River Road

by Johnson, Suzanne

  “I’ll be ready at noon.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Norma Warin’s picture should be in the encyclopedia under the listing for Iron Maiden, or so I deduced. From Alex and Jake, I’d heard wild stories that I hoped had been exaggerated. Norma escorted by security from a Little League game for threatening to tell the umpire’s wife where he’d been the previous Saturday night (it involved a poker game and a stripper). Norma frightening noisy neighborhood kids with a single well-placed look from her living room window. Norma reducing her husband and four grown sons to utter subjection with a steely glare and a compression of lips.

  I pondered Norma as Alex drove the Mercedes onto the I-10 ramp, headed north. I’d been reduced to soliciting Eugenie’s help again, and we’d settled on a simple pair of dressy black pants and a solid red cashmere sweater she’d loaned me to go with it. I argued against red—scarlet letters and brothels being red-related words I didn’t want Norma Warin thinking about—but Eugenie assured me once again that one could never go wrong with cashmere. It had been so helpful on my date with Jake.

  Showing up on the arm of Norma’s baby boy, even if he was six-three and usually well-armed, was guaranteed to put me under a microscope. I’d met Alex’s older brother, Don, and I’m sure Alex-and-DJ sightings had been reported to Norma on multiple occasions since Katrina. Families never believe the just friends story, even when it’s true, and I blamed my big, clucking partner for letting this farce drag on.

  I rarely heard anything about Norma’s other half, Thomas, so I had him pictured as a tall, thin rabbit of a man who did his best to stay out of his wife’s way as she bulldozed through life.

  I wondered if Jake still planned to be there. He hadn’t called me; I hadn’t called him. I wanted to tell him not to pull away from me out of fear, but I hadn’t come to terms with my own reaction. Things were more awkward now than when he’d first been turned.

  “Do you know if Jake’s coming today?” I asked Alex.

  “Probably.” Alex turned down the volume on his satellite radio, pumping out contemporary country tunes that were about to put me to sleep. “Keep waiting for one of you to mention your date the other night. How was Zachary Richard?”

  I smiled at the memory of the music, the crowd, Jake. If you sliced off the last hour of the date, it had been amazing. “He was terrific. I still can’t believe Jake got him to play the Gator.” It helped that the proceeds had all gone to wetlands preservation.

  “So you just went to dinner, then listened to music?”

  He was fishing like a merman, his tone too detached and casual.

  “Yep.” I wasn’t going to lie, but I also wasn’t volunteering anything.

  He glanced over at me. “What are you not telling me?”

  I huffed. “I’m not giving you a minute-by-minute breakdown of my date, Mr. Snoopy. I don’t ask you what you’re doing every minute you spend with Leyla.” As badly as I wanted to, especially since I knew they had gone out last night while I was sleeping off my merman hangover.

  “Leyla doesn’t have Jake’s issues,” Alex said. “But I’ll tell you anything about my date you want to know.”

  I wanted to know how he felt about Leyla. No, scratch that. I wanted to know how he felt about me. And I hated that I wanted to know.

  I watched the urban sprawl of New Orleans East fly by as we sped toward the Mississippi state line. “I don’t want to know anything about your date.”

  Of course I did, but the questions were all highly inappropriate. It was none of my business if he bonked Leyla till dawn or if he wished she were in the car with him today instead of me. This was all Alex’s fault. One kiss and a couple of innuendoes, and he had me wondering things I shouldn’t.

  I changed the subject. “What did Jake find out about Melinda Hebert and her autopsy?”

  Alex cursed as an SUV whipped in our lane and cut us off. “Just more weirdness. We all assumed she drowned and somebody found her and laid her out there on the bank, but there was no water in her lungs. No signs of trauma to the body. They’re waiting for tox reports to come in, but early assumptions are it was a suicide because she was distraught over Doug’s disappearance.”

  “She took poison or overdosed on something, then went out and arranged herself on the riverbank in Duvic?” I didn’t buy the suicide theory. It would work fine for the Plaquemines authorities but they were missing some key bits of information. Like the fact her husband had been mutilated, and that a breach with the river of the Underworld was found near her body.

  “I’ve been doing research on the Styx, but things have been so busy I haven’t gotten very far with it,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing tomorrow, though. I’m going to figure out what the connection between the Styx and the dead wizards is if it kills me.”

  Alex cleared his throat and assumed his sarcastic faux-French accent. “Would that be tomorrow before your dinner date with Jean Lafitte?”

  “Did you know you sound like a cartoon skunk when you do that? And besides, I don’t meet him till seven. I have all day.”

  He shook his head. “I have nothing else to say on that subject.”

  Good. Because now that it was getting closer, I was nervous about it. It had been quite a while since Jean had tried to kill me, but, as Alex pointed out, the man always had an agenda and I hadn’t figured out how dinner with me was going to benefit him.

  My partner reminded me I had more immediate worries. “We need to create some dating history before we get to Picayune.”

  I banged my head on the car window, and a sudden onset of nerves sent my heart skipping. “If we’ve been together since Katrina, we’re probably at the stage in our relationship where we bicker and sit around watching reality shows and eating off TV trays.”

  Alex grinned. “That’s what a long-term relationship looks like to you?”

  I thought about it. “Well, yeah. What does it look like to you?”

  He paused, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “No idea. Never had one. You just described my parents.”

  This would not be fun. Since being sent to live with Gerry as a kid, I hadn’t been around a big group of extended family—or even a small group, for that matter. My own family had imploded after my mom’s death. First my dad shunted me off, then my grandparents, and I’d ended up orphaned on the doorstep of the man I’d eventually learned was my father. And Gerry had no other family except Tish.

  The Warins bred like bunnies. Alex was the youngest of four and Jake the oldest of three. Except for Alex and Jake, all the siblings were married and had kids of their own. I’d never keep them all straight.

  A thrill of fear ran chittering across my nerve endings. What if Norma thought I was a potential grandchild producer? “Is it too late to back out? We could do something fun, like go to a shooting range. You could teach me all about the different kinds of guns.”

  Alex frowned until he looked over, saw my face, and recognized desperation setting in. “Mom has called three times this week to make sure you’re coming,” he said.

  “Great. She’ll be expecting someone taller.” And prettier, with better social skills and a domestic bone or two.

  “She probably thinks you’re pregnant since I’m finally bringing you home to meet the family.”

  Oh my God. I closed my eyes and tried to regulate my breathing.

  Alex laughed and turned the radio back up. The sound of banjos was not comforting.

  I fidgeted the last five miles, until he finally steered the convertible off the interstate, through a twisting set of two-lane highways, and onto a loose gravel road into the woods.

  He cursed as the car bounced over what wasn’t much more than a rocky path. “They built this house as their retirement home right before Katrina, then spent three years repairing it. Still no driveway.”

  We reached a clearing where a redbrick split-level house nestled on a wide swath of autumn-browning grass. An arc of spindly pines surrounded the back and one side. On the other sid
e, a herd of children rolled in a thick layer of straw, throwing prickly pinecones at each other and screeching in shrill pitches only the very young can achieve. Alex pulled behind one of several pickups littering the drive. I recognized Jake’s shiny red Ford.

  “Uncle Alex!” A sturdy boy of about four, dark curls bouncing in the chilly breeze, broke from the pack and came running, full-tilt. Alex caught him mid-air and roughhoused as the whole herd stampeded our way.

  Where had my enforcer gone? The guy who once stood in my house and tossed a grenade up and down just to intimidate me? The man who tried to give me a gun as a token of his esteem? The fellow who threatened to kill tomorrow night’s undead date? He’d obviously been abducted by body snatchers and replaced with this handsome, laughing alien. I smiled and stood back, letting the kids maul their uncle.

  The front door opened, and Jake stepped onto the porch, descended the steps, and walked toward us across the yard. One of the kids, a blond boy of three or four, broke from the group and ran to him, and Jake bent and picked him up easily. He looked strong and sure. Only that tightness around his eyes gave away the stress he was under, and I wondered how he’d explained the disappearance of the pronounced limp he’d brought home from Afghanistan.

  “Hey there, cousin.” He and Alex shook hands, just a nice canine-shifter and loup-garou, meeting for a family outing. Jake turned to me, a trace of his teasing drawl and a flash of dimples reminding me what might have been. “Norma’s just dying to meet Alex’s girlfriend after all these years. She’s all a’twitter.”

  The front door opened again and my stomach lurched, but it was another child joining the fray. I couldn’t do this. “Send me out a plate if you get a chance,” I told Alex, and turned to flee back toward his car.

  He extricated himself from the kids and grabbed my arm as I went by. “It won’t be that bad.” He jerked me closer to him and put an arm around my waist. From a distance it probably looked affectionate, but he held me in a vise grip. I wasn’t going anywhere he didn’t go, and he was heading toward the front door, from which a formidable woman with a helmet of dark hair had just emerged with a big smile on her face.

  “Well, bless your heart, you must be Drusilla.” I swear to God Norma Warin sounded just like Shirley McClaine’s character in Steel Magnolias. “We’ve just been dying to meet you, honey.”

  She gave Alex a quick kiss, then grabbed my arm and pulled me away from him and into the house. “Aren’t you just the cutest thing? I didn’t realize you were such a little bitty girl. Come on in the kitchen with the rest of the ladies.”

  I threw a helpless look over my shoulder at Alex and Jake, who stood side by side in the doorway, laughing. Maybe my misery could bring them closer.

  * * *

  The family gathering wasn’t that bad, at least not until the fried chicken and mashed potato leftovers were all put away and everyone had finished a big hunk of the coconut cake Jake’s mom, Liz, always made for family to-dos.

  I’d been roasted and grilled by every female in the family and emerged battered but intact. My Alabama roots gave me some street cred in Picayune that helped make up for the deficiencies of growing up in New Orleans, which every upstanding citizen of the world knew was nothing but a hotbed of vice and corruption and licentious behavior.

  During the process of dumping leftover peas and broccoli casserole into plastic containers and burping the lids, Jake’s sister Juli informed me in no uncertain terms where I stood.

  “You better not be stringing Alex along, and I see Jake watching you. Didn’t think I saw that, did you? I swear, you better not hurt either one of them or you’ll answer to me. I don’t care if you are some hotshot FBI chick from New Orleans.”

  I nodded.

  She dumped at least a pound of banana pudding into a container and shoved it at me. “Take that home—it’s Alex’s favorite. You probably don’t even cook for him, do you? I wish he hadn’t settled on a career woman. Are you even a Baptist? Because your kids can’t be raised Catholic. We just can’t have that. We eat meat on Fridays clear through from Mardi Gras to Easter.”

  I didn’t know where wizards and shapeshifters would fit into the grand scheme of things or exactly when she expected said kids to be born, so I just nodded again. It would all be over soon.

  Plus, I’d had a flash of insight into Alex and his family dynamic. The fried fowl wrapped in tinfoil wasn’t the only chicken here today. Cluck cluck cluck. He wanted me here, pretending to be his girlfriend, so the women would quit asking him when he was settling down and spawning new Warin babies. Since Jake was divorced it freed him from the family’s fear of his eternal bachelorhood, even though he had no kids to show for it.

  Juli and I emerged from the kitchen and joined the rest of the adults in the big family room. Things were winding down, and the TV had been turned to the local news—or at least news from Hattiesburg, the nearest station that didn’t have the taint of New Orleans on it.

  A little girl with wispy-fine blond hair and honey-colored eyes, no more than six or seven, tugged on Juli’s arm. It was Corey, her oldest. She looked like a short, female version of Jake, and I wanted to hug her.

  I needed to get away from all this domesticity before it rubbed off on me in some permanent way.

  “Mama.” She got louder the more Juli tried to shush her. “Look.”

  Our eyes followed her finger toward the front window, from which we could see across the porch and into the yard. Backlit by the low-hanging sun of early dusk, Jake and Alex stood nose to nose, arguing intensely. I didn’t think they were discussing Liz’s coconut cake.

  “I bet they’re fighting over you,” Juli said, loud enough for the mamas, Norma and Liz, to hear. I’d have given her a good, hard magical zap if I could’ve gotten away with it and wasn’t still suffering from merman-lag. “You need to break it up before they start throwing punches.”

  I considered slipping a silencing potion in her glass of iced tea. I had all the basic ingredients in my purse and it didn’t take any curing time. A quick trip to the bathroom and I could have it ready.

  Tom Warin, every bit as tall and but not quite as brow-beaten as I’d imagined, spoke up for the first time. “Those boys been fighting their whole lives. It ain’t like this is the first time and it won’t be the last. Just let ’em go at it. They never hurt each other too bad.”

  His pronouncement made, he turned the TV to the Weather Channel and ignored the storm brewing in his front yard.

  His brother Ed, shorter and the source of his son’s dimples, chuckled and leaned his own chair back to assess the situation. “Nothin’ serious.” He returned his attention to the TV. “They ain’t even bleeding yet. Looks like a cold front’s headin’ in next week. Better check on that shipment of space heaters.”

  I sighed and walked onto the porch to get a better look. Jake’s dad was wrong; it was serious, whether anyone was bleeding or not.

  “Hey guys,” I said softly, moving off the porch and stepping between them. Probably not the smartest move, but I didn’t know what else to do. I turned my back to Alex and faced Jake. Alex had better control, and Jake was about to lose it.

  I put my hands on his chest. “Look at me, Jake.” I repeated it three times before he finally dropped his gaze from Alex and turned cold, calculating eyes to me. Fear shot through me, and I saw his nostrils flare. Jake was barely home, and the wolf smelled my adrenaline rush. Again.

  He blinked hard a couple of times and backed up, shaking his head. “I. God. Shit.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “I should never have come back. I don’t think I can do this.”

  “What happened?” I turned to Alex with raised eyebrows.

  “We were just having a discussion.” Alex looked mad enough to chew glass. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the house. “Get your stuff. We need to head back.”

  We packed up the wrapped plates of food and the container of banana pudding, and got back on the road with a minimum o
f drama.

  I waited till we hit the I-10 before I started. “Tell me.”

  Alex feigned ignorance. “About what?”

  “You and Jake. What was that about? He was about a second away from going all loup-garou on you, and you weren’t backing him down.”

  He chuffed, sounding more like Gandalf than Alex. “He told his enforcer sponsor he wants to take field assignments, not do investigative work. It’s a bad idea.”

  I thought about Jake’s admission that he wanted to kill things. Field assignments would let him do that and maybe burn off some of that feral energy. But what if the more he killed, the less picky he was about what he killed?

  “What does his sponsor say?” I shifted in my seat. “I can see both sides of it. I mean, admit it, you miss the field work too, don’t you?”

  Alex clammed up. I had a quick ethical argument with myself over whether or not it was fair to try to read his emotions, then said to hell with it and did it anyway. I pretended to watch the shadows of the new Twin Span bridges rising along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain while I opened my mind to his.

  Alex had always been hard to read, but he was upset enough that he was broadcasting more than usual. Frustration and anger didn’t surprise me. Jealousy did. He was jealous of Jake?

  Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. Jake was treading on Alex’s turf while Alex was stuck doing sentinel work. It put them in prime position to restart the macho rivalry that had died down the last few years as Alex maintained his FBI cover and Jake ran the Gator.

  Lightbulb. “You don’t want the competition.” I turned as far sideways in my seat as the seat belt would allow. “You don’t want Jake competing with you as an enforcer.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alex snapped.

  Yep, that was it. I’d nailed it. “Is not.”

  No answer. Clenched jaw. Big frown. I could see them in the soft lights from the dash as darkness fell.

  I turned back around in my seat and watched the ocean of dead trees that, this long after Katrina, still marked the entry to New Orleans East as they streamed through the car’s high beams. Alex pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine. Backwash from passing eighteen-wheelers jostled the car.