Relentless River: Men of Mercy, Book 10

by Lindsay Cross

“Fine! I’m helping Frankie move a package for Jason Dupree.”

  Cheri froze, her entire body instantly turning to ice. “Dupree is a drug dealer. A murderer. Why would you get involved with him?!” The Slidell police never managed to find enough evidence to convict Dupree, because any witnesses to his crimes ended up dead. He made Al Capone look like an amateur.

  “Shhh. Keep your voice down. We’re just moving some cash for him.”

  “Cash? How much?” Her mind spun out of control. Jason Dupree gave serial killers a bad name. He’d not only murder Lamont, but every person he knew if it meant covering his ass.

  “Just a little.” Lamont managed to get up to his elbows, his pale face, the half she could see, broke out in a sweat.

  “What exactly is ‘just a little’?” Cheri started to shake. Dupree didn’t deal in little anything.

  “One million.”

  All the air left her lungs in a whoosh. She dropped her head to the floor. The fluorescent lights flashed overhead. Oh. My. God.

  Lamont’s damaged face swam into her vision. “Chére? You can’t tell anyone, especially Bo. Promise me.”

  A pair of dark brown boots appeared next to Cheri’s head. “What can’t you tell me?”

  Heart jamming up her throat, Cheri stumbled to her feet, gave Bo her back and attempted to help Lamont from the floor as she struggled to get her fear under control.

  Her cousin was working for Dupree, the biggest crime lord in Louisiana, and Bo was standing right behind her. Watching her.

  Her knees trembled. Had Bo overheard? Would he arrest Lamont and take him away from her?

  “Stop, before you drop him and knock him out again.” Bo moved her to the side, bent down and lifted Lamont from the floor. Then he maneuvered him back to bed, lowering him with difficulty.

  Cheri didn’t give Bo time to fire off his questions again; instead, she inserted herself between Bo and the bed, jerking the sheet up to Lamont’s chin with a warning glance. “You’re rambling and talking nonsense. Why would Bo care about you breaking it off with Ginger?”

  Lamont picked up her lie with the practiced ease of experience. “Don’t know, chére. I’m feeling a little woozy.”

  Bo snorted and Cheri turned to glare over her shoulder at him. “He’s hurt, have a little compassion.”

  “You two are lying through your teeth.”

  Lamont groaned and covered his eyes. “The light, chére. Turn it off. My head’s pounding. Doc said I’d be sensitive seein’s how I got this concussion.”

  “See, Bo? I told you he’s hurt. You should go back up front and flirt with your little nurse friend.” Adrenaline fueling her heart into a pounding rush, Cheri spun and grabbed the bed rail behind her for support.

  “Just so you know, I had a talk with the nurse after you left.” Bo’s already chiseled face turned to granite. “She won’t ever talk to you like that again.”

  His admission sucked the air right out of the hospital room. “Why?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Why did she get the feeling it did matter to him?”

  Bo continued, “What does matter is whatever you two are scheming, and I think it has everything to do with your brother showing up tonight.”

  “We haven’t seen Frankie since we left Slidell.” At least she hadn’t. She’d thought Lamont hadn’t either, until tonight.

  “I believe you haven’t, but not him.” Bo nodded past her shoulder.

  Cheri squeezed the handrail. “Lamont hates Frankie as much as I do. Why would he have anything to do with him?”

  She could practically feel the guilt blasting off Lamont and into her back. He’d been in touch with Frankie, all right, and working for Dupree. All without her having a clue.

  What else was he hiding?

  Bo’s knowing gaze pinned her to the spot. “That’s a question I intend to find the answer to.”

  11

  “Well, don’t you look like something Twinkles dragged in out of the bayou.” Ms. Oralee Bates, Desha County’s adopted secretary for the sheriff’s office, placed her wrinkled elbows on a fifties era metal desk.

  Bo gave her a genuine smile, shielding a little bit of the fatigue from a long sleepless night. “Now Oralee, you know that little squirrel you call a dog could no more drag me down a steep hill than he could out of your backyard.”

  Oralee cackled and clapped her hands together. “You’re right. Twinkle’s as blind as a bat and going deaf I’m pretty sure, but something kept you up all night. And that something, I hear, might have been the single bullet hole in the head of the corpse Verne found floating in the bayou.”

  Bo paused midair in the process of hanging his hat on the hook next to the front door, and spun slowly on the balls of his feet to narrow his eyes at the crafty old bird. Oralee and Ms. Van Meter, scions of Mercy, Mississippi, matriarchs of the United Methodist Church and all around women of good will, were also two of the biggest gossips he’d ever dreamed God could invent. However, this was fast even for Oralee Bates.

  Which could only mean one thing.

  Bo turned his attention down the short narrow hallway past Oralee. “Bart, I’d like a word.”

  Immediately the sound of a ten-year-old squeaking rolling chair filled the tiny office as Bart shoved back from his desk, followed by Bart’s pounding footsteps as he came barreling down the hall. Somehow Bart managed to look winded, his pale cheeks flushed red. “Yes, Sheriff?”

  “Can you tell me what section 504C of the Mississippi police manual states? I believe it’s in paragraph three,” Bo said, his voice calm.

  Bart clicked his heels together and saluted, his presentation as if he were meeting the President of the United States instead of Bo Lawson, Sheriff of Desha County, population five thousand and counting down.

  “All investigators of any possible crime scene shall retain all possible information related to the case in the utmost confidence so as not to impose any outside sources of discrimination or possible leaks of information to anyone other than those directly involved in the investigation. Those involved include investigating officer in charge, any of his subordinates—”

  “Enough,” Bo cut in with a slow drawl, crossing his arms over his chest and bracing his feet shoulder width apart. It was a move he’d learned from his Staff Sergeant his first week in basic training, a move meant to intimidate. And a move that looked like it worked just as well with Bart as it had on Bo when he was eighteen years old. “Does the manual say sharing information with the secretary is permitted?”

  Bart stuttered out, “N-n-no…”

  “And does the manual say any investigating associate who shares classified information shall be subject to the proper punishment procedures?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  “Care to list punishments for the serious infraction of interfering with an ongoing investigation, Bart?” Bo let his voice lower with just the right amount of menace, intending to put the fear of God in him, even though he didn’t intend to punish Bart. He’d be willing to bet money Oralee had siphoned information out of him without Bart even realizing what was going on. The crafty old woman fed off gossip, and when she got the tiniest tidbit, she took off like a gun shot.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bo saw Oralee shift uncomfortably in her chair. “Now, Sheriff, he’s just a young kid, still learning the ways.”

  “Young or not, he could have completely destroyed our investigation.”

  Bart turned an astonishingly pale shade of green, much like the color of the cinder block walls in Bo’s old high school cafeteria. Bart tugged on the tight, perfectly pressed collar around his neck. “Sheriff, I didn’t mean—”

  Bo opened his mouth, ready to come back with a sharp retort when Oralee cut in again, shoving up from her relaxed position to step in front of Bart. “Don’t you get on to him. He had no idea what he was telling me, and you know it.” She crossed her arms over her more than ample bosom, wrinkling the material in her dove gray dress.

  Bo le
aned down a good foot and still towered over the short woman. “I figured. Just so you know, whether Bart realizes you were manipulating him or not, sharing classified intel is a serious infraction. This is your warning, both of you.”

  Oralee gave a big harrumph and then sank back into her seat. She’d stepped right into his trap and knew it.

  “You’re smart; I’ll give you that, even if you are a pain in my rear end,” Oralee said.

  “Ease up, Bart. You’re not in trouble this time. You’ve just got to realize our dear old secretary should’ve worked for the CIA.”

  Bart shot Oralee an accusing and hurt glare before saluting Bo once more and marching back to his office, his spine ramrod straight.

  “I think you’ve hurt his feelings.”

  She let out a long-suffering sigh, as if Bo had just heaped the weight of the world on her stooped shoulders. “And now, because of you, I’ll have to spend the entire week making him cookies and pies to make up for it.”

  Bo could see the wheels turning in her head. He cautioned her, a smile playing around his lips. “Oralee, I don’t think you’ll be able to bribe more information from him with fresh baked sugar cookies.”

  She reached across her desk for a stack of papers and started shuffling through them, pulling the stapler at the corner of her desk a little bit closer. “I would never expect sugar cookies to do that.”

  Bo leaned down and rapped his knuckles lightly on the scratched and dented metal desk, drawing Oralee’s attention. “If you try chocolate fried pies, though, I’ll expect at least two.”

  Bo strode into his office to the sound of Oralee’s chuckle. Even though he’d been through years of rigorous training, been in Marine Special Operations Command for nearly a decade, lived off MREs and his own cooking, which consisted of anything he could put on a grill, he had a secret addiction to chocolate fried pies. And Oralee had her great-grandmother’s original recipe, which had to involve an entire tub of butter and heaps of sugar, because nothing so mouthwatering delicious could be good for him.

  Except maybe Cheri Boudreaux.

  Bo sank into a rusted rolling chair a shade too small for his large frame, flopped his elbows onto his equally old desk, and dropped his head into his hands. Cheri had turned the tables on him last night in a move he hadn’t expected. He’d anticipated chewing her out for causing so much havoc in his town and then walking away. Bo snorted at his own stupidity. As if he could simply pat Cheri on the shoulder and walk away. Even now, he could feel her silky long red hair sliding around his fingers. Her cat-like green eyes mesmerized him and put him in some kind of trance whenever he got close.

  He’d known better. He’d known staying in her bar after clearing the fight, he’d put his foot inside her open door. For the past year, he’d been hell-bent on keeping her at a distance, because despite her somewhat roguish appearance and wild demeanor, there was an artless naiveté she could never disguise.

  An innocence Bo hadn’t encountered since before his first tour of duty. As if from a distance, he remembered his old self, when he used to laugh and cut up with his buddies, flirting carelessly but always gentle with his girlfriends, almost scared to touch them. The gentleness had been beaten and shot out of him after multiple tours overseas after experiencing all the death and destruction.

  Yeah, he believed in what he’d done. He had no regrets because it had all been to protect and serve his country. Nevertheless, he wasn’t naïve enough to believe war hadn’t changed him. Handling women with kid gloves just didn’t cut it for him anymore. His needs were darker, harsher and something he kept hidden from anyone within fifty miles of Mercy. If word got out about his tastes in bed, the small southern town and strong Bible belt backbone would impeach him in no time flat.

  He hooked up only with women who shared his taste, Bo wasn’t stupid enough to believe word wouldn’t spread like the plague. A part of him didn’t really care about his own position, but he cared about Cheri. No matter how much she tried to paint herself as the outcast bartender, he’d seen the hurt in her eyes last night when the admissions nurse had looked at her like a girl from the street corner.

  And no matter how much he knew he shouldn’t care, her look had made his blood boil.

  Remembering the taste of her sinfully spicy lips made his mouth tingle, and he clenched his hands into fists. This was what she did to him. How she tortured him. And why he’d lost control last night. Something he couldn’t afford to do again. He knew the connection between him and Cheri went way deeper and couldn’t be solved with a simple screw. His only hope would be to stay the hell away from her.

  But after overhearing Lamont’s comment last night in the hospital, staying away from Cheri would be impossible. Lamont and Frankie were somehow involved with the floater. They knew something and didn’t want to tell him.

  And now, so did Cheri. Bo just had to figure out how to get her to talk.

  Bo thought briefly about sending in Bart, but his deputy could barely look at her without blushing. How he’d managed to make it through the police academy at the top of his class was beyond Bo. He must have a thread of steel somewhere behind all those blushes and stammers.

  The job would harden him. Dealing with criminals and drug dealers and dead bodies, innocence wasn’t a privilege you were allowed to keep, whether you wanted to or not. Bart would develop instincts, just like Bo had.

  Those instincts had fired off red hot last night. First when he’d taken her mouth and second, when her brother had appeared in the bar. And he’d been so rattled at being taken unaware, he hadn’t given his instincts much credit. Then Lamont’s comment in the hospital.

  He’d been weak.

  Now he had to deal with a pissed off Cheri thinking he’d toyed with her when he’d only been trying to do what was right and stop the madness. She’d made him lose control, something he never did. Hadn’t she reacted just as strong, though?

  The phone rang and Bo answered it. “Hello?”

  “Bo, I got a return on the fingerprints. We won’t have to wait on DNA,” Caldwell said.

  “What is it?” Bo grabbed a pad and pencil.

  “His name is Joe Kidd, a.k.a. Fresh, whatever that means. His residence is in Slidell, Louisiana. Known associates include a Deshawn “Ice” Taylor, Ferdinand “Slice” Jones and a Jason Dupree.”

  Bo quickly jotted down the names. “I’ll look into it. Find anything else in your examination yet?”

  “Bullet was still lodged in his frontal lobe. It’s a .40 caliber, brass tipped. Did some serious internal damage. I’m sending it to the lab for prints. Pretty standard issue.”

  “Thanks, Larry. I’ll look into it. Let me know if you find anything else.” Bo disconnected and then called his contact in New Orleans. “Morceaux.”

  “Val, this is Bo Lawson.”

  “Bo, what the heck have you been up to? It’s been a long time.” The thick Cajun drawl of Bo’s old supply sergeant filled the line. Valery Morceaux and Bo had done a few tours together, including their last, and both got out at the same time. Now she was SAIC, Special Agent In Charge, at the New Orleans FBI field office.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I got a couple of names, and I need to know if you’ve heard of them.” From the sounds of Fresh’s associates, they’d be on someone’s watch list.

  “Hold on, let me open up my computer.” Bo listened as Valery clacked keys. “All right, shoot.”

  Bo tapped his pencil next to each name as he went down the list. “I’ve got a Deshawn Taylor, Ferdinand Jones and a Jason Dupree.” There was a moment of complete silence, no keys clacking or anything. “Val, you still there?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  Bo got a prickle down his neck, the same one he used to get right before walking into a firefight. “They’ve been linked to my investigation.”

  She expelled a loud whoosh of air, and the prickling on Bo’s neck intensified.

  “My friend, the first two are small time lackeys, but Dupree – he’s b
ad business. You don’t want to go getting on his bad side.”

  “I need more.”

  “I can’t give you more. But I can tell you one thing.”

  Bo nearly crushed the phone in his grip. “What?”

  “If you got someone involved with Dupree, you need to put them in witness protection before they disappear.”

  12

  A few hours later, Cheri chopped fish to the beat of the pounding bass of the band filtering through the thin kitchen walls, her anger and fear growing with each thud. She should have known the first few bikers who’d walked into the bar earlier were only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the gang showed up, which put The Wharf right back up to capacity.

  Not only that, she’d had to rely on Lainey for a ride tonight. Another unexpected turn of events. She’d been ready to ride with Lamont, especially since his recovery from his fake concussion. She needed to grill him about Dupree, but he’d pulled a disappearing act this afternoon. Now she was stuck doing his job and worrying about his ass.

  She wiped another bead of sweat from her face with the back of her arm, careful not to get any fish guts on her skin. Lainey barged through the doors, makeup melted off, her sweat-soaked shirt clinging to her too hollow stomach. “Swear to the good Lord, if another one of those bikers makes a grab for me, I might just have to tell him off.”

  “If anyone makes a grab for you, dump a pitcher of beer on his head. That usually cools them off pretty damn fast.” And had worked for Cheri last night. But not so much for her car after Arlow slashed her tires.

  The dress code at The Wharf wasn’t exactly Little House on the Prairie but it wasn’t The Playboy Club either. Regardless, she didn’t like strangers copping a feel just because she worked in a bar.

  Unless of course the man was Sheriff Bo Lawson. If he flipped whatever switch he’d flipped last night again, all the self-righteous anger she’d managed to build up would be obliterated by the touch of his hand.

  “The band skipped intermission to keep everyone dancing, but we’ve got way too many people to keep up with.” Lainey leaned against the table near the door, shoulders slumped.