The Awakening

by Jana DeLeon

  The man who’d raced outside last night exited the house and started across the lawn toward the swamp. The man was a problem. The vandal didn’t know who he was or what he was doing there, but it couldn’t be good. If the man didn’t leave soon, he’d have to be dealt with.

  No one was going to get in the way of the master plan.

  * * *

  JOSIE HAD JUST STEPPED inside the back of the house for a break when the phone started ringing. Instantly, her lower back tightened and her chest hurt. The first payment wasn’t due to the bank for another three weeks, but what if they’d heard about her problems? What if they called the note and ignored the earlier agreement?

  She picked up the phone and barely managed to get out a “hello.”

  “Josie,” the loud male voice boomed over the phone, “this is Samuel.”

  Josie blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. Sam Walker was the local Realtor and busybody. He’d been able to talk people into a coma as early as elementary school. “Hi, Sam. How are you?”

  “I’m doing great. Hope you’re doing the same.”

  “Everything’s just fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing in particular. I was just wondering if you’d given any thought to that talk we had a couple of weeks ago.”

  “There wasn’t anything to think about,” she said, trying to control the sharpness in her tone. “I’m not interested in selling.”

  “No need to get upset over it. I figured as much, but I told the client I’d follow up, so I am. I’ll find him something else to suit. I always do.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case.” People probably bought something just to get away from him. “Well, if that’s all, I’m kinda busy.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you’d be interested in having dinner. I’m free every night this week.”

  Shocking.

  “While I appreciate the offer, I’m not really interested in dating. I’ve got too much on my plate right now for romantic entanglements.”

  He laughed. “Not all entanglements between a man and woman have to be the romantic kind.”

  Okay. Ick.

  “I’m not interested in any entanglements right now.”

  Or ever with you.

  “Well, the offer for dinner is still open. No entanglements required. You have to eat.”

  “And I plan to. Usually in my own kitchen and in between tasks. I appreciate the invitation, but my schedule is just too busy right now to take that kind of time off.”

  “I heard you had a little trouble out there. I figured you’d put off the opening until you could deal with it.”

  Josie felt a flush of anger run through her. She knew exactly where Sam had heard about her trouble—Sheriff Reynard. That loudmouth wouldn’t do anything to help, but he had plenty of energy to gossip all over town about her private business.

  “You figured wrong,” she said, keeping her voice calm and even. “The bed-and-breakfast will open in time for the New Year’s guests.”

  “Then I best let you get back to it. If you change your mind about selling or the dinner, let me know.”

  She hung up the phone without forming a reply, not sure she had a polite one left in her. If Sheriff Reynard was telling everyone that she’d come to see him, worried about the delays in construction that the vandalism was causing, they might start to speculate about just how little money she had left. Right now everything was only rumor, but more than a few eyebrows had gone up in town when she sent some of her mother’s expensive paintings to New Orleans for auction. People probably wouldn’t have to dig very deep to find out just how hard up she was.

  If that information got back around to Tanner, she’d be mortified, although she had no idea why. In theory, it seemed stupid to care what a stranger, a hired one at that, cared about her. But for some reason, the idea of him knowing she was broke and making deals with the bank to keep her family home wasn’t something she wanted to think about.

  Enough people had already guessed the truth. She was going to do the best she could to change her situation before everyone had proof.

  * * *

  TANNER STRODE DOWN THE path in the swamp to where the crew was working on the fencing. With all the construction noise, it wasn’t hard to find them, despite the many branches and forks of the swamp trails.

  The men froze as he came through the brush, and Tanner could tell they were ready to flee if necessary. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  An older man, probably mid-fifties, stepped toward him. “You didn’t. You have to be aware working in the swamp, and with the trouble lately, we’re paying extra attention.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Tanner said. He extended his hand to the man, who he guessed was the crew leader. “I’m Tanner LeDoux.”

  “Ray Melancon. I run this crew. Are you a new foreman, Mr. LeDoux?”

  “Please call me Tanner, and no, that job is still Emmett Vernon’s. I was hoping to talk to him. Is he around?”

  Ray looked mildly disgusted. “He shows up for a minute or two. Then he’s gone. All day, I worry and wait on equipment and guidance, but he’s nowhere to be found. This morning was no different.”

  Tanner frowned. “I just came from the house, and I didn’t see him anywhere around the grounds.”

  “He walked that way,” he said, and pointed deeper into the swamp. “About an hour ago.”

  Tanner scanned the foliage where Ray was pointing. What could he possibly want out there?

  “If you’re not a new foreman,” Ray said, “can I ask what you’re here for?”

  Tanner smiled. “I’m here to track down a monster.”

  Ray’s eyes widened and he took a step back from Tanner. “You shouldn’t joke about such things. The creatures that haunt these swamps don’t like to be the butt of jokes.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I wasn’t joking. I’m a professional tracker. Ms. Bettencourt hired me to see that the vandalism stops. That means catching the vandal.”

  “You can’t catch the Tainted Keitre. No one can.”

  “You’re probably right, as it doesn’t exist, but I can catch a man trying to make you believe he’s a monster.”

  Ray shook his head. “You young people don’t understand the swamp like the elders. My great-grandfather taught me everything about this swamp, including the legends.”

  “And what legend covers vandalism?”

  “It’s an awakening.” Ray looked back at the crew, who’d stopped working to listen. Some of the men nodded. Most just looked at him with fearful expressions.

  “You think the creature was awakened? By what?”

  “Maybe the construction. He seems to target the repairs,” Ray said, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “But that’s not what you think.”

  Ray shook his head. “I think the creature appeared because a greater evil is present in the swamp. Something that wasn’t here before. It’s out of balance. Can’t you feel it?”

  Because Tanner had always felt the Honey Island Swamp was out of balance, he wasn’t sure how to reply. Of all the places he’d lived, the swamps in Mystere Parish had been the only place that he’d never relaxed. All those years in the Atchafalaya Basin and he’d never felt the unease that settled over him after only five minutes of standing in the Honey Island Swamp.

  “You do feel it,” Ray said. “I see it in your eyes.”

  “Look, the truth is, the swamps in Mystere Parish have always felt uncomfortable, especially the Honey Island Swamp.”

  “Ah, then you are a man in touch with the ebb and flow of nature. Even on its best day, this swamp is different than others—I’ll give you that—but lately, I feel something darker than usual. Something malevolent.”

  Ray shook his head. “I think it’s a good thing that you want to help Ms. Bettencourt. She’s a lady and there’s not a lot of women these days that I’d call as such, but I know what I saw and it weren’t no man.”

  “Not e
ven a man wearing a hairy suit?”

  “A man in a hairy suit can’t disappear in the brush without even a whisper of sound. A man in a hairy suit can’t make an unholy howl like the one we heard.” He waved his hand at his crew. “We know the truth. We saw it. You can choose not to believe, but you should at least prepare as if you do.”

  Because he couldn’t argue with the man’s logic, Tanner nodded. “I’ll let you get back to it. Thank you for your time.”

  Ray gave him a single nod. “Be aware, Mr. LeDoux. Very aware.”

  Tanner stepped past the crew and into the swamp in the direction Ray had indicated Vernon had gone. It was a simple matter to pick up Vernon’s trail. The ground was so damp with morning dew that partial footprints showed often in open patches of dirt. The brittle, dead branches snapped easily when pushed or stepped upon and marked the man’s passage, as well.

  Tanner wondered why Vernon had gone off into the swamp at this location, where there was no clearly defined path. He could tell he’d been moving steadily southeast, but had yet to locate a trail that had been traveled with any regularity. Wherever Vernon was going, he hadn’t gone there this way before.

  Yet another mystery, when he hadn’t made any strides on the first.

  He continued through the swamp at a decent clip, his mind rolling back through his conversation with Ray. The man was Creole, and according to the personnel files, had lived in the Honey Island Swamp his entire life. He was not unlike the men who’d taught Tanner everything he knew about tracking, hunting and survival. They were tough men, cunning in their environment.

  But Ray was afraid.

  That bothered Tanner more than he wanted to admit. He understood the superstitions of the swamp people and those that still believed in the old ways of voodoo and the like. People who believed in such things were naturally cautious and extremely observant, but rarely scared. It quite simply wasn’t the way they were made.

  He was still trying to make sense of it all when he followed Vernon’s tracks around a huge cypress tree and then stopped short. The smell that wafted past him wasn’t one he recognized. It was musky, like a skunk, but fouler, like decaying remains.

  The swamp, which had been filled with the sounds of insects and birds just seconds before, had gone silent. Not even a breath of air passed over him, and the silence echoed in his head.

  He sniffed the air, turning his head to try and determine the direction of the smell, but he couldn’t be certain.

  Suddenly, a twig snapped, the tiny sound echoing like a sonic boom in the silent swamp. Instantly, he locked in on the direction of the sound, pulled out his pistol and crept toward a thick grove of brush about twenty yards in front of him. When he was about ten yards away, a low growl came from the brush. He paused for a second, trying to place the sound, but his mind couldn’t lock in on a match.

  He took a breath and lunged forward, hoping to catch whatever lurked there, but as soon as he moved, whatever it was burst from the brush and ran away from him. Over the top of the pile of brush, he could barely make out a mass of gray hair crashing through the swamp.

  By the time he ran around the thick hedge of brush, the creature was long gone, but his tracks remained. A huge foot with four toes. Tanner didn’t even stop to register the implications before he took off following the tracks through the swamp. He moved as fast as possible, but had to slow a bit when the tracks led into an area thick with decaying vines.

  The tracks disappeared in the vines and he stopped to listen. He could hear the tide of a bayou nearby and then a giant splash. He took off through the brush in the direction of the splash and slid to a stop at the edge of a ten-foot drop into the bayou. He looked downstream in time to see a hairy head duck underwater.

  He ran down the bank as quickly as the thick undergrowth allowed, scanning the bayou for any sight of the creature. The bayou twisted ninety degrees to the right and he pushed around the corner and scanned the water, but nothing was there.

  At least three feet of cypress roots made up both sides of the bank. The creature could have climbed up anywhere down the quarter-mile stretch in front of him, or could have grabbed some air and continued swimming with the tide. He’d scan the bank on both sides, but he already knew it was a long shot that he’d find anything.

  He didn’t even stop to dwell on the more troubling aspects of the entire situation. There was plenty of time for that later—after he’d had a hot shower and a stiff drink and had figured out what he was going to tell Josie.

  Chapter Six

  Holt Chamberlain hung up the phone and looked up at his brother Max, who paced in front of his desk.

  “Well?” Max asked.

  “We got an ID,” Holt said, his surprise apparent in his voice.

  “A real one?”

  “Yeah, a dead, no-longer-breathing but very real and documented person. At least, documented for the last decade.”

  “And you’re sure the tattoo was a match?”

  Holt nodded. “I went to the morgue in Baton Rouge to identify it myself.”

  Max stopped pacing and slid into a chair in front of the desk. “So?”

  “Harrison Belafonte. Forty-two. Owned an insurance company in Baton Rouge where the FBI was about to launch an investigation into the possibility that he was using his agency to launder money. Sound familiar?”

  “Like Martin Rommel was doing with the restaurant.”

  “Yep, and I don’t think for a moment that it’s a coincidence.”

  “Did Belafonte kill himself?”

  “According to the coroner, he had enough cocaine in his system to kill an elephant, but he couldn’t say whether the overdose was intentional or accidental.”

  Max blew out a breath. “So is it some sort of organized crime that these guys are involved in?”

  “It looks that way, but we have to figure out the connection between Rommel and this Belafonte in order to have any idea where to look for live members.”

  Holt’s phone rang again and he looked at the display, then frowned. “It’s the Baton Rouge police.”

  He answered the phone and listened in silence to what the cop said. When the man was finished, he thanked him and slowly put the phone back in place.

  Max leaned forward in his chair. “What is it?”

  “We might have our connection. Belafonte was ex-military. I always suspected Rommel was, just by the way he carried himself.”

  “I thought Belafonte’s fingerprints had been altered, like Rommel’s.”

  “They had, but he had a pin in his leg. They traced the number back to a military hospital in Virginia. Belafonte was Casey Theriot. He was Special Forces and the military has been looking for him the last ten years.”

  Max whistled. “You thinking these guys were Special Forces who went rogue?”

  “Rogue, mercenaries...doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things. The outcome is the same.”

  “What in the world have we stepped in the middle of?”

  Holt frowned. “More importantly—how was our father involved and why was he murdered because of it?”

  * * *

  TANNER SPENT ANOTHER four frustrating hours trying to track the creature, but didn’t find a trace of him on either side of the bank. It wasn’t really surprising given the thick canopy of dead vines covering the ground, and it was also possible the creature hadn’t come up the bank on that stretch of bayou at all.

  Annoyed with the lost opportunity, he made his way back to where the crew was working, to see if Emmett Vernon had ever returned to do his job. The men were still hard at work on the fencing, and he gave Ray a nod as he entered the clearing.

  Surprisingly, Vernon sat on a boulder making notes on a pad of paper. Tanner headed over and stood in front of the man, who continued to look down at the paper. Tanner’s shadow fell right across his paper and he hadn’t exactly tried to mask his approach. Vernon knew he was there. He was just choosing to ignore him.

  “Emmett Vernon, right?” Tanne
r asked.

  Vernon sighed and looked up at him, clearly disgusted. “Yeah, who’s asking?”

  “My name is Tanner LeDoux. Ms. Bettencourt has hired me to figure out who’s vandalizing her property.”

  “Good luck with that,” he said and dropped his gaze back to his paper.

  “Any reason why I need luck?”

  “Chasing legends in this swamp is going to require more than a good pair of boots.”

  “I’m a professional tracker.”

  Vernon froze and looked back up at him, his expression now wary. “You don’t say.”

  “Yep. I grew up in the Mystere Parish swamps, got my degree in forestry and have worked as a game warden since college. I’ve never missed finding my target before, and I’m not about to start.”

  Vernon stared at him for a couple of seconds. “And you’re telling me all this why, exactly?”

  “Because I want information from you about what you think is going on.”

  “I would think it’s obvious. A bunch of superstitious fools had some drinks on the job and imagined things.”

  Tanner glanced over at Ray, who was clearly angry at Vernon’s words.

  “It wasn’t drunken superstition that tore down the fences,” Tanner said.

  “Right smart of you to figure that out. Now, what do you want from me?”

  “Your thoughts on who might have enough of a problem to cause trouble.”

  “I already gave you my opinion on what happened, but you’ll have to ask Josie who wants to cause her trouble.”

  “Josie can hardly have a beer with the locals and get them to talk, and being a stranger, neither can I.”

  Vernon scowled. “You want me to set up my friends and neighbors to pump them about something they ain’t got nothing to do with? I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know they’re not involved?”

  “Look. I don’t know what Josie told you, but if someone’s got a problem with her, I’d try looking into the people she met after she left Miel. She didn’t come back here with her tail between her legs for no reason. You ask me, she’s running from something. Maybe you should ask her if it came looking for her.”