Proving Grounds: A London Carter Novel (London Carter Mystery Series Book 2)

by BJ Bourg

  CHAPTER 8

  After tying Norm’s boat to the front steps of the Simoneaux home, we stepped out and followed Mr. Simoneaux through the main doorway of his house. We turned left and found ourselves in the kitchen area. The first thing that got my attention was the smell of freshly fried shrimp that hung thick in the air, giving off a foggy appearance in the small enclosure. The next thing I noticed was the grave danger we were in.

  A dozen men and women were scattered about the kitchen and living room areas, and they were all armed like they were going to war with a small country. Some had shotguns resting against their shoulders while others held scoped rifles at port arms, but the majority of them sported tactical slings with AR-15s dangling from the end of them.

  Norm immediately bolted backward and turned to leave, but two men who were wielding riot guns closed the gap in the doorway and stood like statues, blocking his path. When he turned toward me, his plump face was pale.

  “What’s going on in here?” Dawn asked calmly.

  “This is my private home and I can do in here whatever the hell I want.” Mr. Simoneaux folded his arms across his chest and stared defiantly at us. “This is still America and we have a right to defend our homes.”

  “And defend it, we will,” said a man from the back of the room. His hair was so long it hung over his eyes, and I wondered if he could even see well enough to take an accurate shot. “From all enemies—be they civilian or governmental.”

  “It doesn’t look like you’re defending your home,” I said. “It looks like you’re forming a posse.”

  No one said a word, but several people shifted their feet and I heard someone drag a pistol from its holster. I could feel the hate as they stared unwavering at us. They clearly had a plan of action and had been in the process of executing that plan when we showed up. At the moment, we stood between them and their plan, and they didn’t like it one bit.

  As I studied the group, one thing became clear—they were willing and able to attack us if necessary. They would rather shoot three cops in cold blood than give up on their mission. I also noticed something else—they all looked to Mr. Simoneaux for guidance. He was driving this train. If he told them to execute us, the room would explode into blood and bullets, but I was going to take some of them with me, beginning with the head of the family himself.

  “Maybe we are forming a posse and maybe we aren’t,” Mr. Simoneaux finally said. “What the hell do you think you’re going to do about it?”

  I knew if I said the wrong thing we could all die here today. While I wasn’t afraid to die and I had no family to worry about, I didn’t want to do something that would risk the lives of Dawn and Norm.

  I scanned the crowd for a long moment, deliberately taking my time. I wanted them to know we were not intimidated by their superior show of force and firepower. Finally, I turned back to Mr. Simoneaux and said, “It looks like we all want the same thing—we just want it in different ways. We want the killer in jail and you want him dead.”

  Mr. Simoneaux pursed his lips and nodded. “You’re right about me wanting him dead, and dead he will be.”

  The crowd cheered and waved their guns in the air. In my peripheral vision I saw Norm jerk in his skin. Dawn stood stone-faced and calm, her hand only inches from her pistol. I knew if shit turned south she’d also be sending a few of them to hell ahead of us.

  I started to speak in my normal tone of voice and Mr. Simoneaux had to raise his hand to quiet the crowd. “What was that?” he asked.

  “Do you know who killed your son?”

  “I have a good idea.”

  “But do you know for sure?” I pressed. “Look, I get it that you want your son’s killer dead. Shit, I wanted to murder the bastard who killed my family, too, but I couldn’t just go off and take the law into my own hands.” I conveniently left out the part where I had been in the planning stages of taking Dan Stevens’ life when he was killed in another DWI-related crash.

  Mr. Simoneaux’s face softened just a bit, and I knew I was getting somewhere. “You lost your family?”

  I nodded. “A drunk driver killed them, and I knew for a fact it was Dan Stevens. You don’t know for sure who killed your son.”

  That brought a chorus of complaints from the crowd, but Mr. Simoneaux silenced them. “Do you know who killed my boy?”

  I frowned. “No, sir, I don’t, but we’d appreciate it if you allowed us to do our job—to get the proof we need to put the real killer away.”

  “And why should I do that?”

  “Because if you kill the wrong person, the real killer will still be out there and will probably get away with it—even if we catch him later, because his lawyer will argue you killed the real murderer.”

  Mr. Simoneaux seemed to mull it over. He turned and searched the crowd, stopping when his eyes fell on a woman who was sitting at the table. The woman’s eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and she was still wearing her nightclothes. She nodded and lowered her head.

  His shoulders sank a bit and he took a deep breath. When he exhaled, he wiped his forehead. “I’ll give you one week to catch my boy’s killer. If you don’t get him by then, I’m going to bring hell down on Wellman Boudreaux’s mansion—and no one will be able to stop me.” He sighed and pointed toward the back door, addressing the crowd in his house. “Go on out to the screened porch and give us a minute alone.”

  When no one moved, he stomped his boot on the wooden floor. “Now, damn it! Get out there and give me a minute alone with these officers.”

  The crowd slowly started gravitating toward the side door and spilled out onto the porch. The long-haired fellow from earlier paused by the door and hefted the AR-15 in his hand. “I’ll be right out here if you need me, Frank. Just say the word and they’re toast.”

  I wanted to rush across the room and stomp his face in, but I held myself back. If history was any indicator of the future, I knew I’d be seeing him again.

  When we were alone with Mr. Simoneaux and the woman at the table, he turned to Dawn.

  “You said you wanted to talk to my boys. Is that all you want to do—talk?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “What about the gators they lifted from Wellman Boudreaux’s land? Do you intend to try and arrest them for that?”

  Dawn shook her head. “I believe you’ve all been through enough today, sir.”

  Mr. Simoneaux studied Dawn’s face, as though not sure if he should trust someone who wore a badge. Finally, he turned and walked through the living room, waving at us to follow him. He then led us down a long hallway and said, “They’re on the back porch waiting for y’all.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The back porch of the Simoneaux home was wider than the side porch and deeper. There was a clear view of the forest back there and I stepped toward the railing. From my vantage point I could see where the overflow of the swollen pass ended and the land began. Hidden among the trees in the shallow water were several boats. I nodded to myself and felt a sense of respect for this shrewd old man. He concealed the boats out back and hid an army in his house. If he wanted to prevent an attack on his place he would’ve flaunted his muscle. But that’s not what he did. Nope, this man didn’t want to scare away his enemies—he wanted to lure them in and decimate them should they make an appearance.

  Something didn’t look right with one of the trees to my left, about forty yards out, and I studied the leaf and branch pattern. I grunted. A man in a store-bought ghillie suit was crouched amongst the foliage and he was holding a scoped rifle. The rifle wasn’t pointing at us, so I figured he was one of Simoneaux’s boys.

  I nodded subtly in his direction and asked Mr. Simoneaux if the man was part of his crew.

  “I’ve got five good men out there.” Mr. Simoneaux said. “Wellman Boudreaux and his boys won’t know what hit them if they decide to pay us a visit.”

  I turned away from the railing and walked to the far side of the porch with Dawn—our boots echoing against the h
ollow porch floor—where Orville and Quentin were sitting on a swing. Both men wore long faces and appeared drained of life.

  Dawn introduced us and I nodded to them. After pulling a wooden stool from the wall and sitting in front of them, I looked to Quentin first. Dawn had told me he was the eldest son, but, while he was better dressed than Orville, he didn’t act like it. He seemed unsure of himself and timid. His yellow hat was stained and crooked on his head. Dried blood was smeared on the bid of his coveralls and on his white T-shirt.

  I pointed to the blood. “Did you try to save Norris?”

  Quentin rubbed a rough hand through his salt-and-pepper beard and nodded, staring absently at the floor.

  “Can you tell me what happened out there? What went wrong?”

  “I told them I had a bad feeling,” Quentin said, his voice quivering. “But they wouldn’t listen to me. The last words Norris spoke were to make fun of me.”

  “What do you mean by a bad feeling?” I asked.

  “I get bad feelings sometimes. Like a premonition. And every time I get the feeling something bad happens.”

  I nodded, not knowing whether I should take him serious or have him evaluated. “What happened after you got this bad feeling?”

  “They killed Norris, that’s what happened. One second he was there laughing at me and the next second he was dead on the ground.”

  Tears slid down Quentin’s puffy cheeks and disappeared amongst the underbrush of his beard.

  “I saw the shell casings where you fought back against the killer. Were you shooting at something in particular, or just firing blindly into the trees?”

  Quentin was crying now. Orville pulled his bandana from his head and handed it to Quentin, who wiped his face and blew his nose with it. I was mildly disgusted when Quentin returned the bandana to Orville and he wrapped it back around his bushy hair.

  “We were shooting blindly into the trees,” Orville said, taking over for his brother. “We couldn’t see nothing. It was foggy and the sun hadn’t come fully up yet, so it was still shadowy in the woods.”

  “I understand y’all stole four alligators from Wellman Boudreaux’s property.”

  Orville tore his eyes from me and glanced at his father, who nodded. “It’s okay, son. You can talk to these people. They promised to help us find the person who killed Norris.”

  Orville sighed and nodded. “When Wellman’s dad was alive he used to let us hunt the north shore of the lake, and that’s how we’d make most of our money to survive for the year. Since the old man died, Wellman refused to give us permission to hunt the property and we can’t get alligator tags anymore.”

  “So, y’all steal from him now?”

  Orville shuffled his feet. “I wouldn’t use such a strong word. I’d just say we take back what’s ours. You know, like reclaiming your property?”

  “I’m sure Wellman would view it as stealing.” I was thoughtful for a minute, and then asked how they were able to sell the alligators without tags. There was more shuffling of the feet, but he just sat quiet.

  “Look, I know my boys broke man’s law,” Mr. Simoneaux said from behind me, “but we’re just trying to survive the best way we know how. We have clients that’ll pay top dollar for alligators—tagged or not—and it’s the only thing that keeps us going throughout the year. If we didn’t do that we’d lose everything. Isn’t it better that we’re doing what we have to do to survive instead of getting a government handout?”

  I couldn’t argue, but asked, “If you live off the land and own this place, why do y’all need to steal for money?”

  Mr. Simoneaux removed his hat and rubbed his tired face. “When the oil disaster happened five years ago, I was forced to take out a mortgage on this place. Wellman knew about the loan and he cut us off a year later, hoping we would run out of money and lose the place to the bank.”

  I nodded my understanding. “And then he would buy it for pennies on the dollar at auction.”

  Mr. Simoneaux nodded and shoved the hat back on his head. “We decided to beat him at his own game. If you want to arrest anyone for it…arrest me, because it was my idea and my son’s won’t do nothing without me approving it.”

  I waved him off and turned to Orville with my next question. “Did y’all take a different route each time y’all went from the Boudreaux land to your own?”

  Orville gave me a blank stare. “Why would we do that?”

  “So, you didn’t?”

  He shook his head. “We followed the same trail all four times. Well, we made eight trips all together—four going and four coming back.”

  “Did y’all see or hear anything that was out of the ordinary on any of those trips?”

  He dabbed at his bushy mustache. It was a seventies variety perv-stache, and I was sure it was food from an earlier meal I saw stuck in the hairs on the left side of his face. I tried not to stare at it, but it was difficult.

  “Well,” I asked, “anything?”

  “We heard a branch break on one of the trips. I think it was the last one, but it could’ve been from an animal. I can’t remember anything else.”

  “Did y’all hear a boat at all? Either before or after the shooting?”

  Orville shook his head.

  “Do any of you have enemies? Anyone who hates y’all enough to kill one of you?”

  “Wellman and his boys.” Orville shrugged. “Other than them, we don’t have problems with anybody.” He pointed toward the front of the house. “You saw all of those people in there. They live in these parts and they’re all our friends. They hate the Boudreaux family as much as we do.”

  Mr. Simoneaux nodded his agreement. “Our family has never had problems with anyone until Old Man Boudreaux died. When that happened, Wellman took over and he cut off a lot of families from hunting the lake. If one of them boys turned up dead, I could name a lot of people who would want them dead…but not my boys.”

  “Any of the Boudreaux boys an expert with a scoped rifle?” I asked. “Maybe had some sniper training in the past?”

  “Every hunter out here is an expert with a rifle,” Orville said. “If you can’t shoot, you can’t feed your family.”

  I started to explain that “expert” was a relative term and there was a vast difference between a hunter and a sniper, but decided against it. “What about threats? Has Wellman or any of his boys threatened y’all in the past?”

  Orville shook his head and looked up at his dad, who agreed.

  I sighed. As I’d feared, they couldn’t give us anything concrete. All we had was a guess, and that was not enough to arrest Wellman Boudreaux or any of his people.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dawn and I didn’t speak much on the boat ride back to the landing, both of us trying to solve the case in our minds. It was dark when we arrived and Louisiana’s state birds—mosquitoes—were out in full force.

  After we gathered up our gear and Norm had secured the boat on the trailer, we said our goodbyes and agreed to meet at the boat landing in the morning to pay Wellman Boudreaux a visit.

  “I’m waiting with the boat next time,” Norm said. “I ain’t built for all this SWAT team shit. I hired on to write lifejacket tickets and yell at teenagers for speeding through no-wake zones, not to get murdered and eaten by Deliverance-style clans out in the swamps.”

  As I walked toward my unmarked truck, I passed a row of tents nestled against the pier. I could hear soft whispering from inside the different tents as the occupants were talking the night away. When I reached the last tent I saw a shadowy figure in a folding chair staring out over the water. Mosquitoes swarmed around the figure, but it didn’t flinch. Although it was dark, I could easily make out Shannon Reed’s lanky shape. I stopped and shifted my drag bag to my left shoulder. “What are you doing out here all alone?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful.

  Shannon didn’t turn around. A cigarette dangled from his fingers and he took a long drag from it before speaking. “Why do they do it, law man?”
/>   Scrunching my nose, I asked what he was talking about.

  “Why do they slaughter so many alligators?”

  I was surprised by how sad he sounded. I’d taken him as the opportunistic sort and figured he was just riding someone else’s cause right into the ground, trying to gain as much popularity and exposure as he could in the meantime.

  “It’s their livelihood, Mr. Reed. It’s how they feed their families and put clothes on the backs of their kids. No different than a carpenter or a doctor.”

  “Yeah, but carpenters and doctors don’t have to murder other creatures to get their jobs done.” Shannon smashed the cigarette out on the arm of the chair and shoved the butt in his shirt pocket. He then lifted a finger. “I take that back—some doctors do, indeed, murder people in the course of their jobs, and they never pay for it.” He sighed. “But that’s a conversation for another time. Today, I’m trying to save these beautiful crawling dinosaurs from certain extinction.”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” I said, and walked to my truck, leaving him to mourn in peace. Once inside my truck, I swatted at the few mosquitoes that followed me and turned my phone back on. It immediately lit up with a dozen or so text messages and a few missed calls. All of the text messages except one were from Sally. She apologized for getting angry and asked that I call her. As the text messages had come in throughout the day from her, they seemed to grow more hostile. She accused me of ignoring her messages and her phone calls. I sighed and checked the calls, figuring I’d get to hear her screaming voice over and over. The first missed call was from Dean. His son was going to be shipped off to boot camp at the end of next month and he was throwing a going away party for him tomorrow night, so he asked if I’d like to go.

  “You can even bring your new girlfriend if you want,” he said, laughing hysterically. I could hear Jerry and Ray laughing in the background, too. I smiled and went to the next call, but grunted when I heard the voice. It was from Sally, as were the next four voice messages. I deleted them without listening to them. The last message was from Dawn. I immediately sat up in my seat.