by Alison Kent
Want to? Why wouldn’t I want to? What would I do instead?
“—and we’ll know where to find you if you don’t.”
“I’ll be back. As soon as I can make it.” That was a promise. “There’s not a thing on the Gulf Coast worth stayin’ there for.” And that was a fact.
Three
“H e’s coming home, Baby Bear. He’s finally coming home. I swear I don’t know whether my heart’s beating itself full of fear, or if it’s fluttering from waiting to see what he’ll look like after all this time.”
Terrill Landry, Sr.—Bear to everyone living in Bayou Allain, Baby Bear to Lorna Savoy, who knew more of his secrets than his wife had ever been privy to learn—slapped a thick palm on a file folder to the right of the leather blotter centered on his desk.
“I’ve got a picture right here, Lorna, if it’ll save you from peeing yourself,” he told her, glancing to where she stood at his office window, the green paisley drapes more expensive than her outfit, her manicure, and her haircut combined.
For not the first time in the twenty years of their association, he found himself wishing he’d taken on someone who hadn’t turned out so silly, so easily flustered, so goo-goo eyed when it came to men—except that particular bit of Lorna’s being female had played well with his dealings and made the rest of who she was easier to overlook.
Then there was the surprising fact that inside all that fluff, she had a good head for his work. He supposed that had a lot to do with the pit of her existence before he’d plucked her out of her family’s shack in the swamps, and knowing he was giving her a chance she’d never get again.
He looked her over.
Her hair was a nest of bottle-red flips and teased curls, her tits 100 percent real, still firm and high, and more than enough for any man’s hands, mouth, or dick. Her hips, still trim, were curvier now than they’d been years ago when he’d crawled between her legs without help. Her stomach remained bikini flat above her shaved-bare pussy.
Even thinking of all that, he couldn’t deny that these days he found more pleasure elsewhere. These days in particular it came from the impending culmination of what he’d been working toward for near on half his life. Being on the back side of sixty, it took more than what he could get from Lorna to keep his flames fed, even if once in a while it was nice to remind her of all that she owed him for.
She turned away from his office window, lifted a brow darker than her hair, and after a long moment, approached in that slow, easy way she had, using the bright white tips of her nails to pick at the loose end of the belt cinched around her waist, her lips pursed.
“If I pee myself, Baby Bear, it’ll be because I’m scared out of my wits. When he called to tell me he was coming to look over the place, I thought I was going to die.”
Scared of Simon Baptiste when she should’ve been worried about Bear himself. “All you have to do is follow the script. If he asks why Le Hasard has gone to hell, give him the reasons we worked out. You’ve done things a lot more fearful than that in your life.”
He saw it in her bright blue contact lens–covered eyes when she snapped, “The minute he sees the place as rundown as it is, he’s going to know something’s up. Of course he’s going to ask; wouldn’t you? Or are you too feeble-minded to remember that he’s been paying me to keep the place spruced up and rented out? And I haven’t been doing either, thanks to you.”
He waited, letting her think on what she’d said, on whom she’d said it to, on how much she should be wanting to take back her words. Then he reminded her of a few things, doing nothing more threatening than making one big fist out of his laced hands and making sure he had her eye. “My mind’s as sharp now as it was twenty years ago. I remember everything, and you’d do good to do the same.”
She knew where her bread was buttered and that helped her shed the attitude. She sunk defeated into the chair in front of his desk, wrinkles showing in her neck as she slumped. “That’s the problem, B.B. I remember it all. I know every one of the things I’ve done, and especially what I did that night to Simon and King….” She let the sentence trail with a shudder that took over her body.
Bear wasn’t worried. He’d made sure she’d been as high as a kite that night. He doubted she remembered what he didn’t want her to. And the only two people who’d been with her when the fire had started had no cause to question the past.
He stood by his admonition. “This is what you’ve been doing for years, Lorna. You’re a professional. You make deals. You buy property. You sell property. You take your commissions and doll your gorgeous self up with the money you rake in. There’s no reason to start second-guessing yourself this late in the game.”
He planted both hands on the top of his desk and pushed out of his chair, standing tall, looking down. He needed this taken care of so he could get back to looking toward a future he’d never thought would come. “You can make Simon Baptiste believe anything you want him to, Lorna. Anything at all.”
Later that night in his regular booth at Red’s, his usual drink in one hand, his unlit cigar in the other, Bear found himself facing the most aggravating of quandaries. How in the hell did his son survive the life of a deputy sheriff with a goddamn limp dick for a spine?
“Jesus Christ, Bear.” Terrill Jr.’s voice was scratched raw and brittle like all he’d done for days now was cry. “We should’ve found something by now. People don’t just disappear into thin air.”
The boy sat with his shoulders slumped, his hands wrapped around a near-empty mug. He hadn’t gone home since Monday to do more than see if his wife had come home. Bear was fairly certain the boy hadn’t slept but maybe an hour or two in the same expanse of time.
It showed in his eyes, which were bloodshot, his face, which needed a shave, his uniform, which smelled of sweat and long hours behind the wheel of his cruiser, driving aimlessly as if he’d find Lisa wandering the streets of Bayou Allain, or strolling through Vermilion Parish, lost.
All in all, Bear was disgusted. “Terrill, take yourself home and get cleaned up. You look like shit. That’s no way to treat your uniform.”
“I’m off duty,” Terrill told his mug, rubbing at his rheumy eyes. “And if anything, I look like a man whose wife vanished without a trace. I doubt anyone is going to care about a few stains or wrinkles.”
“I care, and that should be reason enough.” On this, Bear put down his foot. No matter their personal trials, the Landrys would maintain a strong front. They couldn’t have people talking, speculating, digging into their lives and their business. Not now. Not now. “If it’s not, then you should look to the people who put you where you are today.”
“One and the same, Bear,” Terrill said, leaning his chin into the cup of his palms. “You put me where I am. You think I don’t know that?”
Bear glanced away from his son and toward the two men sitting on stools at Red’s bar beneath the sign for Abita Beer. He looked around at the tables clustered to the side of the dance floor. He took in the members of the band playing from the small stage near the door.
No one seemed to be paying his corner more attention than usual, so he turned again to his son. “What you need to know is that your appearance matters. Your appearance affects your reputation, and your reputation is what earns you the respect of the people.”
“What matters is my wife,” Terrill said, his voice getting louder with each word, his hands coming away from his face to slam against the table. “You may run this town, but you are not going to tell me how I should act when my wife is missing.”
“People will see that you’re grieving whether you’re wearing a shirt that’s wrinkled or pressed.” Bear covered one of Terrill’s hands with his own.
“Then at least they’ll be seeing the truth.” Terrill pulled away, signaled Red to send him another beer.
Agreeing it was time for a refill, Bear glanced in the same direction, catching King Trahan’s eye in the bar’s mirror. As if enough wasn’t enough; damn his indige
stion.
Dealing with Terrill and Lisa and Lorna Savoy already had his gut in an uproar. Now seeing King was souring the drink in his gullet. The Trahan boy hadn’t spent near enough time behind bars to Bear’s way of thinking, but then he had no one to blame but himself for the way that had worked out.
Still…Bear could read a whole lot of what King was thinking in his eyes. And there was just enough wild-man hatred there to give Bear a good solid pause.
When he finally tore his gaze away and checked in with his son, he decided the refill could wait. It was time for Terrill to call it a night. He reached for the mug, unexpectedly caught by the sadness twisting his son’s face.
He shouldn’t have been. He shouldn’t even have noticed. Not emotion or sentiment or anything soft. And yet…“Go home, Terrill. Shower. Sleep. Then come by my office before you head for Abbeville in the morning.”
“What the hell for?”
“I’ve got a man in Houston’s done work for me in the past. We’ll get him over here looking for Lisa,” Bear said, knowing he was going to end this night in bed with a roll of antacids.
Terrill’s head came up. “You didn’t want anything to do with a P.I. yesterday.”
The boy’s petulance was plucking at Bear’s last nerve, and he deserved it for making the suggestion—a show of support at odds with what he was feeling. “Yesterday I was waiting for the girl to get back from whatever shopping trip she forgot to tell you she was taking.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Terrill’s question was rhetorical and dripped with sarcasm. “If anything, she would’ve gone back to the library. And she would have called.”
“Maybe so.” Bear had never imagined his daughter-in-law’s genealogy research would turn into a time bomb. The ticking had become a relentless pain in his head. “But bringing in a P.I. before now would’ve been jumping the gun. You’re law enforcement. You know how this works. Lisa being family doesn’t change procedure.”
“It damn well should,” Terrill said, back to rubbing at his eyes. “Waiting lets the trail grow cold.”
“My man specializes in cold trails. He’ll sniff out any clues we’ve missed.”
“We haven’t missed a thing. There’s nothing. She was here. And then she wasn’t.”
“Meaning, if she left of her own accord, someone somewhere has seen her or her car.” How many times were they going to have to cover this ground?
“And if she didn’t? Leave of her own accord?”
“Then someone somewhere would still have seen her or her car. All we have to do is find that someone.”
“Needle in a haystack.”
Bear wasn’t about to disagree. But then, Vermilion Parish and Bayou Allain in particular were neither one population rich. “It’s time to start thinking beyond what we know to what we don’t, Terrill.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
It had to be the beers talking. His son was a deputy sheriff. He was not a deputy buffoon. “Do you know anyone who might want to get to Lisa? Anyone from her past? Anyone she might have talked to while doing her research?”
“No one,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Bear. We’ve already been through this.”
“We haven’t been through enough,” Bear told his son. “If we had, we wouldn’t be looking for only the second person known to disappear from Bayou Allain.”
Four
K ingdom Trahan sat bellied up to the bar, two fingers hooked around the neck of his beer bottle, his eyes shifting from the mirror on the wall to Red, the owner and barkeep who was busy pointing out to the eighteen-year-old trying to pass himself off as twenty-one how easy it was to spot a fake I.D.
King remembered eighteen all too well. It wasn’t a year he looked back on fondly, and the several that followed hadn’t been any better, spent as they were in Angola, where he’d been confined in Louisiana’s state pen.
At the end of his time served and along with his freedom, he’d come away with skills that went beyond sorting laundry and stamping out license plates. One was a heightened sixth sense. Another amounted to a pair of eyes in the back of his head. And both were working overtime tonight.
He didn’t know what it was in the air, but there was a buzz prickling at his nape that had nothing to do with his beer. He could see Terrill 1 and Terrill 2 in the older Landry’s usual booth. Terrill 2 had just come off duty, the parish’s finest, protecting and serving as long as doing so didn’t get in Terrill 1’s way.
It wasn’t so much a case of like father like son, the off-spring turning out to be as crooked as the man who’d spawned him, but more a case of the spawn being as cowed by the Big Bear as everyone who lived in Bayou Allain. Most everyone, anyway.
King would’ve thought the Landry men were discussing news of junior’s wife, except what he was feeling was bigger than Lisa. King didn’t believe Bear’s claims of knowing nothing about what had happened to his daughter-in-law. Bear Landry knew everything that went on in the parish whether the information was made public or not.
Whatever had the air humming, King was certain he’d find out soon because the strange energy wasn’t confined to the back corner where the Landry men huddled. It was up front, blowing in on the wind along with the soft vanilla scent from the clematis every time the front door swung open.
If he came to town for a beer more often instead of drinking alone in his trailer at Le Hasard…maybe that’s what the electricity was all about. How Simon would finally see for himself what had become of his land—land that by rights should’ve belonged to King but by law did not.
Then again, King didn’t notice anyone paying him any more mind than usual. Red had greeted him with a cold beer, not a word about his cousin finally stepping foot back in Bayou Allain, just bullshit about work biting the big one and the well on Le Hasard sitting there waiting for the workover he’d been promising for years now to get to.
The life and times of a wannabe roughneck…
It was when Red’s front door opened a couple of minutes later that King latched on to the fuss. Red’s was by no stretch of any imagination a place a woman might come for a cocktail, and in a million years King couldn’t see the one walking through the door palming a mug of suds.
Then again, he didn’t have to think hard to picture the fingers toying with the ends of the scarf draped around her neck fondling the stem of a martini glass, or, for that matter, his dick.
That said, he figured his hands would be too callused to touch her in return, and why his thoughts were going to places he never would proved that he really did need more than one night a month out in public.
He raised his bottle to his mouth, kept his gaze focused on her face in the mirror, watched her take in the band in the corner, the three couples groping on the stamp-sized dance floor, the rows of booths and pool tables on the other side, and the bar against the back wall.
It was a weeknight. The crowd small. He and T-Beaux Gentry the only ones cracking their way through Red’s basket of peanuts at the bar. All the other patrons gawking at her had someone at their elbow or across their table or in their arms to whisper with.
King did not. He was sitting there all by his lonesome, and roughneck or not, he knew he had a look that brought women close. Something dangerous, he’d been told. Something earthy and raw. This one, after meeting his eyes in the mirror and seeing that for herself, headed toward him—a fact that had ol’ T-Beaux snarling at Red for another damn beer.
King, he just chuckled beneath his breath, cracked open another peanut, and swept the dust and the hull from the bar to the floor as she climbed onto the stool at his side.
“Let me guess,” he said, taking in her cleavage and the lacy edge of her bra where the neckline of her black top gaped beneath her scarf. “A fruity martini or champagne.”
She snorted. It was a sound he had to think back on to make sure he’d heard it right. He did that as she was saying, “Until I sweat out last night’s tequila, I’m sticking to coffee, th
anks.”
“Coffee, huh?” King glanced toward the far end of the bar where Red huddled with T-Beaux, wadding the towel he used to wipe spills and making no move toward the princess who might as well have climbed into a fishbowl as onto a stool.
Pushing away from his own seat as well as from the imagined picture of her damp skin sweating out tequila, King stepped through the swinging gate into the service alley, where he lifted the carafe of brown sludge Red had brewed hours ago and brought it to his nose.
“This stuff’s good for nothing but tarring roofs,” he told her. “I’ll make a fresh pot.”
He went about doing so, waiting for her to tell him not to bother, it wasn’t necessary, she’d pick up a cup at the first Starbucks she hit on her way out of town—since he couldn’t think she was here on purpose; she had to be lost—instead of putting him out.
But she didn’t.
She sat there wearing at least a grand in a designer’s idea of casual duds, her black hair snipped and clipped to fall around her shoulders and down her back just so.
What? Just because he’d farmed, ranched, netted shrimp, worked on a rig, and collected unemployment he didn’t know an expensive woman when one sat down beside him smelling like a field of flowers in Tuscany?
He finished with the coffeepot and turned to see her eyes on the mirror, searching through the reflections of Red’s crowd. Interesting, he mused, leaning closer, his forearms crossed on the edge of the bar.
“Lookin’ for anyone in particular or just a good time, mon ami?”
The look she gave him would have withered the balls on a lot of men. King took it as a challenge.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine.” She left it at that.
King prompted, “That so, chère? Someone living in Bayou Allain?”
“Last I knew, yes. But no one answered the door at the address I have. No one answered at any of the neighbors’ doors, either.” She paused as if weighing the wisdom of what she wanted to say before adding, “Lots of drafty houses you’ve got here.”