Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)
Read Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) Online
Authors: Susannah Sandlin
ALSO BY SUSANNAH SANDLIN
Storm Force
The Penton Legacy series
Redemption
Absolution
Omega
Allegiance
The Collectors series
Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Deadly, Calm, and Cold
WRITTEN AS SUZANNE JOHNSON
Christmas in Dogtown
Pirateship Down
The Sentinels of New Orleans series
Royal Street
River Road
Elysian Fields
Pirate’s Alley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Suzanne Johnson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle.
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503934740
ISBN-10: 1503934748
Cover design by Michael Rehder
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
The bones said death was comin’, and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her
grand-père
Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across every day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he’d done all those years ago.
What he’d brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva’s brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now.
The bones said death was coming and, once Eva was gone, the curse should go with her. No one else knew the secrets of Julien Savoie and this cabin and that box full of sin he’d dug out of the bayou mud back in Isle de Jean Charles.
Might take a while, but sin catches up with you. Always had. Always would. And the curse had driven Eva to sin. Oh yes, she had sinned.
She’d known her reckoning would catch up with her, although it had taken a good, long time. She’d turned seventy-eight yesterday, or was it eighty? She couldn’t remember for sure, and the bones said it didn’t matter now.
On the scarred wooden table before Eva sat three burning candles that filled the room with the soft, soothing glow of melting tallow. She’d made them herself, infusing them with the oil of the fragrant lilies that every spring spread a bright-green carpet over the lazy, brown water of the bayou. The tools of her ritual sat on an ancient square of tanned hide passed down through generations of holy ones, of those blessed by the gods with the ability to throw the bones.
A small mound of delicate chicken bones, yellowed and fragile from age, lay inside the circle of light cast by the candles. Daylight would come in an hour or so, but Eva didn’t expect to last that long. Death was even now making his way toward her.
She leaned forward, wincing at the stab of pain in her lower back. Since the first throw of the bones had whispered her fate two days ago, she’d been cleaning. Scrubbed the floor, worn smooth by decades of bare feet. Washed the linens, folding them in neat piles in a drawer at the bottom of the old pie safe. Discarded most of the food in the little refrigerator that sat in the corner. Dragged the bag of trash down the long, overgrown drive past LeRoy’s old 1970 Chevy pickup that she still drove up to Houma for groceries and such once a month. Left the white bag at the side of the parish road for the weekly trash collection.
She’d spit on LeRoy’s truck as she passed it because she couldn’t spit on the man who’d bought it. He was long gone.
Now the cleaning had been finished. Whoever discovered her raggedy old body wouldn’t find a mess, not in Eva Savoie’s house.
A few minutes ago, with the old cabin as clean as she was capable of making it, she’d thrown the bones one last time. Part of her hoped they’d read different, hoped she’d be granted a few more days of grace.
But the bones still whispered death. Eva accepted it, and she sat, and she waited. At least the girl, Celestine, would inherit a cleaned-up house. The girl, Antoine’s granddaughter, knew nothing of the secrets, nothing of the curse. Eva had made sure of that.
Eva figured it would be a game warden who found her. Since the thirty-day gator season had started a week ago they’d passed back and forth on Whiskey Bayou at least once or twice a day, their sharp eyes scanning the waters for anybody up to no good, their boats moving steadily through the still, dark bayou. If years past were any sign, every few days one of the wardens would knock on her door all polite, askin’ if she needed anything. She always said no.
LeRoy used to say the game wardens kept honest folks from eating, kept them from earning a living because of all their rules and laws about what you could hunt and how much fish you could catch. Eva figured while there was an argument to be made for that, they also helped protect the old ways of life. Couldn’t tell LeRoy that, though. Couldn’t tell old LeRoy nothing. She’d wasted too many breaths trying.
If the game wardens came round this time, she wouldn’t be alive to answer. Whoever drew that unlucky straw, well, he’d find her where she sat.
Eva waited for her heart to fail—that seemed to be her most likely way to go. As she rocked, she noted each steady beat, biding her time for the instant when the
thump-thump-thump
would falter and her breath would catch, then stop. She reckoned it would hurt a little, but what if it did? The curse had doled out worse ends to those who came before her.
She’d doled out worse herself.
The buzz of a boat’s motor sounded from outside the cabin, faint but growing louder. Wardens on patrol already, most likely.
The boat’s engine increased to a deafening buzz, finally coming to an abrupt stop so near it had to be right outside her door. Silence filled the room once again until, through her bones, she felt the thud of someone jumping onto the porch that wrapped around the cabin. The porch formed the platform on which the house sat, linking it to the spit of land behind it when the water was normal. When storms blew through, it provided an island on which the cabin could sit or, if need be, float.
As heavy footfalls crossed the porch, Eva struggled to her feet. Every pop and crackle of her joints knifed streaks of pain through her limbs as they protested the cleaning they’d done, followed by the sitting.
Too bad the game warden hadn’t stopped a little later, after she was gone. She didn’t like to think of her body having to bake in the hot cabin for days before anyone found her.
But the curse was what it was, and the bones said what they said.
The knock, when it came, was soft, and Eva reached the door with the help of a sturdy cane she’d carved herself. Opening the door, she squinted into the glare of a flashlight that was almost blinding after the soft light of the candles. She peered up at a young man with eyes that gleamed from beneath the hood of a jacket. He was not a game warden, and it was too hot for a jacket.
“Who are you?”
Her voice cracked. She knew who he was. He was Death.
“The devil come to pay you a visit, Eva.” The man’s voice was smooth as silk, smooth as a lie, smooth as death itself. “And you know what the devil wants.”
She knew what he wanted, and she knew the only way to end the curse was to deny him.
She’d been granted no easy passing by the Savoie curse after all, but she
would
die today to end it.
The bones never lied.
CHAPTER 1
A pair of dark, reptilian eyes and a gray, bony snout rose above the waterline two feet from the bow of the grayish-brown mud boat, the smallest, most nimble of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ fleet. From the boat’s hiding spot deep in the shadows, below a stand of trees overhanging Whiskey Bayou, Senior Enforcement Agent Gentry Broussard tracked the alligator’s movement.
A lively little six-footer, judging by the length of the head, and the third alligator Gentry had spotted since having eased the boat into its spot an hour before sunrise, within sight of two traplines laid the night before. With any luck, he’d have a poacher in custody before the day heated up enough to make hell look like the Arctic. Mosquitoes the size of B-52s had already begun the process of eating him alive as they frolicked on the exposed skin of his arms.
Since the nearest line was pulled taut this morning with the bait end underwater, a gator likely sat on the bayou’s muddy bottom with that pronged hook lodged in its gullet. It was going to be one pissed-off reptile.
Gentry pitied the animals, but he understood why the state let hunters trap and kill gators for thirty days at the end of each summer. It kept the gator population from growing out of control, true enough, but mostly, the valuable meat and hides made up a big chunk of local hunters’ annual income. It was good for the economy, and the gators were more than plentiful.
So Gentry had no problem with the licensed hunter who’d set the lines the night before under his supervision—the guy had been here in Terrebonne Parish his whole life, worked hard, followed the rules. But the poacher was another matter. If he showed up this morning, Gentry would take him down. In this world of living close to the land, there was no place for thieves trying to steal what others spent grueling, dirty hours to earn.
Nothing came easy here at the bottom of one of the biggest wetlands and swamps in the United States, a truth woven into the twisting, isolated tangle of the lower Atchafalaya Basin and the marsh and wetlands stretching like fragile bits of lace into the Gulf of Mexico. Places like Terrebonne Parish. Places like Whiskey Bayou.
Places where a bored, sleep-deprived agent like Gentry Broussard might work off some energy. All he needed was one dumb jackass to show up and claim his illegal prize.
Gentry settled back in the shallow boat behind its curtain of hackberry limbs, raised his binoculars, and followed the gator’s progress. It glided in a graceful arc across the narrow bayou, leaving a V-shaped wake. Before reaching the opposite bank, the reptile dropped into deeper water and out of sight.
For the past three days, Gentry and the bulk of Louisiana’s Wildlife and Fisheries agents, including his enforcement unit, had been doing water-safety checks because of the Labor Day weekend. Now that things were settling back toward normal, it should be a slow day, even for a Friday.
Normally, slow would be fine with Gentry, but with three days off looming ahead of him, the more energy he could work off during this shift, the better—even if it meant chasing a wild boar or a wilder human who’d drunk too much before taking his boat on a joyride down the bayou south of Montegut. He needed to wear himself out before ending his shift and coming face-to-face with a different kind of chase—his own demons, hot on his heels.
Every day off provided a distinct chance the demons might win.
As the day dawned, the veil of gray shadows thinned into light. Gentry glanced up and down the bayou. His gaze ticked across a downed tree. A white ibis stretched its graceful neck out of the tall, dense sawgrass. A narrow path of beaten-down foliage revealed where a gator had slid into or slithered out of the water. A few hundred yards to Gentry’s left sat old Eva Savoie’s cabin, its wood weathered and grayed from age and humidity and storms. She made a little money each year by leasing out her corner of the bayou to one or two hunters for gator season, and thinning out the gators kept her safer as well.
Some said that the old Cajun woman was a voodoo priestess, others that she was a witch. All agreed she chose to speak little distinguishable English, only the thick Cajun French patois that the old-timers here clung to with an almost religious fervor. Most could understand and speak English perfectly well.
She had company this morning, though; the small boat tied up at the corner of her porch looked like something that got dragged in by the last hurricane.
A muffled thump from the cabin sent an itch of unease up the back of Gentry’s neck, and he scratched at it absentmindedly as he focused his binoculars for a better look at that boat. It bobbed in the water, empty. Whoever was visiting old Eva hadn’t planned to fish or hunt. No ice chest. No life jacket. Not even an empty candy wrapper, judging by what he could see from across the bayou.
Gentry didn’t like it. His gut didn’t like it.
However, everyone agreed Eva Savoie was a woman who would as soon take a knife to you as welcome you into her home, if she didn’t like your looks. He was probably just starting to feel the exhaustion he’d been seeking.
Gentry’s lieutenant, Warren Doucet, always told his agents to check on Eva if they were working the area, and Gentry had stopped in a few times in the past. She was physically frail but mentally sharp. She’d won him over when she said she remembered his daddy as
un bon garde-chasse
, a fine game warden, even though it had been two decades since agent Hank Broussard had died of a heart attack in their home in Dulac, twenty miles west of here.
Hank’s youngest son, Gentry, had just turned twelve. He’d idolized his dad and didn’t remember a day of his life when he hadn’t wanted to be a wildlife agent.
Gentry didn’t believe in voodoo, and he didn’t believe in witches. Crazy old Cajun women with knives and guns were another matter. None of the licensed local hunters—a wary lot regardless of their outlook on voodoo or witchcraft—underestimated the power of a pissed-off woman with a shotgun. Not a one of them would dare set a gator line within sight of Eva Savoie’s front door without a license, much less steal someone else’s gator.
That meant Gentry’s poacher was either one of the hunters who came in from North Louisiana or Texas for the season and hadn’t figured out the system yet, or it was some greedy dumb-ass amateur. If the poacher hadn’t shown up by seven, the licensed hunter would claim his gators and Gentry could check on old Eva before finishing out his shift farther down the bayou.
Or maybe not. He cocked his head as the faint buzz of an outboard motor echoed over the still water, then closed his eyes to focus on the sound. It was coming in fast from the west, off Bayou Terrebonne.
The seconds it took the boat to appear seemed like an hour, but Gentry finally spotted it rounding a turn from the juncture of Terrebonne and Whiskey Bayous.
He raised the binoculars again, moving slowly to avoid detection. The newcomer killed his engine and stood up, using a pole to propel his boat in silence toward the gator line. The guy looked up and down the bayou, pausing to stare at the Savoie cabin. The poacher was alone, didn’t have a flotation device anywhere Gentry could see, and wore an old, long-barreled pistol in a holster on his hip like he was freaking John Wayne.
Looked like Gentry had found his dumb-ass amateur.
September had begun like August had ended, hot enough for Gentry to be sweating inside his summer uniform: dark olive-green shirt with “LDWF Enforcement Division” patches on the sleeves, and uniform pants in the same color. Easy to move around in, but guaranteed to induce a sweat in places one didn’t discuss in polite company. And that was before you took into account the twenty pounds of gear hanging off his belt.
Gentry squelched the urge to stop the guy immediately and forced his gaze to stay with the binoculars. No serious law had been broken yet, and that itch at the back of his neck over Eva Savoie’s visitor hadn’t given him a reason to ignore his original mission.
Gentry settled into an easy crouch and watched as the vessel, a beat-up waste of aluminum with a torn tarp stretched on poles above it for shade, glided toward the gator line. The potential poacher leaned over the line and appeared to be wrestling his prize to the surface. Patient, Gentry eased out his cell phone and snapped a few shots of the poacher at work, then texted the nearest fellow enforcement agents patrolling the parish this morning:
GOT
1
. STAND BY.
If they didn’t get another text in two or three minutes, they’d know either Gentry had made an arrest or things had gone south. Either way, they’d come in for backup.
When everybody and his dog in the parish had a firearm of some kind and the temperature was hot enough to fry brains before noon, it didn’t take much to send things south.
After a few minutes, the guy finally pulled the pistol from its holster and maneuvered to get a good shot at the only place one could kill a gator with a bullet—a small, vulnerable area at the back of the thick, bony plate across the animal’s head. He took two shots. For a moment, Gentry feared the gator was going to pull John Wayne off the side of the boat, which meant he’d have to rush over there and save the idiot. Finally, despite such violent thrashing from the angry gator that torrents of water sprayed over the boat’s ragged canopy, the poacher delivered the kill shot.
All he needed was to wrestle the dead alligator into the boat, and Gentry would have him.
As soon as the poacher tugged the gator’s massive head over the side and appeared to be winning the fight to haul the heavy reptile the rest of the way in, Gentry used an oar to push the mud boat from its hiding spot, then pressed the switch to start the quiet trolling motor he’d used to get here from the little boat launch off Montegut Road. With an outboard, it was hard to sneak up on anybody.
The poacher was so intent on pulling at the gator that Gentry’s approach didn’t register until he’d gotten within a few yards. Last thing you wanted to do was surprise a guy with a pistol, even if the gun was back in its holster, so Gentry settled his shotgun into an easy carry in the crook of his left arm. It was a hold he could quickly turn to shoot if needed, and most people didn’t want to argue with a shotgun.
He cupped his right hand around his mouth. “State wildlife agent. Need some help?”
The poacher stopped, turned, got a gator-in-headlights look on his face, and promptly sat on the reptile still hanging half in and half out of the boat. As if his scrawny ass could hide what looked like a well-fed nine-footer.
“Hellfire and damnation!” was the guy’s first reaction, then he reconsidered. “Yessir, can ya help me pull dis big boy into da boat? Looks like I got a good’un to start da day.”
Gentry put on his thickest South Louisiana drawl to match the poacher’s. Having grown up across a few miles of bayou in Dulac usually won him a little trust and sometimes kept things from getting ugly. “That’ll bring some money, for sure. This your first time huntin’ round here?” The poacher paused to consider his answer while Gentry set his shotgun on the floor of the mud boat and stepped into the rust bucket. He moved his right hand toward the .45 in his own holster and flipped open the snap, just to remind John Wayne that he wasn’t the only badass in the boat. Gentry might not have the shotgun, but he still had plenty of firepower within easy reach.
Moving slowly, he gave the poacher time to devise a strategy while he helped the man pull the gator from the water. It landed on its back with a thud, long claws still flexing. Gentry watched it a second to make sure the movement was a postmortem reflex. It wouldn’t be the first time a stunned gator awoke and made breakfast out of a careless hunter’s arm or leg.
The poacher strapped tape around the gator’s jaws, moving with an exaggerated slowness that told Gentry he was hiding something. “Usually, I hunt down on Lac Chien,” he finally said. “But thought I’d try me a new spot this year.”
Gentry nodded. “Sure, I understand. Would you mind if I took a look at your hunting license? No worries; just standard procedure.”
John Wayne cleared his throat again as he tapped on the pockets of his jeans. “Why, you know, I ain’t got it with me. Left it on da table back at home, way down da bayou near Cocodrie. Want me to call my old lady, have her bring it out here? Take her a while.”
Gentry nodded. “Sure, I got time. Go ahead and call her.”
The poacher patted his pocket again. “Don’t seem to have my phone.”
“You can use mine.” Gentry held out his phone.
“Forgot—she ain’t home dis morning. Guess you’ll have to write me a ticket fer not havin’ no license.”
Gentry pulled his ticket book from his pocket. “Yes, sir, and I also will have to take possession of that alligator.” He paused. “Sir, have you been drinking this morning?”
The poacher looked at the huge alligator and pondered this unhappy turn of events for a moment. When he looked back at Gentry, his eyes had turned ugly. “You damned possum cop. Ain’t got nothing to do but try and keep an honest man from making a living.”
Gentry nodded. This guy was typical of what he’d come to expect from a certain breed of South Louisiana swamp hunter: short and wiry, dark-haired, leathery tanned skin, heavy on the ink that covered both biceps, the sleeves ripped off his faded, button-front red shirt, certain that The Man was out to rob him of his livelihood.
Most of the local folks’ families had eked out a living from this muddy swampland for generations. They worked hard, earned honest pay, and possessed big hearts and generous natures.
Except the ones who didn’t.
Gentry gave the man a steady look. “Sir, I know for a fact that you aren’t licensed to hunt on these lands, and that you didn’t set the line for this gator. Do you want to know how I know that?”
The poacher quit sputtering and watched Gentry with a dull, sullen expression.
“I know that because I helped the licensed hunter set this line myself after somebody cut his yesterday. So you’re also facing a charge of poaching. Would you open the cooler sitting at the end of the boat, please?”
Cursing under his breath, the poacher stumbled en route to the cooler and opened it to reveal a couple of six-packs. Actually, the one nearest Gentry was now a four-pack. He leaned over and spotted an open can beneath the seat.