Showdown in Mudbug

by Jana DeLeon

  There was a dim glow in the room created by a lamp tucked behind a desk in the corner. Zach blinked twice and, after a scan of the room, decided he was in the lobby. The place looked more homey than corporate. With any luck, that desk in the corner would have a nice old-fashioned registration book. He eased over to the desk and pulled out the first drawer. Jackpot. He opened the book and flipped to the last page.

  Eighteen fifty-six. What the hell?

  He scanned the other entries on the page, then closed the book and shoved it back in the drawer. Obviously it was an old record used for display. He checked the remainder of the drawers but came up empty. Looking over at the computer tucked in the far corner of the desk, he sighed. Hacking wasn’t exactly in his skill set, but it was either that or knock on every door in the building, which would only draw a bunch of attention he was trying to avoid.

  He sat in the office chair and turned his attention to the computer. What was a good password?…room service, mudbug, hotel, california. Okay, so maybe he needed a better plan. He sat back in the chair and stared at the blinking password box.

  “I never figured you for a breaking-and-entering kind of guy,” a voice whispered in his ear.

  Chapter Seven

  Zach knew it was Raissa by the way his body responded. Her soft breath on his ear set his skin on fire, and he felt stirrings in places that had no business stirring over a suspect. He turned around in the chair and was certain his heart had stopped beating.

  Raissa stood in front of him wearing a black silky tank with lace trim, black spiky shoes that had to be five inches tall, and from the looks of it, not much else. “I see you’re not in uniform,” Raissa said, her voice low and sexy. “Did you at least bring the handcuffs?”

  Zach felt his blood rush to one part of his body, which didn’t need the additional confusion, and down to another, which definitely didn’t need the additional stimulation. His mind raced with all sorts of possibilities that had nothing to do with police work but everything to do with the discovery phase—starting with what she was wearing under that silk nightie. Agent Fields had said they couldn’t question her, and by God, Zach couldn’t think of a single question he needed answered at the moment.

  Except maybe what she was wearing under that silk.

  She smiled down at him, sexy, hot, and so clearly issuing a challenge. Zach rose from the chair and locked his lips on hers in a single fluid motion that made her gasp. He pushed her back against the wall, enjoying the momentary surprise that crossed her face before she grabbed his head and lowered his lips to hers once more. He brought his hands up to cup her face as their mouths parted and their tongues met each other in wild abandon.

  Then something struck him on his neck and he dropped to the ground, certain he’d been hit by lightning.

  “Got him!” he heard a woman shout. “Cover me, Mildred.”

  “Wait!” he heard Raissa yell in the frenzy.

  His entire body screamed in pain, and when he turned to see what had happened, he got a blast of spray right in his face. “Shit!” His hands, still numb from the initial blast, covered his eyes, but it was too late. He felt the burning of Mace and hoped to God that the woman who had attacked him had a bigger weapon to use, because as soon as he could see again and move, he was going to shoot her.

  “Are you all right, Raissa?” the woman asked. “We saw him strangling you.”

  Zach managed to get one eye partially open and saw Raissa staring down at him, her face a mixture of amazement and amusement. Two other women stood in front of her—an older woman with the Mace and a younger one with a stun gun. Jesus, what kind of hotel was this?

  “Sabine had Beau hook up your security system to portable monitors and gave one to me and Mildred,” the younger one explained. “We figured that way you’d have backup if anyone tried to sneak in here. And since Luc left this morning, I thought I’d stay here and help.”

  Raissa filled a plastic cup with water from a cooler next to the front desk and handed it to Zach with a smile. The other two women looked at each other, clearly confused, then at Zach, then back at Raissa. Then the younger one paled.

  “Oh, shit,” the young one said. “Here I was thinking you dressed pretty damned hot to sleep alone, and oh, shit.” She looked down at Zach and bit her lower lip. “He’s Just One.”

  “The one and only,” Raissa confirmed.

  The young one looked down at him, a pained expression on her face. “I am so sorry. If I’d known you were him, I wouldn’t have tased you, I swear.” She tugged on the sleeve of the older woman’s robe. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The older woman put her hands on her hips and gave them all a stern look. “Not until someone explains to me what is going on in my hotel.”

  “He’s not here to kill her,” the young one said, then paused and gave him the once-over. “Well, on the other hand…” She grinned at Raissa and pulled the older woman out of the lobby. “You’re in big trouble, Raissa,” she called over her shoulder as she trekked up the stairs with the hotel owner. “Huge. Enormous.” He could hear her laughing all the way up to the second floor.

  Zach struggled up from the floor, trying to appear anything but mortally embarrassed. “Friends of yours?”

  Raissa smiled. “Why, Detective, you don’t think perfect strangers would attack a man over me, do you?”

  Zach cast a glance at the staircase. “Maybe not. The young one was scary.”

  Raissa laughed. “Oh, you have no idea. Maryse is a scientist.”

  “Let me guess…a mad one?”

  Raissa gave him a sexy smile and stepped so close to him that he could feel the heat coming off her body. “I assume you didn’t spend time tracking me down just for some night action. Might as well come up to my room. You can use my bathroom to clean up and tell me why you broke into a hotel and risked assault by two crazy women.”

  Zach hesitated, knowing being alone with Raissa in a hotel room…with a bed…was about the worst idea ever. He’s already completely lost control and paid for it with his eyesight and a burn mark on his neck, but as she walked past him and up the stairs, he realized he was walking slowly behind her.

  Raissa’s room was quaint and homey, as he’d expected it would be, but he was surprised with the size and the equipment. What was likely once a sitting area contained two folding tables lined with computer monitors. He took a step toward the tables and glanced down the row of monitors. Different views of the street and alley outside the hotel and the lobby inside the hotel displayed on the screens.

  He looked over at Raissa, who was, unfortunately, slipping a silk robe over her skimpy negligee. It was just as well. Being electrocuted hadn’t been on his list of things to do, but it was probably far less painful than the mistake he had been about to make.

  Raissa reached for a bottle on the dresser and poured two glasses of scotch. “The bathroom’s through the far door if you need to flush your eyes more.”

  Zach shook his head. “I think I’ll see again. Hopefully not blurry.” He pointed to the row of computers. “What the hell is going on here? You’ve got more security on this hotel than we have at the police department.”

  Raissa handed him a glass and motioned to two chairs pushed over to the side of the tables. She dropped into one and took a long drink of her scotch. Zach slid into the chair beside her, hoping he was finally going to get an answer to the question of the enigmatic Raissa Bordeaux.

  “I’m expecting company,” Raissa said. “And I’m not really interested in visitors at the moment.”

  “I can tell,” Zach said, and rubbed his neck.

  Raissa reached for a backpack next to her chair and rummaged through it for a minute. Finally, she pulled out a tube of aloe vera cream and handed it to Zach. “I’m sorry about the burn. I honestly didn’t know that Maryse and Mildred had their own closed-circuit system hooked up. Heck, I didn’t even know Maryse was here. I thought I was the only one who knew you were in the hotel.”

  Zac
h squeezed some of the cream onto his fingers and rubbed a bit onto his neck. “So why does a psychic need so much hardware? If you were for real, you should have known I was coming here before I did, right? So why the Fort Knox routine?”

  “I don’t mean to offend your manliness, but you’re not the reason all this hardware is here. Right now, you are actually the least of my worries.” Raissa tapped one finger on her glass and stared at the wall behind him. Finally, she looked directly at him. “You’re not supposed to be talking to me, are you?”

  “Well, no. Not exactly.”

  Raissa sighed. “Who did they send?”

  Zach didn’t bother to play dumb. Clearly, Raissa knew the drill. “Some prick named Fields.”

  Raissa laughed. “You gotta be kidding me. Hell, Fields couldn’t find me if I was sitting on top of him.”

  Zach couldn’t help feeling pleased that Raissa had the same opinion of Agent Fields. “Yeah, I liked him about that much myself. The idiot’s parked in front of your shop, beating on the door every ten minutes. I told your landlord a bum was banging up his property. It should distract him for an hour or so.”

  Raissa smiled. “Fields is going to be royally pissed that he’s stuck at my house. He’s sorta an early-to-bed guy.”

  Zach sobered and looked her directly in the eyes. “So are you going to tell me why you’re wanted by the FBI and hiding out in a hotel room with Pentagon-level security? You wouldn’t have given me that fingerprint if your secret still mattered. I knew that at the time. Something changed, but what?”

  “What did Fields tell you?”

  “Nothing, except that it was FBI business and the New Orleans PD was forbidden to contact you. Given the tip you provided on the Franco girl, my captain is about to have a coronary over that directive. I fi gured I’d just go ahead and ignore it and likely pay for it later.”

  “Unless you can find Melissa Franco.”

  “Yeah, there is that angle.”

  Raissa stared at him for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “The FBI wants me to testify against a mob boss, but they had some trouble keeping me safe. I left protective custody nine years ago and never looked back. Well, not for the FBI, anyway.” She tapped one of the monitors. “I keep the mob boss in my sight on a regular basis, which is probably why I’m still alive.”

  Zach nodded. What Raissa said made complete sense, given her lack of background history. “Were you an informant?”

  “I was an agent.”

  Zach straightened in his chair, unable to control his surprise. “Shit! I mean, I knew you could handle a weapon, but lots of criminals can, too. Not that I’m saying I thought you were a criminal…Oh crap, I’m messing everything up.”

  “It’s okay. You’d have been stupid not to think I was a criminal. I would have.” She smiled. “Although that does bring into question exactly why you were caught in a compromising position with a woman you thought was a crook.”

  “I didn’t think that, exactly. Not really. Oh, hell, the reality is that all the evidence pointed to you being a criminal, but for some reason it never felt right. Intuition sounds stupid, but I guess that’s all I’ve got.”

  “Intuition is far from stupid. It’s kept me alive more times than I can count.”

  “Yeah, but still. An FBI agent? Wow. Sorry, but that’s really not what I was expecting to hear—” He jumped up from his chair and stared down at her. “Holy shit. You investigated the other abductions. That’s why you know so much.”

  “Actually, I fell into the investigation by accident when I was undercover on another case. In fact, investigating those abductions is what blew my cover. The bureau wasn’t thrilled.”

  Zach sat back down. “What did you find?”

  Raissa sighed. “You’re going to think I’m crazy again.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not going to think you’re lying. This case isn’t exactly normal.”

  “I saw an alien suit in the closet of one of the people I was investigating. Not hanging, like you would a costume, but in a trunk by itself. A padlock was on the trunk but not fastened all the way, so I took a look inside. I had no idea what to think about something so weird and dismissed it, figuring I didn’t want to know. Then a friend of mine told me about this abduction case he was working where the MO matched some previous cases. I asked about dates and times. Every time an abduction happened, this particular guy was ‘unreachable.’ ”

  “And the other girls had already been returned, so you knew about the alien part.”

  “That’s the thing that really got me. I mean, why else would that suit be locked away like that unless it was something that could create a lot of trouble? It was too much of a coincidence to ignore.”

  “Why didn’t you follow him?”

  “He wasn’t my primary, and he didn’t live in New Orleans. So the next time he told my primary he was going to be off the grid for several hours, I went to Baton Rouge to follow him.”

  “And got caught,” Zach finished.

  “Yeah.”

  “And your primary…who was he?”

  Raissa hesitated for a couple of seconds, then finally said, “Sonny Hebert.”

  Zach felt his heart pound in his chest. He stared at Raissa, at a complete loss for words the first time since he’d met her. “You were undercover in Sonny Hebert’s organization?”

  “Yeah, for almost two years.”

  “As what? I mean, what did you do that you got that close to him?”

  Raissa gave him a small smile. “Can’t you tell?” She pointed to the row of equipment. “I’m a computer whiz. I could move money in ways that even the banks holding it couldn’t trace. And I dabble a bit with security systems. I’m probably indirectly responsible for the alarms being bypassed at the kidnapping scenes.”

  “Jesus. I can see where that might make you a valuable commodity in Sonny’s world.”

  “Oh, you have no idea. Sonny paid me a quarter million a year. Not that I got to keep it.”

  “Holy crap! I think I’m playing for the wrong team. Damn my conscience.”

  Raissa nodded. “I damned mine a time or two when I was moving millions to tax-free shelters overseas. Or driving around in my ‘company’ car—a Bentley, by the way.”

  Zach whistled. “So Sonny caught you following up on his guy?”

  “No, the guy did. Monk Marsella. He was Sonny’s cousin and ran the Baton Rouge side of things.”

  “And you think this Monk is the guy who took Melissa Franco?”

  Raissa frowned. “I did, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “You remember that guy in the bar? You know, the one I was going to castrate with my nine-millimeter?”

  Zach felt his heart beat stronger for a beat or two, but his mind had flashed firmly back to Raissa’s lipstick-coated finger pressed against his cheek. “Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat, hoping it might clear up his mind. “Hard to forget.”

  “Spider hasn’t likely forgotten, either. I picked Spider to question because he’s a weak link, a real pansy compared to the others. He says no one’s seen Monk in six months. I’ve asked around, and he’s not lying, as far as I can find.”

  “So what happened to him? Somebody’s got to know.”

  “I’m sure someone does, but I’m guessing he’s not in rehab or taking a leave of absence in Bermuda. Even if someone suspected what happened, they’re not going to say. It’s not exactly safe to have an opinion on the boss’s cousin coming up missing, especially if the boss is the only one with the rank to make that call.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.” He tapped his fingers on the table for a minute, then asked, “So what do you think happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I can’t prove anything.”

  “It matters to me. I trust your instincts. You’ve been right about everything. In fact, you’ve been one step or ten ahead of me.”

  “Well, I did have the advantage of a historical point of reference, but yo
u’re right, I do have an idea. I think Monk is vacationing at the bottom of the Mississippi River.”

  “Then who kidnapped Melissa Franco?”

  Raissa stared at him, her expression mixed with frustration and fear. “I have no idea.”

  She rose from her chair and put her glass on a tray on the dresser. “So, do you still want to pin me to a wall and frisk me?”

  Her tone was light, but Zach could tell it was anything but sexual. He didn’t blame her one bit. “Between being electrocuted, going partially blind, and finding out my main suspect is a damned FBI agent—who I’ve been forbidden to contact—and my new main suspect is likely dead, I think I’m too overwhelmed to perform.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.” Raissa sat down next to Zach with a sigh. “Besides, I figure I’ve got another hour or so before Agent Fields shows up here looking for me. It would be best if your car’s not parked out front, I imagine.”

  “He’s going to be a problem.”

  “Who, Fields? Hardly. Fields is lazy. He’ll come here once, find out Sabine’s out of town. Mildred will tell him no one’s seen me and that will be the end of it. Hell, he’ll run from a town like Mudbug. The man thinks camping out means a four-star hotel instead of five.”

  Zach laughed. “Then you might have found a home base. I just hope you packed well. Your apartment is likely off-limits.” He rose from his chair. “I guess I better get my car off the street, but I’m coming back tomorrow. I want to check a couple of things, and then I want to pick your brain.”

  “Next time, call first.”

  “Next time, I’ll come in with police lights flashing and wearing a cowbell.”

  Raissa placed her hand on his arm. “That might be enough.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hank Henry glanced up and down the street in front of the construction site and breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t see Rico Hebert’s car anywhere. He was in the clear, at least for the moment. He had no doubt that Rico would turn up sometime that day. The man was a thug but completely reliable. If Rico said he was going to do something, you could bet on it.