“Not really. That same gator’s been showing up off and on for a couple of weeks. At least I assume it’s the same one; at least it’s the same size. I thought Doris might be feeding it.”
“Hmm.” Jena removed her baseball cap and ran a long, slim hand over her hair, smoothing a pinned-up, braided mass of deep red. Cole imagined it would be about shoulder length if she wore it down, and would feel like fine silk if he ran his fingers through it. He tracked her movement with what felt disturbingly like hunger. “She thought you were the one feeding the gator.”
Cole grunted. “I know better. You leave a gator alone, and it’ll do the same for you.”
“Exactly.” Jena turned toward the door. “Well, I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. You have my card. Will you call me if you see anything unusual with another gator?”
“I don’t have a phone.” And it would be better if we never spoke again.
Except Cole couldn’t help asking one question after noticing that her reach to open the front door seemed stiff, as if her back hurt or she was trying not to move her upper body with any abruptness.
“Mind if I ask what happened to you? The scars on your face look like you might’ve been hit with flying glass, and you’re moving as if you’re in pain.”
She’d stepped onto the front porch but now turned to study him with a slight frown that drew fine dark-red eyebrows together with a little wrinkle in between. One look at the blush on her face told Cole he’d trampled all over a sore spot—literally.
“Just a minor injury on the job,” she said. “Good day, Mr. Ryan.”
Jena Sinclair turned and walked down the stairs and out of his life with a square-shouldered gait that told him she was making a concerted effort to hide whatever was wrong with her. She reached the black pickup, where the other agent waited with his gaze trained on Cole’s house. She turned back to look at Cole, still standing in the doorway.
He had no idea how to read her expression, but he could take his own emotional temperature and he didn’t like the results. Jena Sinclair had taught him a couple of things about himself in the past few minutes that he didn’t want to know.
First, sometime in the past five years, a deep fatigue had wrapped itself around him—not the fatigue that could be slept off with a soft bed and a warm blanket, but the fatigue caused by a tightened harness that restricted. That promised no end to long days and longer nights. A harness of his own making.
Cole had realized another surprising thing too. Very surprising for the man who needed nothing and no one.
He was lonely.
CHAPTER 9
Mac was animated on the drive to drop off the gator at regional headquarters in Thibodaux, where it would be sent to the LDWF Wildlife Division lab in Baton Rouge for testing.
Using about 10 percent of her brain, Jena managed to make appropriate “hmmmmm” and “you think so?” responses when needed. The other 90 percent was busy thinking about Cole Ryan. So much about that man simply didn’t add up.
When she’d seen him in the distance, standing in his doorway for the first time, she’d mistaken him for a different kind of man, the type she thought of as a Terrebonne Hard Case. Usually, Hard Cases were guys that were long on hair and short on teeth, and who lived as much off the land as possible. They ate what they caught and weren’t that picky about what it was. They might boil a mess of crawfish in an iron pot one night, sharing the feast with the whole neighborhood. Two days later, dinner might be a lone bullfrog or a squirrel.
There were lots of Hard Cases in the parish, although not nearly as many as there used to be, Gentry had told her. Most of them were as warm and big hearted as any other people in Terrebonne—maybe even more so. Hard Cases just lived the way they lived, often the way their parents and grandparents had lived, eking out a living and relying on the bounty of the parish for each meal.
She’d been utterly and absolutely wrong in her assessment, though. Cole Ryan was no Hard Case. He looked to be in his early to mid thirties and was clean shaven but for thick blond hair that reached almost to his waist. Parts of it were pulled into braids, but those strands struck her as more practical than cosmetic, like he wanted to keep his hair off his face. What she’d mistaken for gray-streaked locks were sun streaks in thick amber-gold hair most women would kill to have. He spent a lot of time outside.
And the man had the clearest, bluest eyes Jena had ever seen outside the brilliance of the sky during a cloudless day in Louisiana winter.
She didn’t want to think about the six-pack on display or the muscles that moved beneath the tanned skin of his biceps when he opened and closed the door—or crossed his arms over his chest. The man even had perfect teeth, what little she’d been able to see of them from his brief attempt at conversation, a skill in which he was clearly out of practice.
Cole Ryan, if that was his real name, did not have a South Louisiana accent either. He talked like a Southerner, but one who hailed from Shreveport or Jackson or Birmingham—certainly nowhere south of I-10. And he talked like an educated man, or at least one who knew how to think on his feet. He’d danced around that story about why he’d moved to Terrebonne more smoothly than an Olympic skater on ice. He’d also been observant about her injuries, and not just the ones visible on her face.
No, Cole Ryan was not the kind of man who lived like a hermit on the edge of the water behind an abandoned sugarcane field, not unless he was in trouble with the law or had mental health issues.
He was eccentric, for sure. Everything about him said: “Leave me alone.”
“What’s going on up here?”
Mac braked fast, startling Jena back into the real world, where it had grown dark. Ahead of them, blocking the highway, lay a sea of flashing red and blue lights from SO patrol cars, an ambulance, even a couple of Houma PD sedans. And a ladder truck from the Montegut firehouse.
“I don’t know, but isn’t that one of our trucks up there—with the boat hitched to it?” Jena craned her neck but the license plate was hidden by the boat; each of their trucks had the agent’s unit number on the plates. “I can’t tell who it is.”
Mac pulled over. “I’ve been monitoring the radio but whatever’s going on is being kept vague. Just telling people the drawbridge up there is open indefinitely and people should plan alternate routes. Let’s check it out.”
Jena shivered when she got out of the truck. First, because she’d been so preoccupied with Cole Ryan that she hadn’t been paying attention. Second, because the last time she’d climbed out of the passenger side of a department pickup on the narrow shoulder of this same parish road, she’d been shot, waking up in the hospital in Houma with two bullet wounds, a lot of glass cuts, and a missing friend.
She spotted a pair of familiar figures—Gentry and the Terrebonne enforcement unit’s other senior agent, Paul Billiot. She pointed them out to Mac, and she and Mac made their way through a tangle of officers, each on a radio or, more often, a phone. Everybody was crouched behind a car or blocked from view of the bridge by a truck or SUV.
Jena had spent her first year intimidated by the intense, dark-eyed Paul Billiot, an active member of one of the parish’s indigenous Native American tribes. He had fought like hell to find Ceelie when she was kidnapped, though, and he’d even driven to New Orleans a couple of times with Gentry to see how Jena was recuperating. Now she didn’t fear him, but she definitely respected him.
Mac, however, who’d spent his first year in Terrebonne as Paul’s partner, hadn’t moved past the intimidation stage. Paul had probably traumatized him on purpose; the man had a very deeply guarded, but wicked, sense of humor. When they reached the two senior agents, Mac stood off to the side and kept his mouth shut, not noticing Paul looking at him with what Jena would call the Billiot version of a smile. He knew the junior officer was afraid of him and enjoyed it.
She stood next to Gentry and nudged him with her elbow. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t look at her but jerked his
chin toward the highway ahead. “I think Black Diamond is about to claim another victim.”
Jena frowned, scanning what she could see of the roadway. An old VW Beetle sat on the narrow shoulder just before the drawbridge at Highway 55 and Exxon Company Road, and the bridge was raised. Patrol cars blocked the roadway on the south side, just ahead of them, and Jena could see glints of flashing lights lining the road on the bridge’s other side.
No one appeared to be in the drawbridge operation tower.
Standing on the other side of her, Paul leaned over and said, “Top of the bridge. This side.”
“Oh no.” She drew in a ragged breath. The kid could’ve been anywhere between fifteen and twenty because he still had that skinny, gangly look teenage boys always got until they filled out, like puppies with oversized feet they hadn’t yet grown into. He walked the ragged, toothy edge of the raised bridge as if it were a circus high wire, teetering between the grooves that locked into the opposite side when the bridge was lowered. He wore baggy jeans but no shirt. His lank dark hair flopped in his eyes, and he’d stretched out his arms on both sides for balance.
Finally, Jena saw why no one was trying to force him down. In one hand he held a gun, its outline unmistakable. The weapon was a semiautomatic, the spotlight from a couple of the cars bouncing splashes of light off its shiny barrel. Every once in a while he’d shoot in the general direction of the line of patrol cars, and the officer in charge would remind everyone to stay down and hold fire. He didn’t seem to be shooting at anyone, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t get shot.
“Let us get you down from there, son. All you need to do is drop the gun. You can climb down the ladder onto the fire engine.”
The voice boomed from somewhere, and Jena again looked at the tower next to the drawbridge. “They got an officer in the tower?”
“Yeah, several,” Gentry said. “The negotiator has been trying to talk him down for at least half an hour. Nobody’s sure how he even got up there. He was singing and talking for a while, but for the last ten minutes or so he’s been quiet. His movements have grown more erratic.”
“How do you know it’s Black Diamond?” The image of Jacks singing and trying to cartwheel across the brick wall behind Jena’s house wouldn’t leave her mind. What if he’d been on this bridge? What if he’d had a gun? What if she’d still had her gun on her when he knocked her down?
“We don’t know for sure.” Paul glanced over at Mac, who remained quiet. “Something wrong with you, Griffin?”
“No, sir, just observing.”
“Good.”
Jena shook her head at Paul, who gave her a raised eyebrow in return. She’d been around Mac enough to realize he was upset by this boy’s situation and not just intimidated by his former partner.
“The kid claimed it was Black Diamond before he stopped talking,” Gentry said. “All we can do is take his word for it. He’s sure as hell acting BSC.”
The boy yelled something Jena couldn’t understand. His movements were clear, though. He’d stopped walking. He held the gun’s barrel to his temple.
The officer with the bullhorn stood and held up his free hand in a placating gesture. “Son, don’t do that. Please drop the gun, and it’ll be okay. I promise, we want to help you. Nothing bad’s gonna happen to you. We just want to make sure you’re safe.”
Jena was just thinking the sheriff’s negotiator was offering the kid an awfully big target to shoot at when a sudden shot rang out. Blood and tissue from the boy’s head sprayed in a red-black arc, backlit by the spotlights. They heard a splash seconds after the boy disappeared over the bayou side of the open drawbridge.
“Shit. Damn it!” Paul’s fist cracked down hard on the hood of the truck, but Jena couldn’t take her eyes off the bridge. The boy was gone. No way he’d survived that shot.
“We’ve got a boat and drag hook over here!” Gentry shouted, striding toward the bridge. “Clear a path for us to launch next to the tower.”
Paul jumped into the truck, but stuck his head out the open window. “Sinclair, Griffin, call the lieutenant and make sure he knows what’s going on. We’ll call it in as soon as we find the kid.”
“Got it.” Jena hadn’t realized she was crying until a tear dropped off her chin and tickled its way down her neck. “You need us to do anything here?”
He looked back at Mac’s truck. “You got a boat hitched to that truck?”
Jena shook her head. “No, we’ve got a gator on his way to the lab in Baton Rouge.”
“Go ahead and take it around the long way. We got plenty of deputies here. Don’t forget to call the lieutenant.”
Back in Mac’s truck, heading south to cut around via a detour of at least forty miles, Jena filled in Lieutenant Doucet on the situation, then sat staring at her phone.
Mac glanced at her. “You okay?”
She should be the one asking him. Jena had never seen Mac look so shaken, even after finding the gator victim, but she probably didn’t look much better. “I think I need to make another call.” One she didn’t want to make.
Finally, she dialed Jackson’s cell number.
Her mother answered, however, instead of her brother. Great.
“Good evening, Jena.”
Jena was too tired to play her mother’s passive-aggressive steel magnolia games.
“Hi, Mom. How is Jackson? Why are you answering his phone?”
There was a pause during which Jena imagined Grace Sinclair, dressed in tasteful winter-white slacks and a matching angora sweater, relaxing by the fireplace with a glass of wine and pretending life hadn’t gone on a house call to Satan, riding in a handbasket.
“Jackson, I’m afraid, is at Oschsner, although we’re trying to keep it as quiet as possible.”
Jackson had just been released from jail that morning. Why would he be in the hospital unless he’d gotten more drugs? Unless . . .” The answer came to her. “You had him committed, didn’t you? I need to see him. Will they let me see him?”
“Of course not. You’ve done quite enough by turning him over to the authorities before we had a chance to handle it quietly. They’re not letting anyone see him or talk to him for the next two weeks.”
Jena couldn’t ignore the implication that Jackson’s predicament was her fault. “Mom, I couldn’t handle him. I’d never seen him so aggressive or angry, and he needed help. No one at all can see him, or just me? Not even you or Dad?”
“No one.” Grace Sinclair’s voice dripped acid. “He’s been threatening to kill himself—more specifically, to slit his wrists. I wonder where he got such an idea?”
Jena would have hung up on her mother, but her mother beat her to it. Grace Sinclair might love her kids in her own way, but sometimes it was hard to see it.
CHAPTER 10
Mac fidgeted in the back row of the big muster room at the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. He’d never seen such an assortment of law enforcement officers crammed into a single room—state police, Houma cops, wildlife enforcement agents, sheriffs’ deputies. They weren’t just from Terrebonne either, but also the neighboring coastal parishes of Lafourche and Saint Mary. Men and women wore an array of uniforms, plainclothes, suits and ties, shorts and tees.
Pacing back and forth across the front of the room, walking with clipped steps to match his clipped voice, was the lead DEA agent on the case, a guy named O’Malley.
Mac sat with Jena on one side. Between him and the aisle sat EZ Caine, short for Ezekiel Zebediah. “Dad was kind of religious,” he’d explained when they met, proving he was a man with a gift for understatement.
EZ, who wore his head shaved, had the squarest jaw Mac had ever seen, and sported the biceps of somebody who worked with weights—a lot. He had come over from Golden Meadow in Lafourche Parish to fill in for Jena after the shooting. EZ had applied for a permanent transfer to Terrebonne, and probably was going to get it.
They needed more agents—Wildlife and Fisheries personnel were dealing with wh
acked-out alligators as well as helping with the influx of Black Diamond, which seemed to be growing and showing up in places drugs didn’t usually go.
Like the kid who’d killed himself last night on the drawbridge. The seventeen-year-old was an honors student at a Catholic school in Houma, not unlike the school Mac had attended just south of Presque Isle. The kid also was only eight years younger than him—just a year or two younger than Mac’s youngest brother.
A small plastic bag with an ounce of Black Diamond had been found in the kid’s room under his mattress, but nobody had any idea where he got it—or at least nobody was saying. The tox results weren’t back yet, but there wasn’t much doubt that the black powder in the bag under his pillow had sent him on a quest to climb the drawbridge and shoot himself.
Gentry and Paul had pulled him out of the water within fifteen minutes, but the kid was way beyond saving.
Mac felt as if he’d aged ten years in the last ten hours, witnessing the boy’s mother sobbing openly on the starched shirtfront of his pale father, who struggled with a shaky voice to make a statement to the media.
That wasn’t all. The DEA task force leader said there had been three other shootings in the parish last night where Black Diamond had been a factor.
LDWF and the Coast Guard had been searching every boat they could find coming into the parish in the southern half of Terrebonne, but almost 50 percent of the 2,100-square-mile parish was water. The state police and sheriff’s office were crawling over the more solid northern half of the parish like ants. So far, nothing.
For now, Mac and Jena were staying on routine patrols, but the lieutenant had asked him to reschedule his time off next week. He’d planned to rent a cabin down near Cocodrie and spend a few days with Cassie, a hot attorney he’d met in a Houma nightclub a few weeks ago. Cassie had been disappointed, but there were always more Cassies in the world, and Mac hoped his postponed time off meant Warren was going to bring him in on the Black Diamond case.
The vibration from his cell phone brought him out of the semi-stupor he’d been sent into by Agent O’Malley’s dry explanation of the chemical properties of Black Diamond, and why DEA officials felt sure it was imported from China rather than being cooked up inside the parish.
Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2) Page 8
