by Jessie Cooke
“Did Evan tell you what I said?”
Pops smiled. “After all you been through in life, Miss Sally, you think you’d be a believer by now.”
Sally had tried hard not to get caught up in the crazy things her Paw Paw believed in. She wanted nothing more than to live a respectful, professional life and not be pointed at and talked about the way Andre Guidry had been for most of his life. But there were things that had happened in her lifetime that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t deny...there were “forces,” things that couldn’t be seen or heard, working their magic behind the scenes. She didn’t admit to anyone that she believed that, but like Pops said, she’d been through too much in her life to be a complete nonbeliever.
“Pops can you just tell me about Lucien? What is it he really wants from me, and why?”
“All I can tell you, Miss Sally, is that his hate for Evan Babineaux has colored his life in a dark way. Everything that boy has done since he was fourteen years old has been for the soul purpose of destroying Evan and everything he loves.”
“As far as I know, he’s never even met Evan.”
“The night you told Evan you were carrying his child, he was there. But worse, the night Evan’s father died...he was there too...”
Sally gasped and her stomach lurched. The night Jean Luc died was a night she had stuffed as far back into the recesses of her memory as she could get it. It was the worst night of her life and if she lived to be a hundred years old, she was sure it always would be. It was just a few weeks after she told Evan she was pregnant. She’d been home with her Paw Paw, and it was early on a Sunday morning. The sun wasn’t even up yet when an insistent knocking on the front door woke them both out of a dead sleep. Sally had been standing on the stairs behind him when her Paw Paw opened the door and when she saw Evan, she screamed. Her beautiful lover was covered from head to toe in mud and blood...and other things she still couldn’t bring herself to think about. His pretty blue eyes showed through the mud like light blue beacons and even from twelve feet away, she could see the torment in them.
Her Paw Paw had calmly brought the barely eighteen-year-old boy into the house and once he’d gotten Evan calmed down enough to tell him that none of that blood was his, he sent him into the bathroom to clean up. By the time Evan had scrubbed his skin clean and dressed in a pair of pajama pants her grandfather gave him, Sally had made a pot of tea and Paw Paw built a fire. For a long time, Evan sat wrapped in a blanket, just staring at the fire, and Sally and her Paw Paw sat silently watching the flames dance in his eyes, and waited. Sally thought she was prepared for whatever he had to say, but once he started talking, she wasn’t so sure. Evan said the blood “and other fluids” splattered across his face and bare arms belonged to a man named Rodney Durant. Rodney Durant worked for Jean Luc Babineaux and had a reputation for being a drunk. It seemed that Rodney had gotten drunk the night before, and Jean Luc let the man sleep it off on his couch as he had done many times before. After Evan’s mother passed, Jean Luc opened their home to anyone that needed shelter. It was just part of his generous spirit and another reason people loved him.
But this time, for reasons unknown to anyone...maybe even Rodney himself...the drunk man had waited until Jean Luc was asleep, and then he’d taken Evan’s father’s own gun and used it to take Jean Luc’s head almost completely off his shoulders. Evan found his father like that when he came home from a late night of partying with his friends, and he found Rodney asleep on Jean Luc’s couch with a heavy spray of blood and brain matter covering his body and the shotgun leaning up against the couch. Evan said that Rodney was still clutching the gun in his sleep. He said his sight was blurred and everything went red. He killed the man, with his bare hands...but hadn’t even realized what he was doing until it was all over.
After Sally’s Paw Paw heard the story, he told Sally to keep Evan there and watch him and he left. He was gone most of the day, and when he got back he told them both exactly what to tell the police when they showed up. Evan came home just like he said he had, and found his father, alone, and dead. No one would ever find Rodney Durant and since he was basically a transient, no one would question his abrupt departure from the swamps. It wouldn’t be until weeks later when she or Evan would find out that old man Guidry had gone all the way out to Jefferson Parish and contacted a man named Arthur Landry, also known as “The Joker.” No one knew how old Landry was or where he came from. The rumors said he just showed up in the parish one day, wearing a leather jacket with the head of a colorful jester embroidered on the back, in dark sunglasses, and riding a Harley Davidson. He built himself an old cabin in the woods and lived off the land for the most part and became the object of much speculation and gossip. People said he never took off his sunglasses even when he did go to town to buy supplies. They said that his face was completely hidden by his wild, long hair and the beard that touched the middle of his chest, and of course no one ever saw his eyes.
As time went on, stories began to surface that Landry was what they called a “fixer” in the parish. The superstitious Cajun population whispered about the things that Landry supposedly had done, all of them geared toward cleaning up legal messes that people might get themselves into. They whispered mostly about the payment Landry demanded for his help. The rumors said that he refused to take cash as payment but demanded much more. What Landry supposedly demanded in exchange for his help was a piece of someone’s soul. They were asked to leave a piece of hair, or skin...and of course no one could say what he did with those, but there was plenty of speculation about that as well.
Sally did her best most of her life to not heed all of the rumors, and the superstitions of the people who surrounded her. Her Paw Paw had been the subject of many of them and was an outcast most of his life because of it. Sally wanted nothing more than to live a life where people didn’t point and stare at her everywhere she went, and at forty-nine-years old, she was satisfied that she’d attained that. But there was a time when she let herself wonder...
It was two days after Landry “cleaned up” Evan’s mess when Sally woke up in the morning in a pool of blood. The doctors told her it wasn’t abnormal for someone so young to have a miscarriage the first time she was pregnant, but Sally couldn’t shake the belief that losing her baby had everything to do with the Joker, and his payment for what he did for Evan. She’d voiced that to him in her grief, and then no amount of begging could stop him from going out to see the Joker for himself. He was gone for days and Sally let her vivid imagination believe he was dead. She was on the verge of going out to Jefferson Parish and looking for him, right before he showed up, wearing a leather vest with the exact same symbol on it that the Joker wore on his.
Somehow Evan had befriended the man Sally blamed for the loss of their child. They had the biggest fight of their lives that night and three weeks later, without telling him goodbye, Sally left for college. It took years when she got back for them to salvage their friendship, and it was never the same as it had been before.
She suddenly realized she was still sitting in Pops’ kitchen. For a few minutes it had felt like she’d teleported back to the past, and she’d forgotten what she was there for. Pops was sitting quietly and although the man had no eyes, she felt like he was watching her. She opened her mouth to ask another question but realized that there was nothing else left to say. She knew that no matter what anyone said at this point, she’d already made up her mind not to trust Lucien any longer. She thanked Pops and left and as she rode her bike home she wondered if maybe it was just time for her to leave her past behind...for good.
17
Three Days Later
Blackheart was running on about two hours of sleep in the past seventy-two hours and he felt it in every part of his body. He had men rotating shifts following Lucien, who so far had only gone back and forth to work. He also had them checking on Sally at least twice a day and thus far, she hadn’t gone anywhere other than to work or the grocery store either. While Blackhea
rt was trying to get enough on Lucien to convince Sally the guy was bad news, Gabe and Chance had tracked down two more of the Mad Men responsible for hurting Chance’s girl. They caught up to them at a bar in Slidell, but this time the police were called and all four men were arrested. Chance and Gabe were charged with assault, and Chance also had an unregistered gun on his person so he was charged with that as well. Thanks to the overcrowding of the parish jails, however, both of the young men made bail. It was set at an outrageous amount, though, and since there were no bail bondsmen in the area that would touch the Jokers with a ten-foot pole, Blackheart had to come up with a shit-ton of cash to post it.
Ty had found out that the shell company on the fax letterhead was a realty company with its main offices based in France. The number on the paperwork went straight to an answering machine every time, but after doing her own investigation for a couple of days, Elise called Blackheart to tell him she had some news. He met up with her at a restaurant in the Quarter and she said:
“So, La Boutade is owned by a company called Prime Investments. Prime Investments is a shell corporation that owns at least nine properties in Louisiana and Mississippi. One of them is the office where your friend Lucien’s consulting firm is located. It looks like two of the properties in Mississippi are commercial rentals that generate about ten grand a month in income, a warehouse here in New Orleans that doesn’t seem to be rented currently, and four residential homes. Of the four, three of them are located in or around New Orleans and two of them are currently occupied by renters. The last one is in Atchafalaya, near the basin.”
Blackheart frowned. None of that sounded any more ominous, and maybe even less so, than the things the club got up to, but he wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. “You have an address, on the one in the basin?” She shuffled a few papers and handed one over to him. He felt the color drain out of his own face when he looked at it. The house Lucien owned in the Atchafalaya Swamp was the one that Sally had grown up in, her grandfather’s house. “Can you tell when this was purchased?” he asked Elise. She took the paper back, perched her gold-framed glasses on her nose, and looked it over. Finally, as Blackheart felt his patience waning, she laid it down and pointed at a date in the center of the paperwork.
“There, it looks like it was purchased about ten years ago.”
“Fuck...this motherfucker has been stalking her for at least ten years?” Elise raised one of her eyebrows and Blackheart said, “Sorry.” Elise didn’t like the language and he usually tried to control it around her. But Lucien’s buying Sally’s Paw Paw’s house, and then showing up in her life ten years later, couldn’t be a coincidence. “I’m sorry, Elise, but I have to go.” He stood up and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. When he leaned down to kiss Elise on the cheek she said:
“Keep me posted, okay? And if you need anything else...”
“I’ll ask for sure. Thank you.” He all but ran out to his bike and he was almost there when his phone began to ring. He was going to ignore it but it was Le Singe. “Yeah?”
“Boss, where are you?”
“I’m busy. What’s up?”
“It’s bad, boss...” Le Singe seemed to have a catch in his throat and Blackheart’s insides began to tremble. Anything that would choke up his VP had to be bad. “It’s Booger...he’s dead, boss.”
A wave of nausea passed through him and he had to reach out and clutch the handlebars of the bike to keep upright. “Jesus...how?”
“I’m not sure. Petit called and wants someone down at the morgue now to identify the body.”
Blackheart felt like he was going to throw up. Booger had been watching Lucien....fuck! Sally! “Le Singe, where’s Sally?”
“I’m here now, boss...at her house. She’s not home. Trying to get her on her cell but she’s not answering.”
“Did you call her office?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll do it. Get every man on deck you can find. I’m headed for the morgue now. Fuck!” He ended the call and with a shaking hand he pressed in the number for Sally’s office. Before the receptionist could finish her greeting he said, “I need to talk to Sally Guidry!”
“I’m sorry, sir, she’s not in today...”
“Where is she? Melissa, this is Blackheart, I need to know where she is.”
“I’m sorry, Blackheart, I don’t know. She didn’t call in sick and she didn’t show. We haven’t been able to reach her.” The nausea intensified and for several seconds he had to fight through a wave of it before he could get on his bike. He made one more call to Le Singe again.
“As soon as you get the guys together, I want you all headed out to Atchafalaya. I want the Guidry house searched top to bottom. There are also some cabins not far from the house that they used to rent out...I think they’re condemned now...but have someone search those too. If you find Sally, feel free to do whatever you want to that piece of shit, Williams. Look hard, Singe, and find her! I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
“You got it, boss.” Blackheart headed for the coroner’s office as soon as he finished that call. His old friend John Le Plant buzzed him in, and he wasn’t surprised to see Petit and his partner were there as well. Petit gave him a sympathetic look when he walked in, and when his partner started to open her mouth, he stopped her with a touch on her shoulder. Blackheart brushed past them both and met Le Plant at the door. His old friend looked sad and Blackheart knew for sure then that there was no chance the man under the sheet on the table wasn’t Booger. His friend touched him on the shoulder before leading him into the room and gently folding back the sheet. Booger lay there, looking like he was asleep, if not for the bluish tint to his lips and the gray color of his skin. Blackheart swallowed the lump in his throat and said:
“How was he killed?” Le Plant, in gloved hands, folded back Booger’s long beard so that Blackheart could see the perfectly straight, slim cut across his brother’s neck. He’d seen many dead men in his life, but this one was personal and it hurt so fucking badly that he wanted to kill something, or someone. He swallowed hard again and said, “How long has he been dead?”
“I think that’s enough,” Petit’s partner suddenly said. Blackheart looked up at her and saw her actually tremble slightly and take a step back when she saw the look in his eyes. Ignoring her Le Plant said:
“Maybe four to five hours when they found him.” Then not waiting for Blackheart to ask he said, “He was found naked, on the cement at the end of Dauphine.” That made Blackheart taste the bile in his throat. He’d been laid out on one of the busiest streets in the French Quarter as a final humiliation. Without saying a word to any of them, he pushed by the detectives roughly and almost ran to the bathroom, where he finally relieved his stomach of the half an éclair and coffee he’d had during his meeting with Elise. Once that was out of the way he went over to wash his face and rinse out his mouth. Pulling his head up then, he found himself staring at the reflection of a man who was filled with pure, unadulterated rage.
18
3 Hours Earlier
For three days, Sally had avoided Lucien’s calls. She planned on talking to him face to face, but she wanted to do it on the weekend when they could meet in a public place and she wouldn’t have to rush. She knew she could be wrong. She knew that heeding what an old, semi-crazy blind man and Blackheart, who always had ulterior motives, said could be a huge mistake. But the bottom line was that right or wrong she had a bad feeling about Lucien now in the pit of her gut and she needed to end it before it happened to end her.
She’d gotten up on Wednesday morning and in the midst of getting ready for work, there had been a knock on her door. When she looked out and saw it was Lucien she took a deep breath and opened the door. “Lucien, this is a surprise.” His normally soft blue eyes looked cold and his lips were set tight. He didn’t look as neatly groomed as usual. His hair was mussed and his suit wrinkled. She watched as he stood there with his fists clenched at his sides and wished that she hadn’t o
pened the door.
“It wouldn’t have been, if you were taking my calls. What happened, Sally? What did I do?”
“Oh, Lucien, you didn’t do anything. I’m sorry. I’ve been struggling for a long time, even before I met you, with the idea that maybe I needed to make some big changes in my life. I should have told you that upfront, before either of us developed feelings. I’m sorry. I’m just not in a place right now to get into a relationship. I was going to call you this weekend and talk to you...” A gasp came out of her mouth when suddenly Lucien pushed her back from the door and into the house. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You can’t do this,” he said, standing between her and the door. “You can’t just walk away. We’re meant for each other, Sally. You have no idea how long I’ve waited and how many sacrifices I’ve made...”
“Oh Jesus, Pops was right.”
He frowned. “Pops? That crazy old blind man? You talked to him about me?”
“He said you’ve been around for a long time, Lucien. He said you were there way back when I was only eighteen years old and Evan and I were...”
“Shut up!” he snapped, venomously. “I don’t want to hear his name.” Sally had been nervous at first, but now she was just plain scared. She tried to regulate her breathing while thoughts ran rampant through her head. She could make a run for the back door, but he was a lot bigger and a lot stronger than her. Was he capable of hurting her? The look on his face when she mentioned Evan sure did look like he was.
“Lucien, maybe we should sit down and talk about this.”
“No,” he said. “Not here, anyways. I need to get out of town and I need you to come with me.” He was still flexing his fingers, opening and closing his fists, and when Sally looked down at them this time, she could see there was blood underneath his fingernails. With her entire body shaking she said: