by Jenna Ryan
* * *
Crucible debated telling someone about his idea, on the off chance that his best laid but not necessarily wise plan backfired. If it did, he’d be alone in a creature-infested swamp, at the mercy of something far more brutal than an alligator.
But who could he trust? Killian would go straight to Cutter and the other directors. His job, his obligation. Miranda, Crucible’s PA, would insist on accompanying him. And any of his other agents would need to fly in, wasting time he no longer believed he had, at least where Rosemary Sayer was concerned.
No, he had to go solo and hope his laser-thin hunch about Tanner was correct.
And his fears about the Reaper’s identity weren’t.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They couldn’t leave him, and they couldn’t bury him, although the second thought crossed Tanner’s mind more than once.
He compromised by taking Grimes to the nearest town and talking circles around the befuddled police chief. Unfortunately, the man wasn’t the yokel he’d been hoping to find, and in the end he was forced to dig out his government ID as well as Crucible’s Washington phone number.
“Are you sure that was the right thing to do?” Rosemary asked when he climbed back into the Hummer. “The chief’s bound to contact Crucible eventually.”
Tanner kept an eye on the station door. “I didn’t have a lot of alternatives. I told him we met Grimes briefly in Bayou Faye and didn’t know a whole lot about him. The next time we saw him, he was lying dead near an old pickup with no vehicle identification number, no plates and nothing on his body.”
“A cop bought that? Seriously?”
“He bought the government ID and enough of my bullshit attitude to wait for a more detailed explanation. Be grateful.”
“I am.” Flipping open Grimes’s wallet, which had in fact been on the body, she pulled out a laminated card. “Found this. It says he’s a licensed private investigator. I also found this.” She extracted a second card. It had the familiar silhouette of a man’s profile on the blood-smeared front. “Both the driver’s and P.I.’s licenses have the name Emmett Orion Gardrock on them.”
“Sounds like a Flintstones’ character.”
“Which might be why he used a dead man’s name when he presented himself to you.”
“It’s an old, but highly effective trick,” Tanner said. “Emmett Gardrock would have been a quick make.”
Closing the wallet, Rosemary stuffed it in the glove box. “I know why we did what we did, but I feel bad leaving a John Doe back there rather than Emmett Orion Gardrock.”
“He’ll have a name when we have the Reaper. I won’t let him go to his grave as John Doe. There are enough people involved here already. No point adding more names to the list.”
“I’m not arguing.” She sat back. “So. We have a dead P.I. driving a truck we abandoned during a shootout. Last thought in his head? Ben’s name. Just that. Well, that and something about steel wool.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“Ben hired him, didn’t he?”
“It’s a good bet.”
“Why? To find you? No. Ben didn’t need to find you. He told me where you were. To follow me, then?” Her heart sank. “This probably sounds crazy, but I wanted him to be the Reaper, or even Leshad. Then I could hate him and think he deserved to die. But right now I’m betting Mr. Gardrock was hired by Ben to watch my back in case I didn’t or couldn’t get to you.”
“Or in case Ben didn’t or couldn’t get to you in order to send you to me.”
“This is ridiculously complicated. My head’s starting to hurt.”
“Goes with the territory, Rosemary.”
She manned up, exhaled. “Moving past the guilt. Gardrock rented one of your properties. He must have made those arrangements before Ben died. Certainly before I came to you.”
“He made the arrangements through a phony legal firm ten days before you arrived in the bayou. That’d be about four days before Ben was killed. My guess? Ben was making discoveries that disturbed him. Maybe nothing he felt he could take to Crucible, but enough to scare him in terms of your safety.”
“So Ben hired Gardrock to follow me while he was still undercover.”
“He probably wanted Gardrock to make it possible for you to disappear should the need arise. When that need did arise, Ben either had no time or no opportunity to contact the man he’d hired to protect you.”
“Okay, insanely complicated,” Rosemary remarked. “Is it possible Ben didn’t know about the arrangements Gardrock had made? Contact between them would have been limited, right? Isn’t that how undercover ops work?”
Tanner’s lips curved into a humorless smile. “Trust me, angel, you don’t want to know how undercover ops work. Or didn’t work, in Ben’s case. For our purposes, let’s add Gardrock’s name to our list of allies, feel appropriately bad and keep working through the puzzle. I’m driving his Hummer.”
Rosemary stared in speculation at the silhouette calling card she hadn’t returned to the P.I.’s wallet. “I think Gardrock was following us, and he wound up tangling with the Reaper, who was also following us. Shots were fired. We got away in his vehicle and he got away in yours.” A frown appeared. “By accident or design?”
“By serendipity—a lucky accident—with a nod to the ‘by design’ side. He left the keys in the ignition and his vehicle in plain sight. I think he wanted us to escape while he kept the Reaper busy. Plan worked.”
She massaged the muscles at the back of her neck. “Well, now I feel even more horrible than before. If he’d been a bad guy and died, I could have convinced myself his death was deserved. But knowing he was a nice man means also knowing that another person’s dead because of me.”
“Because of the Reaper, Rosemary. And Leshad.”
“Right. Them.” She paused. “I feel responsible. Indirectly, but still.” She waited a long beat before asking, “Why would Gardrock have one of Leshad’s silhouette calling cards in his wallet?”
“Good question.”
“Do you have a good answer?”
“I have an answer, yeah.” He adjusted his headband. “But it’s not good. I don’t think Gardrock got shot the day we switched vehicles. My guess is, he stayed on the Reaper’s ass and followed him to the antique shop.”
Rosemary’s brows went up. “Are you saying Gardrock and the Reaper shot each other after the Reaper tried to kill Desdemona, and that’s why there was so much blood in the shop?”
“It’s one theory,” Tanner allowed.
She slanted him a suspicious look. “What’s another?”
“That there was a three-way shooting. The Reaper got Des, Gardrock got the Reaper, the Reaper got Gardrock, the card got dropped in the confusion, and despite all the bullet holes, no one died at the scene.”
Her lips twitched into a smile. “So, no Billy the doll anywhere in this theory?”
“My theory, my reality, angel. I can get my head around Madeleine, because I’m sane, and I saw her. Anything Billy-related ventures into the realm of voodoo, and I have no particular desire to go there.”
Rosemary fell silent for a while, but Tanner knew she was thinking. What he suspected she was thinking made him edgy, but as long as she kept it to herself, no harm, no foul.
“I saw Billy,” she said quietly.
Why could it never be simple? he wondered. Promising himself he wouldn’t punch the gas until they reached an actual road, he rubbed his brow and asked, “You’d share good news, too, if there was any, right? You’re talking about yesterday, aren’t you, at the antique shop, where you eavesdropped on my conversation with a ghost.”
The fact that her lips quirked again didn’t improve his plummeting mood.
“I heard the tail end of it, Tanner, and, yes, I admit it, the eavesdropping was done partly with my mind, because the floor being the way it is, I knew if I walked any farther than the front desk, the creaks would give me away. So I made it not creak, at least not in a way you or I could hear.
Madeleine probably did, but I don’t think her showing up there was for my benefit.”
Reluctant amusement won out over annoyance. Easing to a halt, Tanner curled his fingers around her nape and stared straight into her eyes. “Do me a favor, Rosemary.” Leaning in, he kissed her, hard, with just a hint of that underlying annoyance. “Get to the damn point.”
“I already did. I saw Billy. Madeleine faded out the way she does, and for a moment, there he was. Not much more than a shimmer in the shadows, but there, I’m sure of it, after Madeleine was all the way gone.”
He took a spin on the normal side. “It could have been an optical illusion.”
“Created by a ghost?”
“Still preferable to thinking wooden dolls can appear and disappear at will.” Or shoot rifles, but no way was he going there. “We need to get back to the Marie,” he told her, and thanked God for small favors when she didn’t ask why. A nod was her response, followed by a quick kiss and a glare through the windshield that would have chilled the blood of a lesser man.
“The longer the list of victims grows, the more I want to cause the Reaper pain.” Her eyes, perfectly calm, returned to his. “Or better yet, turn him into what the name he’s taken on implies.”
“The personification of death?”
“Yes, only without the personification part. I’m going to focus on Papa Lucien, Tanner, make sure he stays safe until we get back to the hotel.”
Couldn’t ask for more than that, Tanner reflected. And turned his own mind to what he did best.
* * *
Rosemary surged out of a deep sleep and almost over the side of the bed. Tanner caught her before she tumbled out, but it still took her several seconds to reorient and drag her mind from the nightmare.
Lightning glimmered at sporadic intervals, with thunder far, far behind it. The swamp and everything that lived there seemed to Rosemary to be waiting. She had no idea why or what for, but that’s how weird feelings were. Irrational, inexplicable, and in this case, downright spooky.
“Lucien’s fine,” Tanner said before she could ask. “He just wheeled by the door. I heard him humming in my mind. He’s a crappy hummer when he’s worried, which he is, about us and Skeeter.”
Rosemary rocked her head to work out the kinks of the freakishly vivid nightmare. “Should someone—us—be out looking for him?”
“The Reaper won’t bother Skeeter, Rosemary. Why mess with a ticking time bomb if you don’t have to? It’s you he wants, not an unstable junkie.”
Feeling jumpy, she reached for her clothes. “I think I want a cup of horrible tea that’ll help me sleep without dreaming.”
Propping up on one elbow, Tanner watched her pull on white bikinis, a pair of really tight jeans and a short coral tee. “We could have sex instead. That might work.”
She found she could still be amused. “We had sex, Tanner. That kind of stimulation fuels dreams. Not bad ones as a rule, but consider the situation. If I had a sleeping pill I’d—well, no, actually, I wouldn’t take it, but that’s not the point. I don’t want an encore performance of the dream I just had, not ever, so horrible tea it is.”
“You called Ben’s name.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“And mine.”
That stopped her. Deflating, she sat next to him. “I was in Madeleine’s garden, the one where she’s buried behind her shop. I was trying not to step on her scarlet bells—her foxgloves—when all of a sudden, the flowers started ringing like mini alarms. I looked up and saw Ben. He was all dirty and bleeding. Then a clawed hand shot out of the ground and grabbed my ankle. A skeleton in a filthy robe followed it up. I called to Ben, but he was gone. Madeleine appeared for a moment, but she vanished too and left Billy the doll behind.”
“Busy nightmare.”
“There’s more. When I looked past the Reaper, I saw you. Dead. You’d been shot, like Gardrock. The Reaper leered at me and laughed. He said you forgot to play to your strength, but that he never would. Just to be sure, though, he pulled out a gun and pointed it at you. He said you were the trickiest bastard he’d ever met, and he shot you again and again and again. That’s when I woke up.”
“You have an active mind, Rosemary, even in sleep.” Tanner slid a lazy finger along her arm. “Must make it difficult to relax all the way.”
“I have moments of complete relaxation. They’ve just been harder to come by lately, what with dolls and apparitions popping in and out and all the bullet dodging we’ve had to do.” When he sat up behind her, she laid her head on his shoulder. She smiled as his hand strayed along the side of her throat to her collarbone, before gliding slowly toward her breasts. “I’m not going to get that tea, am I?”
“Could be you won’t need it. Sex isn’t a rocket ride every time. Slow and easy’s good, too. Think cool waterways and grassy shores, Rosemary. Think birds and summer skies and a breeze you can hardly feel on your face.”
He took her mind to that lush and lovely place deep in the bayou, where everything was a sensory delight and no evil existed.
But it lurked. She knew it was there, in the shadows. It couldn’t find them, not yet, but it would. That’s why they’d come to the Marie. To draw the Reaper in. To do what had to be done.
Later.
With her mind drifting and her eyes closed, she laughed. “You’re undressing me, Tanner. I just put these clothes on.”
“Yeah, I know. I watched you do it.”
“You could have seduced me before I went to the trouble.”
“Could have,” he agreed. “Didn’t want to.” His eyes, when she opened her own, held a wicked, and not entirely sexual gleam. “I like stripping away layers, angel, and exploring what’s underneath them.”
“Speaking of,” she murmured, “you’re a man of multiple layers yourself. I only wish I knew how many more there are to explore.”
“It’s always best to start at the top and work your way down.”
As he lowered her onto the bed, Rosemary let her concerns and most of her tension float off into the shimmering night, where a voodoo drum beat like a demon heart, deep in the shadows of the moonlit swamp.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tanner had a sure-fire system for personal demon exorcism. It started with sex to burn off excess adrenaline. Coffee took care of the emotional battle that followed. Prowling the grounds afterward kept him moving and also helped him rememorize the dense bayou landscape.
Waiting was the worst part of any looming battle, but it would come. Eventually it had to. The harder it went down, the better. He wanted it fast, furious and final. His skill pitted against the Reaper’s, with Rosemary as far out of the picture as she could reasonably be.
Right now, she was helping Papa Lucien make gris-gris and hone his mental skills. Accidentally on purpose, Tanner figured, Skeeter’s name would come up, and Papa Lucien would be all over her for psychological advice.
As for Skeeter himself—no one had seen him since yesterday. A concern? Possibly, depending on his current state of mind.
A deceptively lazy afternoon melted into yet another turbulent night. No surprise to anyone, the stagnant heat offered up more thunder, and a light show that would have put a metal band’s special effects team to shame.
The sounds within the swamp deepened and slowed. After dinner, Papa Lucien insisted on teaching Rosemary how to play mah-jongg while Tanner turned down an offer by a pair of vaporous guests to go frog hunting. He had no quarrel with frogs and absolutely no desire to eat their legs. Instead, he picked up his gun and his rifle, and made a silent trip around the perimeter of the hotel.
He noticed the discordant sound several seconds before he spotted the source of it. Leaving the path, he moved across the spongy ground and ducked under low branches draped with tattered moss.
It wasn’t easy to distinguish his quarry from the darkness, but Tanner’s eyes adjusted quickly and the lightning flashes helped.
Five minutes passed before the man moved again. When
he did, Tanner was on him, wrapping a forearm around his throat and jamming the rifle into one of his kidneys.
“Twitch,” he warned and left the remainder unspoken. “What the fuck are you doing here, Crucible?”
The other man’s response was, as always, perfectly cool. “Playing a hunch. A correct one, it seems. You took Rosemary to meet Desdemona. Why else would she be lying in a hospital as we speak? Knowing you as I do, I figured you’d be doubly pissed off at the Reaper for putting her there. The rest was easy. You get a mad on, Tanner, you look to end it.”
“I was looking to end it before that bastard Reaper took aim at Desdemona. But you’re right. Now I want his head and his balls on a platter. You screw this up for me, pal, and yours’ll be joining them.”
“You haven’t told her, have you?”
“Rosemary’s as informed as she needs to be. Isn’t that how you preach it? What the target doesn’t know might kill her, but at least she’ll be spared the agony of worrying about it.”
“So you took the worry on instead.”
“For now. She’ll work it out by the time Desdemona’s back on her feet and she’s convinced Papa Lucien isn’t going to wind up in a similar state.”
“You care too much, Tanner. You make things personal.”
“It’s one of my failings. My temper’s another. So’s the resentment I’ve become a master at building.” Loosening his grip, he shoved Crucible away. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
His expression solemn, Crucible regarded him from a safe distance. “And you should have told her how it was going to be, the only way it ever could be from the start. You know how this has to end, Tanner.” His eyes hardened to stone. “No matter what happens, no matter which way it goes, Rosemary Sayer is going to die.”
* * *
Skeeter wasn’t bad. Not bad to the bone anyway. Sometimes young people got messed up. Other times, nature helped the messing up along.
According to Papa Lucien, a doctor had informed him long ago that Skeeter suffered from autism. No cure available, he’d stated, and walked away. Another had suggested ADHD and warned Papa Lucien to expect an unpleasant future for the boy. A third had insisted Skeeter had wildness in his marrow and had refused to view the problem as a medical matter.
