Queen of Diamonds: An Amber Farrell Novel (Bite Back Book 7), page 27
“Closer together.”
They looked puzzled, but shuffled until they were hip to hip.
I sat, straddling their legs, facing them. Up close. Resting a hand on each of their chests.
“So. Here we are: an evil, predatory, near-outcast House and a couple of sweet innocents adrift on the sea of politics.”
They blinked in confusion and glanced at each other, their faces mirroring their uncertainty.
“Oh, you’re good, you two. Butter wouldn’t melt and so on.”
I ran fingers along Xavier’s fine jawline. “Poor boy, so fascinated by the beautiful, sexy House Tucek he nearly made a fool of himself in the restaurant.”
I stroked Jo’s cheek. “And sweet Jo, all flustered and blushing and clearly out of her depth greeting important guests in the small hours of the morning. Well done, both of you, but you’re busted. You can drop the act now.”
There was a long moment of silence before Xavier cleared his throat. “It wasn’t really an act for your benefit anyway.”
“And I was flustered,” Jo added, looking embarrassed.
I grinned.
“As if House Labastide has made any choices over the last couple of days that she didn’t weigh three times. Including who she invited to eat at the table with us tonight. The pair of you could probably fool a genius and tempt a saint, but if Labastide doesn’t already know it, Tucek was on to you. That stuff about needing to find her own prey was just to give her an out.”
I cocked my head as I looked at them. “Your House put you in a position that she shouldn’t have. Tucek wouldn’t have made a mistake with you that Labastide could use, but she might have taken up an offer. She could have gotten into your heads. Trust me on this, you don’t want that. And I hope you don’t believe her talk about how much fun her toru have.”
Jo bit her lip. “Okay. But like Xav says, it’s not the same deal with you.”
I laughed. They weren’t making any attempt to deny they’d been prepared to spy on Tucek, but I wouldn’t get them to admit they were also expected to spy on my House.
Better this than sweeping for bugs and cameras, Tara said.
“Anyway,” I got up. “You are genuinely welcome. The rest of the House will return. I’m going to try for some beauty sleep I’m desperately in need of. But one thing I should make clear.”
They looked up expectantly.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re here following Labastide’s orders. These rooms are temporarily House Farrell, and we don’t expect anyone to offer body or Blood under threat or compulsion, whether that’s the mundane type or paranormal. If you want to enjoy yourselves with my House, it’d make me happy. If you don’t, or even if there’s one person you don’t want to be with, then there is no obligation, no breach in manners to say ‘no’. You can leave at any time if you want.”
They didn’t. My House streamed back in and I headed for the shower where my wife was all hot and wet and soapy, if I was lucky.
Chapter 45
Jen was hot and wet and soapy. She lost no time in getting me into the same state when I joined her in the shower.
“I was starting to think you had other duties again, honey,” she murmured. “Poor you, so much to do, it’d be no surprise if you left some part of your responsibilities... unsatisfied.”
I chuckled as my hands enjoyed the smooth sweep of her back. I imitated her drawl: “Why, Mrs. Farrell, I do believe you are flirtin’ with me.”
“Oh, heavens, no, Mrs. Kingslund. Flirtin’ is promises you may not keep. I tell you straight, I have every intention of keeping my promises.”
Teasing each other with our pet names gave way to a kiss: a deep, unhurried kiss that lit fires in our bodies. Our passion would always be like a banked fire; all it needed was the stir of our bodies against each other, a breath, a sigh, and it burst into flames again.
Wary of all my wounds, my wife had me turn around and pressed against me from behind. She had one arm wrapped around my ribs, one hand cupping my breast and teasing the nipple, the other hand free to wind like a serpent across my belly, testing, seeking. My heart threatened to break out through my ribs and it was all I could do to clutch her arms and keep myself standing.
She didn’t take the usual route with our eukori linked, which would have slowed us down and stretched out the pleasure. She wanted to make me come hard and fast. She whispered it in my ear, along with husky, breathy suggestions about what I’d have to do for her later.
"Yes. Yes. All of that," I gasped. "I promise."
The way I surrendered my body completely to her touch excited her. At the last moment, she allowed my eukori in, and we shared the perfect, primal pleasure as it exploded through our bodies.
At that exact point, with the shocks still echoing through me and my legs threatening to fold, I sensed one of my House approach.
Rita came in the bathroom, holding my cell and tapping hesitantly on the shower door.
“Sorry, Boss. I think you want this.”
I guess I did. Not as much as I wanted to stay in the shower or move to the bed, but life had a way of being unfair.
It was David, with urgent news.
I staggered out to the bedroom, leaving a muttering wife behind.
The alpha of the Alexandria pack, Bill Patout, had promised me the name of a guy who organized ‘special’ hunting trips in the Atchafalaya basin. I hadn’t believed it, but there was no harm in getting a contact, and a complete lack of clues about where the swamp witch might hide meant I would look at anything.
Bill had sent that contact, but Rita checked and found a dead end. So she’d sent it to Matt and David to see if their technical wizardry could provide up-to-date information.
David was calling with the result.
“The guy exists all right,” he said. “But he’s working hard at becoming invisible. I found an old copy of his website on the Dark Web. He turned it off, but these things bounce around until the echoes die down. I haven’t got an address for him, but watching a couple of the videos, I think you need to find him. This is the real thing. He’s hunted rougarou and he knows stuff about the Atchafalaya.”
“I guess somewhere in that bad news about not finding him, you still have a reason for me to not get into the shower and then go to bed.”
“Yes. When I hit the blank wall, I went sideways. Your friend Captain Morales...”
“As in Denver PD? He’s not going to be much use in Louisiana.”
“Maybe, but he has a friend on the New Orleans force who owes him.”
“And this is a reason I have to go out, leaving my wife here?”
“Yes, I’m afraid. He’s scheduled for a week’s vacation, starting tomorrow. Morales called him and set up a meet tonight. In... about half an hour.”
“Okay. Thanks to the Captain, and the pair of you, too.”
I didn’t want to waste time unpacking, so I started putting the clothes I’d just taken off back on.
“Nice thong,” Rita said. “We have to take Flint. Gwen’s new orders: one of them any time you step outside now.”
“Okay. Better extract him from the party before he gets in too deep. If you know what I mean.” I could already sense it was going to be a good party next door.
“It’ll break Jo’s heart.”
My wife snarked from the bathroom, “I’m crying here.”
Rita snickered and left me to finish dressing.
“And warn Maia she has security until we get back,” I called after her.
“Yes, Boss.” Slightly exasperated.
I was still fine-tuning working with Rita. I’d never have said that to Yelena because I’d have known she would do it. I was getting there with Rita.
Scarf to hide neck bruises. Shoulder holster with Mk23. Brown jacket. The pistol interfered with the cut of the jacket, so I’d have to leave the buttons undone. Fine.
Sunglasses to hide the black eyes and facial bruises. Spare pair for Rita—she wasn’t as badly bruised as me, but I didn’t want our contact to think we were battered wives or something.
I was ready. Now I just had to go into the bathroom and explain to my hot, wet wife why I was going out again, but that I remembered I had promises to keep.
Just over half an hour later, we were at the Bon Temps bar in Tulane-Gravier.
“Crappy-looking bar,” Flint said.
“Probably not Lieutenant DiMarco’s favorite bar. Just a place he meets strange people introduced to him over the phone by an old friend.”
I checked my cell for the photo I’d been sent of the lieutenant.
It showed him as a slab of a man in a hard-wearing gray suit, and I saw him the moment we walked in. It was probably the same suit.
He was sitting on a stool, resting his elbows on the bar and reading the Times-Picayune, neatly folded in half. There was a glass by his hand.
As we’d planned earlier, Flint took a seat while Rita and I went on to the bar.
“Lieutenant DiMarco?”
He flipped his paper, folding it one more time, and then turned.
“I’m guessing you two... three,” he amended as his eyes found Flint, “are my mystery guests. I wasn’t sure. I could never tell when Morry was pulling my leg.”
“He wasn’t pulling it this time.”
DiMarco’s face was red and puffy, seeming to squeeze his eyes until they were little more than slits, but the look was sharp. The man didn’t miss much.
He grunted.
The bartender came up and gave me a smile that went on and off in one continuous move. “What’ll you have?”
I spotted the Old New Orleans rum I’d enjoyed the night before and asked for three. “And whatever he’s having.”
DiMarco nodded thanks for the drink, watched all of us and said nothing while Rita took Flint his rum.
“So, Lieutenant,” I started, “we’re looking for someone, and you come recommended.”
“Yeah. Look, I’m sure Morry owes you big time for him to call me, but you’re gonna have to tell him his check didn’t cash. Tomorrow I get on a boat and I go spend a week doing nothing but fish and drink beer.”
“What bait do you use to catch beer?” Rita asked.
“Hey, funny girl. Wait, that was a movie, wasn’t it? Funny Girl?”
“It was,” Rita said. “Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif. You probably remember it for Barbra.” Her voice dropped. “I get to remember it for Omar.”
Rita was doing a good job of loosening him up, so I sipped my rum and waited.
“That’s sad,” he said and wrinkled his nose. “You seen a recent picture? Omar’s gotten old.”
“Not in the film.”
He smiled thinly. “You’re good. Morry tells me you’re some bad asses up in the Rockies, but you come in here looking like California fashion victims. And you know what? I don’t like talking to people wearing sunglasses. Makes me think they’re hiding something.”
I took mine off and laid them on the bar. Rita followed suit.
His eyes widened. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Since you’re standing here, I’m guessing I should be looking for the other guys’ bodies?”
A difficult question, when asked by a police officer.
“No,” I said. “They’re... out of your jurisdiction.”
DiMarco took a slug of his drink and thought about it, his glittering eyes back to their narrowest. Then he laughed.
“I like that,” he said. “‘Out of my jurisdiction’.”
He drained his drink. “So what ya got?”
Rita handed over a printout with a picture.
“Frederico ‘Freddy’ Walker,” she recited. “Louisiana native. Thirty-eight. Six-two. Ex-Ranger. Boat mechanic sometimes. Other times—”
“Con artist.” DiMarco tossed the printout on the bar. “Yeah, I know of Freddy. Not been around for a while. What’d he do to get your attention, all the way up in Colorado? I hope you haven’t come all this way to collect some old debt.”
I smiled. “Nope. Need to talk to him about illegal hunting trips into the basin.”
DiMarco didn’t look convinced. “If it wasn’t Morry asking...” He shook his head.
He stood up abruptly and handed Rita back her printout.
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded. “I got a date with a boat tomorrow. Middle of the night will be the best time to catch someone like Freddy. If he’s around. This type of guy ends up as fish food, no one ever knows.”
Chapter 46
The first five places DiMarco took us to were a bust; his informants weren’t there, or they hadn’t seen Freddy. No one had heard any news about him.
We didn’t crowd him, but we were close enough to hear DiMarco wasn’t just going through the motions.
It didn’t look good to me, but he shrugged off my pessimism. “Not how it works. Just rattling cages so far.”
Stop number six wasn’t a bar. It was the mouth of an alleyway between two bars on the outskirts of the French Quarter.
It smelled of piss-damp bricks and garbage. Street lights gleamed on puddles oozing out of dumpsters and sagging pyramids of trash bags. Music screeched from a portable player, blending with bass thumps from the bars.
“Hears yas looking for Freddy,” one of the hoodies said. He had old wounds to his throat and his voice came out as a harsh whisper.
“You seen him?”
“Maybe.”
I took a couple of steps closer.
“Whys ya looking?” I could see his gaze drop to my belly, and it made me smile.
“Want to talk to him about hunting trips,” I said. “Heard he used to do that a lot.”
They all laughed, a sort of snuffling sound.
“Yeah, he did that. He did. Big game.”
They thought it was a con, and I was falling for it. I didn’t care.
I took some bills out of my pocket and rustled them. “You know where we can find him?”
“He don’t come here. Sometime he down the river park, near the pier, sometime he stay Desire someplace.”
“Need an address,” I said. “Need to know where.”
They formed a huddle. There was a lot of headshaking, and ‘no, man’.
“Know who know,” the guy with the whispery voice said when they broke up.
“That’s worth half, because I still got to pay the person who knows.”
“Don’t pay, you know jack shit.”
“And you got jack shit in your pocket.”
He settled. We got the ‘business’ address of a guy called Cordell they said Freddy was working for, they got fifty.
DiMarco grimaced as we walked away.
“This is no good,” he grunted. “This guy, Cordell Jarvis, he’s a gang dealer. And this place... CP3? The old Calliope Projects? Not where we want to go without backup.”
“Trust us.”
He shook his head, but we got back into the Hill Bitch and he directed me across the city to the other side of the tangled junction where the Superdome sat.
DiMarco gave me a brief rundown of how Jarvis worked.
We passed the big interstate junction and arrived in a very different area.
“Bordered by railroad shunting yards and the interstate,” I said. “Hey, I would never have guessed that the Calliope Projects would turn out bad.”
“It’s cheap,” DiMarco replied. He wasn’t happy here.
“Not a good idea to park and leave the truck,” Rita said, head swiveling to watch all sides. “Not if we want to drive back.”
“I only need to know where Freddy is now,” I said. “It won’t take me long, but it’s probably better for you to stay with the car, Lieutenant. Drive it around the block a couple of times.”
“Uh, no. No.” DiMarco had been getting more on edge as we’d driven here. “Look, I thought you’d be smart enough to bail when you saw the place. I can’t let you go in, not even with the big guy.” He indicated Flint in the back. “You won’t come out in one piece.”
“It’s okay, really,” I said. I reached with eukori and used it to lean a little on him. Not a compulsion. Just a nudge.
I still felt bad about it.
Rita stretched over the back of his seat. “Come on, Lieutenant,” she said in his ear. “It’s what we came out to do. Morales vouches for us. We’ll be in and out too quickly for things to go wrong. It’s the only way. You know you can’t come in with us. You’d see criminal activity and then you’d have to make an arrest. Which would mean you’d be tied up with paperwork and that boat would leave tomorrow without you.”
It was exactly what was needed. She used my eukori to divert his decision processes from thinking about us going in, to not wanting to get involved himself.
A little blurring of his thoughts. Later, he’d justify it by putting it down to the drinks he’d had.
Meanwhile, we were getting out of the truck and he hurriedly moved across to the driver’s seat.
“Couple of circuits of the block,” I said, and walked off to the apartment building. Then: “Flint, I really need the lights to go out when I say.”
“Yeah. Thought you might want something like that. Slow down a little and give me a hand.”
He was still walking, but his eyes were closed and we had to guide him through the trash piles, up the path to the broken front door. I could feel the skin-tingling ripple of a working coming off him.
Our target operated out of the corner apartment on the ground floor.
DiMarco had said he wouldn’t have drugs in this apartment. His whole operation was a demonstration of just-in-time business practice that legitimate executives would envy. He had street corner guys all over his territory in the city. They had the minimum amount of product in their pockets, and called on cellphones for more. Runners would bring them the supplies from stashes that were kept in cruising cars which never ran a light or failed to indicate a turn. Other runners would collect the money. Those runners would stop outside a bar and talk with a guy on a motorcycle, shake hands, stroll away. Then the motorcycle and the money would come back here, nice and regular, or Jarvis got ‘anxious’, and when he got anxious, someone often died.
It was all a matter of whether he was here, or out on one of his ‘patrols’.
