Bayou Born, page 3
“Make you a deal,” I started.
“No.” This time he really did cross his fingers. “‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’”
“Come on, Uncle Harold. The name’s Luce, not Lucifer.” I anchored my fists at my hips. “It’ll be hours before Dad finds out about this, and he’ll be nursing the mother of all hangovers by then. We’re talking a good twelve hours before he’s both conscious and sober enough to feel righteous when he gives me a come-to-Jesus lecture. This girl doesn’t have that long.”
“Goddamn pigheaded Boudreaus,” he swore without heat.
Uncle Harold got downright blasphemous when he got his back up over what he considered tomfoolery.
A shrug twitched my shoulders. “I am my father’s daughter.”
“You remember that too.” His sigh confirmed he had accepted the inevitable. “Let’s go face down Baby Godzilla. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and he’ll eat me before your daddy hears tell of this.”
A couple of nearby uniforms offered us a hand as we hefted the lightweight boat, carried it down to the sludgy water and slid it in between a pair of fat-bottomed bald cypress trees. I stepped in first, and one of the guys passed over my shotgun. The boat rocked under me, but it was a comforting sway. Most folks in the area kept a boat like this flipped hull-up in their backyard for weekend fishing emergencies. I accepted the heavy spotlight Uncle Harold passed me, the one he used for night fishing, and tightened the rugged clamps on a crimped section of the bow. A flip of the switch on its neck blasted the night with a thick beam I trained so it sliced through the other spotlights, crisscrossing over the body and illuminating the scene from opposing angles.
“I don’t see anything,” I muttered. “Maybe all the racket scared off the gator.”
“And maybe we’ll find all those barrels of gold James Copeland and his gang supposedly buried out here back in the eighteen hundreds,” he scoffed.
We trolled within six feet of the body, then he cut the motor so we glided the rest of the way. I unhooked one of the plastic oars mounted on the inner wall and extended it over the water. Poking a corpse with a stick wasn’t how I’d anticipated spending my birthday, but in this line of work, you learn to adapt. I got in a soft jab to her side, and her lips parted on a groan.
Corpses have been known to sigh as air is expelled from their lungs, but this close I caught the fine muscle contractions twitching in her eyelids.
“Hot diggity damn,” I whispered, “she’s alive.”
“Praise God,” he answered. “Let’s bring that girl home.”
Uncle Harold also fell back on his Southern Baptist roots when confronted with evidence of what he considered divine providence.
“How do you want to do this?” I twisted to face him. “Still no sign of the gator.”
“Don’t even think it.” He fisted the back of my shirt. “You’re not sticking your hands in that sludge.”
I might have rebelled had a gentle wave not caused her left arm to give an involuntary bob under the surface. Metal glinted in the light, and I leaned forward despite Uncle Harold’s weight tugging on me. Rose-gold stripes the width of a hair elastic began at her wrists and banded her arms. The rest of the intricate design was hidden by the depth at which her extremities floated, but I had seen enough to know the concentric circles traveled over her shoulders and across her back to join at her nape, a tattooed cardigan that wasn’t ink at all. It was metal. Fine wire. An unclassified alloy.
Forget Ezra. This woman was like me. Our markings identical.
Ice pumped through my veins the longer I stared at her, and I embraced the diamond-sharp clarity in its wake. Cold detachment was my default setting whenever a situation at work spun sideways. The job was dangerous, and cool heads prevailed. Fear usually triggered this response, I learned that my first week on the street, and I was distantly aware that if I was shutting down then I must be terrified, even if I had ceased feeling the tremors. Gator or not, I couldn’t lose her.
“Whoever this is,” I said when I rediscovered my voice, “she’s not the Claremont girl.”
But the passing resemblance between the two explained why Rixton had been called.
A shiver in the water drew my eye, and my hindbrain zinged a warning through my limbs seconds before a crimson—thing—its scales a red so deep it edged into black, launched out of the water. I sat down hard, landing in Uncle Harold’s lap as a blocky head surfaced, its meaty jaws snapping closed over the space where my head had been a fraction of a second ago.
“That was not an alligator.” The quaver in my voice pissed me off. “That was— What was that?”
Ripples agitated the otherwise placid surface, and a gentle swell raised the level in a way that reminded me of how bathtubs overfill when you climb in one. But what the hell was big enough to disturb an entire corner of a swamp? Not the chitinous beast that had tried inviting me over for dinner. It had been massive, bulkier and more alien than any reptile I had ever seen, and yet . . .
A sibilant hiss like steam escaping a tea kettle spiked the air, a curious thump as plated skin rasped against the underside of the boat, and I swiveled my eyes toward my uncle. He indicated the girl in the water with his chin, and bile rose up my throat imagining what had turned him so pale.
The girl had woken and angled her head a fraction in our direction. Pale eyes white-rimmed with terror rolled around in her head like rocks in a soda can.
“Run,” she gurgled as murky water poured into her mouth. “Run.”
CHAPTER THREE
Aside from the fact running was a physical impossibility, what with the water and all, wild horses couldn’t drag me away from this woman and the answers she might possess. Who was she? What was she? When had she been dumped? Where had she come from? How had she ended up in the swamp? Why had she been abandoned here? On and on and on to infinity.
I lifted my shotgun, braced the butt against my shoulder and watched for eddies around the victim. Gator skulls were thick, and gator hide was tough. I’d dated a boy in high school who hunted them with his brothers. In the way of guys desperate to impress girls, he’d explained in detail about the amount of skill required to hit what he called a kill spot at the base of their necks. Fire a bullet at the right angle, and it blasted straight into their brain for a humane kill. Or so he claimed.
But that thing wasn’t a gator. Would the same rules even apply?
I was no slouch with a firearm. I had to qualify with my service weapon and a shotgun each year in order to keep my job. I could hit a bullseye, sure, but the idea of a kill spot being the size of a quarter and positioned behind the protection of meaty jaws made my palms damp.
The visual examination I had performed on the girl earlier indicated no obvious wounds, and there was no blood in the water. That was good. But hauling her out presented us with a couple of serious issues. I had no doubt that thing would get testy about us stealing its food and attack her or us or both. And johnboats weren’t all that stable when two people attempted to haul a soaking wet third over the low rim. The last thing we needed was to end up in the water with her.
The purr of the motor turning over startled me, and I glanced back at Uncle Harold. “What are you doing?”
“We can’t get her out without backup. Not without one of us getting injured. That gator—that thing—is too aggressive.” His hand trembled on the tiller extension handle. “We’ll put in that call to MDWFP and wait on them to dispatch a conservation officer with the proper equipment and experience to make this work.”
I was already shaking my head. “The girl—”
“I saw her markings.” He stared at my covered arms, recollection of my own banding clear in his gaze. “I want answers for you—for Eddie too—but the risk is too high.”
“I can’t walk away from this.” I lowered the shotgun and twisted to face him. “If she dies, everything she knows goes with her. I can’t let that happen.”
“Well, that makes two of us.” He lifted his chin. “And I outrank you, Officer Boudreau.”
My lips had parted on a fresh argument when a high-pitched whine drew my attention as an airboat zipped from the direction of River Bend. A massive airplane propeller churned in a gleaming metal cage anchored to the stern and kicked up a damp breeze ripe with decaying vegetation and an earthy musk. Two men dressed in black tactical fatigues, their muscles coiled tighter than spring-loaded mousetraps, parked on a bench mounted in front of the cage. A third crouched on the bow with his head tipped back, nostrils flaring as though he was scenting the moist air. Weird.
“Who are these yahoos?” I murmured.
“No clue.” Uncle Harold waited until they cut their engine, then killed ours, and yelled, “I’m Sergeant Harold Trudeau with the Canton Police Department. Identify yourselves.”
“We’re with White Horse Security out of Tupelo,” the crouching man called back. His head swung toward me, the pink tip of his tongue peeking from between his lips as he inhaled. Weirder. “The Claremont family hired us to aid in the search efforts for their daughter.”
I removed the flashlight from my duty belt and skimmed over their equipment. Their company logo was printed right there on the side of the boat. Most of their supplies were branded too, with the image of a muscular, white warhorse stamping its left front hoof. As I went to put away the light, the beam crossed over the face of the crouching man, who had shifted closer during my search, and I almost lost my grip. For a second I thought his eyes . . . No. My mind was playing tricks on me. Still. I swept it in an arc, on purpose this time, but he had tucked his chin to his chest to avoid the glare.
“Are you licensed and equipped for animal control?” Uncle Harold asked, far too calm to have witnessed the same green reflection as I had imagined. “We’ve got a situation out here.”
“Yes, sir.” One of the seated men lifted a sleek, black shotgun in one hand and a gallon-sized, plastic freezer bag full of papers in the other. “We are.” He toed the corner of a cooler strapped down with bungee cords. “We came prepared with bait, hooks and line, just in case.”
“Call your credentials in to dispatch.” He rattled off the number from memory. “Once I get verification, we’ll talk.”
The man who had yet to speak was the one who made the call. The guy with his foot still propped on the cooler pretended interest in the shore beyond my shoulder while sneaking glances at me. I was used to covert observation and caught him at it. He chuckled and shrugged like, I’m staring, so what? The first man was having trouble keeping his eyes to himself too.
What were the odds of a crew out of Tupelo recognizing me on sight? Sure, coverage of my initial discovery had gone nationwide, but that was old news. And yeah, a handful of stations outside our area had televised my graduation from police academy along with a human interest story cobbled together with soundbites and snatches of footage used without my or my dad’s permission. But I couldn’t shake the impression their interest in me was sharper than it ought to be.
A subtle vibration hummed through the soles of my boots, and I flattened my palm against the metal base. “What is that?”
The White Horse men kept mute, and not a one of them met my eyes. Behind me, Uncle Harold tapped his phone against his thigh like it might shake out the call he was waiting on. He’d felt it too, and he didn’t want to analyze what might be large enough to send a growl bouncing off the bottom of a boat.
Careful not to lean out over the water, I wedged myself into the V near our spotlight and watched over the girl, whose eyes had closed after that brief spark of awareness. “We’ll have you out of there in a jiffy,” I promised in case she could hear me. “You’re going to be okay.”
The crouching man tilted his head in a catlike manner as though my behavior puzzled him.
Less than five minutes later, dispatch called with an all-clear, and Uncle Harold mopped his forehead with an embroidered handkerchief. “They’re good.” He cranked the motor. “Gentlemen, I thank you for your efforts. We’ll await you on the shore.”
I grasped his hand. “We can’t just leave.”
“You’re welcome to stay with us,” the quiet man offered.
The crouching man’s lips stretched into a pointed smile. “There’s an extra seat.” He gestured to a shorter bench mounted behind and higher than where the others sat. “We’ll make quick work of this.”
Uncle Harold kept our hands linked. “Luce, I don’t think—”
“I’ll be fine.”
The crouching man tossed me a rope, and I used it to reel us closer. The cooler man rose and aimed his shotgun at the water on one side of our boat, and the quiet man claimed a weapon from beneath his seat and did the same on the other side. They were covering me. “Keep my shotgun,” I told Uncle Harold, jerking my chin toward the White Horse men. “I won’t need it.”
“Take care of my girl,” he warned them. “Luce, I’ll be on the tailgate waiting for you.”
The crouching man reached for me. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not,” I lied through my gritted teeth. I took his hands, and his long fingers slid under the cuffs of my shirt to finger the first of the metal bands embedded at my wrists. I snatched my arms out of his grasp, my pulse roaring in my ears. “Touch me like that again, and we won’t need to use what you’ve got in that cooler for bait.”
His eyes went heavy-lidded at the threat like I’d offered to strip naked and ride his thigh.
“Thom,” the quiet man said, “don’t antagonize Luce. You know the rules.”
“Luce?” Uncle Harold hesitated.
“I have to do this.” They could have been cannibals sharpening their knives and salivating, and I would have stepped into their arms with a smile if it meant saving this girl. “I’ll be careful.”
Turning my back on my uncle, I clasped forearms with the crouching man, and this time he behaved himself as he hauled me over the water and onto their boat. At least until his nose skimmed the column of my throat. Weirdest.
The quiet man emitted a displeased rumble of sound, and the neck-sniffer flowed back into his crouch at my feet. “I’m Miller Henshaw.” He indicated the cooler man. “This is Santiago Benitez.” He scuffed his boot near the crouching man. “Thom Ford you’ve already met.”
“Thom’s our tracker. Vanishes in the bush for weeks at a time.” Santiago’s dark, chocolate eyes flicked up to mine with a taunt in them. “He’s half wild. Some might say feral.”
Wild. Feral. Oh yeah. These guys knew who I was, and Santiago wasn’t shy about letting me know it.
The thing about bullies is they tend to deflate when ignored, which is what I did to Santiago.
“We need to get her out of the water,” I said to Miller. These guys had the muscle and resources to make it happen. “What’s the plan?”
Smirking at Santiago’s affront, Miller strolled to the cooler and flipped open the lid. The stink of whole, raw chickens left to stew in the sun almost bowled me over. “We’re tossing these into the water. Soon as the gator heads after it, we’re hauling up the girl.”
Simple. Easy. I liked it.
Santiago abandoned his station and thrust his weapon into my hands. The weight of it made me cringe imagining the recoil, but these guys were built like brick houses. They could handle it. Santiago, who glared at Miller until he backed away from the cooler, lifted out the first of four chickens. He wound up his arm and hurled it. It made a loud splash when it landed, and the smell. Phew, boy.
Miller flipped on a spotlight mounted on a brace and panned the area. On the third sweep, he locked the base. “Got him.”
Water churned, and two eyes breached the surface, their crimson reflection eerie but normal for gators. For that reason, I asked, “How sure are you that’s the same one?”
“Positive.” His tone left no room for argument. “Thom?”
Movement teased the corner of my eye, and I turned as Thom slipped into the water. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Saving the girl,” Miller drawled. “That is what you wanted?”
“But Thom—”
“Will be fine,” he assured me, returning his attention to the beast and Santiago’s chicken flinging.
Thom reached the woman with an elegant breaststroke that sliced through the water. Sliding his arm around her waist, he reclined and used a one-armed backstroke for the return trip. The sight made my palms sweaty, and the shotgun slipped. The idea of getting in the water with that thing . . . Nope with a side order of nah-uh, never gonna happen. I returned the gun to the rack beneath the bench, afraid I’d fumble the thing and lose it to the swamp, then dropped to my knees and gripped the handhold for leverage. With Thom’s help, I hooked one arm across the girl’s chest and hauled her onto the deck. He hopped up beside us before I could offer him a hand.
“You’re strong.” He slicked damp hair off his forehead. “Soaking wet, that girl weighs a good buck thirty.”
I didn’t look up from checking her vitals when I said, “Adrenaline.”
He made a thoughtful sound I figured was aimed at me until he wiped his fingers across her cheek. “This isn’t Angel Claremont.”
“No, she’s not.” The Claremont girl had family. She was normal. This girl—this woman—was anything but ordinary. “Does it make a difference?”
“Not to us,” Santiago added cheerfully. “We get paid either way.”
“Keep an eye out,” Miller ordered. To me, he said, “Hold on.”
I sat down, pulling her upper body across my lap, elevating her head, careful to avoid touching her bare arms, and braced my foot against the cooler to keep us from sliding. Halfway to shore, Thom placed his hand on my shoulder, and his grip was iron. I didn’t rock even when Miller ran aground.
The EMTs rushed us in a flurry of activity. Lifting the woman and strapping her to a stretcher, they hustled her off to the waiting ambulance. Uncle Harold lingered near the tailgate of his truck waiting for the crowd to disburse, a cell pressed to his ear. Rixton lacked his patience. He stepped onto the airboat without waiting for an invitation, offered me his hand and hauled me to my feet.
