Men Made in America Mega-Bundle

by Gayle Wilson, Marie Ferrarella, Jennifer Greene, Annette Broadrick, Judith Arnold, Rita Herron, Anne Stuart, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Bevarly, Patricia Rosemoor, Emilie Richards

  Had he always had this blind spot? He’d believed that good was good and bad was bad. It made his job easier to do. Antoinette had tried to tell him differently.

  Antoinette…

  Antoinette was down at Bayou Midnight right now, visiting Didi. Sam felt a jolt of fear. The woman he loved was in the place he loved, and yet nothing was as it had always seemed. The facts were muddled now with emotions; he was no longer sure of his own name. He was only sure of one thing: he had to get to Antoinette, and he had to get there fast. And once he was there and sure she was safe, he had to investigate what Skeeter had said and interrogate Martin.

  He stopped only long enough to call Didi’s number once more. When there was still no answer, he grabbed his keys and rushed out the door.

  Antoinette lay under a heavy tarpaulin on the bottom of a wooden skiff and tried to untie the ropes binding her hands. It was a useless attempt, but she couldn’t keep herself from trying. The tarp smelled of fish, and it was constructed of stiff black canvas that absorbed the day’s bright sunshine. It was difficult to breathe the fetid, smothering air that filtered through the canvas, and there were moments when she wondered if she would die before they reached the chenier, where death would come slower but even more inevitably.

  They had been traveling for a long time before she felt the weight of the tarp being lifted off her. Leonce’s bandanna made it difficult to gulp the air she needed, but she was able to breathe more efficiently. Slowly she felt better. The tarp was replaced, then lifted off several more times before she felt the boat slow. She had lost all concept of time. It might have been days or only an hour since the men had tied her and dragged her into the skiff. The tarp was removed once more, and rough hands pulled her to a sitting position. Leonce bent over from his seat in the skiff to untie her feet.

  It took precious moments for her eyes to focus. They weren’t in the marshes. The area was a desolate swamp, rank and evil looking with dry land almost nonexistent. “This place usually got more land this time of year,” Leonce was saying to Lew. The other man, Jerry, was nowhere to be seen. She imagined he was in another boat, loaded with dynamite, on his way down to the Gulf.

  “It’ll have to do. We don’t have time to look for something else.”

  Leonce hesitated, his gaze flicking quickly over Antoinette’s face before he looked back at Lew. “All right.”

  She implored them both with her eyes and made sounds deep in her throat, but they ignored her. Lew maneuvered the skiff as close to one tiny little rise of land as he could, and Leonce stepped out, sinking almost to his waist in sucking black mud. He stepped up on a cypress knee, pulling the skiff closer until he could reach Antoinette. With one strong jerk she was beside him on the knee, then she was shoved to the dubious support of spongy ground.

  Leonce helped her rise to her feet, then touched her cheek, wiping away one errant tear. “I’m sorry, ’Toinette,” he said loud enough for Lew to hear. “I’ll be back,” he promised under his breath as he turned and stepped back down in the mud to climb into the boat.

  She stood on shaking legs on the narrow bank and watched the skiff pull away. Her hands fumbled frantically with the rope that tied them. Her bonds seemed looser, and she remembered Leonce had pulled her up by the rope after he’d shoved her off the cypress knee to the ground. She wondered if he’d purposely loosened it. The skiff was far in the distance when she finally managed to slip the rope off her hands. In a second her mouth was free, and she stood, gratefully gulping the heavy, foul-smelling air as the boat finally disappeared from sight.

  Leonce had said he’d be back. Had he meant it? Lew wouldn’t be back, nor would Jerry. They had chosen a spot so remote, so isolated, that if someone stumbled on her in the next week, it would be miraculous. They had talked about leaving her on one of the cheniers down toward the marshes. She knew enough about the terrain to realize how much more preferable that would have been. The cheniers were high ridges of dirt deposited by the Mississippi on its way to the Gulf. Once established they often grew wind-twisted oak trees to further hold down the soil and keep it from eroding. At her most optimistic she had pictured herself waiting under the shade of one of those trees for a fisherman or a trapper to rescue her.

  At her most pessimistic she had expected Lew or even Leonce to kill her. Instead, she was somewhere in between life and death, in the middle of a horrible, pestilent back-hole cypress swamp that no one would ever choose to come into. If Leonce didn’t return for her, it would be the last place she would ever see.

  The ground she stood upon was no more than twelve feet in diameter. There were cypress trees all around her, most of them out of reach unless she waded through the mud. None of them was large enough to climb. Trees that size had been logged for their rot-resistant lumber, and even in this hellhole there were skeleton trunks testifying that the loggers had been there sometime this century.

  She suspected that until today the loggers had been the last people in this swamp. Leonce had pretended to know this place, but she wondered if even he had really ever been there before. If people had been few and far between, however, the swamp was still teeming with life. The birds she had found so beautiful around Sam’s cabin were there. As she turned to examine the tiny island, she watched a gray water snake slither off into the muck that had been behind her. She stifled a cry, forcing herself to breathe deeply. There were dozens of varieties of snakes that lived in the basin. Only a small percentage of them were poisonous. If she allowed herself to panic each time she saw one, she would die of the fright.

  She tried not to think about the snakes. There would be alligators here, too, and insects that most people didn’t even know existed. She swatted at a deerfly that persistently buzzed around her head and tried not to think about dusk and the onslaught of mosquitoes that would come. Sam had told her once that mosquitoes were usually worse at dusk, fading away as day passed resolutely into night. If she was lucky, there would only be an hour or two of mosquito torture. And, of course, by dark she would be surrounded by this hostile environment without light to see what was around her. Mosquitoes would be the least of her problems.

  She started to cry then. There was no way of controlling the helpless, strangling fear that rolled over her in waves. She gave in to it, sinking to her knees and covering her face with her hands. As she sobbed, she began to pray.

  Sam slammed on the brakes of his Toyota, narrowly missing the big sheepdog who stood in the middle of the dirt road leading to Didi’s house. Sam had driven the familiar roads to Bayou Midnight examining every car coming from the opposite direction in fear that he would miss Antoinette. Now Tootsie’s presence assured him that she was still there.

  He rolled down his window and shouted a few succinct words. The dog barked sharply several times as if offended by Sam’s rough treatment before she moved to the side of the road to lie with her head on her paws and stare down into the bayou. Sam drove on, parking behind Didi’s house. He sat at the steering wheel for a moment, trying to figure out what was going on. Antoinette’s car wasn’t here, nor had it been parked at Claude’s house. Didi’s car was gone, too, indicating that they weren’t together. Perhaps he had missed Antoinette after all, and yet Tootsie was still here. He couldn’t imagine Antoinette leaving Bayou Midnight without her dog.

  There was no explanation inside the house, either. He found a brief note of thanks from Antoinette to Didi, with a promise to call later that day to tell Didi about her talk with Claude. He puzzled over the cryptic message, feeling more and more uneasy. Something was wrong, but nothing fit well enough to form an answer.

  When no other information turned up, he took a shortcut back to his uncle’s house. Berry brambles tore at his pant legs, but he paid no attention. In the woods beside his uncle’s house, he stood gazing toward the water. Nonc Claude’s skiff was gone, and one of the two pirogues that usually sat on the dock was gone, too. He walked down to the water, looking for something out of the ordinary, but everything was in place.
He was just about to try the house when he noticed that the door to the boathouse was locked tight.

  The lock was new and shiny, an intrusion in a world where everyone trusted everyone else and things were always as they seemed. When had Nonc Claude taken to locking the boathouse? Or had locking it been Martin’s idea?

  Locking an isolated boathouse was the kind of peculiar behavior that was to be expected from his cousin now. It could be an example of Martin’s paranoia, an attempt to lock out a world that was increasingly infringing on his way of life.

  Or it could be something worse.

  The sixth sense that had failed Sam so often in his search for the Omega Oil saboteurs was working overtime. If he was wrong, he would kiss the ground at his cousin’s feet in apology. If he was right and Martin was in trouble, was, in fact, making trouble, he didn’t know what he’d do.

  At the door of the boathouse, he pulled out the one piece of equipment that identified him as a cop better than any other and shot off the lock. Inside, his worst fears were confirmed. There had been a scuffle here. The signs were unmistakable. He scanned the room as he approached the closet door and prepared to shoot off that lock, too. But there was no need. The lock was not snapped shut. He lifted it and opened the door. The closet appeared to be empty. It was only just before he turned away, when his eyes had finally adjusted to the dim light, that he saw one single dynamite cap tucked into a crack in the corner.

  “So now you know.”

  Sam wasn’t surprised to hear Martin’s voice. He had, after all, been the one to teach Sam to move with the silence of the hunted. Sam turned slowly and faced his cousin, gun still in hand. “What is it I know, Martin?”

  Martin narrowed his eyes. “You, you’re the big cop, Sam-son. The truth, it’s all around you, heh? You should smell it like the coon smells the new young in an egret’s nest.”

  “What I smell is the stench of evil.” Sam threw his gun on the floor between them. He began to stalk his cousin, his hands tightly knotted into fists. “Where’s Antoinette?”

  Martin watched his cousin advance. His eyes were sorrow filled. “Me, I taught you better, Sam-son. Can’t you see what’s happened?”

  “I can see you’re not the man I thought you were.” Sam’s tone was deadly. In that moment he knew his control was almost gone. “What have you done with her? Where’s Antoinette?”

  “With Leonce.”

  Sam advanced another step. “Don’t make it worse by lying, Martin. Leonce is on his rig. Where is she?”

  “Do you think you can beat me, Sam-son? Will it bring back your woman?” Martin threw up his hands in a Gallic gesture as old as civilization itself. “Listen to the truth, l’imbecile. ’Toinette’s with Leonce. I got here too late to stop them. Me, I deserve a beatin’ for lettin’ this happen!”

  Sam stopped a foot from Martin. “You have thirty seconds to tell me what you’re babbling about.”

  “Leonce, he knows about those fires. He didn’t set them, but he knew who did, and he wouldn’t go to the police.”

  Sam sucked in a breath. He knew that, no matter what Martin had become, he would not protect himself by incriminating his brother. “Go on.”

  “I been tryin’ to watch out for him. It’s been makin’ me crazy knowin’ the trouble he’s in. He don’t know I know what he’s done, but I do. He changed, got eaten up inside, and no one saw it but me. So I followed him and put the story together from little pieces of talk.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Two men he works with, friends, were settin’ the fires. Leonce found out and tried to stop them. He didn’t wanna turn them in. He found out they was gonna blow up the Omega Oil buildin’ in New Orleans, and he followed them there, but he was too late. He went into the building, even saved a little girl’s life, but she saw his face. Then he knew he was in it, too.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “You, you’re a cop,” Martin said simply. “I had to try and protect my brother. Even from you, Sam-son. Even from you.”

  Sam knew enough about family loyalty to understand what Martin had done. His shoulder throbbed, and he felt unutterably weary. The rage he’d felt was turning into fear. Where was Antoinette? “You made a bad decision.”

  “Worse than you know. I thought it was all over. Then las’ night I came in here late. Leonce, he’s been keepin’ that closet locked. Said he wanted to keep his traps there under lock and key. Didn’t make no sense, he’s got his own house, but Papa agreed. Las’ night I saw the lock was new. I picked it and found a closet full of dynamite. Leonce, he’s been staying down on Bayou Sorrel, so I went there at dawn to talk to him. But he was gone. By the time I got back here, the dynamite, it was gone, too.”

  “How much dynamite was there?”

  “Enough to blow up an oil rig. Leonce’s rig, it’s empty now, no one on it but a few watchmen. But if it goes, Omega’ll go, too. Poof, no more cheatin’ oil company.”

  Sam could feel his whole body sag. “What makes you think Antoinette is with Leonce?”

  Martin’s expression was compassionate. He reached across the space between them and rested his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “Pray to le Bon Dieu that she is,” he said softly. “’Cause if she’s not, she’s in her car. And her car is at the bottom of Bayou Midnight.”

  Chapter 16

  The parish sheriff stood at the bayou’s edge, staring down into the water that had been named only too well. It was as black and as mysterious as midnight. He shook his head slowly. “There’s nothing we can do until the scuba team gets here and goes in to investigate. Only a damned fool would have gone into that water without the right equipment, son.”

  Sam stood beside him on the bank, clenching and unclenching his fists. His clothes still dripped from his own pathetic attempt to find what lay under the murky surface covered with a torn patch of water hyacinth. He had never felt so helpless. Now, as he watched, two deputies knelt on the ground behind him, measuring tire tracks and jotting down notes. “She could be down there,” Sam said, shoving his fists into his pockets.

  “If she is,” the sheriff answered kindly, “getting her out fast ain’t gonna help.”

  Sam was holding himself in rigid control, but he knew if he could see his own face, it would have the look of a man who has just seen the worst life has to offer. He wished he could break down and release the lump in his throat that threatened to choke him. It would be better than this terrible restraint.

  The sheriff was still speaking. “Why don’t you go back to the house, son. We’ll come up and tell you as soon as we know something.”

  Sam gestured in the general direction of the Gulf. “If I can’t be out there looking for her, I want to be here.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could do about looking for anybody. Those men had hours on you. And the coastal police are waiting for them at the rig.”

  Sam knew the sheriff was right. He had fought for the right to be in on the chase, but in the end Martin’s and the sheriff’s common sense had won out. It was more important for Sam to stay close to Bayou Midnight in case Antoinette was found in her car or somewhere in the vicinity. One other thing had influenced his decision. When he had called the coastal police to report what he’d learned from Martin, he had found they already knew about the planned explosion on the oil rig. Leonce—finally choosing law over loyalty—had managed to alert them. There was no way that the men could escape. Leonce had helped save the rig from destruction. Sam could only hope that he had saved Antoinette from the same.

  “It’ll be her car down there, but ’Toinette won’t be in it.” Martin came around the corner and stood on the bayou bank, next to the spot where Tootsie lay peering down into the water as if she expected her mistress to rise from its depths. Martin spit in the water for emphasis.

  “Someone drove it off the road…or worse,” Sam said, hating the opaque, tannic-stained water, hating the bayou that had once given him a new life.

  “I thi
nk the car was pushed in.” One of the deputies stood, gesturing at indentations in the dirt between the parallel tracks. “These look like boot heels. Someone puts it in neutral, then they give it a big shove or two. Over it goes.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” the sheriff said, not even turning to examine the marks. Sam knew the sheriff had seen them immediately. He had, too. The sheriff didn’t even flinch at the deputy’s words. “Get some pictures. It’s gonna rain.”

  The sky had darkened prematurely, not with twilight, which was still a good two hours away, but with the portent of a ferocious bayou storm. No one had to say out loud just how much more difficult it would be to get any leads if the storm hit. All of them knew. And if the scuba team didn’t get there fast, they’d have to wait until morning to find out the truth about the car.

  “She’s not in that water,” Martin reaffirmed. “Leonce, he wouldn’t let her die.”

  “Hope you’re right, son,” the sheriff said, scratching his belly. “Your brother’s in enough trouble as it is.”

  “Martin! Sam!” Didi’s voice drifted toward them at the same moment the staticky squawking of the sheriff’s radio cleared and a message for him to call in came over the airwaves.

  Sam turned to watch Didi running toward them, waving her arms to catch their attention. She had arrived home from church right behind the sheriff’s car. Sam hoped he would never have to be the one to break this kind of news to a loved one again. She had cried and refused to believe it at first, but in the end she had accepted Sam’s words with courage and faith in Leonce. She would not believe that her beloved husband had done more than show ill-advised loyalty, and she could not believe that he would have let anything happen to Antoinette. Sam hoped to God she was right.

  Now Didi stopped in front of Sam, gulping for air and talking twice as fast as usual. “The police called. Leonce and the others, they’re in custody.”