Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  More puzzled than she'd been when Jack had dragged her from the library, she skimmed a dismissive glance over Lott, who was inexplicably carrying a raincoat, even though the day had dawned sunny and summer steamy, then offered a polite, half smile to the man standing on the other side of the sheriff, a man nearly as large as Finn, whose face looked like ten miles of bad road. This was a man Dani would never want to meet on a dark street.

  “This is Lee Thomas,” Finn introduced him. “Lee, this is my brother Jack, and the prettiest lady in Louisiana, Danielle Dupree.”

  “It's a pleasure to meet you, Miz Dupree,” Thomas said, his soft musical cadence suggesting Georgia roots.

  “It's nice to meet you as well,” Dani said in her best tea-party manners, even as she continued to wonder what in the world they were all doing here. “Are you with the FBI, too?”

  “No ma'am, I'm with the United States Marshals Service. We're sort of the jack-of-all trades when it comes to federal crimes and prisoners. I worked with Finn a while back when I was assigned to the Missing and Exploited Children's Task Force.”

  “I see,” she said, not really seeing anything at all. This was getting curiouser and curiouser.

  “Good to meet you, too,” he said, shaking hands with Jack. “Finn's told me all about you.”

  “It's all lies,” Jack said easily. “The Marshal's Service handles the Witness Protection Program,” he told Dani.

  “Well, that's certainly interesting,” she said, still not having the faintest idea why Jack had dragged her to the courthouse.

  “We like to think so.” Lee Thomas's teeth flashed in another smile which softened the harshly carved lines of his face and made him oddly attractive. “I've been workin' on a joint effort with the Justice Department, DEA, and the FBI on this one case that's particularly interesting. It involves a New Orleans mob family.”

  “Really?” She felt a prickling sensation at the back of her neck.

  “Yep,” Finn said, looking a bit smug, Dani thought. “The Maggione family, as a matter of fact.”

  “There's this guy who's worked for them as a cocaine mule off and on over the years that we're currently babysitting until he testifies at a bunch of trials,” the marshal continued the explanation. “The family businesses have pretty much been on life support since Papa Joe died, and we think, thanks to what we've learned from this informant, we'll be able to finish them off. Then Finn called me and asked me to do some digging, and damned if your daddy's name didn't come up.”

  “My father's name?” Lightheaded from fear, Dani grasped Jack's arm. “But he's already served his sentence. He's on parole.”

  “Oh, yes, ma'am. I sure know that. I also know that the governor's office is working on his pardon right now.”

  “Pardon?” Afraid she'd heard wrong, afraid to hope, she looked up at Jack, who nodded in confirmation. “I don't understand.”

  “Turns out the judge was set up and framed by Lott and a former member of the state legislature, who was, until he was picked up in Baton Rouge this morning, a gambling industry lobbyist, “Jack revealed.

  “But why would anyone want to frame my father?”

  “Papa Joe's grandson was coming to trial for grand-theft auto and attempted murder. Since there was no question about him being guilty—he'd left DNA all over the guy's car—the verdict was pretty cut and dried. Unless they could get a friendly judge to assure a mistrial. Framing your father was the easiest way, short of killing him, to get him off the bench,” Finn explained. “Lucky for him, the old man was never one to advocate violence when another method would work just as well.”

  “According to our informant, the sheriff wasn't that wild about the idea,” the marshal revealed. “Seems he wanted to pull the judge over for speeding one night, jump him, drive him a few miles out of town, shoot him, and toss him in the bayou for the gators to take care of.”

  Dani's gaze flew to Lott. He glowered back, his reptilian eyes seething with venom. Then her gaze moved down to his wrists, which, she noticed for the first time, were handcuffed beneath the raincoat.

  “I always knew you were despicable. I just never realized how truly evil you were,” Dani told the sheriff.

  “That's not all,” Finn said. “The fire at the library wasn't exactly an accident after all. The fire marshal found evidence of an accelerant in the crawl space above the apartment's kitchen.”

  Dani's blood chilled at the idea of someone purposefully setting fire to the home she and her son had planned to move into. “But the fire wasn't ruled arson.”

  “Not officially,” Nate agreed. “Because we didn't want to tip our hand. Interestingly enough, we found some explosives in Lott's garage and a store in Lafayette that sold him the alarm clock he used as a timer. We also have two witnesses who place him at the scene the night before the fire, and a third, who'll say that he heard the sheriff suggesting doing whatever it took to make sure the judge didn't have any reason to come back here where he might start digging around.”

  “There's a plane waiting in Baton Rouge to take the sheriff to D.C., where he'll be formally charged with an entire laundry list of offenses, including a little drug-trafficking business he had going on the side,” Lee Thomas said. “I'd say he's going to be put away for a long, long time.”

  Dani's eyes swam. She opened her mouth to speak. Stopped. Shook her head and tried again. “I don't know how to thank you.”

  “Finn and I are just doin' our job, Miz Dupree, putting the bad guys behind bars where they belong.”

  “It's still such a glorious surprise. Does my father know?” she asked Finn.

  “We told him this morning. Although it isn't standard operating procedure, since these are special circumstances, I thought the judge might like to come along when we picked Lott up. He said he was feeling a bit peaked this morning and thought he'd pass, but the satisfaction of knowing he'd been vindicated was enough.”

  Even concerned as she was about her father's health, Dani's heart soared. She hugged Finn and kissed him. Then did the same to Lee Thomas.

  Jack was pissed off, just a little, when the federal marshall held her just a heartbeat too long.

  Christ. Who was he trying to fool? He didn't want any other man's hands on his woman for any length of time. But, since the marshal had come through for them, and put the last piece into place that cleared the judge, Jack decided he'd let him live. This time.

  “Well, guess we'd better go congratulate the judge,” he said, snaking his arm around Dani's waist. Mine, both the gesture and his gaze said. “You'll probably want to be there when the governor calls him.”

  Finn grinned at his brother's uncharacteristic possessiveness while Lee Thomas wisely backed up a step.

  “So,” Jack asked Dani as they walked out of the courthouse, “how come you didn't give Lott a few choice parting words?”

  “I considered it. But then I decided he wasn't worth letting myself all upset.”

  “Good call.”

  She looked up at him. “You did this, didn't you?”

  “I'm out of the cops-and-robbers business, remember?”

  She stopped beside the horse that had definitely proven lucky today. “Jack. I want to know.”

  “Hell, all I did was get the ball rolling by giving Finn the name of the mule and where they could probably find him and suggesting he may be willin' to cut a deal to get himself put into the government-protection program. Finn and I knew in our guts it was Lott, but getting the proof took a bit more time. My original plan was to just have Finn shoot the bastard and save the taxpayers a lot of money, but Nate, he thought that might be overkill and counseled restraint.”

  “I'm glad he did. Since I'd hate to have to start visiting you in prison.” Her eyes shimmered. “I owe you, Jack. More than I can ever pay back.”

  “Oh, I wouldn't worry about that.” He grinned down at her and dropped a light kiss on the tip of her nose. “We're two intelligent people, you and me. I bet if we put our heads together, w
e'll think of somethin'.”

  So,” Nate asked, the next afternoon, “you pop the question yet?”

  “No.” Jack shook his head as he stood on the sixteen-foot-tall ladder and trimmed in the paint along the ceiling. “I was going to the night of Alcèe's wedding, but then we sorta got sidetracked.”

  Nate countersunk a nail on the doorframe of the cabinet he'd built to hide the oversize television. “From the way you two were dancing, I'm not at all surprised by that.”

  “It wasn't sex that kept me from telling her. I'd planned to earlier, then I decided to put it off until morning. Then I ended up having one of those old nightmares and woke up in a sweat, shouting my head off.”

  “I can see how that might sour the mood.”

  “Oh, she was real good about it.” Jack dipped the brush in the paint bucket and wished for a cigarette. “Said all the right things, and all, but I decided that it must have freaked her out a little, so I decided to wait till today. Soon as I get this wall done, I'm goin' over to the apartment and help her hang pictures. Matt's off at some group baseball camp that's supposed to help the boys bond as a team, so I figure I'll have the rest of today and all night to convince her.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Nate cocked his head at a sound filtering up the stairs. “Is that the front door?”

  “Yeah. I got the chimes hooked up yesterday. It's probably the FedEx guy. My agent called and said he was sending over some contracts for me to sign.”

  “You don't have to come down,” Nate said. “If you stop trimming before you get to the corner, you'll end up with brush marks. I'll get it.”

  Jack had worked in some of the more dangerous places on the planet. He'd dodged death more times than he'd cared to count. But those DEA operations had been a walk in the park compared to the idea of proposing marriage. Having used visualization techniques successfully in the past to ensure a successful outcome, he was running over the words he'd so painstakingly written down, making sure he'd memorized them so as not to fuck things up when the sound of Nate clearing his throat pulled him back to the present.

  “I think you'd better come downstairs, Jack.”

  His brother's voice was strained. His expression more grim than Jack had ever seen it. Except at their daddy's funeral. Fear struck right at his heart.

  “Is it something 'bout Danielle? Is she okay?”

  “Yeah.” Nate dragged a hand through his shaggy, suntipped hair. “It's about Dani. And she's okay, so far as I know. But there's someone here I think you need to meet.”

  The words were directed at Jack's back as he raced down the stairs two at a time. When he hit the foyer, he came to an abrupt stop, feeling as if he'd just been gutshot. As impossible as it was, a young Dani, looking exactly the way she had back in her early teens, was standing there holding a newspaper in her hand.

  “Are you Mr. Callahan?” She may be a dead ringer for a younger Danielle, but her voice revealed no trace of Louisiana.

  “Yeah.” He knew he was staring but couldn't help himself.

  Turnip was doing her happy welcome dance all around the girl, but the dog could have been as invisible as the ghosts supposedly haunting Beau Soleil for all either one of them paid attention to her.

  “I read about you. And this house.” She held up the tabloid story.

  “I see.” Jack could not drag his eyes away from those wide blue-green hazel eyes and the sleek slide of blond hair. “Actually, I don't,” he admitted.

  “I'm sorry.” She blushed prettily, and despite knowing absolutely nothing about adolescent girls, Jack thought she possessed a bit more poise than most. “I should have explained.” She drew in a deep breath. The hand she pulled through her long hair was trembling, evidence that she wasn't as calm as she was obviously trying to appear. “My name is Holly Reese. . . . And I think . . . well, I believe you might be my father.”

  The apartment was finally almost looking livable. Oh, there were still boxes stashed away in the bedroom closet, there might not be as much room as there had been in Fairfax, and it certainly wasn't Beau Soliel, yet it was still home. Dani couldn't wait until Matt returned from baseball camp and saw all the team pennants she'd tacked up on his bedroom walls.

  She decided to reward herself for a job well done with a long luxurious bubble bath and was lying back in the tub, her freshly washed hair wrapped in a towel, eyes closed, cooling slices of cucumber on her lids, when someone began pounding on the door.

  “Danielle,” Jack shouted, “open this door!”

  Fear struck like a laser straight into her heart, her first thought being that something had happened to Matt. She sat up, causing the cucumber to fall into the water.

  “Goddammit, Danielle,” he called again. “I know you're in there.”

  She leaped from the velvet cling of perfumed water, leaving wet footprints on the tile floor. She'd laid her clothes out on the bed, but far more concerned about her son than how she looked, she grabbed her worn, ancient terrycloth robe from the hook, threw it on, and went racing to the door.

  She flung it open, took one look at the murderous scowl on Jack's face and knew that whatever he'd come here about, it couldn't be good.

  “What is it?” Her heart beat even faster. She reached out an arm which he brusquely pushed aside as he strode into the apartment. “Is it Matt? Is he hurt?”

  “So far as I know Matt's fine.” His eyes were hard as agate, his mouth as grim as she'd ever seen it, his words growled through clenched teeth. But relief that he'd not come here about her son had Dani relaxing marginally. Which, she discovered, was a fatal mistake.

  She'd thought him dangerous when she'd first tracked him down at Beau Soleil. But a different kind of danger was emanating from him. For the first time since returning home to Blue Bayou, she was looking at the man he'd told her about. The man who'd willingly worked in the shadowy, deadly drug underworld; the man who'd killed the bad guys before they could kill him.

  She swallowed, her mouth dry from fear. “Jack . . .” She held out a trembling hand. He ignored it. “What's wrong?”

  “Wrong?” He spat the word at her. “How about the fact that I'm not real wild about being played for a goddamn fool?” His large hands took hold of her shoulders, his fingers dug painfully into the flesh beneath the terrycloth. She was about to tell him that he was hurting her, when his next words choked the complaint off in her throat. “Why the hell didn't you tell me we had a daughter?”

  The blood drained from her reeling head in a rush. Dani swayed as her knees went weak and would have fallen if he hadn't been holding her so tightly.

  “H-h-how . . .” She couldn't talk. Couldn't think. Her mind whirled. “Who told you?”

  “You're going to love this.” His coldly vicious smile lacked the easygoing warmth she'd come to love. Fire and ice, Dani remembered Desiree saying. “Our daughter showed up at Beau Soleil today.”

  White dots like the flutter of moth wings danced in front of her eyes. “That's impossible,” she whispered raggedly.

  “Dammit, don't try to lie your way out of this, Danielle. The timing matches up with her age and she's the spitting image of you. Hell, Nate could see it the minute he opened the door.”

  “It can't be.” She shook her head, unable to make sense of this while her stomach was in her throat and her mind felt as if it'd been hit with a sledgehammer. “Jack.” When the moths turned into a blizzard, she grabbed hold of his arms to keep from falling to the floor. “Please let me sit down.” His muscles tensed beneath her fingers. “I'm going to faint.”

  Apparently seeing that about this, at least, she was telling the truth, he dragged her over to the couch she'd bought at an antique shop he'd taken her to in Houma, pushed her onto the cushions it had taken her two nights of sewing to cover with pretty magnolia-printed fabric, and shoved her head between her bare knees.

  “Take a deep breath.”

  The indrawn air burned her lungs. Despite outside temperatures in the nineties, she was cold. So
cold.

  The towel came unwound as he pressed harder; her damp hair fell over her shoulders and face. She was shivering like a woman stumbling through an Arctic blizzard.

  “Keep your head down and don't move. I'll be right back.”

  She couldn't have moved if she'd wanted to. As she continued to take the deep breaths that became less painful and began to clear her head, Dani heard the heels of his cowboy boots striking like hammers on the wooden floor. There was the sound of water running from the kitchen, then he was back.

  “Here.” He took hold of her hair, dragged her head up, and shoved a glass into her hand. “Drink this.”

  A little water splashed over the rim and onto her bare leg as her unsteady hand lifted the glass to her mouth. The water was cool against her throat, and helped clear out the lingering clouds of vertigo.

  “Thank you,” she managed.

  “Don't thank me; I just don' want you passin' out on me till I get the truth.” He sat down in an overstuffed chair across from her that still needed recovering and pulled a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.

  “I thought you'd quit,” she said before she could stop herself.

  He speared her with another of those icy looks. “And I thought I could trust you. Seems we both were wrong.”

  He struck the match on the sole of his boot, lit the cigarette, and inhaled. “Okay,” he instructed, “start talking.”

  He sounded as if she were one of his prisoners he was interrogating. Dani realized on some level that while he had every right to be upset, she should be angry that after how close she'd thought they'd become, he had so little trust in her, but at the moment she was too confused to try to stand up to a man who was undoubtedly an expert at intimidation.

  “I don't know where to start.”

  “The usual way to start a story is from the beginning. Why don't you try that?”

  “All right.” She drew in a ragged breath and tried to compose her thoughts. “I didn't find out I was pregnant until after you left.”