by Tami Hoag
Laurel hovered on the edge of the action, her stomach twisting, her breath like two hard fists in her lungs, disjointed thoughts shooting through her mind like shrapnel. She hadn't even been aware of Savannah's presence in the bar. Seeing her like this, locked in combat with another woman, was too surreal to be believed. She brought a hand up to her mouth and bit down hard on her thumbnail.
Suddenly an explosion rent the air, followed by a chorus of screams, and everyone went absolutely still for a split second. Laurel was sure her heart stopped, sure one of the women had fired and someone had been killed. But the fighters broke apart, Savannah with Jack dragging her backward, T-Grace with her daughter in a choke hold. Heads turned toward the bar.
Ovide held a smoking .38 in one meaty fist. The gun was pointed toward the ceiling, and a telltale plume of plaster dust was floating down. The bartender's face was as impassive as ever. He looked like a ridiculous cartoon character standing there, his walrus mustache drooping down, tufts of white hair sprouting out of his ears. He didn't say a word as his patrons stared at him, but set the gun down behind the counter, calmly picked up a glass, and went on drying it with the rag he had never bothered to put down.
T-Grace gave her daughter a rough shake. “Fightin' with the customers. Talk about!”
Annie wiped a drizzle of blood from her nose with the back of her hand, her gaze, still hot and angry, locked on Savannah Chandler. “She started it, Maman—”
T-Grace cut her daughter off with a wild-eyed look. “I don' wanna hear no more. Get on with you! Go fix yourself up.” She gave her daughter a shove in the direction of the ladies' room and clapped her hands over her head as she turned back toward the rest of the crowd. “Allons danser!” she ordered as Roddie Romero and the Rockin' Cajuns wailed out of the jukebox.
The bar patrons drifted back to their prefight activities, several couples taking T-Grace's command to heart and swinging out onto the dance floor to work off the excitement by working themselves into a sweat.
Adrenaline was still scalding the pathways of Savannah's blood vessels. She felt wild and irrational and didn't give a damn who saw it or what anybody thought. She shot Jack a pointed look over her shoulder. “If you wanted to put your hands on me, Jack, all you had to do was say so.”
He let go of her abruptly. His face was set in stern lines. He pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Your lip is bleeding.”
Savannah just stared at him, recklessness rolling through her in big waves. Very slowly, very deliberately, she ran her tongue along her bottom lip, licking the blood away.
“You want to do that for me, Jack?” she murmured seductively, swaying toward him. “I'll bet you go for that sort of thing, don't you? Writing all those bloody, gruesome books gives you a taste for it, doesn't it, Jack?”
Jack said nothing. He had thought more than once of succumbing to Savannah Chandler's charms, but always something made him steer clear at the last second. Some instinctive wariness made him keep his distance. He hadn't understood until that second it was fear. Not of the woman, but of what they might become together. She would pull him over the edge with her, then only le bon Dieu knew what would happen as they tumbled together into madness. A cold chill trickled down his back at the thought.
“We're two of a kind, you and me, Jack,” she whispered, holding his gaze.
Laurel arrived at her sister's side, pale as chalk, frightened and furious, trembling as she reached out to touch Savannah's arm. “My God, are you all right? You're bleeding! Jesus, Savannah, what were you thinking?”
Savannah shrugged off the touch and glared at her. “I wasn't,” she snapped. “That's your department, Baby. You think, I act. Maybe if someone could put us together, we'd be a whole person.”
She spun away and bent to snatch up her red calfskin pocketbook from the floor, not in the least bit concerned that the hem of her dress rode all the way up to her bare ass as she did so. Laurel's breath caught in her throat, and she took a step toward her sister meaning to pull the skirt down to her knees if she could.
“Savannah, for God's sake!”
Savannah gave a derisive sniff as she dug a cigarette and slim gold lighter out of her bag. “God's got nothing to do with it, Baby,” she said as she lit up. She took a deep, calming drag and blew the smoke toward the ceiling, never taking her eyes off Laurel. “He's a sadist, anyway. Haven't you realized that by now?” She smiled bitterly, a smile made gruesome by the bright red blood staining her lush lower lip. “The joke's on us.”
Satisfied with having the last word, she turned on her red stiletto heel and strolled out the front door as calmly as if nothing had happened at all.
“She gonna come to grief, dat one,” T-Grace said, her voice vibrating with anger. She stood beside Laurel with her hands jammed on her hips, electric blue cowboy boots planted apart. Her tower of red hair was listing perilously to the left. Her leathery face was suffused with color, and her dark eyes bugged way out, making her look as if some invisible hand had her by the throat.
Laurel didn't bother to argue the point. Her heart sank at the thought that it was quite probably true. Savannah seemed bent on destroying herself one way or another, and Laurel had no idea what to do to prevent it. She wanted to believe she could stop it. She wanted to believe they could control their own destinies, but she didn't seem to have control of anything. She felt as if she were trying to stop a crazily spinning carousel by simply reaching out and grabbing it. Every time she caught hold, it flung her to the ground.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Delahoussaye,” she murmured. “Please be sure to send the bill for damages to my aunt's house.”
T-Grace wrapped an arm around her and patted her shoulder, instantly the surrogate mother. “Don' you be sorry, chère. You don' got nothin' be sorry 'bout, helpin' us out like what you did with dat damn Jimmy Lee. You come an' eat some crawfish, you. You so little, I could pick up over my head.”
“T-Grace,” Jack said, resurrecting his smile with an effort, “who you tryin' to fool? You could pick me up over your head and dance the two-step.”
She shook a bony finger at him, fighting the smile that pulled at her thin ruby lips. “Don' you tempt me, cher. You so full of sass, I jus' might show you who's boss, me. You come on sit down 'fore dat bump on your head make you more crazy than you already is.”
As they wound their way through the throng, T-Grace snatched hold of Leonce and ordered him to mind the bar. Leonce swept off his Panama hat and made a courtly bow, the tails of his Hawaiian shirt drooping low. He came up with a big grin that split his Vandyke and gave Jack a punch on the shoulder.
“Jumpin' into catfights, talk about! What you gonna do next, Jack? Mud wrasslin' with women and alligators?”
Jack scowled at his friend, reached out with a quick hand, and flipped Leonce's hat off Leonce and onto his own head, leaving Leonce blushing back across his balding pate. “You're just jealous 'cause you were only the warm-up act.”
Comeau's face darkened at the reminder, his scar glowing an angry red like a barometer of his temper. He tried to snatch the hat back, grabbing air as Jack ducked away. “Fuck you, Boudreaux.”
“In your dreams,” Jack taunted, laughing. “Go water the liquor, tcheue poule.”
T-Grace whirled around and boxed his ear, knocking the hat askew. “We don' water nothin' here, smart mouth.”
She hardly broke her stride, continuing toward a little-used side door, barking orders at a waitress along the way and signaling to her husband to join them. Jack rubbed his ear and shot her a disgruntled look from under the brim of the straw hat—a look that was tempered by a twinkle in his eye.
They went outside and across a stretch of parking lot to the bank of the bayou, where a picnic table and assorted lawn chairs sat, divided from the yard of a tidy little forest-green house by the requisite flower shrine to Mary. The area was partially illuminated by cheap plastic Chinese lanterns alternated with yellow bug lights strung up between two poles.
The sun had sunk, but night had yet to creep across the sky. The bayou was striped with bars of soft gold light and translucent shadow.
Ovide planted his bulk in a lawn chair and said nothing while T-Grace supervised the layout of food on the picnic table. Laurel hung back, uncertain, wary of why she was being treated as a guest. She glanced at her watch and started to back away.
“I appreciate the offer, Mrs. Delahoussaye, but I think I should probably go. I ought to find Savannah—”
“Leave her be,” T-Grace ordered. “Trouble, dat's all what she'll get you, chère, sister or no.” Satisfied with the spread, she turned toward Laurel with her hands on her hips and a sympathetic look in her eyes. “Mais yeah, you gotta love her, but she'll do what she will, dat one. Sit.”
Jack put his hands on Laurel's shoulders and steered to the picnic table. “Sit down, sugar. We worked hard catchin' these mudbugs.”
She obeyed, not because she was hungry or eager to please, but because she didn't want to think what she would do if she could find Savannah. She wanted to talk, but the talk would invariably turn into an argument. When Savannah was in one of her moods, there was no reasoning with her. A headache took hold, and she closed her eyes briefly against the pain.
“Eat,” T-Grace said, sliding a plate in front of her. It held a pile of boiled crawfish, boiled red potatoes, and maquechou—corn with chunks of tomato and peppers. The rich, spicy scents wafted up to tease Laurel's nostrils, and her stomach growled in spite of the poor appetite she'd had two seconds ago.
Jack tossed the Panama hat on the end of the table, straddled the bench, and sat down beside her, too close, his thigh brushing hers, his groin pressing against her hip. The air seeped out of her lungs in a tight hiss.
“She's a debutante, T-Grace,” he said. “Probably don' know how to eat a crawfish without nine kinds of silver forks.”
“I do so,” Laurel retorted, shooting him a look over her shoulder.
Defiantly, she snapped off a crawfish tail, dug her thumbs into the seam, and split it open to reveal the rich white meat, which she pulled out and ate with her fingers. The flavor was wonderful, making her mouth water, evoking memories. In her mind's eye she could see her father wolfing down crawfish at the festival in Breaux Bridge, his eyes closed with reverent appreciation and a big smile on his face.
“You gonna be a real Cajun and suck the fat out'a the head?”
She jerked free of the bittersweet memory and scowled at Jack, who was slipping his arms around her to steal food off her plate. “Go suck the fat out of your own head, Boudreaux. That ought to occupy you for a while.”
Ovide's mustache twitched. T-Grace slapped the arm of her lawn chair and cackled. “I like this girl of yours, Jack. She got enough sass to handle you.”
Laurel tried unsuccessfully to scoot away from him. “I'm afraid you've got the wrong idea, Mrs. Delahoussaye. Jack and I aren't involved. We're just . . .” She trailed off, at a loss for an appropriate word. Friends seemed too intimate, acquaintances too distant.
“You could say lovers, and we'll make good on it later,” he murmured in a dark, seductive voice, nuzzling her ear as he reached for another crawfish.
T-Grace went on, unconcerned with Laurel's definition of the relationship. “A girl's gotta have some sass. Like our Annick—Annie, you know? She gets herself in a scrap or two, but she takes care of herself, oui? She's a good girl, our Annie, she jus' can't pick a good man is all. Not like her maman.”
She reached over to pat Ovide's sloping shoulder lovingly, her hard face aglow with affection. Ovide gave a snort that might have been approval or sinus trouble and tossed a crawfish shell into the bayou. A crack sounded from the dark water as a fish snapped up the shell.
“We raise seven babies in this house,” T-Grace announced proudly. “Ovide and me, we work every day to make a good home, to make a good business. Now we got this damn Jimmy Lee making trouble for us, sayin' Frenchie's is the place where sin come from. Me, I'd like to send him to the place where sin come from. Ovide, he's gonna get the ulcer from worryin' 'bout what dat Jimmy Lee gonna do next.”
She patted her husband's shoulder again, brushed at the wild gray hair that fringed his head and poured out of his ear. She shot a shrewd, sideways look at Laurel. “So, you gonna help us wit' dat or what, chère?”
The other shoe fell. Laurel felt trapped with Jack on one side and T-Grace staring her down on the other. She shifted uncomfortably on the bench, wanting nothing more than to escape. She shook her head as she abandoned her supper and extricated herself from the bench. “I believe we've already had this conversation, Mrs. Delahoussaye. I'm not practicing law—”
“You don' gotta practice,” T-Grace said dryly. “Jus' do it.”
Laurel heaved a sigh of frustration. “Really, all you have to do is call the sheriff the next time Reverend Baldwin comes on your property—”
“Ha! Like dat pigheaded jackass would bother with the like of us!”
“He's the sheriff—”
“You don' understand, sugar,” Jack drawled. He swung his right leg over the bench and stretched his feet out in front of him, leaning his elbows back against the table. “Duwayne Kenner only comes runnin' if your name is Leighton or Stephen Danjermond. He's got too many important meetings to bother with the common folk. He isn't gonna get mixed up with Jimmy Lee and his Church of the Lunatic Fringe unless a judge tells him to.”
“That's absurd!” Laurel exclaimed, rounding on Jack. “That's—”
He raised his brows. “The way it is, sweetheart.”
“He's sworn to uphold justice,” she argued.
“Not everybody has the same conviction about that as you do.”
She said nothing, just stood there for a long moment. He had no such conviction. Jack made his own rules and probably broke them with impunity. He joked about the system, derided the people who tried to make it work. But he knew she didn't.
He watched her, his eyes a dark, bottomless brown, his expression intense. He was trying to read her. She felt as if those eyes were reaching right into her soul. Abruptly, she turned back toward T-Grace.
“There are several attorneys here in town—”
“Who don' give a rat's behind,” T-Grace said. She abandoned her plate on the ground, forfeiting her dinner to Huey, who crawled out from under the picnic table and laid claim to the crawfish. T-Grace ignored the dog, her hard gaze homing in on Jack. She walked up to him with her hands on her hips, her chin tipped in challenge. “Jack here, he could help us, but here he sits on his cute little—”
“Jesus Christ, T-Grace!” Jack exploded. He got up from the bench so quickly, it tipped over backward with a crash that sent the hound scurrying for safe cover. “I'm disbarred! What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Oh, nothin', Jack,” she said softly, mockingly, not giving up an inch of ground. “We all know you jus' wanna have a good time.” Daring more than any man would have, she reached up and patted his lean cheek. “You go on and have a good time, Jack. Don' bother with us. We'll make out.”
Jack wheeled around in a circle, looking for some way to vent the anger roaring inside him. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs, bellow like a wounded animal. He snatched a beer bottle off the table and hurled it, narrowly missing the bathtub shrine to the mother of God, and still the fury built inside him.
“Shit!”
T-Grace watched him with wise old eyes. “That's all right, Jack. We all know you don' get involved. You don' take responsibility for nothin'.”
He glared at her, wanting to grab her and shake her until her bug eyes popped right out of her head. Damn her, damn her for making him feel . . . what? Like a cad, like a heel? Like a good for nothing, no-account piece of trash?
Bon à rien, T-Jack . . . bon à rien.
That's what he was. No good. He'd had that truth drilled into him since he was old enough to comprehend language. He had proven it true time and again. He had no business howling at the truth.
His gaze caught on Laurel, who stood quietly, her arms folded against her, her big eyes round behind her glasses. The champion for justice. Willing to sacrifice her reputation, her private life, her career, all for the cause. Dieu, what she must think of me . . . and all of it true.
That was the irony—and he had a finely honed appreciation for irony—that he was everything T-Grace accused him of and less, that he was exactly what he aspired to be, and now the image he had settled into was turning on him—or he was turning against it.
“I don' need this,” he snarled. “I'm outta here.”
Laurel watched him stalk away, a little shaken by his outburst. A part of her wanted to go after him, to offer comfort, to ask why. Not smart, Laurel. She had enough trouble of her own without taking on the burden of Jack Boudreaux's darker side . . . or the plight of Frenchie's Landing. . . .
But as she turned back toward T-Grace, she couldn't bring herself to say no. It was no big deal, she told herself. Just a visit to the courthouse, a phone call or two. She wasn't taking on the world. Just a pair of honest, hardworking people who needed a little justice. Surely she was strong enough for that.
“All right,” she said on a sigh. “I'll see what I can do.”
For once, T-Grace was speechless, managing only a smile and a nod. Ovide hefted himself out of his chair and dusted remnants of crawfish shells off his belly. Laying a broad hand on Laurel's shoulder, he looked her in the eye and growled, “Merci, chère.”
Chapter
Twelve
Jimmy Lee sat on the windowsill, feeling sorry for himself, wearing nothing but his dirty white trousers and a frown. Sweat trickled in little streams down his chest to pool on his belly. He sipped at a glass of brandy, brooding, reliving his humiliation in his mind, tormenting himself with it. He had had that crowd in the palm of his hand, he thought, curling his fingers into a fist. Then that damn Chandler bitch had ruined everything. Of course, he had managed to salvage the situation with his quick thinking, but the moment of glory had been spoiled, just the same.
