smell. “The tea . . .”

  “You think someone poisoned their tea?” Cane asks.

  “No, I think . . .” The tea. Oh god. The tea I left out on the table last night like a dumb-ass. The tea that wasn’t on the table this morning. “Gimpy! The tea!”

  Cane’s forehead wrinkles.

  “I got a text from Deedee,” I explain. “Gimpy was sick and she and Theresa had to take him to the vet to get his stomach pumped. Yesterday, when I was here, Lance gave me some tea bags. He said they were a rare caterpillar fungus that’s supposed to clear out your system before a piss test. He’s been drinking it for months. That’s how he kept the FCC off his back about what I assume was his pot-smoking habit. I took the tea home and left it out on the table and—”

  “Gimpy ate it,” Cane finishes, because he knows the ways of my cat.

  “I bet he did. And then, when I saw him in the Hogans’ garden, he was acting really weird, even for him.” Remembering Gimpy’s performance makes me guess why Cane sounded funny when he first talked about seeing Lance. “You said Lance was rolling around when you came in, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you couldn’t tell if he was in pain or something else.” He nods. “Like hot-and-bothered kind of something else?”

  Cane looks relieved. “Yeah. I thought maybe he was on Ecstasy or something.”

  I turn to Hitch, holding up the cup in victory. “It’s the tea. It must be poisoned.” But Hitch isn’t impressed. Or pleased. In fact, Hitch kind of looks like it’s his turn to fight the flight or puke response inspired by the stink of the dead men’s soiled pants. “What’s wrong?”

  He stands, backing away from Lance with a small shake of his head. “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” I put the cup on the counter and cross the room. I don’t stop until I’m close enough to smell the sweat breaking out beneath Hitch’s iron suit. “This has to stop, Hitch. We can’t keep—”

  “I poisoned it.”

  “What?”

  “I poisoned the fungus,” his says, shock and misery mixing in his tone. “That was the business I had to take care of yesterday morning.” His throat works. “I drove up to St. Gabriel, boarded the barge upriver, and contaminated the compound.”

  “Why?” I ask, the word barely escaping past the acid rising in my throat.

  “It’s one of the items that keeps disappearing from the barges. It’s the source of fairimilus, the peptide I was telling you about yesterday.” He runs a shaking hand across his mouth, wiping sweat beads from his upper lip. “I thought if the test subjects got sick it would make the staff at the lab disorganized, and it would be easier for me to get in and out.”

  “Jesus, Hitch.” I sway on my feet, the enormity of what he’s confessed making me dizzy. “That’s . . . murder.”

  He shakes his head. “No. I had no idea this would happen. The man who gave me the poison said it made people nauseous, that’s it. I didn’t—”

  “You almost killed my cat!”

  “He almost killed you.” Cane is suddenly by my side, his arm around my shoulders. “If you’d drunk that tea, you’d be dead.”

  Dead.

  I glance down at Lance, his soulless husk hitting me on an entirely new level. Cane is right. I would have drunk the tea. I definitely would have, especially after what Tucker said this morning about the injections showing up in drug tests.

  “Right.” My breath comes out a shaky hiss.

  “I’m sorry,” Hitch whispers.

  “I don’t think that covers it when you’ve killed people.” Cane’s voice is so deep I can feel it vibrate in my chest, the way it does when he’s really, really angry.

  “I’m so sorry.” Hitch ignores Cane, eyes only for me. “I was trying to save Stephanie and the baby. I didn’t know what else to do. I—”

  “You can remain silent,” Cane says. “And know that anything you say can and will be used against you in a—”

  “Don’t Mirandize me!” Hitch turns on Cane, vein pulsing at his temple. “You don’t understand what’s happening here!”

  “I understand these men are dead, and you confessed to maybe havin’ something to do with that.” Cane angles in front of me, not intimidated by Hitch or his anger or the fact that Hitch is an FBI agent. In that moment, my respect for Cane grows a few sizes, though I’m not sure hauling Hitch down to the station is the right thing to do.

  But he definitely needs reigning in. He’s not thinking clearly. If someone doesn’t knock some sense into him, more people are going to die.

  “Yes, these men are dead. And maybe it’s my fault,” Hitch says. “If so, I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. But I was only trying to protect my family, like you’re protecting your sister.”

  Cane shakes his head. “Not even close to the same thing. I’m not hurting anyone. I’m not killing people.”

  “I don’t think the Center for Disease Control would agree,” Hitch counters, stepping closer to Cane, chest puffed out in a primitive display of aggression. “Neither would the federal government. Smuggling an infected person out of a camp carries a mandatory ten-year sentence.”

  “And manslaughter, even involuntary manslaughter, could get you ten to life.” Cane mirrors Hitch’s stance, puffs up his own bigger, meaner-looking chest and glares down at the shorter man. “And I mean to see you answer for—”

  “Okay, y’all. Let’s just calm—”

  “Fine!” Hitch shouts, interrupting my attempt to take the testosterone in the room down a notch. “Arrest me. What the fuck do I have to live for, anyway? These men are fucking dead.” He stabs a trembling finger toward the body at his feet. “And they were my last chance to find the fucking lab before it’s too fucking late,” he shouts, his fragile sanity thread snapping. “My baby is going to die and my wife might die, too, and even if she doesn’t, she’ll hate me for the rest of her life for failing her when she needed me the most. I know I’ve fucked up. But what the fuck was I supposed to do! I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but what the—”

  “Stop it!” I shout, moving between Cane and Hitch before Hitch explodes or Cane pulls out his cuffs. I lay a gentle hand on Hitch’s chest, feel the pounding of his heart through his bones. “You’ve got to calm down. This isn’t helping. We should go search the office. There might be something there that will help us find the cave.”

  I turn back to Cane, who’s trying very hard to act like he doesn’t notice that I’m touching Hitch. “We don’t have time to explain everything right now.” We don’t. Not about the cave or about what’s going down here personally. “But the basic gist is that Hitch has to find a mobile lab out in the bayou where dangerous people are doing bad things, and shut it down, or someone is going to kill his family. Stephanie’s been poisoned, and the person who did it won’t deliver the antidote unless Hitch does as he’s told.”

  Cane’s eyes soften. “We can’t tell you anything more or it will put your life in danger,” I continue. “And you can’t say anything about this to anyone. If you do, you’ll be risking our lives as well as yours. Just let us go and we can all sit down and talk about the rest of this . . . later.”

  Or never, if I get lucky.

  I don’t think these men deserved to die, but it was an accident. And they only ended up ingesting the toxin because they were stealing, because they were habitual thieves and supplying criminals of a more deadly variety. They weren’t citizens it’s going to hurt our world to lose. They took the gift of immunity and exploited the people they should have helped.

  May
be I’m a sociopath, but I can’t work up a lot of righteous anger for their deaths. And I don’t think this accident—no matter how horrible—should lead to Hitch spending the rest of his life in jail.

  Cane sighs, a long, labored sigh that doesn’t inspire much hope that he agrees with me. “Annabelle, I can’t do this. If Agent Rideau is being blackmailed, we have to report it to his superiors. And I can’t—”

  “My superiors can’t be trusted.” Hitch sounds like he’s backing slowly away from the edge. “At least some of them can’t, and I won’t know which ones until after I find the lab.”

  Cane pauses. I pounce on his moment of doubt. “Please. I’ll go with Hitch and keep him from doing anything stupid, and you can go get Amity and take care of her.”

  “If they’ve got an armored vehicle, he can,” Hitch says. “None of us are going anywhere without armor. An iron-sided vehicle won’t be enough. If the swarm starts spitting acid it will eat right through.”

  “What?” Cane turns to me, a look in his eyes that says he suspects Hitch has lost his mind. He must not have seen the swarm.

  “Come on. We’ll show you.” I tug the edge of Cane’s shirt as I walk by. After a second’s hesitation, he follows me out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I fill him in on what’s happened with the new fairies—minus the fact that I can control them. Cane isn’t ready for that information and, even if he were, I’m not willing to spill any more of the Big Man’s secrets.

  I know Cane believes the only way to deal with terrorist tactics is not to deal with them at all. But I wonder if he’d feel the same way if someone he loved were in danger and the only way to keep them safe was to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told.

  You shouldn’t shut up. Or do as you’re told. You should take your next dose of medicine and use your fairy weapon to take out the Big Man and Grandpa Slake and Gerald and anyone else—human or fairy—who’s a threat.

  I shiver at the thought. I’m already headed down the road to Sociopathville. I’ve pretty easily justified Jose’s and Lance’s deaths. How easy would it be to justify a few more, a couple three murders in the name of making the world a safer place? But if I keep walking this way, it’s going to be hard to turn back, and my gut tells me I’m not going to like who I am at the end of the road.

  “What do you think?” I stand beside Cane in the door to the stairwell, watching the new fairies circle and dart, their movements growing more agitated.

  Above them, the puffy, gray clouds have grown black and swollen. Thunder rumbles through the air. I’m hoping it’s the storm that has the fairies all worked up, and not something else. Like psyching themselves up to attack the building.

  Cane observes the teeming Fey with a cool eye, but I know this must be hitting him hard. The swarm represents a terrible new threat to the people he’s sworn to protect. “I don’t know what to think,” he finally says, sounding so sad my arms are around his waist before I can think twice about it. I hug him, ducking under the elbow he lifts to let me in, and squeezing tight.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looks down at me, expression still unreadable. “You were listening to my call this morning.”

  “Yes. I wish you’d told me the truth.”

  He nods. “Maybe I should have.”

  “And I wish you didn’t feel like you have nothing left to lose,” I whisper. Because I don’t know if there will be a better time to say it. And I mean it.

  Emotion flickers in Cane’s eyes, but before he can speak, Hitch slams out of the office behind us and comes rushing down the hall. Cane pulls away. I cross my arms, missing his warmth already.

  “I’ve found something,” Hitch says, holding out a set of blueprints. “These are almost twenty years old, but they’re from Robusto Oil and Chemical.”

  I take the prints and hold them up so Cane can get a look over my shoulder.

  “They called it a subterranean office environment,” Hitch says.

  “The mobile lab.” Hope sparks inside of me when I see Donaldsonville’s Railroad Street on the plans. “If they used these, we should be able to find the first lab station about . . .” I check the legend. “An inch is equivalent to ten miles, so . . . about five miles from town? Maybe a little more?”

  Hitch nods, his cheeks flushed red and his hair standing up in damp clumps. He must be getting hot in that suit. “I think it’s a good place to start.” He takes the plans and rolls them into a cylinder. “After that, I’ll track east. If I hurry, I can hit every lab stop before the end of the day.”

  “You mean we can hit every stop before the end of the day,” I correct. There’s no way I’m letting him go alone, and Cane certainly won’t stand for it. If he weren’t otherwise engaged, I know he’d insist on joining Hitch on his hunt.

  “We should all go,” Cane says, proving I know him fairly well. “Two armed people will be better than one. It’s not safe to bring Amity this far upriver with the swarm outside, anyway,” he continues. “Let me call my contact. I’ll have him stop wherever he’s at and tell Abe he needs to take over the pickup. We wanted one of us to stay in town, but . . .” He shrugs and pulls out his phone. “I’ll tell him to call in a report to the FCC and the CDC about those things outside, too. Unless you’ve—”

  “No, I haven’t had the chance,” I say. “But I’ll text Jin-Sang.” Calling Jin would be faster, but I don’t want to get into a conversation with my boss right now. I don’t have the time for the freak-out that will follow this news.

  Cane nods. “Okay. Give me a minute, and we’ll go. I drove the armored cruiser. I’m parked by the back door so we should be able to make it to the car safely. I’ve got my suit downstairs and Agent Rideau is covered, so . . .”

  “Right.” I pull out my phone. Cane walks down the hall, getting some privacy for his calls. I’m so busy jabbing out my message to Jin that I don’t notice how weirdly quiet Hitch is until I’m about to hit Send. “What’s up with you?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, edging subtly closer. “Your eyes look better.”

  “They feel better.” I lift my phone to my chest. “For real. What’s up?”

  He sighs and gives my phone a pointed look. “As soon as you and Cane start spreading the word about the swarm, the sky is going to be full of FBI helicopters. The FCC will want to see what’s going on, and they go to the New Orleans FBI when they need someone in the air. Maybe the invisible people will see the swarm and realize that’s why the copters are here. Maybe they’ll think we talked and start killing people we love.”

  I hit Send on my message to Jin, refusing to have this debate with Hitch. “I’m sorry,” I say. “This is my job. If the swarm heads toward Donaldsonville, the new fairies might be able to get through the gates and we have no idea what contact with people will mean. If they’re like the others, the entire town could be wiped out or infected in a few hours. People need a heads-up to find a place to hide. I should have done this twenty minutes ago.”

  Hitch drops his eyes. “I understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe I’ll be able to take care of things before the helicopters arrive.” He stares out at the churning sky. “I’ll have time to get to a few of the lab stops before the copters get here from New Orleans. Maybe all five if the clouds stick around and make flying dangerous.”

  “Hitch, I don’t—”

  “This is another reason I should go alone.” His eyes plead with me to understand. But I can’t.

  “You remember the last time you were here, when you kept trying to stage an intervention and keep me from throwing my life away?” I wait until Hitch nods before continuing. “Well, I’m staging an intervention now. You’re not thinking clearly and you’re making bad decisions and I can’t—”

  “I am thinking clearly,” he interrupts. “If I’m spotted from the air by an FBI friend, they won’t question seeing me. If I’m spotted by someone else, at least I’ll be the only one on their hit list.”

  “No.” I h
old up a warning finger as he starts backing toward the stairs. “You don’t get to decide this. We agreed that—”

  “You made the right call, Lee-lee,” Hitch says, using Cane’s pet name for me. “You two love each other. I hope you’ll be happy.” And then he turns and runs down the stairs, sprinting like a track star despite the heavy suit.

  Guess all that damned running is paying off for him after all.

  “Hitch stop!” I scream, before spinning to warn Cane. “He’s going for your car!”

  Cane flips his phone shut. “He doesn’t have the keys.”

  “He’ll hotwire it. He’s fast. Go!” I shout. “Take the back stairs and see if you can beat him to the door.”

  Cane sprints for the staircase. I turn and dash after Hitch, though I know it’s pointless. Unless he falls down the stairs, there’s no way I’m going to catch him. I’m fast, but I’m a former athlete, not a current one. My plan to get back in shape hasn’t progressed past the thinking-about-making-a-plan-to-start-getting-back-in-shape stage.

  Sure enough, by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, Hitch is nowhere in sight. I take off in the general direction of the back door, hoping Cane reaches it before Hitch. If not, I have a feeling Cane will take this chase outside, and he probably won’t take time to put on his iron suit.

  The thought makes me run faster. And curse myself. And wish I had a gift for thinking things through on the turn of a dime. I never should have said anything to Cane! I should have gone after Hitch myself, or let him steal the car, or—

  “Both of you hold up. Right now. You’re going to hurt yourselves,” comes a firm voice from around the corner.

  I’m not expecting that voice. Really not expecting it. Even though I knew there was a chance I’d be seeing the face it belongs to today. My leg muscles go wobbly and I trip over my feet as I stumble to a stop. I smash myself against the hallway wall, pressing my lips together to silence my gasps for breath.

  Around the corner I hear Cane rumble, “Marcy?”