Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)

by Susannah Sandlin

  He’d provided every photo of Lang he could get his hands on, which were sadly few and none more recent than from seven or eight years ago, when they’d run into each other in New Orleans. Lang had hit him up for drug money.

  Three miserable days. Three glorious days. Whatever time he wasn’t playing witness or informant, he’d spent with Ceelie. Talking about everything except the case. Finding common ground in music and a love of this land and culture. He had thought she’d rejected it, but she hadn’t. She was part of it. She sang to him, worked on new songs, cooked a mean red beans and rice with andouille and an even meaner seafood gumbo.

  And yeah, they’d spent a lot of time gathering firsthand knowledge of each other’s bodies. She was experimental and adventurous with sex, and he loved her openness and lack of self-consciousness. She said he had a lot of work to do in that department but he was damn good once she got him where she wanted him. Like on the weight bench or the dining-room table. He’d never look at the laundry room the same way again.

  She knew he got weak-kneed when she sucked on his earlobes, and he knew the sensitive spots on her breasts and a certain way to move his fingers that would make her moan and writhe and beg him to take her.

  The memories forced him to shift to a more comfortable position in his truck as he backed out of his drive, waving to Ceelie. She sat on the landing at the top of the stairs to the house, sharing a slice of toast with Hoss. He’d rather go back and make good on what the memories had started, but he was technically on the clock.

  They’d both be working on the case today, but from different directions. Jena Sinclair would be taking Ceelie back to visit Tomas Assaud, to see if she could get more information on LeRoy Breaux. He’d called the man a thief, which meant there was something worth stealing. Maybe with Jena and her badge there, he’d be more willing to elaborate.

  Whatever there was to steal, had LeRoy told the teenage Lang Broussard and Tommy Mason about it? And if so, why would Lang be going after it now, after all these years? Maybe Tomas could fill in some blanks.

  Ceelie had feared the old man wouldn’t meet with her again, but when she’d sent a message through his grandson, Tomas had agreed.

  As for Gentry, he’d gotten the go-ahead from both the sheriff and Warren to embark on a little fishing trip today in the name of interagency cooperation. It had occurred to him that, while everyone was looking for Lang Broussard and digging into the background of LeRoy Breaux, no one had been looking at Eva Savoie.

  He figured the sheriff had agreed to let him get involved because this mission was virtually guaranteed to keep him out of the deputies’ way, but Gentry would take whatever they gave him. He needed to stay involved. Plus, he was a believer in the old adage that so often proved wise: follow the money.

  Eva Savoie operated on a system out of step with the rest of the world except those living off the grid: cash and barter. She didn’t have a bank account, and she’d inherited the land and the cabin with no debt attached to the estate, so there was no conventional trail of finances to follow. Still, she had property taxes to pay and gasoline and food to buy. She had electric and water bills. She had expenses, in other words, so she needed income.

  Last night, Gentry had contacted the hunter who leased alligator-hunting rights on Eva’s property each year, and got confirmation: the man always paid her in cash and sealed the deal with a handshake. A couple of times, when the cabin or the truck had needed repairs, she had bartered part of his fee for that.

  He paid her a nice sum, but not enough for her to live on.

  Next, he tracked down her utility accounts and, in both cases, she’d paid her bills in person, in cash, and always on time.

  Gentry had stewed about it all night before bringing the subject up with Ceelie. “In cleaning up the cabin, did you find any kind of ledger where Eva kept up with money? Any receipts?” Often, people who lived on the cash system—especially older people—were obsessive receipt keepers.

  “A lot,” she’d said. There had been papers and receipts scattered all over the room. The ones covered in blood she had glanced through and thrown away. As for the others, she’d found an empty shoebox she figured they had been in when Lang ransacked the cabin, so she put them in there and stuck the box under the bed.

  This morning, he’d gotten permission from the TPSO to visit the cabin. The driveway was empty, but he figured there were deputies or state police either in the adjacent wooded areas or nearby in a boat. He made plenty of noise, slamming his truck door, jingling his keys, and taking his time on his way to the cabin so anyone watching would see his uniform.

  Being mistaken for Lang could get dangerous. The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if Jennifer Mason had made that mistake when he found her outside the garage. No way Lang could have been hiding out there for three years, but he could’ve been there overnight, which meant she might know more than they’d thought.

  Gentry let himself inside the unlocked door. It was hot as hell from being closed up for several days, but nothing looked out of place. He figured Lang would be laying low for a while, but if he were still in Terrebonne Parish, his brother would take another run at searching this cabin eventually. He’d bide his time, wait until he felt safe, and try again.

  A squawk from his radio almost sent Gentry through the ceiling. If he got any jumpier, he’d be screaming like a girl—a comparison about which Ceelie and Jena would have plenty of commentary.

  It was Stella, verifying that he was in the cabin after she’d been called by a member of the TPSO surveillance team. “Yeah, I’m here.” He was glad they were on their toes. “I should be here an hour or less.”

  “You get out of there as soon as you can, Gentry Broussard. The whole idea of that place gives me the creeps.” Stella managed to put a shudder in her words.

  Yeah, apparently it was working on his last nerve too.

  He turned on the AC and took a seat at the dining table with the shoebox in front of him. A pair of sad-eyed basset hounds stared at him from the scuffed brown-and-white box. Eva had bought herself some Hush Puppies shoes once upon a time—a long time ago, judging by the state of the box.

  He spent the next half hour going through receipts for electric bills, water bills, property taxes, automobile taxes. All paid in cash. Receipts for groceries bought at the Piggly Wiggly.

  Finally, he found one that sent his heart rate into a gallop: a pawnshop receipt from a place in Houma. Eva Savoie had received five thousand dollars in cash for what was described only as “two coins.” The receipt was dated six months ago.

  The money scattered around the cabin must be all she had left, or maybe Lang had taken some cash after all.

  What kind of coins would a pawnshop pay five grand for? One way to find out.

  Gentry sped through the rest of the receipts, but his gut told him he’d found what he needed. Once he finished, he took a cell-phone photo of the receipt from Houma Quik Kash as he’d found it in the stack. One never knew when a time-stamped photo would be helpful in a court case.

  He stuck the receipt in his pocket, stacked the rest of the papers back in the box, and returned the basset hounds to their spot under the bed.

  He sat on the bed for a few minutes. Ceelie’s bed. The house still smelled of pine, but also of her shower gel. His focus flitted from a place in the corner that looked as if the foundation pier was sinking, to a water stain on the ceiling over the throwing table, as Ceelie called it. Considering its age and the storms that had blown through here in the last century, the cabin was in pretty good shape. Eva had kept it up. With a little work, he could turn it into a nice place for Ceelie to live. Or a weekend spot for the both of them.

  Gentry shook his head, hoping to rattle some sense into it. He was getting way ahead of himself. He felt as if he’d known Celestine Savoie all his life, but they were still virtual strangers. Hell, maybe he was just lonely.

  He’d keep telling himself that.

  Using the radio clipped to t
he collar of his shirt, he roused Stella and asked if she’d find someone from the sheriff’s office who could drop by the cabin. He wasn’t going to sneeze without the TPSO being involved. Lesson learned. He didn’t like groveling so much that he wanted to give a repeat performance.

  Less than ten minutes later, he opened the door to welcome Adam Meizel.

  “We gotta stop meeting like this, Broussard.” Meizel stepped past Gentry into the cabin and leaned over in front of the window unit, letting the cold air hit him on the face. “Nice humble pie you served up yesterday for the department.”

  “Yeah, well, amazing what the desire to keep a paycheck coming will make you do.” Gentry pulled the receipt from his pocket. “What d’you make of this?”

  Meizel pursed his lips and studied the receipt, dark brows lowered. Deeply tanned, with dark-brown hair cut short, he wore the top button open on his light-blue short-sleeved uniform shirt. “Looks like Miss Eva had some money. Any idea what kind of coins these were and where she got them?”

  Gentry filled him in on Tomas Assaud’s comment about LeRoy Breaux being a thief, and his mom’s contention that LeRoy had had some kind of get-rich-quick prospects back in 1996 that had enticed his teenage brother. “Thought someone from the sheriff’s office might want to run up to this pawnshop and ask some questions. Might be that Eva Savoie has some assets hidden around here that we didn’t know about. Maybe that’s what Lang was looking for.”

  Meizel tucked the receipt into the shirt pocket beneath his shiny TPSO badge. “And let me guess; you’d be happy to ride shotgun.”

  Gentry nodded. “In the spirit of interagency cooperation, of course.”

  “Of course. C’mon. It’s almost time for me to go off duty anyway. You’ll have to drive, though. My partner needs to stay with the boat.”

  Like most towns that had seen more prosperous days, Houma was a mixture of historic buildings with small-town charm, modern parish-government structures, and urban sprawl, with the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway meandering through the middle of it all.

  Houma Quik Kash was housed in a concrete rectangle tucked amid an industrial corridor. It was a big rectangle, though, and judging by the number of cars filling the lot and the size of the place, it did plenty of business. Gentry figured it had to be prosperous if they could afford to pay $5K for a couple of coins. If it was like most pawnshops, those coins were worth a hell of a lot more than Eva got.

  They parked Gentry’s truck in the lot and studied the storefront a moment before getting out. “This is my show,” Meizel said. “Just in case you were wondering.”

  Gentry held up his hands. “I’m just observing.”

  He followed the deputy inside, aware of the stares they got from the customers. They probably didn’t often see a sheriff’s deputy and a wildlife enforcement agent together, both armed and in uniform, and Gentry doubted their presence would help business.

  “Can I do something for you, Officers?” The manager, a short, round, balding man in a rumpled pink shirt, came bustling from the back of the store, introducing himself as Jerry Dorchand.

  Meizel showed him the receipt. “We need to talk to whoever conducted this transaction. Looks like your name signed at the bottom.”

  He looked at it briefly. “Right. That would be me. Come on, let’s go in the back. Nothin’ personal, but you guys are bad for business.” Which made Gentry want to stand around the front of the store on principle, but he followed Meizel’s lead. They trailed Jerry through the junk heap of a store and into a back-corner office, a dark-paneled 1970s special complete with cheap green indoor-outdoor carpet. The pawnshop manager motioned them to a couple of metal folding chairs and took his seat behind the desk.

  “First, I want you to know this was a straight transaction—nothing funny about it.” Jerry compulsively straightened the papers on the edge of his desk, which struck Gentry as an awfully nervous tell for a guy who only conducted straight transactions. “Sellers sign a form sayin’ they got the right to sell what they’re sellin’.”

  “Don’t worry, sir.” Meizel’s voice was patient but firm. “We aren’t here to accuse you of anything. We’re trying to learn exactly what these coins were, and anything you can remember about the person who sold them to you.”

  “That old lady complain about somethin’? ’Cause she agreed to the price without no fuss, and she seemed to understand English well enough. Can’t always tell with them country folks. But she can’t come back after six months and send the sheriff to do her complainin’.”

  “Ms. Savoie is not complaining. Ms. Savoie is dead,” Meizel said, and the way Jerry absorbed that news, with relief, made Gentry want to blacken one of his beady, greedy little eyes.

  “That’s too bad, too bad. So what do you think I can tell you?” He remained on the edge of his chair as if he might bolt at any minute, but he had stopped reorganizing his paperwork. “Can I see the receipt again?”

  Meizel handed it over.

  “You get that many valuable coins in here that you need to look it up?” Gentry asked as Jerry flipped through a ledger and held the receipt alongside an entry.

  “You’d be surprised at some of the stuff people bring in here, Officer. Half the time, they don’t have a clue as to what they got. They usually think it’s worth three times what it really is.” Jerry returned the receipt to Meizel but squinted at Gentry. “How come a game warden’s involved?”

  “Never mind that.” Meizel folded the receipt and put it back in his pocket. “You remember enough about this transaction to talk here, or would you remember better over at the Justice Complex?”

  “No, no, no. I remember it.” Jerry leaned back. “It was for two 1861 gold dollars. 1861-Ds, as they’re called. Don’t see ’em very often. In fact, the only other ones I’ve seen were from this same lady—she brought three of ’em in a few years back.”

  Gentry racked his brain for anything intelligent to ask about coins, but his knowledge was limited to how many it took to get a soda out of a machine. “What’s special about these coins?”

  “Well, 1861 was during the Civil War, you know?” Jerry turned to the bookshelf behind his desk, pulled out a book of coin values, and began flipping through it. “There were only a couple of places in the Confederacy that minted coins, and 1861 was the last year there was any gold in the South to mint. Don’t see many of ’em around.”

  Gentry looked at Meizel as Jerry slid the catalog across the desk and thumped on the left-hand page with his index finger. “There’s the 1861-D.”

  Meizel looked at the catalog a moment before handing it to Gentry. “Did Ms. Savoie say where she got the coins, or how many she had?”

  Gentry scanned the page and almost choked to see the prices those coins sold for at auction. Jerry should be arrested for only paying Eva Savoie five grand for coins that were worth more like fifty grand apiece.

  “No idea, and believe you me, I asked her, ’cause those are quite a find,” Jerry said. “She said her granddaddy left ’em to her. You know there’s old wives’ tales about Confederate gold and pirate gold being buried all over South Louisiana. Gotta figure at least some of them stories is true.”

  Gentry frowned. The curse. Ceelie had told him the Savoie curse that the old man Tomas talked about began with Eva’s grandfather. Had he found a cache of these coins?

  If so, LeRoy Breaux might, indeed, have found himself a fortune. Or maybe Lang thought Eva still had the money.

  “Has anyone else come in and asked about these coins or about Ms. Savoie?” Gentry asked.

  Jerry leaned back in his chair and waited. He was doing them favors now and wanted to make sure they knew it.

  “We’d appreciate anything you can remember,” Meizel added.

  “Yeah, now that you mention it. There was a guy who came in a few minutes after her that day, wanting to see the coins and asking a lot of questions.”

  Gentry didn’t look at Meizel but he heard the tension in his voice. “This guy have a name?”r />
  Jerry shrugged. “No, and I hustled him outta here when it was clear he was fishing for information on the old lady.” He paused. “I didn’t tell him nothing about her. Nothing at all.”

  Jerry was able to give them enough description to determine that the man fit Lang’s profile.

  “Looks like we hit pay dirt,” Gentry told Meizel on the way back to the truck.

  “Yeah, let’s take a detour to the department while we’re in the vicinity,” he said, climbing back into the passenger’s seat. “I think we found your brother’s motive.”

  CHAPTER 21

  As soon as Gentry’s truck had turned off Pelican Street and driven out of sight, Ceelie threw the bones. She didn’t know how he’d feel about her doing rituals at his dining-room table, but he’d seemed pretty accepting of her mixture of mysticism and faith. Then again, he’d grown up in the parish, so he’d seen it all his life.

  Jena wasn’t due for another half hour, so Ceelie locked the front door as she’d promised to do, then turned off the lights, closed the blinds, spread out the leather mat, and lit the candles. She gathered the bones from her dad’s old cufflink case and prayed over them before raising them in both hands over the mat and letting them fall as Tante Eva had taught her so many years ago.

  “The bones never lie,” she whispered. “They always fall true.”

  Would the chicken foot still lie across the neck bone? Or had the sign of danger disappeared since she’d last thrown them three days ago?

  She opened her eyes and stared at the pile of bones on the mat. A chill stole across her scalp at their new configuration. The foot had landed across the neck bone again, but this time instead of being apart, the tiny skull had gotten tangled with them. One claw of the foot, crooked and awkwardly jointed, stuck through the eye socket.

  Not only was someone close to her in grave danger. So was she.

  The bones never lie.

  Maybe not, but they could be misinterpreted. Ceelie wasn’t sure what old Tomas would think of it, but she took a photo of the bones with her cell phone so she could show him. She’d been thinking about asking the old man if he would teach her the rituals. At least maybe he’d help her with this reading, because Ceelie knew there was meaning in every nuance of the bones with relation to each other. She’d forgotten most of what Tante Eva had taught her, and what she did remember was rusty and unreliable.