by Jana DeLeon
Breaking her heart was not an option.
Chapter Twelve
Jake knew the moment Mallory entered the casino. A strange sensation pulsed through his body, and he looked up at the doorway as she stepped inside. She was beautiful, as always, but even from across the floor he could tell her step lacked the usual energetic bounce and her expression was more thoughtful than playful.
The situation was taking a toll on her, and for that, he felt guilty.
Jake noticed Mallory was careful to avoid his gaze. Probably a good idea. With all his training and experience, Jake could force a blank face if needed, but Mallory's life had probably never called for anything but the truth, something she was used to delivering like rapid gunfire.
Once she'd taken the drink orders and headed off to the kitchen, Jake pulled the first of the cards from the shoe and dealt it across the table. There wasn't any use in waiting on Mallory for the first hand. The other players weren't a threat to him, and Silas had obviously found a way to work around her. A way Jake hoped would surface sometime today.
They were just finishing up the first hand when Mallory returned with the coffee. Father Thomas had managed to play out a rather good hand and had taken a fairly impressive pot to start the day. He beamed up at Mallory as she slid between him and another player to place the mug of coffee in front of him.
"Mallory, my child," the priest said. "Look at the start of the Lord's day - it's rained chips like manna."
Mallory grinned. "Now that would be an impressive trick. And a very dangerous one in this town."
All the other players, except Silas, laughed and even Father Thomas gave her words some consideration. "Perhaps you're right," he said finally. "I shall keep this blessing the Lord has given me to myself. For the safety of the community, of course."
"Of course."
Father Thomas turned to the table and started to pick up his drink when he noticed it was coffee. "What's this? It's already ten A.M. Why did you bring me coffee?"
Mallory moved to the next player and placed another coffee on the table. "Because the casino is completely out of Jack Daniel's - no thanks to you - and there won't be more in until lunch, at which point we'll be about a hundred miles offshore on this floating boat of fun. Add to that, the beer cooler broke down sometime last night, so all the beer is hot. Scooter fixed it, but it will probably take until lunchtime to cool everything off again."
Father Thomas stared at her with a look of dismay. "The plague has come upon us."
"Well, unless you plan on parting the Gulf of Mexico so the delivery truck can drive out here, you're going to have to choose another way to pickle your liver. I brought the coffee to give you time to decide."
Mallory finished up drink service and slid onto her stool, giving Jake a brief nod. She'd done a thorough job touching the players, even Silas, though it was probably a complete waste of time. Still, Jake understood why she needed to try and respected her for doing it.
He dealt the next hand across the table, then reached down to flip up the edge of his cards, hoping for something good enough to keep him in play.
No way!
He stared at the cards, utilizing every ounce of control he had to maintain a blank look on his face. And the royal flush stared back at him in all its glory.
What the hell?
The other men had already made their discards, and he had to think fast. It was tempting to keep the hand, even though he knew there was absolutely no way he could. Finally, he took the ace and king and tossed them into the pile of discards. He dealt the replacement cards and desperately hoped for a miracle.
He held his breath as he pulled the edge of the cards off the table and almost fell over when he saw what lay beneath his fingers -an ace and a king of a different suit. It was as if the first day of the tournament were happening all over again.
As if Mallory's bad luck was back in play.
Mallory watched in amazement as hand after hand went Jake's way. It was as if someone had flipped her switch back on. But how?
Her mind flashed to the voodoo doll hidden in her closet and she drew in a breath. Had that really been the catalyst? Had Silas Hebert held some kind of power over her through the doll? It was the only explanation, the only thing that had changed from yesterday to today.
And it was the last thing she wanted to believe.
Jake appeared normal as he played the hands out, but Mallory knew him well enough by now to know that a confused interior lurked behind that calm facade. Which meant he had no idea why the table had turned, either.
She felt Silas's eyes upon her and shifted on her stool. She'd caught him stealing looks at her several times that morning and felt his stare even more often than she'd seen it, her skin prickling each time.
Did he know? Had he done an inventory of his room after they'd left the hotel and found the doll missing? Or was he simply thinking she and Jake had some elaborate way of cheating and he hadn't been able to figure out how?
Maybe Silas guessed someone had broken into his room, and he'd found the deck of marked cards. Maybe Silas just wasn't cheating any longer because he figured they were onto him. But then if he'd found the marked cards, why in the world didn't he just buy a brand-new deck and proceed as before? The entire situation did not add up, no matter how you sliced it.
She managed to keep her cool until lunch, excused herself from the table almost immediately, and hurried to the ladies' room, hoping to catch Amy before she left for the dining room. The whole voodoo-doll thing was really bothering her, and she needed a second opinion - a rational one, she hoped - before she jumped off the deep end.
Unfortunately, Walter Royal stopped her before she could exit the casino.
"Mallory," he said, with a full-toothed grin, "I've been meaning to ask you about your truck. That's company property, right? Is that a six cylinder or an eight?"
Mallory grit her teeth and glared at him. "The truck belongs to me, but I'll be happy to remove the Harry Breaux Construction sticker from the door."
Royal looked somewhat disappointed, then brightened. "Oh well, it was an old model anyway. Can't have my new foreman driving around in a beat-up truck. I've got a reputation to protect." He tipped his hat at her and strolled down the hall, whistling as he went.
Mallory stared after him and fought the urge to put an NFL move on the man. Walter Royal gave the term "son of a bitch" a whole new meaning. Trying to block her mind from the potty king and his ridiculous hat, she hurried on to the ladies' room, hoping Amy hadn't already gone to the dining room for lunch.
Amy was just reapplying her lipstick when Mallory burst into the ladies' room and motioned her back toward the lockers. She gave Mallory a surprised look at her frantic waving, but dropped her lipstick in her purse and followed Mallory into the dressing area without a word.
Thankfully, the dressing area was empty, so Mallory whirled around to face her confused friend as soon as they stepped inside. "I am in big trouble, Amy."
Amy's eyes widened. "What's wrong? Is it the ATF?"
"I wish." Mallory reached into her locker and brought out the shoe box with the voodoo doll. She wasn't really sure why she'd brought the doll with her that morning. Her original thought had been to pitch it off the boat somewhere in the middle of the Gulf, but so far, she couldn't bring herself to go through with it.
"I took this from Silas's room last night," Mallory continued. "Jake doesn't know." She lifted the lid off the box and turned it so that Amy had a clear view.
Amy took one look inside the box and gasped. "Oh, my God! Mallory, that looks exactly like you ... even the outfit."
"I know. Why do you think I took it?"
Amy shuddered and looked away from the doll. "Okay, that's just creepy. Why in the world would Silas Hebert have a voodoo doll of you?"
"I don't know. I was thinking maybe we could find out something about it. I mean, someone had to make it, right? And somehow Silas Hebert doesn't seem the type to sew doll clothes."
Mallory bit her lower lip, knowing she was asking a lot of her friend. "My uncle has a makeshift office on the second floor of the casino. He has a part-time bookkeeper or something who uses it a couple of times a week, but otherwise, it should be empty. He's got a computer in there, and I know he has satellite Internet service."
"Can we get to the office without Reginald seeing us?"
"I think so," Mallory replied. Since it seemed that she and her uncle had gone to great lengths to avoid running into each other today, Mallory couldn't imagine Reginald would be out and about during the lunch hour.
"Then let's get going." Amy smiled and shoved her purse back in her locker. "You know, my life has gotten a whole lot more interesting lately. I'm beginning to think hanging out with you more often might have its advantages."
Mallory gave a single laugh and stepped out of the dressing room. "Oh yeah, potential arrests, the risk of crossfire, voodoo dolls ... I can see why you wouldn't want to miss out on any of that."
Amy just grinned and followed her out of the ladies' room and up the stairs to the second floor. The office was at the far end of the hall, and Mallory let out a sigh of relief when she pushed open the door and found the room empty. Amy hurried behind the desk to the computer and started working her password magic. It didn't even take a minute before she was logged in and ready to go.
"Piece of cake," Amy said, and smiled. "Now hand me that creepy doll. I want to see if there's a tag or something on it. Something that may lead us to who made it."
Mallory hesitated for a moment then passed the doll across the desk. "It looks handmade, Amy. I don't know that you'll find anything that way."
Amy shrugged. "So then I go about searching the long way. I just figured if the person who made this fancies themself an artist of any kind, they might have put their name or at least initials somewhere on the doll."
It made sense, sort of, if you could go along with the idea that an artist would want to advertise he or she was practicing voodoo. "You look for a tag. I'm not touching that thing."
Amy opened the box and stared down at the doll, the doubt on her face clear as day. "Do you know if it works?"
"What do you mean? Of course, I don't know. Not for sure. But if you consider that Silas had it yesterday and won, and I took it last night and now he's not winning, well ... you have to wonder."
Amy nodded and reached into the box, lifting the doll from its resting place. "Maybe we should test it."
"What? How the hell would we do that? I don't know a thing about voodoo and neither do you." Mallory slid between the desk and the stack of boxes lined against the wall and inched toward Amy.
Amy studied the doll a minute more, then pulled a butterfly barrette from her hair and poked the doll in the leg.
"Ouch!" The pain in Mallory's thigh was so quick, so unexpected, that she yelled before she'd been able to stop herself. Amy jerked back her hand and stared at Mallory, a horrified look on her face.
"Oh, my God! It works, Mallory. This doll works."
Mallory looked down and pulled a metal ruler from in between the boxes. She held the ruler up for Amy to see. "It's just a ruler," she said, secretly thanking God she hadn't tossed the doll overboard as she'd planned. Involuntary suicide was hardly the way she wanted to exit this life and with her luck, she never knew what might happen. "Just get to researching, will you? And no more poking."
Amy giggled. "Okay, but I'm probably going to need to remove the clothes to look for a tag. You might want to turn up the heat in here."
"God forbid," Mallory muttered, and turned her attention to the bookshelves behind the desk, not wanting to watch the dissection of the doll and somewhat afraid of what might happen as Amy dug around for a tag. Deciding not to take any chances, she kicked off her shoes, just in case a heel was compromised, and removed her long dangly earrings with the pointy ends.
"See," Amy said, and held up the semi-naked doll, "it's working already."
Mallory looked down at the pile of discards she'd been wearing only moments before and laughed. "Okay, it is sort of funny. But still too weird to be real funny." She turned away from Amy and back to the bookshelf, a picture in the corner catching her eye.
"Hey, look at this," Mallory said. "It's an old yearbook."
Amy nodded but didn't look up from her work. "Yeah, yeah, then read it or something. I think I found something here."
Mallory tucked the faded yearbook under her arm and sat down across the desk from Amy. "What did you find?"
Amy pointed to tiny initials, "T.H." penned on the foot of the doll. "I bet this is the designer." She reached for the keyboard and began tapping away. "If she does this retail, she might have a website."
Mallory shuddered to think of owning a business that helped make others miserable, but New Orleans wasn't exactly known for its most upstanding of citizens. The city defined "weird" in so many ways that Mallory couldn't keep up-voodoo, vampire bars, and probably a whole host of other things she didn't want to know about.
She opened the yearbook and flipped through the pages, hoping Amy found something soon since the lunch hour was starting to get away from them. She smiled at the old-fashioned hairdos in the book. The students looked so prim and proper, like future deacons and elementary school teachers, which apparently wasn't the case if the yearbook belonged to her uncle. That was at least one strike against them already.
She flipped another page and stared at the picture in surprise. Her mother, a much younger, happier-looking version of her mother, beamed up at her from the page. She was wearing a cheerleader uniform and looking quite perky. Mallory stared at the photograph, wondering what had happened to the girl in the picture, because the bitter woman she'd known had never looked this way to Mallory, not once.
"Mallory," Amy's voice cut into her thoughts. "I think I found it. Take a look at this." She flipped the flat-screen monitor around so that Mallory could see the Web site displayed. "This girl, Tammy Howard, is the artist. It says here that she creates the dolls from photos. They are specialty gift items."
Mallory placed the open yearbook on the desk and studied the site, with its pretty pink and purple flowered edging and whimsical gold lettering. No skulls, no blood, no sign of voodoo. "It doesn't look like she's into the whole black arts thing."
Amy studied the site a bit more and shook her head. "No, it doesn't. Of course, this could all be a cover, or she might really be who she says she is and Silas is just using her talent to create the dolls. It wouldn't be any big deal for him to pass off a photo of you as a niece or other relative and pay her a big load of money to put a rush on it."
Mallory leaned back in her chair and blew out a breath. "Yeah, you're probably right. But then who cursed the doll? Obviously it works. What's happening with the cards can't be a coincidence. And besides, if Silas Hebert is spending that much time and effort on something, it must be paying off."
"Or he thinks it does." Amy bit her lip. "I could do some more searching on voodoo. I have a friend who's a religion major at the university whom I could go see tonight. She's doing her thesis on African religions. Surely, voodoo is one of the things she's covered."
"Okay," Mallory said, and rose from her chair. "Give me a call after you talk to her. I'll try to do some research online myself. Maybe we can figure something out."
Amy nodded and looked down at the yearbook. "Did you find a picture of Reginald?"
Mallory looked down at the forgotten yearbook. "No." She picked the book up and showed Amy the picture. "But I found my mother. That's her."
Amy studied the picture for a moment, then looked back up at Mallory. "You look a lot like her - minus that silly hair."
Mallory looked at the picture again. "Yeah, I guess I do."
Amy motioned for her to flip the page.
"Is your father in there, too?"
Mallory shrugged. "I don't even know if they went to the same high school. They never really talked about how they met or anything." She flipped through a couple more pages of happy, shiny-faced youths clustered in groups for club photos then entered the section of "Most Likely" shots. She smiled at the "Most Likely to Succeed" photo and flipped the page, but one look at the "Most Likely to Marry" photo made her gasp.
It was her mother again, of that she was sure, but the man with her definitely wasn't her father. The boy in the picture was a lot older now and the youthful expression on his face probably hadn't extended much beyond high school, but there was no doubt in her mind that the boy in the photo was Silas Hebert.
Jake chose a table in the corner of the dining area, some distance away from the rest of the staff and the other players. For a while, he watched for Mallory to enter the room, even though he knew she couldn't sit with him. After a half hour, he gave up wondering where she was and picked up his sandwich. He was halfway through the first bite when Brad sat down at his table.
"I know it was you last night," Brad said. "Don't think I couldn't arrest you on suspicion."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jake replied, and took another bite of his sandwich.
Brad stared at him, his eyes flashing with anger. "Don't give me that shit. I'm not buying it and you know it." He looked out over the dining area, then back at Jake. "Look, I know about your partner."
Jake stared at Brad in surprise. "How do you know about Mark?"
"I ran into him in New Orleans. He was handling an exchange of goods for Silas in one of the casinos. He told me about the bust."
Jake narrowed his eyes at Brad. "You're telling me a federal agent just walked up to a complete stranger in a casino and blabbed all about his undercover operation? I don't think so."
