Swamp Team 3 (2 page)

Carter, who had finally managed to close his mouth, stared at me for several seconds, then his lower lip started to quiver. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in any longer and the grin he’d been fighting against crept out.

“Just an FYI, I’m not much for the Gothic look,” he said. “I prefer my women with a little color to their skin.”

I ripped the tablecloth off the kitchen table and dragged it across my entire face, top to bottom, then stared in dismay when I saw next to no flour on the cloth. “First of all, I am not
your
woman, so what you prefer isn’t relevant. Second, all of this is your fault for asking me to dinner in the first place.”

He continued standing there with that shit-eating grin. “Well, it’s probably cost me a perfectly good T-shirt, but so far, the invitation is scoring high on the entertainment scale.”

“Get out.” I dropped the tablecloth and pushed him toward the back door. “It will probably take a sandblaster or an exorcist to get this crap off my face. So unless you want me looking like this at dinner, I need to get to work on it now.”

I slammed the door behind him and locked it for good measure. A second later, the banging started.

“Hey, let me in,” Gertie yelled. “I need to pee. I promise I won’t set anything else on fire.”

I looked over at Ida Belle. “I suppose you want to tweeze me now?”

Ida Belle shook her head. “After this, anything is an improvement.”

I sighed. That pretty much summed up my entire stay in Sinful.

###

It took two hours, exfoliating scrub, and a putty knife to get the flour off my face. By that point, Ida Belle and Gertie felt so guilty about the botched day of beauty that no one mentioned wax or tweezers again. At least that’s what I thought. On closer inspection, it appeared the offending hairs had gone away with the scraping of the flour.

Once I had ditched the corpse look, I sent both of them packing and went upstairs for both a shower and a bath—a shower to wash the flour out of my hair and a bath to work the knots out of my back and neck. Then I went outside to the hammock, where I promptly fell asleep, Merlin splayed across my stomach. I had set my watch to go off thirty minutes before Carter was set to pick me up. Anything I couldn’t do in thirty minutes wasn’t going to happen regardless.

Based on Carter’s appreciative expression when I opened the door that evening, thirty minutes was more than sufficient. Quite literally more than, as I’d used twenty minutes of it to get ready and the other ten figuring out where to strap my pistol under the thin, clingy dress. I’d finally given up and selected the most girlie and least efficient option, my purse. During my entire professional career, I’d never once encountered a criminal who waited on a woman to remove her firearm from her purse, but then I hoped odds of my needing to use it tonight were low.
 

Carter gave me the once-over and smiled. “I see you’re back from the undead.”

“The whole vampire look is last year,” I said as I stepped outside and locked the door. “How’s your T-shirt?”

“Waxed so well I could probably surf on it, and currently standing upright in my garbage can.”

“You should send Gertie a bill. I’m thinking about a lawsuit for pain and suffering. Mostly the suffering part.”

He grinned and opened the passenger door to his truck. “If I recall correctly, I’ve repeatedly told you that the two of them are trouble.”

I waited as he walked around and slid into the driver’s seat. “I never disagreed with the trouble part. But since they’re not the evil, mean-spirited kind of trouble, I decided to ignore you.”

He started the truck and shook his head. “Continue to do so at your own peril.”

“I probably will.” I stared out the windshield as we drove out of my neighborhood and toward Main Street, trying to come up with something to ask or say that didn’t prompt Carter to ask about my past. I was a professional liar, but not a very creative one. A spur-of-the-moment lie rolled past my lips like a breath mint. An entire past of lies would probably choke me.

When he turned onto Main Street, I let out a quiet sigh of relief. Other people would be at the restaurant. I could always ask Carter to tell me about them. That would be neutral enough. But instead of pulling into one of the Main Street parking spaces, Carter drove straight through town and pulled onto the highway.

“Where are we going?” I asked, already afraid I knew the answer.

“New Orleans. Tomorrow is my day off, and I still haven’t figured out if you’re doing any work at all, so I thought we could venture out for something besides Francine’s.”

My palms went clammy and my pulse ticked up a notch. If I’d been locked in that truck cab with two enemy assassins and a pit viper, I would have been more comfortable. The thought of hours of round-trip conversation, plus dinner, was something I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared for. I didn’t like team sports and had only started watching television a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even have enough material to cover the main course.

But if I waited for him to start a conversation, he might open with “tell me about yourself.” Faking a heart attack would be easier than making up details that would pass inspection by a cop. Good Lord, how had I gotten myself into this mess? This was all Ida Belle and Gertie’s fault, insisting that dating made me look more normal. Maybe that worked for other people, but they should have known better with me.

“So how long did you serve in the Marine Corps?” I asked, then cringed.
 

My initial thought was that the military was something I could discuss intelligently and pass off as having friends who’d served, but now, I realized I’d just asked him something personal about his past. According to Gertie, that gave Carter permission to do the same with me. With my first question, I’d already managed to screw up the entire evening.

“Twelve years,” he replied. “When I went in at eighteen, things were pretty quiet. The first Gulf War was over, per se, and the second hadn’t fired up yet.”

“How many tours in Iraq did you do?”

“Four, but most days it felt like forty.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, even though I knew exactly what he was saying. Every mission I’d done seemed to play out in only two speeds—lightning fast and reverse. The actual takedown was usually only a matter of seconds. But the research and placement time leading up to that one shot could take months, even years.

“I don’t think I could fathom it either if I hadn’t been there,” he said. “When I was a kid, some of the high school guys enlisted and served in the first Gulf War. I talked to several of them before enlisting myself. I heard the stories, and they tried to explain what it felt like, but words couldn’t do it justice. It wasn’t until my first tour that I understood exactly how insignificant their descriptions had been compared to the reality.”

“What was your specialty?”

“Nothing at first. I didn’t have a college education and no particular skill set, so I went over as infantry. Got promoted to rifleman after a while. I was good at it, so I stayed there.”

Red lights began flashing in my mind. Riflemen were excellent shots but often also served as scouts. If Carter was a scout, he would be specifically trained to recognize other military personnel by movement and reaction, not just uniform. Which meant that if he ever saw me in action, he’d know I wasn’t the librarian, Sandy-Sue Morrow, I was pretending to be.

The overwhelming feeling that agreeing to this dinner had been the biggest mistake I’d made since arriving in Sinful was something I could no longer ignore. With every bit of information I discovered about Carter, the possibility of him discovering my true identity ticked up several notches. When things were calm, I barely managed to portray an innocuous civilian. When things heated up—and they always seemed to—it was next to impossible to stop myself from my natural reactions to a threat.
 

Carter’s cell phone rang and he checked the display and frowned. “What part of ‘night off’ did you miss in my instructions?”

I heard a high-pitched female voice. It sounded somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place it exactly.

“What?” Carter’s voice hardened. “When? Yeah, tell Sheriff Lee I’m on my way.”

I stiffened as I realized the voice was Myrtle Thibodeaux, the night dispatcher for the sheriff’s department and one of Ida Belle and Gertie’s cohorts in the Sinful Ladies Society, a group of older single women who controlled a good part of what happened in Sinful.

He dropped his cell phone on the seat and gave me an apologetic look as he took the next exit off the highway. “I’m really sorry about this, but I’ve got to get back to Sinful.”

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a house fire that I need to check on, and I figure you’re going to want to come with me.”

I sucked in a breath. “Gertie?”

“That would make a hell of a lot more sense, but no. The fire is at Ally’s.”

Chapter Two

“Is Ally all right?” I asked, my voice increasing in octave and in volume.

“Yeah,” Carter said. “She inhaled a bit of smoke, but the paramedics said she’s going to be fine. Still, I figured you’d want to make sure.”

“Yes, of course. Thanks.” I clutched the door handle as Carter made a U-turn with minimal decrease in speed, then got back on the highway and pressed his accelerator to the floorboard.
 

Ally was a waitress at Francine’s but was working on opening her own bakery. We met when I first arrived in town, and I’d found her honesty and kindness a breath of fresh air. She’d quickly become the first female friend I’d ever had in my age group. Unlike Ida Belle and Gertie, Ally had no idea that I wasn’t the real Sandy-Sue Morrow, and that’s the way I intended to keep things. It was safer for both of us that way.

“How did the fire start?” I asked. The combined thoughts of Ally’s daily baking and Gertie’s grease fire all ran together, creating a viable reason for the tragedy.

“They’re not sure yet. Hopefully the firemen will know more by the time we get there.”

“I hope it’s not all gone.” I couldn’t even imagine losing everything I owned in a matter of minutes.
 

Carter looked over at me and nodded. “Me, too.”

###

The fire was nothing more than a smoke trail leading into the clouds once we arrived, and I was relieved to see the house still standing. The firemen appeared to be congregated around one corner at the back of the house. I saw Ally on the sidewalk, talking with a large woman in workout clothes, who held a leash with one of those small, yappy dogs on the other end. As I jumped out of the truck, the woman gave Ally a quick hug and headed across the street, I assumed to her home.

Ally glanced over as I hurried up and her face crumpled as she launched into me, throwing her arms around my neck.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, her voice raspy.
 

I lifted my arms to encircle her, feeling more awkward at that moment than I had in Carter’s truck.
 

“I’ve never been so scared,” she said.

I gave her a squeeze. “All that matters is that you’re safe,” I said.
 

She sniffed and released me, taking a tiny step backward. Her eyes were red and a single tear rolled down her cheek. My entire life, I’d never wished more than at that moment that my mom had lived longer. A normal woman would have been able to handle this without even thinking about it. A woman who’d been raised by a father who was a cross between James Bond and Rambo didn’t stand a chance of understanding normal emotions.

“What happened?” I asked.

She wiped the tear off her cheek and shook her head. “I don’t know. I’d been testing a new layer cake recipe and the layers needed to cool, so I headed upstairs for a shower. I had just turned off the water when the smoke detectors went off. I swear I almost had a heart attack right there. It took me a couple of seconds to even register what the noise was.”

I nodded. I’d had a few of those unexpected jolts of noise since I’d arrived in Sinful, but at least since mine had happened when I was sleeping, I hadn’t had to stop and consider clothes.
 

“I didn’t take time to dry off,” Ally continued. “Just pulled on yoga pants and a T-shirt and ran downstairs. I could see fire creeping toward the stairwell, and the smoke was already billowing up to the second floor. I didn’t even think to grab a wet towel to cover my mouth. Stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. Your house was on fire. Flight is a perfectly reasonable response.”

She gave me a grateful look. “I probably shouldn’t have taken the time to dress.”

“In this case, I don’t think a handful of seconds made a huge difference, although it would have been much more dramatic if you’d run out of your front door naked. That’s probably one people around here don’t see all that often.”

“You’d be surprised.”
 

Ida Belle’s voice sounded behind me and I spun around to see her and Gertie standing there.

“Are you okay?” Gertie asked Ally. “Shouldn’t you be sitting? Someone bring her a chair, for Christ’s sake! What’s wrong with you people?”
 

I grinned as Gertie clenched Ally’s arm and studied her as if her medical prognosis were written on her forehead. Ida Belle rolled her eyes at all the dramatics.