Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (18 page)

“Never mind that.” Meizel folded the receipt and put it back in his pocket. “You remember enough about this transaction to talk here, or would you remember better over at the Justice Complex?”

“No, no, no. I remember it.” Jerry leaned back. “It was for two 1861 gold dollars. 1861-Ds, as they’re called. Don’t see ’em very often. In fact, the only other ones I’ve seen were from this same lady—she brought three of ’em in a few years back.”

Gentry racked his brain for anything intelligent to ask about coins, but his knowledge was limited to how many it took to get a soda out of a machine. “What’s special about these coins?”

“Well, 1861 was during the Civil War, you know?” Jerry turned to the bookshelf behind his desk, pulled out a book of coin values, and began flipping through it. “There were only a couple of places in the Confederacy that minted coins, and 1861 was the last year there was any gold in the South to mint. Don’t see many of ’em around.”

Gentry looked at Meizel as Jerry slid the catalog across the desk and thumped on the left-hand page with his index finger. “There’s the 1861-D.”

Meizel looked at the catalog a moment before handing it to Gentry. “Did Ms. Savoie say where she got the coins, or how many she had?”

Gentry scanned the page and almost choked to see the prices those coins sold for at auction. Jerry should be arrested for only paying Eva Savoie five grand for coins that were worth more like fifty grand apiece.

“No idea, and believe you me, I asked her, ’cause those are quite a find,” Jerry said. “She said her granddaddy left ’em to her. You know there’s old wives’ tales about Confederate gold and pirate gold being buried all over South Louisiana. Gotta figure at least some of them stories is true.”

Gentry frowned. The curse. Ceelie had told him the Savoie curse that the old man Tomas talked about began with Eva’s grandfather. Had he found a cache of these coins?

If so, LeRoy Breaux might, indeed, have found himself a fortune. Or maybe Lang thought Eva still had the money.

“Has anyone else come in and asked about these coins or about Ms. Savoie?” Gentry asked.

Jerry leaned back in his chair and waited. He was doing them favors now and wanted to make sure they knew it.

“We’d appreciate anything you can remember,” Meizel added.

“Yeah, now that you mention it. There was a guy who came in a few minutes after her that day, wanting to see the coins and asking a lot of questions.”

Gentry didn’t look at Meizel but he heard the tension in his voice. “This guy have a name?”

Jerry shrugged. “No, and I hustled him outta here when it was clear he was fishing for information on the old lady.” He paused. “I didn’t tell him nothing about her. Nothing at all.”

Jerry was able to give them enough description to determine that the man fit Lang’s profile.

“Looks like we hit pay dirt,” Gentry told Meizel on the way back to the truck.

“Yeah, let’s take a detour to the department while we’re in the vicinity,” he said, climbing back into the passenger’s seat. “I think we found your brother’s motive.”

CHAPTER 21

As soon as Gentry’s truck had turned off Pelican Street and driven out of sight, Ceelie threw the bones. She didn’t know how he’d feel about her doing rituals at his dining-room table, but he’d seemed pretty accepting of her mixture of mysticism and faith. Then again, he’d grown up in the parish, so he’d seen it all his life.

Jena wasn’t due for another half hour, so Ceelie locked the front door as she’d promised to do, then turned off the lights, closed the blinds, spread out the leather mat, and lit the candles. She gathered the bones from her dad’s old cufflink case and prayed over them before raising them in both hands over the mat and letting them fall as Tante Eva had taught her so many years ago.

“The bones never lie,” she whispered. “They always fall true.”

Would the chicken foot still lie across the neck bone? Or had the sign of danger disappeared since she’d last thrown them three days ago?

She opened her eyes and stared at the pile of bones on the mat. A chill stole across her scalp at their new configuration. The foot had landed across the neck bone again, but this time instead of being apart, the tiny skull had gotten tangled with them. One claw of the foot, crooked and awkwardly jointed, stuck through the eye socket.

Not only was someone close to her in grave danger. So was she.

The bones never lie.

Maybe not, but they could be misinterpreted. Ceelie wasn’t sure what old Tomas would think of it, but she took a photo of the bones with her cell phone so she could show him. She’d been thinking about asking the old man if he would teach her the rituals. At least maybe he’d help her with this reading, because Ceelie knew there was meaning in every nuance of the bones with relation to each other. She’d forgotten most of what Tante Eva had taught her, and what she did remember was rusty and unreliable.

At least she hoped so, in this instance.

Her hands shook as she blew out the candles and placed the bones back into the case. At a soft knock on the front door, she almost bolted to the back of the house.

She needed to get a grip and remember that she might not even be reading the bones right. She took a deep breath and looked through the peephole in the front door to see a funhouse view of Jena Sinclair.

“You’re early,” she said, stepping aside to let Jena in. “Give me about ten minutes to finish getting ready.”

“I’m not early. Gentry must have preoccupied you.” Jena stopped as soon as she saw the mat and candles on the table. “Or maybe something else did.”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. Back in a few minutes.” Ceelie had no idea where Jena stood on the whole topic of faith and mysticism. As a New Orleanian she would’ve been exposed to the touristy version of voodoo but probably not to real practitioners. She probably hadn’t been in the parish long enough to have run across the mishmash of local beliefs. Even a decade ago, when Ceelie had left the parish, the blend of faiths had been dying out here among the younger residents.

She changed into her most conservative clothes, a pair of dark jeans and a button-front white blouse she’d picked up a couple of days ago at a thrift store while Gentry was trying to make nice with the sheriff’s office.

It wasn’t that Tomas Assaud would think more or less of her because of what she wore, but she wanted to show her respect. She stared in the mirror at her features that had always been part blessing, part curse. The tan skin and black hair, with the blue eyes, marked her as a half-breed. More like a Heinz 57 breed. She could’ve downplayed it by cutting her long hair or changing the color, but she wouldn’t feel true to herself.

And Gentry loved her hair, which shouldn’t matter as much to her as it did. She unraveled the braid and pulled it back in a loose ponytail for a change. And realized she was stalling. Something felt wrong today. It had prompted her to throw the bones, and that certainly hadn’t made her feel better. She felt as if whatever was destined to happen today wouldn’t roll into motion until she walked out that front door. And then she wouldn’t be able to stop it, whatever
it
was.

Maybe whatever Tomas could tell her would help. Officially, she was looking for information on Tante Eva’s curse and on what LeRoy Breaux had or hadn’t done. Unofficially, she wanted nothing less than spiritual enlightenment.

Which, if Jena knew, would probably make her cancel the trip.

Okay, time to do it.

Ceelie went back to the living room, where Jena was playing with a beyond-happy Hoss. The little black Frenchie had adapted well to having women in his life, even though Ceelie had caught Gentry baby-talking him more than once in the past few days. The dog didn’t lack for attention, unless it was because of his roommate’s long, erratic work schedule.

“You mind riding with me?” Jena waited on the landing while Ceelie locked the door behind them. It had felt weird exchanging keys with Gentry this morning. “Since I’m officially on duty, I need my gear in case there’s an emergency call.”

“Sure, that’s fine.” Ceelie followed her down the steps. She’d grabbed her Gibson on the way out the door, thinking maybe she could play for Tomas. She’d also seen some of Gentry’s business cards on the coffee table and stuck a few of those in her back jeans pocket. She’d leave them with Tomas and Joseph in case they remembered anything or, God forbid, saw Lang Broussard. “We’re better off in your truck anyway. Your AC probably works better than the one in the beast.”

She opened the passenger’s door of Jena’s department-issued black pickup and stared at the amount of gear. She’d thought Gentry was just a techno-freak with his tricked-out dashboard, but Jena’s was just as bad.

A laptop computer had been mounted below the center console, and the whole front dash was a mass of cords and equipment. A GPS unit. Two radios, one with “LDWF” written on masking tape across the top, the other reading “TPSO.” Binoculars, tools, clipboard, bottles of water.

“Everything okay?” Jena sat behind the wheel, waiting for Ceelie to climb in.

“Yeah, I just hadn’t realized how much
stuff
you guys carry with you.” She climbed in, twisted to put the Gibson behind the seat, and blinked at the sight of a pile of life jackets, a shotgun, and . . . “Is that a freaking
assault
rifle?”

“We don’t actually call them that since we don’t assault people—that’s a media thing, but yeah.” Jena wove her way out of the neighborhood and headed south after cutting over to Highway 56, a long, winding road that went all the way to Cocodrie. When the road ran out, the land ran out, too.

“We’re the lead agency for water search-and-rescue operations in the state,” Jena explained. “After Hurricane Katrina, some of our agents were shot at while trying to rescue people from flooded homes. You probably remember how crazy it got.” She shrugged. “Anyway, after that, the department furnished all agents with the rifles.”

“That happened the year before I left Houma.” Ceelie’s dad had been buried about six months after the hurricane hit. “We didn’t get that much from Katrina here in Terrebonne, except farther south, but Rita socked us a month later. And a bunch have hit the area since then.”

Jena nodded. “Yeah, it’s one thing that makes it so hard to find somebody like Langston Broussard if he doesn’t want to be found. Every time a hurricane or tropical storm floods this place, a few more people decide they’ve had enough. They don’t think they have it in them to rebuild again, so they walk away and leave their flooded-out houses behind. There are hundreds of abandoned buildings. Hundreds of places for a criminal to take cover and hide out.”

That crawling sensation crept across Ceelie’s head again, and as they sped southward, she shivered at the sight of some of those abandoned buildings. She hadn’t noticed them on her first trip down; they were so common that they had become a seamless part of the landscape.

About ten miles south of Chauvin, Jena stopped for gas and Ceelie went inside the station for sodas. For the next few miles, Ceelie pulled out the guitar and played some of the songs she hadn’t trotted out since Nashville. Somehow the old standards weren’t as onerous now that she wasn’t singing to a bar full of drunk tourists.

“You’re really good,” Jena said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “I talked to Mac Griffin yesterday—the agent I was telling you about who likes music?”

“You mean the agent who listens to music while he picks up chicks,” Ceelie corrected.

“Well, yeah. But he’s going to talk to some . . . damn, that’s weird.” Jena flicked her gaze to the rearview mirror again.

Ceelie looked out her side mirror at a silver sedan driving a few car lengths behind them. “What’s weird about it?”

“That car was behind us before we stopped for gas, so it should’ve passed us instead of still being behind us.”

Ceelie looked at it again. “Maybe they stopped too.”

“Maybe.” Jena shrugged and sped up. “We’ll outrun them. We’re on official state business, right?”

Ceelie laughed. “Right.”

She started strumming the chords to her still-unfinished song about Whiskey Bayou, but lost her rhythm when the SUV lurched.

“Son of a bitch.” Jena reached up and flipped a switch, and in the reflection on the truck hood, Ceelie saw the blue bar of lights atop the vehicle begin flashing. “He butted me from behind.” Ceelie twisted to look back and gasped. “He’s coming at you again.” The sedan bumped the truck with a jolt, and Jena jerked the truck into a quick left, blocking the roadway so the car was coming at the driver’s-side door of the truck at a ninety-degree angle. It slowed to a stop.

Everything slowed to a stop.

“Shouldn’t we try to outrun him?” Ceelie hated the quiver in her voice, but every nerve in her body screamed
Run
.

“Hell, no. I’m going to arrest the son of a bitch.” Jena unholstered her pistol and waited. The driver’s-side door of the sedan opened. Looking across Jena, Ceelie couldn’t see the driver’s face, but she recognized the silhouette of a weapon before he got out. “Jena, he’s got a gun!”

“Shit. Get in the back, behind the seat. Now. And stay down.”

Jena called out the window as she drew her pistol. “State agent! Stop where you are and put down the gun.”

A blast shattered the driver’s-side mirror and left it hanging off the truck.

“Damn it. Ceelie, get down and stay down, no matter what. Pull the life vests on top of you.” Jena grabbed her radio as she propelled herself across the seat with her pistol in one hand, and grabbed the rifle with the other. She slid out the passenger’s door, putting the truck between her and the shooter.

Ceelie thought Jena’s voice sounded way too calm; only a slight tremor gave away her nerves. “L-843. Officer needs help. Shots fired. Shots fired! Highway 56 near Bush Canal. Officer—”

Another blast glanced off the windshield, leaving a spiderweb of cracks. A volley of shots followed as Jena returned fire.

Ceelie looked around the storage area behind the passenger’s seat. The shotgun was a 12 gauge and looked pretty straightforward. And it was loaded. She stuck her head above the life jackets long enough to see the driver looking over the truck bed, trying to locate Jena. Ceelie got a good look at him, and it was a distorted version of a face she’d know anywhere.

“Jena, he’s slipping around the back of the truck,” she hissed through the open door. “It’s Lang Broussard.”

Jena shot again, followed by a shot from Lang. They were circling the truck.

Ceelie pulled out her cell phone, keeping her right hand on the shotgun’s trigger, glad she had put Gentry on speed dial. He answered almost immediately. “Ceelie—what’s going on? I heard—”

“It’s Lang!” she whispered. “Little Caillou Road near—”

A deafening crash knocked both the phone and shotgun out of her hands and she instinctively screamed and covered her face. What felt like a solid wall of glass pellets flew at her from the truck’s passenger’s-side window.

“Jena?” The world turned gray at the edges, and somewhere in the distance, Ceelie heard Gentry calling her name. Blackness fell.