Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)

by Susannah Sandlin

  At least she hoped so, in this instance.

  Her hands shook as she blew out the candles and placed the bones back into the case. At a soft knock on the front door, she almost bolted to the back of the house.

  She needed to get a grip and remember that she might not even be reading the bones right. She took a deep breath and looked through the peephole in the front door to see a funhouse view of Jena Sinclair.

  “You’re early,” she said, stepping aside to let Jena in. “Give me about ten minutes to finish getting ready.”

  “I’m not early. Gentry must have preoccupied you.” Jena stopped as soon as she saw the mat and candles on the table. “Or maybe something else did.”

  “Uh, yeah, sorry. Back in a few minutes.” Ceelie had no idea where Jena stood on the whole topic of faith and mysticism. As a New Orleanian she would’ve been exposed to the touristy version of voodoo but probably not to real practitioners. She probably hadn’t been in the parish long enough to have run across the mishmash of local beliefs. Even a decade ago, when Ceelie had left the parish, the blend of faiths had been dying out here among the younger residents.

  She changed into her most conservative clothes, a pair of dark jeans and a button-front white blouse she’d picked up a couple of days ago at a thrift store while Gentry was trying to make nice with the sheriff’s office.

  It wasn’t that Tomas Assaud would think more or less of her because of what she wore, but she wanted to show her respect. She stared in the mirror at her features that had always been part blessing, part curse. The tan skin and black hair, with the blue eyes, marked her as a half-breed. More like a Heinz 57 breed. She could’ve downplayed it by cutting her long hair or changing the color, but she wouldn’t feel true to herself.

  And Gentry loved her hair, which shouldn’t matter as much to her as it did. She unraveled the braid and pulled it back in a loose ponytail for a change. And realized she was stalling. Something felt wrong today. It had prompted her to throw the bones, and that certainly hadn’t made her feel better. She felt as if whatever was destined to happen today wouldn’t roll into motion until she walked out that front door. And then she wouldn’t be able to stop it, whatever it was.

  Maybe whatever Tomas could tell her would help. Officially, she was looking for information on Tante Eva’s curse and on what LeRoy Breaux had or hadn’t done. Unofficially, she wanted nothing less than spiritual enlightenment.

  Which, if Jena knew, would probably make her cancel the trip.

  Okay, time to do it.

  Ceelie went back to the living room, where Jena was playing with a beyond-happy Hoss. The little black Frenchie had adapted well to having women in his life, even though Ceelie had caught Gentry baby-talking him more than once in the past few days. The dog didn’t lack for attention, unless it was because of his roommate’s long, erratic work schedule.

  “You mind riding with me?” Jena waited on the landing while Ceelie locked the door behind them. It had felt weird exchanging keys with Gentry this morning. “Since I’m officially on duty, I need my gear in case there’s an emergency call.”

  “Sure, that’s fine.” Ceelie followed her down the steps. She’d grabbed her Gibson on the way out the door, thinking maybe she could play for Tomas. She’d also seen some of Gentry’s business cards on the coffee table and stuck a few of those in her back jeans pocket. She’d leave them with Tomas and Joseph in case they remembered anything or, God forbid, saw Lang Broussard. “We’re better off in your truck anyway. Your AC probably works better than the one in the beast.”

  She opened the passenger’s door of Jena’s department-issued black pickup and stared at the amount of gear. She’d thought Gentry was just a techno-freak with his tricked-out dashboard, but Jena’s was just as bad.

  A laptop computer had been mounted below the center console, and the whole front dash was a mass of cords and equipment. A GPS unit. Two radios, one with “LDWF” written on masking tape across the top, the other reading “TPSO.” Binoculars, tools, clipboard, bottles of water.

  “Everything okay?” Jena sat behind the wheel, waiting for Ceelie to climb in.

  “Yeah, I just hadn’t realized how much stuff you guys carry with you.” She climbed in, twisted to put the Gibson behind the seat, and blinked at the sight of a pile of life jackets, a shotgun, and . . . “Is that a freaking assault rifle?”

  “We don’t actually call them that since we don’t assault people—that’s a media thing, but yeah.” Jena wove her way out of the neighborhood and headed south after cutting over to Highway 56, a long, winding road that went all the way to Cocodrie. When the road ran out, the land ran out, too.

  “We’re the lead agency for water search-and-rescue operations in the state,” Jena explained. “After Hurricane Katrina, some of our agents were shot at while trying to rescue people from flooded homes. You probably remember how crazy it got.” She shrugged. “Anyway, after that, the department furnished all agents with the rifles.”

  “That happened the year before I left Houma.” Ceelie’s dad had been buried about six months after the hurricane hit. “We didn’t get that much from Katrina here in Terrebonne, except farther south, but Rita socked us a month later. And a bunch have hit the area since then.”

  Jena nodded. “Yeah, it’s one thing that makes it so hard to find somebody like Langston Broussard if he doesn’t want to be found. Every time a hurricane or tropical storm floods this place, a few more people decide they’ve had enough. They don’t think they have it in them to rebuild again, so they walk away and leave their flooded-out houses behind. There are hundreds of abandoned buildings. Hundreds of places for a criminal to take cover and hide out.”

  That crawling sensation crept across Ceelie’s head again, and as they sped southward, she shivered at the sight of some of those abandoned buildings. She hadn’t noticed them on her first trip down; they were so common that they had become a seamless part of the landscape.

  About ten miles south of Chauvin, Jena stopped for gas and Ceelie went inside the station for sodas. For the next few miles, Ceelie pulled out the guitar and played some of the songs she hadn’t trotted out since Nashville. Somehow the old standards weren’t as onerous now that she wasn’t singing to a bar full of drunk tourists.

  “You’re really good,” Jena said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I talked to Mac Griffin yesterday—the agent I was telling you about who likes music?”

  “You mean the agent who listens to music while he picks up chicks,” Ceelie corrected.

  “Well, yeah. But he’s going to talk to some . . . damn, that’s weird.” Jena flicked her gaze to the rearview mirror again.

  Ceelie looked out her side mirror at a silver sedan driving a few car lengths behind them. “What’s weird about it?”

  “That car was behind us before we stopped for gas, so it should’ve passed us instead of still being behind us.”

  Ceelie looked at it again. “Maybe they stopped too.”

  “Maybe.” Jena shrugged and sped up. “We’ll outrun them. We’re on official state business, right?”

  Ceelie laughed. “Right.”

  She started strumming the chords to her still-unfinished song about Whiskey Bayou, but lost her rhythm when the SUV lurched.

  “Son of a bitch.” Jena reached up and flipped a switch, and in the reflection on the truck hood, Ceelie saw the blue bar of lights atop the vehicle begin flashing. “He butted me from behind.” Ceelie twisted to look back and gasped. “He’s coming at you again.” The sedan bumped the truck with a jolt, and Jena jerked the truck into a quick left, blocking the roadway so the car was coming at the driver’s-side door of the truck at a ninety-degree angle. It slowed to a stop.

  Everything slowed to a stop.

  “Shouldn’t we try to outrun him?” Ceelie hated the quiver in her voice, but every nerve in her body screamed Run.

  “Hell, no. I’m going to arrest the son of a bitch.” Jena unholstered her pistol and waited. The driver’s-side door
of the sedan opened. Looking across Jena, Ceelie couldn’t see the driver’s face, but she recognized the silhouette of a weapon before he got out. “Jena, he’s got a gun!”

  “Shit. Get in the back, behind the seat. Now. And stay down.”

  Jena called out the window as she drew her pistol. “State agent! Stop where you are and put down the gun.”

  A blast shattered the driver’s-side mirror and left it hanging off the truck.

  “Damn it. Ceelie, get down and stay down, no matter what. Pull the life vests on top of you.” Jena grabbed her radio as she propelled herself across the seat with her pistol in one hand, and grabbed the rifle with the other. She slid out the passenger’s door, putting the truck between her and the shooter.

  Ceelie thought Jena’s voice sounded way too calm; only a slight tremor gave away her nerves. “L-843. Officer needs help. Shots fired. Shots fired! Highway 56 near Bush Canal. Officer—”

  Another blast glanced off the windshield, leaving a spiderweb of cracks. A volley of shots followed as Jena returned fire.

  Ceelie looked around the storage area behind the passenger’s seat. The shotgun was a 12 gauge and looked pretty straightforward. And it was loaded. She stuck her head above the life jackets long enough to see the driver looking over the truck bed, trying to locate Jena. Ceelie got a good look at him, and it was a distorted version of a face she’d know anywhere.

  “Jena, he’s slipping around the back of the truck,” she hissed through the open door. “It’s Lang Broussard.”

  Jena shot again, followed by a shot from Lang. They were circling the truck.

  Ceelie pulled out her cell phone, keeping her right hand on the shotgun’s trigger, glad she had put Gentry on speed dial. He answered almost immediately. “Ceelie—what’s going on? I heard—”

  “It’s Lang!” she whispered. “Little Caillou Road near—”

  A deafening crash knocked both the phone and shotgun out of her hands and she instinctively screamed and covered her face. What felt like a solid wall of glass pellets flew at her from the truck’s passenger’s-side window.

  “Jena?” The world turned gray at the edges, and somewhere in the distance, Ceelie heard Gentry calling her name. Blackness fell.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Ceelie! Damn it, I lost the connection.” Gentry’s heart beat erratically. He tried to find his professional calm, but it was gone. He’d jerked the truck into a parking lot, done a gravel-spewing U-turn, and headed south as soon as Jena’s call for help came over the radio. His grip on the phone tightened as he punched in Ceelie’s number. Meizel was already on his own radio, sharing what little he knew.

  Ceelie’s phone went straight to voice mail.

  If he hadn’t been stopped at a red light, he’d have crashed the truck. As it was, Meizel still put his hand on the steering wheel. “Pull over, Broussard.”

  Gentry ignored him, flipping on his lights and running through the intersection as soon as he was sure cars had stopped to clear the way.

  He speed-dialed Sinclair. Straight to voice mail.

  “Pull over now, Broussard!” Meizel yelled, and finally broke through the fog taking over Gentry’s brain.

  He shook his head. “I’m OK. Let your guys know that Ceelie identified Langston Broussard just before the shots.”

  “Damn.” Meizel got on his radio again, and Gentry calmed now that the cavalry had been called. He still didn’t plan on wasting time. He was going with lights and sirens on.

  He punched speed-dial one on his phone.

  Warren didn’t bother with a greeting. “All we know is Sinclair called in an ‘officer needs help’ approximately two minutes ago.” Tires squealed in the background; the lieutenant was already on the road. “I don’t know the situation and we haven’t been able to get her on the radio.”

  “It was Lang.” A welcome numbness settled over Gentry. “Ceelie Savoie called me and got that much out before I lost her. Sounded like a gun blast through the windshield or window. TPSO’s en route.”

  “Everybody in the parish is en route,” Warren said, and Gentry struggled to hear between his own sirens and Warren’s. “Billiot and Griffin were patrolling near Chauvin, so they’ll probably be first on scene. EMS is on the way as well.”

  Gentry ended the call and almost lost the truck on a tight curve.

  “Slow down.” Meizel’s voice was quiet. “Slow down or pull over. If you kill us both on the way we aren’t going to help anybody.”

  Pride fought with common sense, and he slowed down to a reasonable sixty-five.

  “Look, I get it,” Meizel said. “Sinclair is your partner and I don’t think I’m wrong in saying you and Ceelie Savoie are way more than just acquaintances. Am I right or am I right?”

  Gentry let out a long, ragged breath. “Yeah.”

  “Plus that’s your brother out there doing this shit, so cut yourself some slack and just drive. For now, tell yourself it’s just another case.”

  Gentry nodded. If he’d learned anything in the long months after he’d killed Lang—what a joke that all seemed now—it was to let himself feel what he felt. Right now he was so angry he’d eviscerate Lang if given half a chance. For three years, he’d wallowed in guilt over his brother’s death. Now, he wished like hell he’d killed him for real. And if Jena or Ceelie were hurt . . .

  Gentry obsessively called Ceelie’s and Jena’s phones every few minutes for a while, praying someone would pick up. Every time, voice mail. Finally, he stopped trying.

  An ambulance sped up behind them, and Gentry slowed down and waved them around.

  They saw the crime scene long before they reached it. A chaotic swarm of blue and red flashing lights could be seen far ahead, and a dozen or so cars were backed up in the southbound lane in front of them at a dead stop.

  “Screw this.” Gentry swerved into the northbound lane, driving south past the stopped cars. When he came upon a state police car blocking the right lane and a trooper managing traffic, the trooper waved him through.

  “Jesus.” Ahead, Gentry saw Jena’s truck turned almost at a full ninety degrees, blocking the road. A mile farther south and she would have gone in the water making that turn. Sunlight glinted off broken glass, but not as much as Gentry would’ve hoped—it probably meant either the windshield or one or more windows had been shot into and not out of. He could only hope Jena had gotten a better shot at Lang than he got at the truck.

  He pulled in behind a TPSO van and lurched to a stop. Gentry didn’t wait for Meizel; he jumped out and raced toward the pickup, slowing at the sight of a familiar shock of dark-red hair on the ground a few feet from the front wheel on the passenger’s side. Jena.

  He scanned the people standing around—a growing crowd of sheriff’s deputies and state police and LDWF agents. Sirens everywhere. A chopper swooped past overhead, adding to the deafening sound of a fast-forming manhunt. They were a brotherhood and sisterhood that came together when the place and people they loved were threatened. The color of the badge didn’t matter.

  Paul Billiot stood near where the EMTs were working on Jena, talking on his phone. Gentry skirted around him, edging as close to his partner as he could without getting in the way.

  There was no sign of Ceelie. Where the hell was she?

  Jena’s face had bleached to the color of parchment, at least what he could see of it. Blood coated her from hairline to waist, and Gentry did a quick assessment: facial lacerations—a lot of them, some deeper than others. The EMTs had already covered chest wounds to keep the lungs from collapsing, so the damage must be significant. She’d lost a lot of blood, but the EMTs seemed to have it under control. No sign of consciousness.

  “There were at least a dozen rounds fired,” Paul said to Gentry, shouting to be heard over sirens and officers barking orders. “Sinclair took two rounds to the chest; the facial wounds are all from glass pellets. A lot of cuts on her hands where she shielded her eyes; otherwise, she’d have lost one or both. She got off a lot of shots,
but no sign of Lang.”

  “Where’s Ceelie—did they already take her in?”

  Paul nudged him away from Jena and toward the truck. Gentry recognized a stall.

  His voice came out in a hoarse shout. “Damn it, where’s Ceelie?”

  How could an ambulance already have taken her in without passing him? The nearest hospital was back in Houma. Fear slithered up his backbone like a snake.

  “Sinclair’s alive, but barely,” Paul said. “EMTs are trying to get her stable enough to transport; chopper’s on the way from the hospital in Houma. There’s no sign of Ms. Savoie. We found her cell phone, broken, on the back floorboard. Her purse was in the front passenger’s seat.” He paused. “No easy way to say this, Broussard, but we think your brother took her.”

  Gentry stared at him, not seeing anything for the first shocked seconds except the vision his mind conjured of the bloody, butchered body of Eva Savoie.

  Lang had Ceelie, and there were a million places in this wild bottomland for him to hide. And so much worse he could do to her.

  He closed his eyes and tried to draw on his training. This was an abduction case now and a state agent had been shot. They’d have all the people and resources they needed. Everyone had mobilized fast, so Lang didn’t have much of a head start.

  He would make sure they survived, both of them. Jena was stubborn. She would fight to live. Ceelie was tough, and she was smart. She’d find a way to hang on until they found her. He had to help, not fall apart. Losing either one of them was not an option. Especially not like this.

  “What else do we know?” The calm in his voice masked the despair in his heart. And the fear; he ached from it.

  “With Tommy Mason out of the picture, Lang’s gotta need money,” Paul said. “Both women’s wallets were cleaned out, so if he’s stupid enough to use a credit card we’ll know it. An APB has already been issued, and the troopers are setting up roadblocks at every access point off the highway—it’s not like there are many side roads for him to take. If he tries to get anywhere by car, we’ll get him. Troop C’s already got a chopper in the air.”