Marc’s voice sounded strange. Strangled. Like some serious feeling meant he had to force the words past a tightness in his throat.
“Marc—”
“Better go,” he said, firing up the SUV. “Gumbo’s getting cold.”
I nodded. I could take a hint. And under Marc’s watchful gaze, I turned toward Ray’s house.
Bypassing the bungalow’s front door, I headed for the backyard, where I found a full-on ballyhoo in progress. A few of the faces were familiar. Most were not. But flickering light from the deep firepit danced across them all, illuminating their smiles as they laughed and joked and talked and talked. Corinne’s eldest sister, Abigail, jumped up from her lawn chair to hug me. Bethany, the middle sister, did the same, and Abigail’s husband waved me toward a tub on the deck mounded with cracked ice, fat lemon wedges, and boiled, ruby-red, black-eyed crawfish ready for guests to crack and eat by the handful.
I’d never developed the skill—or the stomach—to pick the crustaceans apart the traditional way, so I veered toward a platter of brownies holding down one end of a long folding table groaning with even more food. The gun dealer who’d sold me my little Beretta Bobcat years ago forgot all about the chips and dip when he spotted me. He slapped me on the back and offered me a beer.
At that moment, Corinne emerged from the house. She lugged a heaping bucket of ice to the crawfish tub and dumped the cubes into it. Wiping her brow with the back of her hand, she looked like it was way past her bedtime—or past the baby’s.
“Let me take that,” I offered, popping up at her side.
“Jamie! You made it!” Corinne gladly handed over the ice bucket, sent a surreptitious glance around her backyard. “Are you here alone?”
“All alone,” I said. “Where’s Ray?”
I needed to talk to him, but I didn’t want to point that out.
Corinne laughed. “Where do you think? He’s fussing over the gumbo.”
Like Little Red Riding Hood carrying her basket of goodies through the forest, I bore the ice bucket into the kitchen. The place was warm and welcoming as only Corinne and home cooking could make it. The rich scent of Ray’s gumbo—a heady mix of black pepper, bay leaves, andouille sausage, and okra—met me on the threshold and made my stomach growl.
The man himself stood at the range, stirring an enormous stockpot full of the stuff with a long wooden spoon. For the first time, I noticed his stooped shoulders and his baggy pants. Ray was wasting away, whether he wanted to admit it or not.
I set the ice bucket down on the granite breakfast bar. Ray turned to look at me. His bushy brows drew together and a frown took over his face.
“Where’ve you been, kid? You look like hell.”
“Gee, Ray, you always were a sweet-talker.”
I squinted into the stainless-steel door of the refrigerator, tried to see my reflection in its surface. My glasses were a little crooked after my attack, but a gentle bend of the frames quickly set them to rights. The elastic band holding my hair in its customary ponytail had worked its way loose when one of Nevis’s henchmen had seized it, and I suspected it would take a stiff brush and some Tylenol to return it to its updo, but I didn’t have either in the little handbag still slung across my body. As a quick fix, I pulled the band from my hair altogether and let my long locks settle around my shoulders.
“You’ve been in a fight,” Ray declared.
“Not exactly.”
“Don’t mince words with me. Where the hell was this military cop of yours when all this was going on?”
“Doing his job,” I replied. “Just like Bran’s been doing his.”
Something shifted behind Ray’s eyes. I couldn’t say for certain what it was. But he stopped chiding me in favor of turning to ladle up a bowl of stew for me.
“Get a spoon,” he growled, just as a trio of party guests tripped into the kitchen. Ray invited them to help themselves as he scored two beers from the fridge. With the bottles in one hand and the bowl in the other, he rushed me from the kitchen and down the hall.
When Ray turned in to his home office, I followed. It was a small room, packed with furniture, and it always had been crowded. With the Walthers’ marriage, the space hadn’t quite escaped Corinne’s ministrations, but the stamp on it was still Ray’s.
Fifteen years ago, the room had been nothing more than an old desk, a rickety chair, two metal file cabinets, and pathways through piles of manila case folders stacked to my knee. Ray’s signature chair, a holdover from his father’s 1940s office, was still in evidence, though it had received a spruce. Now, it gleamed with a good waxing and its cracked upholstery had been replaced with burnished green leather that looked a lot like alligator hide. Likewise, the ugly metal file cabinets had been replaced with beautifully grained wooden versions. A spider plant even flourished on top of one of them. The desk was pretty much as it ever was, except I could see the surface of it.
Ray had interviewed me in this room. He’d been reluctant in this room to hire me. And it was in this room that I’d convinced him of my worth.
Ray plunked the bowl of gumbo down on the edge of his desk.
“Sit,” he ordered. “Eat.”
I did as I was told, parking my petite handbag on the corner of the desk and planting my derrière on a small cane-bottom chair Corinne or Ray had slipped alongside his workspace. I dipped my spoon into the savory broth. The complex flavors of land and sea met in the stew and I made quick work of it.
Ray watched me devour his handiwork from the comfort of his old chair, one of the long-necked beers in his hand.
He said, “You saw Bran tonight?”
“I saw him this morning,” I replied. “He was taking souvenir snapshots of an illegal gambling house. Maybe you know the guy who runs it.”
“The garbage can king,” Ray grumbled. “Hunch Nevis.”
“Nevis’s henchmen took exception to our being in the neighborhood. We got away all right. But I went back tonight. Everything was coming up roses until I ran into Monique Wells. You remember Monique.”
“I don’t know…”
“Sure, you do. She came up missing when Eddie Jepson killed her soldier boyfriend during the bombing of the Lady Luck. Before that, though, you had Bran on her tail.”
“And Bran said as much, I suppose.”
“He didn’t have to. I found his surveillance snaps when I tossed his apartment yesterday.”
Ray’s laugh sounded like carbon knocking around the inside of a carburetor. He snapped the cap off my beer and pushed it toward me across the desk. “You always were too smart for your own good, kid.”
“Why did you send Bran to track down Monique, Ray? What’s her connection to Eddie Jepson and Hunch Nevis? Are the three of them tied to a domestic terror cell somehow?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Ray said. “She models some, and I’m pretty sure she turns tricks to pay the rent now and again. Nevis runs girls to service his casino’s return customers, so maybe she’s spent the weekend on her back at his place a time or two, but I never gave a rat’s ass about Monique Wells.”
“You didn’t send Bran to track her down?”
Ray snorted. He surged from his chair, turning his back on me to pluck a cigar from the box on top of one of the file cabinets. I waited while Ray’s clumsy fingers freed the thing from its cellophane.
“Bran’s not tracking that little tart,” Ray said at last. “He’s banging her.”
Chapter 23
“Bran,” I said slowly, “is involved with Monique Wells?”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Does Corinne know about their relationship?”
“Corinne?” Ray’s bushy brows knitted together. “Why would she care?”
I shrugged.
The move was a big fat lie of omission.
“Of course,” Ray said, “Corinne did hire him, and he’s a decent investigator, but other than that—”
“Wait. Corinne hired Bran?”
“Sur
e did. Bran came to the office about two years ago.” Clamping his cigar between his teeth, Ray dropped into his desk chair. “He’d been on and off the streets since Hurricane Katrina wiped out his home and most of his family when he was a teen. He tried to make the best of it, doing odd jobs in the French Quarter for anyone who’d hire him. Club owners, landlords, politicians—lots of folks were cutting corners to get New Orleans back on her feet, and he saw the long and the short of it.
“One day, it dawned on him there might be legitimate money to be made doing what he’d been doing anyway, like safeguarding property and getting the lowdown on crooked competition. He shadowed a private eye, studied, got a journeyman’s license. But the city was still struggling to recover. It hadn’t turned into a land of milk and honey. He worked a little in Baton Rouge, tried Biloxi on for size. He was on his way to stay on his uncle’s chicken farm when his truck broke down on his way through Beauville. He came to the office looking for work so he could afford repairs. Corinne hired him.”
“On the spot?”
Ray rolled his dead stogie from one side of his mouth to the other. He wouldn’t quite meet my eye. “This winter, Corinne suggested I make him my partner.”
“So you did.”
“I did.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “To be honest, I suppose I should’ve offered the gig to you.”
I reached out, touched the handle of the spoon, turned it in the empty bowl just so. “It’s your firm. You get to do what you think is best, Ray.”
“You know, the clients we get down here don’t have the fat bank accounts of the ones who walk into your Georgetown office—”
“The clientele wasn’t why I left Ray Walther Investigations and you know it.”
I’d left because I’d stuck with my rat bastard of a husband, an army officer who got orders for a new duty station. And it was at the new duty station—far from everything familiar and farther from everything I’d built—that he’d hit me up for a divorce. That’s what a long-term commitment had done for me.
“Yeah.” Ray sighed like a steam engine. “I know. Bran does all right, but he’s not you, kid. If you didn’t live so damn far away—”
“Well, I do.”
And that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Dwelling on what if instead of what can I do never got a body where she wanted to go. In business, as in life, success came to those who put one foot in front of the other, and except for occasional excursions, my feet were going to stay inside the Beltway.
Now it was Ray’s turn to shrug. “Yes, you do. So I’ve got Bran for a partner. Corinne had been saying I should retire and taking on Bran was part of her plan. She wants us to travel. Hell, I traveled plenty in the army. But I want to make her happy.”
To my mind, Corinne’s desire to spend more time with Ray didn’t exactly mesh with the feelings of a woman who’d moved on to a new love, emotionally and physically. A wife who wanted every opportunity to see her hot, young hunk might encourage her older husband to stick to his desk at the office or take up a hobby far from the house. So maybe Corinne wasn’t sleeping with Bran after all—and maybe Bran really had been fixing her shower.
If Bran was sweet on Monique, maybe he wanted Nevis’s gotcha list for her sake. In that case, lying to me—and telling me that Ray wanted the list—had been a tactical maneuver. Bran had tried to trick me into doing his dirty work. And he’d succeeded. But I’d failed.
I said, “I’ve got to give Bran credit for his battlefield tactics. He convinced me to go after the names of Nevis’s suckers tonight.”
Ray froze. “You didn’t get ’em, did you, kid? The names, I mean.”
A tapping on the doorjamb halted our conversation. Corinne stood on the threshold. I wondered how long it had taken her to trundle up the hall, what she might’ve heard about Bran, and what she’d been able to glean about Monique.
She said, “There you are. I’ve been looking for you two.”
She was pale. Too pale. And ever so slightly short of breath.
Leaping up from my chair, I took her arm. “Corinne, sit down. You look exhausted.”
“No, I’m just a little tired.” She rubbed a palm over her baby bump and tried to smile. “I came to tell you a big red truck pulled into the end of the drive. I thought you’d want to know.”
Ray grimaced, but whether he was unhappy with the prospect of Barrett arriving on his doorstep or with the interruption to our conversation, I didn’t know.
For my part, the fact that Barrett had shown up here after I’d given him good reason to leave our bed in the middle of the night had my heart beating in triplicate. Maybe he’d come around to my way of thinking. Maybe he could agree that we should just cruise along, building our relationship without having to turn it into anything official. Somehow, however, I doubted it. And bracing myself for another argument, I excused myself and went to meet him.
Halfway down the hall, Corinne’s voice stopped me.
“Jamie?”
She’d left Ray in his office to hurry down the hall after me. Not that she could move very fast. Not with a baby onboard.
She caught up with me, whispered, “Do you love this man? This Adam Barrett?”
“Yes,” I said, unreservedly and without hesitation. “I do.”
Corinne glanced over her shoulder, toward Ray’s office. He hadn’t emerged, but I heard the springs of his ancient desk chair creak. I wondered if he was listening.
“Then if you truly love him,” Corinne whispered, “don’t give up on him. For anything.”
And just like that, my friend fled up the hall. Back to Ray’s office. Back to her husband.
Corinne’s decision to bestow this bit of advice right now didn’t sit well with me, but I got the firm impression she wouldn’t want to talk about her timing—or her meaning—in front of Ray. So with a deep breath and a shaky resolve, I set off to greet Barrett. He wasn’t in the foyer by the time I passed through it and he wasn’t in the kitchen, either. I walked out onto the deck, where strings of paper lanterns still outshined the stars and the salty strains of zydeco prompted party guests to dance on the lawn. As I stood at the edge of the action, Corinne’s single sister, Bethany, sidled up to me.
“Oh,” she breathed. “How yummy is that?”
I followed her line of sight. Where the glow of the lanterns met the dark of the night, Barrett emerged from the darkness. He’d traded in his uniform for the evening, wearing blue jeans and a saddle-brown leather jacket that made the most of his broad shoulders. His blond hair was shower fresh and finger-combed carelessly to the side. And for the life of me, I had the strongest urge to run my hands through it.
I squashed the feeling, shook myself loose of Bethany and her oohing and ahhing, and made my way through the crowd to meet him. Barrett’s face didn’t break into a smile when he saw me coming. And such a signal had me slowing my steps.
“Hi,” I said, reaching him at last.
“Hello,” he replied.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I said I would if I could, so I did.”
“Well, Corinne will be glad you’re here.”
Barrett reached out, swept my long locks from my shoulder. “Is she the only one?”
“No,” I said. “She’s not.”
Barrett smiled then. His smile was a small one—not the full-on grin that put sunlight to shame—but I was glad to see it. Clearly, he was still stinging from our conversation last night, and I felt like a heel for hurting him like I had. But he was here in spite of it all, and that meant the world to me.
He glanced around the yard crowded with people, at the party in full swing. “Think Corinne would miss us if we slipped away right now?”
She wouldn’t.
I was sure of it.
“I’ll grab my purse,” I said, and headed for the house.
I found my handbag where I’d left it: on the corner of Ray’s old oak desk. But there was no sign of the man himself. Light from Ray’s desk
lamp still arced across the blotter, and the bowl and spoon I’d dirtied hadn’t moved an inch. Ray, however, was nowhere to be found, and neither was Corinne.
“She went upstairs to lie down,” Abigail told me when I carried my gumbo bowl to the kitchen and deposited it in the sink.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“She’ll be all right,” her sister assured me. “She’d said she wanted to put her feet up for a few minutes, but she’s probably sound asleep by now.”
“Then I won’t risk waking her. But I should at least say goodbye to Ray.”
“Can’t do that, either.” Abigail smiled. “He ran out for more ice.”
I figured it was more likely Ray wanted to escape the chaos a party brings. I couldn’t blame him for it. I tried to follow suit, but Abigail spent a few minutes wishing me safe travels to DC. And so did everyone else I passed as I hurried to join Barrett outside.
Away from the house, the night was hushed and cool. Dew had begun to settle on the multitude of cars parked along the Walthers’ lane. Barrett met me under the pin oaks fronting Ray’s property. He didn’t ask me where I’d parked my car. I didn’t tell him I’d traded it for an SUV I’d loaned to Marc Sandoval. Instead, we clambered into his truck. He pointed it toward the winding road along the river.
Despite the clouds in the sky, slivers of moonlight escaped from the heavens and streaked the slow slipstream of the river, painting it pearly white. I said little and Barrett said less, but then we didn’t have to. In that moment, just being together was enough.
Eventually, we reached the hotel. Barrett parked the Ram in the stark lot alongside the skyscraper. When he made no move to get out of the truck, I took that as a sign he finally wanted to talk.
He said, “What time’s your flight tomorrow morning?”
He knew, but I told him anyway.
“Ten.”
“I know we planned on my driving you to the airport—”
“—but that was before Eddie Jepson got in the way. I understand.”
Barrett mumbled something that sounded like thanks.
“Will you call me when you get home?” he asked.
The Kill Radius Page 18
