Bayou Born, page 2
“Love you too, Lucey-goosey.” He held on longer than he ought to have, and we both knew it, but I didn’t rush him. His health scare had served as a reminder of how little time any of us have on this earth, and we seemed to have decided by mutual, unspoken agreement, to love each other that much harder until we ran out. “Call if you need me.”
I murmured assurances that I would and extricated myself from his grasp before he noticed the cold sweat gluing my shirt against my spine.
“There’s a checkpoint on Natchez Trace Parkway.” Harold planted a kiss on my damp forehead. “Watch your speed on the way home, dumplin’.”
“Will do.” I waved them off then trotted across the lot. “Night, fellas.”
Alone at last, I caved to the pressure mounting under my skin. I couldn’t climb behind the steering wheel of my Bronco fast enough, punch the gas pedal hard enough, I couldn’t freaking breathe until my tires skidded on the unpaved road leading home.
I sucked in a few of those calming breaths recommended by the self-help books Dad had dog-eared during what remained of my childhood. No dice. The next bolt of agony zinged from my nape down my arms, and my hands spasmed open around the steering wheel. I regained motor control through force of will, righting the Bronco before it bumped off the shoulder into a water-filled ditch.
I flicked my gaze to the radio display as the eleven dissolved into a twelve with two trailing zeroes. Gravel pinged the undercarriage as I hit our driveway. I parked in a spray of loose stones and stumbled out, squeezing the lock button on my key fob as I ran across the yard then leapt onto the low porch.
Briiiiiiing.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” I chanted under my breath. “I’m coming.”
The blip of silence between that first shrill and the next had me blinking perspiration from my eyes. Quick as my shaky fingers allowed, I jammed house keys into their corresponding locks on the front door. Frantic by the third trill, I contemplated breaking a window on the fourth. The stubborn door swung open on the fifth, and I raced up the stairs to my bedroom. By the sixth ring, I had lunged for the phone on my nightstand and gripped the old-fashioned handset in a bloodless fist. I mashed it to the side of my head so hard I sealed the shell of my ear on the receiver. “Hello?”
Heavy silence roared until I got lightheaded from waiting. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t—
“Luce,” Ezra husked, my name a benediction on his lips. “I thought you had forgotten our date.”
And just like that, my world righted.
CHAPTER TWO
The harsh rasp of his words abraded my senses and sloughed away the persistent ache in my arms and shoulders, leaving my nerves raw, my skin sensitized. Relieved tears washed the day’s grit from my eyes as the throbbing receded. For the first time since waking, I unclenched my teeth.
“That’s enough.” I blinked to clear the golden flecks twinkling on my periphery. “I’m good.”
“Don’t fight me.” The order lashed across my senses. “You need this.”
As much as he did?
Before the peculiar thought took root, a second wave of power hit me low in the gut and shorted out my brain. Tingling awareness crashed over me, lifting me onto my tiptoes as though a part of me feared I might drown in his voice and struggled to rise above it. His energy surged, crested within me, then drained through my heels as my boots smacked the hardwood floor.
Impact buckled my knees, and I sagged onto the foot of my bed, flopping backward in a sprawl on the comforter where I shut my eyes for an unguarded moment and basked in the afterglow of my healing. Smoke tickled my nose, and I hoped it wasn’t pouring out of my ears.
“You’re getting better at this,” I breathed against the cool, plastic receiver.
A pleased masculine sound bordering on a growl filled his end of the line in answer.
“It’s like I’m going through withdrawals.” Seizures, hot flashes, sweating, nausea, restlessness, all illustrated the portrait of a junkie. “I don’t use anything stronger than aspirin. What could I be addicted to, do you think?”
He didn’t enlighten me.
“The symptoms worsen each year.” As though I were a longtime user surging toward an inevitable end. “Tell me what’s wrong. Explain how to fix it. You must have an idea. It’s your hoodoo that patches me up each time before I crawl out of my skin.”
“No.” Firm. Hard. This was his line in the sand. Always. It never budged, not even an inch. “You need me for that.”
So much for unclenching my teeth.
“Yeah, well—” a bitter laugh lodged in my throat “—you make sure of that, don’t you?”
That reliance chaffed worse than wearing wet cutoff shorts on a long walk home in the sweltering summer heat. I might be the junkie in this scenario, but he was my dealer, and I had no idea if what he dished out cured me or fed my dependency.
His low sigh tickled my ear. “I’ve upset you.”
Seconds fraught with electric tension lapsed while I thought up and discarded possible responses.
“Forgive me,” he breathed low. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your night.”
Slipping away. He was slipping away, and it would be another three hundred and sixty-five days until I feasted on the scraps of our conversation again. Ezra was the only lead I had on my real identity. I couldn’t afford to let my anger off its leash. I couldn’t risk spooking him. I had to keep him talking.
“Why did you?” I hated how much the answer mattered. “Call, I mean.”
“You know why.” A lick of wry amusement wiped away the sting of his denial. “The same reason you did eighty in a twenty-five zone to get home in time to pick up that phone you’re cradling in your arms.”
I glanced down and dang if he wasn’t right. I had curled around the base like a child cuddling a teddy bear. How had he known? What kind of surveillance had he installed in my room that he could watch over me? Or was he reliant on tech at all? Our relationship was hardly normal. More like paranormal. I had no idea of the limits of his powers. Who was to say they didn’t extend to astral projection or some other metaphysical chicanery? I had long ago accepted that if the man worked magic through an unplugged phone, then he wasn’t limited by the laws of physics like the rest of us.
“I can’t help myself,” I admitted after too long of a pause. I needed this, needed him. End of story.
I had no idea who he was, not really. Ezra was the name he had given me exactly once, his first and only mistake, and I had clung to that fragile lead on his real identity with bloodless fingers all these years.
Starting the September after I was found, he called each year on my legal birthday. My found day. The pain that morning had left me curled up in bed, so Dad let me stay home from school. Feverish, I’d drifted in and out of sleep for hours until I heard distant ringing. At first I thought it was a new symptom and ignored it, but its persistence urged me to my feet.
The sound originated in the attic, which Dad had forbidden me to enter after finding a black widow on one of the boxes of sheets he’d hauled down for me to use, but it kept ringing and ringing and ringing until I broke the rules to get relief. Eleven-year-old me had sobbed as Ezra shattered and remade her that first time. He had apologized over and over for the hurt while promising it was necessary, and I’d thought that made him my friend.
These days, though he was as good as his word and had perfected his methods, I wasn’t as sure.
“Come inside.” Despite the mystical possibilities, my gut told me he’d want front row seats for this experience. “Just this once give me what I wished for when I blew out the damn candle.”
So much for falling back on old habits. Sorry about the potty mouth, Granny Boudreau.
“Don’t ask for what I can’t give.”
Spinning the rotary wheel this way and that, I couldn’t help pushing. “Can’t or won’t?”
“Sometimes the two are the same. Goodnight, Luce.”
“Stay with me until I fall asleep.” I fell back on our oldest bargain, the plea dating back to that first phone call. Rolling onto my stomach, I groped under the bed until my fingers brushed against a plastic case. I had pushed too hard, he was done talking, but I wasn’t through with him yet. “In case the pain returns.”
The olive branch dangled there for painful seconds while I hauled out the boxy yellow Geiger counter I’d borrowed from a friend who worked for the CDC from under the bed. Char blackened the sides of the unit, and the glass covering the dial had shattered. Great. That explained the smoke I’d smelled.
Its negative radiation reading, however, left me as stumped as usual about the nature of Ezra’s magic.
Fabric rustled in the background as though he were making himself comfortable. “I shouldn’t.”
Triumph kicked my lips up into a fierce grin as I reached in my pocket for the voice recorder I used to make case notes on the go and positioned it near the mouthpiece. “But you will.”
He let the ambient noise soundtrack he played in the background of all our calls answer for him.
One minor detail, one tiny slip-up, and I would have hunted him down and gotten my questions answered. He knew it too. And I’ll admit I was flattered that he paid me the high compliment of respecting my determination enough to be wary of me. He had no idea the lengths I would go to in order to solve the mystery of him. Then again, maybe he did. After all, he hadn’t fed me one scrap I could use against him in all these years.
Ezra. Do you know how many guys named Ezra live in Mississippi? In the US? In the world? Factor in its use as a surname too and . . .
A muffled bzz bzz hummed through my right butt cheek like I had bees trapped in my pants.
I set aside the recorder and reached behind me to palm my cellphone. The number flashing on the display was one I recognized. Rixton. He wouldn’t call unless it was important, but I hesitated so long the call ended.
“I have to call my partner.” I punched redial before Ezra could answer. “Will you wait?”
The noise droned on, reminding me of a chorus of box fans, which I took as a yes.
“Rixton?” I lay there, a phone held to each ear, one modern and mundane, the other old and otherworldly. As ridiculous as I must look, trapped between the present and the past, the contrast felt right. “Everything okay with Sherry?”
“Report came in ten minutes ago,” he panted. “Body found in Cypress Swamp. Can’t get to her. Something’s in the water.”
Dread glazed my spine, and I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Like a gator?”
“Like nobody knows the hell what.” A door slammed in the background, the radio chattering with updates from dispatch, and a siren keyed up for a run. “I’m en route.” He hesitated. “You don’t need to be here for this, but I figured you’d want to know in case it’s our girl.”
Our girl. Angel Claremont. Sixteen years old. Honor roll student. Taken on her way to pick up her little sister from the John W. Rosen Elementary School.
I worried my bottom lip between my teeth until I tasted blood. “I’m on my way.”
I pocketed the cell, then ran one hand over my body conducting inventory. Gun, badge, pepper spray, baton. Carrying the old rotary phone under my arm, I scooped up the recorder then took the stairs at a clip. At the bottom, I turned right and opened the closet that hid Dad’s gun safe, spun the dial and picked up a shotgun plastered in screamo band stickers from my misbegotten youth. Unable to prolong the inevitable, I shifted my attention back to Ezra.
“I have to go.” Already my thoughts spun me away from him. “Never thought I’d say that.”
Usually I was the one scrambling for ways to sucker him into extending the call.
“Be careful.” A slight pause stretched before he added a gruff, “Please.”
“Always am, but I’ll be extra vigilant since you asked so nicely.” I lingered precious seconds longer while I worked up my resolve to sever our connection. “Until next year.”
He didn’t sign off, but then, he never did. I placed the handset back in the cradle and set the phone on the coffee table until it could reclaim its place of honor on my nightstand. On my way to the front door, I rewound the recording I’d made of our conversation, hit play and listened to static punctuated by my comments.
“You’re good.” I swept my gaze around the room like he might step from the shadows to accept the compliment in person. “You’re real good.”
I exited the house at a lope and scanned the bushes, but the floodlights mounted at each corner of the porch meant I had a clear view of the empty yard. Ezra must be close if he could see me through the window, right? But never close enough for me to get in my sights. After I secured the shotgun, I cranked the Bronco and headed toward the swamp. Not long after I turned onto Natchez, I spotted the whirl of red, white and blue lights. I pulled over when a siren screamed up behind me. An ambulance? The girl couldn’t be . . . could she?
I stomped on the gas until I reached the stretch of road congested by first responders, parked on the shoulder, then climbed out with my shotgun in hand. I greeted the officers I knew by name but kept my head down to avoid identification by those who might know mine thanks to my fifteen minutes of fame.
Just last month a fellow officer had asked to take a picture with Wild Child Boudreau when we both responded to the same domestic disturbance. Needless to say, I wasn’t about to cheese it up with the guy while our victim cowered in a corner of her kitchen, blood smearing her lip where her husband had busted it in a drunken rage.
Celebrity sucked. Or was this notoriety? Maybe fame wore differently for actresses or models, but when you’re famous for being Swamp Thing Jr., people dehumanize you.
I already had enough questions about my humanity without folks adding to them.
“Rixton,” I called out when I got close enough to spot my partner. “What have we got?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” He lingered at the edge of an embankment that crumbled into viscous water dappled with bright green duckweed. Two pickups had backed as close to the waterline as the soft earth allowed. Spotlights mounted on their tailgates illuminated an area a good thirty yards from the shore where a body floated. “It’s not a gator. Gators don’t move like that. But it’s so damn big, I can’t think what else it could be.”
Folks tended to forget that size records were broken for gators all the time. The current record-holder had been caught in Mill Creek, Alabama. At fifteen feet and nine inches long, it had weighed in at over eleven hundred pounds. This fella might be a contender for the title.
From here I couldn’t tell gender or any other details of the victim, and I wondered if whoever found her had done so by accident. Gator-hunting season ended earlier this month. That didn’t mean a poacher hadn’t gone souvenir shopping and gotten more than he bargained for. “Is she alive?”
“We can’t get close enough to verify. One of the EMTs swears he saw her breathing, but you know what hope and adrenaline does to people.”
“Yeah.” Hope was about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. “We’re wasting time.” The fact she was floating meant one of two things. She was alive, her lungs full of oxygen, or she had been in the water long enough for the gases built up during decomposition to make her buoyant. Either way, we wouldn’t know until we got close enough to examine her. “We have to send someone out there. We got a johnboat coming?”
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks would send out a conservation officer if we requested assistance, but we didn’t have that kind of time. Not when the girl had been in the water for an undisclosed amount of time, and not with a predator swimming in her orbit.
“Trudeau’s putting it in the water over there.” He pointed out a familiar rusty pickup parked on firmer soil. “Better move it if you want to catch a ride.”
A smile bent my lips, and I patted his shoulder. The fact that Rixton hadn’t called dibs meant Uncle Harold had shot down his request to ride along. Oh, he’d try the same with me, but I was onto his tricks. Plus, he’d always had a hard time telling me and my big blue eyes no.
“No, ma’am.” Uncle Harold caught sight of me and practically made the sign of the cross to ward me away. “Your daddy would feed me to that thing if I let you get in the water with it.”
“I won’t be in the water,” I wheedled. “I’ll be in a boat. With you.” I lifted my arm. “And this shotgun.”
“The answer is still no, dumplin’.”
The moment it hit me he was prepping for a solo launch, I set aside the shotgun and jumped in to help. “Where is Dad?”
“My place.” Eyes downcast, he set about loosening the thick straps securing the aluminum boat to its trailer. “He’s testing the pullout couch Nancy bought for the grandkids.”
“Is he . . . ?” I didn’t finish. I didn’t have to, not with family.
“Nancy picked him up after you left. She settled him with a six-pack and one of her grandmother’s quilts. He’ll be fine. This year hit him harder than usual, that’s all.” He patted my cheek. “He’ll be right as rain come morning.”
Guilt soured the back of my throat, and I swallowed it down along with the questions lining up on my tongue. My birthday—no, my found day—beat Dad bloody inside for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I don’t know what he had seen in the swamp that night, what nightmares plagued him, but he had no issue with each of us celebrating in our own way. Me with the phone, and him with a good buzz.
“I should have sent him home.” But I’d had other, selfish things on my mind. That damn phone call.
“Don’t pick up that guilt. Set it down right now,” he ordered me. “You know where he is, you know that he’s safe. He could have taken a personal day, but he didn’t. He wanted you to see he was dealing. Don’t throw away a man’s pride.”
