Hunted (23 page)

The conversation with the superintendent had confirmed what he had suspected: he was being painted as a head case, a lunatic on a rampage. Although in hindsight he supposed he should have seen it coming, what he had
not
expected was to have his supposed breakdown blamed on the stress associated with the death of his kid and ex-wife. The frightening thing about it was that it made sense, made his apparently inexplicable meltdown understandable and thus easier for everyone to believe. A lot of cops had witnessed what a basket case he’d been at the joint funeral, so for them to accept that he’d now gone off the rails wouldn’t require
that big of a stretch. Remembering the funeral brought a wave of pain with it. By now the feeling that his heart had gotten caught in a vise had become so damnably familiar that he knew how to deal with it, so he took a breath and forced all associated images and thoughts out of his mind as he counted backward from ten. Damn Martin Wallace for stirring up memories that he almost always nowadays succeeded in keeping securely at bay.

He was having more trouble than usual getting the picture of his little boy as he had looked lying in his small white coffin out of his head: he had to start the count again. Must be because he was bone tired. He was still wired, still running on adrenaline, but he could feel it starting to ebb. Once it was out of his system, he had a bad feeling that he was going to crash big time. Or maybe the unwanted image was hanging on because over the last few hours he’d been thinking way too much about the imminent possibility of his own death.

Whatever the reason, Reed knew one thing: dwelling on the past did no one any good.

“My father’s involved somehow in those murders, isn’t he?” Caroline yelled at him. This time, her eruption was welcome because it gave him something to concentrate on that wasn’t as painful.

“I don’t know,” he replied, looking at her, breaking his silence just to get his head in a different place. It was the truth, he didn’t, not for 100 percent sure, and he wanted her to know that there was still some doubt. After all, the man was her father. The slim oval of her upturned face was pale and shiny wet now, her eyes were squished up against the falling rain, and her pretty mouth was tight with irritation at him.

He found his eyes lingering on her mouth, found himself remembering that damned stupid kiss, and glanced away again.

“Who were the victims? When were they killed? Where?” Her questions were right on the mark. She would have made a good detective, he thought. If he had been trying to ferret out what had happened, he would have asked the same things in the same order himself.

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Reed looked back at her with a glimmer of humor, careful this time to meet her gaze. “Or at least, somebody would.”

“Ha, ha.”

“I’m not joking. Leave it alone, Caroline.”

“My father is somehow involved in what he himself called ‘suspicious murders.’ Holly kept talking about the cops doing this and that, which makes me think that the NOPD is also somehow involved in those murders,” Caroline persisted. She wasn’t letting it go, which didn’t surprise Reed. When she wanted something she went at it full-throttle: he remembered that from that summer ten years ago. He deliberately wasn’t looking at her again, but he could feel the intensity of her gaze on his face. She was doing a pretty impressive job with her deductions, which wasn’t a good thing. She continued, “I’m right, aren’t I? I can tell I am just from looking at your face. So how is the NOPD involved?” Her voice sharpened. “Are they covering up certain murders?”

“You ever hear, curiosity killed the cat?” he retorted, irritated at her relentlessness.

“Did you ever hear, two heads are better than one?”

“Not if one of them wants to live long and prosper.”

“Fine. Once I’m back home, I’ll ask my father what suspicious murders he was talking about.”

That made his brows snap together. “That would be the stupidest damned thing you could do.”

“So you tell me.”

“No.”

“Damn it, Reed, how can I help you if you won’t tell me anything?”

“We’ve been over this before.”

“Oh, right. I remember. You don’t want my help.”

“That’s right.”

“Because you don’t trust me.”

“Among other reasons.”

“You can,” she said, in a totally different tone, and her fingers curled tighter around his. “I give you my word that you can.”

A promise like that might make like a little worm and try to chew its way into his heart, but he wasn’t about to let it override his judgment. Neither was it going to make him change his mind about telling her anything, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything else. He shut his mouth and kept walking.

She tugged impatiently at their joined hands.

“Reed.”

He didn’t reply. She was so close that her damned breast felt like it was smashed against his arm. Wet as they both were by now, the thin cotton of his shirt and the practically nonexistent silky stuff of hers were no real barrier: he could feel the fullness of her breast, feel the heat of her skin. His biceps were being nudged by the hard little bud of her nipple. Operative word there was
hard.

Damn it to hell, her nipple wasn’t the only thing that was suddenly hard.

She snapped, “What, are you going all strong and silent on me now?”

That earned her a derisive glance. Did she really have no clue what she was doing to him? He started to walk faster, head down against the rain, in hopes of escaping the contact. He would have let go of her hand, but given the fact that they were shackled together, which meant that she had no choice but to keep pace with him, and factoring in how treacherous the soaking-wet, mossy ground was underfoot, and how precise they had to be to stay on what wasn’t really even a path, he figured that would be just asking for her to do something real useful like, say, slip and fall neck deep into a pit of slimy mud.

“You’re pushing it, Caroline,” he warned.

“Pushing what? You?” Her voice held a jeering note. Her breast didn’t budge. She stayed right there with him, hanging on to him for what felt like dear life, which in her case, given where they were, he guessed it probably was. Hell, he didn’t know if the increasingly uncomfortable tightness in his crotch had suddenly sensitized him to her or what, but now he could feel the whole intoxicating shape of her pressed against his arm. The soft roundness of her breast with its mind-clouding pebble of a nipple, the feminine slope of her rib cage, the firmness of her narrow waist and the way it flared out again into slender hips—

He opened his mouth, swallowed brackish drops of rain as well as air as he took a deep breath, then did his best to slam the door on the erotic images that had started flipping in an X-rated
reel through his mind. Thank God the water sluicing over him was cool.

“Good,” she continued, although he had pretty much lost the thread of the conversation by then. “Maybe if I push hard enough you’ll give up and admit you need help.”

If he gave up, it wouldn’t be to admit he needed help. It would be to turn and run his hands over the tantalizing curves that were making the water hitting his skin feel like it should be turning to steam. It would be to pull her against him and—

He grabbed onto his self-control with both hands.

“You want to get directly behind me now and walk right where I walk,” he told her, careful to keep his voice neutral even as he pulled that out of his hat in pure self-defense. “The path’s narrowing and starting to get treacherous. See those red eyes in the water over there? That’s a big ole alligator just waiting for one of us to slip off the side.”

He wasn’t even kidding about the alligator: it was there, its shining eyes as visible as reflectors through the darkness. Course, the creature was just floating along, with no more interest in them than in catching a ride to town, because with all the nutria and muskrats and squirrels around they were fat as pigs and lazy from being well fed, but Miss Caroline from the city wouldn’t know that.

She didn’t. She quit riding his arm at last—thank God!—and fell in behind him.

Saved from both conversation and temptation, Reed set himself to cooling down.

Picking his way along this trail that wound deep into the bayou was second nature to him. He practically had muscle
memory for it, which was a good thing because she was distracting the hell out of him and it was dark as a dungeon with the rain falling and the foliage bending close all around from the weight of the water hitting it. The smell of the swamp—a combination of decomposing vegetation, stagnant water, and mud—was strong. The bogs on either side were deep and unforgiving: over the years he’d seen the floating corpses of many animals, including several deer and on one memorable occasion a cow. Moving more or less parallel to the narrow, still-water tributary that eventually emptied into the Mississippi, they were heading south. The rain was now rattling noisily down through the canopy, falling so hard that it bounced as it hit the ground. The leaves overhead that had been providing them with some protection had pretty much given way, and they were being pelted mercilessly. Caroline was drenched despite the windbreaker that she had draped over her head. He was even wetter than she was, because he had the second windbreaker folded over his shoulder to protect his gun.

“Are we getting close?” Caroline yelled from behind him, sounding almost plaintive as the rain washed over them in sheets. When they had first started walking into the depths of the bayou he’d told her that they were heading for a place where they would take shelter for what was left of the night. At the time she hadn’t expressed a whole lot of enthusiasm, but now he assumed she’d be more receptive as, instead of replying, he pulled her around a trio of towering cypress trees and waved a hand at their destination, which was right in front of them.

A worn-flat fallen log acted as a bridge over what was usually a finger of placid water but that tonight was swollen and rushing.
He held her hand tightly as she followed him across, wary of slipping, then waited as she stepped down beside him onto a carpet of wet, muddy moss. Two strides after that, and he was climbing a trio of warped plank stairs and pulling her up behind him and onto the rickety porch of the fishing shanty that had been his refuge since he was a kid.

“Hallelujah,” she said fervently, and he knew she meant for finally getting out of the rain. The rusty tin roof sounded like it was being pelted by BBs as the rain fell like a silvery curtain on all sides. Pulling the soggy windbreaker off of her head, she clutched it in one hand and stayed close to him as she looked cautiously around. Not that she could see much. The shanty’s cypress siding was a deep, weathered gray even in the brightest daylight. Tonight the wet siding looked black, and the narrow, covered porch was dark with shadows. “Where are we?”

“I come out here to fish sometimes.” Still with her hand in his, he unlocked the door and led the way into the absolute blackness that was the interior of the cabin. It smelled faintly musty, like it had been closed up for a while, which was the case: he hadn’t been out there in months. It smelled damp, too, but hopefully that was just the rain following them in through the door. Luckily he knew where everything was as well as he knew the path that had brought them there. Closing the door, sticking close to the outer wall so as not to trip over anything, he made his way over to the table on the far left side of the room. On it was a battery-powered lantern: working strictly by touch, he switched it on. Immediately the room was illuminated by a soft white glow that lit up the area around it while leaving the corners still deep in gloom.

“Is this where you grew up?” she asked.

He’d had to let go of Caroline’s hand to turn on the lantern, and needing to make use of the arm she was tethered to had brought her closer to him than he would have liked. She stood right beside him again, no longer assaulting him with her breast but still warming up a good portion of his left side where their bodies brushed. He tried to see things through her eyes, taking in the one-room cabin with a glance: rough plank walls and floor; rudimentary kitchen; the small wooden kitchen table with the lantern on it and two upright chairs at each end; a shabby brown tweed loveseat and a tan plush recliner with a coffee table in front of them, and a small, hopelessly out-of-date television (useless for anything except watching DVDs because there was no cable) on a stand in front of that; a double bed, fully made up but with an old, flowered king-sized sheet thrown over it to keep out the dust and any surprise bugs between his visits; two plank doors that didn’t quite hang plumb in their frames, one of which led to the small bathroom and the other to the equally small storage room, on the wall opposite the kitchen; between the doors, what in fancier surroundings would have been called an armoire that provided storage for the Spartan amounts of bedding and towels and extra clothing he kept on hand, as well as a few other more personal items. His gaze touched on it, skittered past. The furniture was old, the entire cabin not much bigger than the living room of most houses, but it suited its purpose and it suited him.

“No,” he answered. He put the plastic bag of groceries onto the table, then shrugged the backpack off his shoulder and dropped it beside the food. That long-ago summer, he remembered telling her tales of growing up in the swamp, and it was
clear from her tone that she remembered. “I grew up over on Orange Cow Bayou.”

Which was maybe an hour away as the pirogue paddled. After his mother had remarried and taken off when he was eight, with his father, having left when he was a baby, being by then long gone (both of them were now dead), he’d been raised in a similar but slightly larger shanty that had at least had a separate bedroom for his Granny, while he’d slept on the couch until he’d gotten too tall to fit. By the time he’d graduated high school and left for the Army a twin bed had been added to the main room which he’d slept on, although the lack of privacy had sucked. He had found his way here one day when he was out catching crayfish and sliders and had gone farther than he’d intended. The old man who’d lived here then had been out front in a fanboat cursing a blue streak as he’d tried to wrestle a heavy propane tank onto the porch from the boat tied up out front. A strong and sturdy eleven, Reed had stopped to help. From that day on until the old man—his name was Maxwell Sligo, he was a former cop, and it was he who had instilled in Reed the desire to become one, too—had died, they’d been fast friends. Reed had been twenty-one and just out of the military when Max passed, and the fishing shanty, left unoccupied, had just kind of become the place where he went to get away from it all. No one knew about it—well, no one who was left alive, anyway, his grandmother having died shortly after Max, and his son, well . . .