Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2)

by Susannah Sandlin

  “C’mon, Jena.” Jackson had finally found his tongue. “It’s no worse than those generic Xanax you pop every day. At least I didn’t drag a sharp art tool across my veins.”

  She rounded on him, concern morphing to fury. “Don’t ever mention that in front of me again.” She took a deep breath, bringing her anger under control. “Show me what you took.”

  Jackson shoved her out of the way hard enough to knock her off balance. She landed on the floor atop a pile of dirty clothes, papers, and graphic novels. He looked down at her for a few seconds, the war that raged inside him visible in his trembling lips and his clenched jaw. She could practically see it through his skin: the little brother she loved wanted to apologize and help her up; the tanked-up lunatic he’d suddenly become wanted her to suffer and maybe was considering even doling out more punishment. She froze in place, silent, waiting to see which Jacks would win the battle.

  Instead, he turned and stalked out of the room. The front door slammed and, outside, a few seconds later, tires squealed. She supposed he was off to get acquainted with more locals and whatever they were selling.

  Jena sat up slowly, her bones aching like an arthritic octogenarian. She undid the top three or four buttons on her uniform shirt and pulled it aside, wincing at even that small movement. The gunshot wound on the underside of her left breast had left a round, puckered scar, thanks to all the soft-tissue damage done by the bullet and the surgery to remove it. The scar might be redder than what passed for normal these days, but nothing was bleeding. The gunshot wound located lower on her abdomen, the one that had done the worst internal damage, was smaller, round, and not as red.

  Nothing had been visibly worsened by the fall, but she’d need to take it easy—maybe take one of the hydrocodone pills she still had left in a bottle in a kitchen drawer so she’d be able to sleep.

  No, scratch that. She was on duty tomorrow and didn’t need a drug hangover. Besides, she hated the way they made her feel.

  She rebuttoned her shirt and looked around for something to hold on to while she leveraged herself back to her feet. Under the corner of the heavy white-painted oak dresser her mother had purchased to furnish this bedroom, she spotted a small plastic sandwich bag, the type that had the built-in zipper closure. Jackson’s pot stash, damn it.

  She snatched it up before using the corner of the dresser to drag herself upright, then looked down at the sandwich bag. Her heartbeat grew more erratic as she realized the small plastic bag contained not marijuana but a few teaspoons of black powder. It could’ve been a coarsely ground black pepper, but Jena feared it wasn’t nearly as innocuous. Or maybe she was wrong. She prayed she was wrong, because she’d seen a drug that looked like this in a briefing in Thibodaux only a few days ago.

  Jena opened the bag and touched a cold, shaky finger to her tongue, then touched the powder, praying that whatever this stuff tasted like, it wasn’t anise. Black licorice was the signature taste of Black Diamond. Law enforcement officers who’d encountered the drug called it BSC—batshit crazy—because that was the effect it seemed to have on most who took it.

  Jackson drove her nuts, but Jena loved him. She didn’t know what to do if he’d gotten his hands on Black Diamond except turn him in and hope she could keep him away from doing any more of this stuff. It was said to have a greater addiction rate than heroin and meth combined, similar to the “Devil’s Drug,” flakka, that had been plaguing South Florida.

  Could Jena turn in her own brother? The right answer wasn’t easy, but it was clear. She had to. In good conscience, she couldn’t send him back to New Orleans and sweep the whole thing out of her life without trying to get through to him. And she sure couldn’t let him stay here, where he obviously had access.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t Black Diamond at all. Only one way to know.

  Jena touched her finger to her tongue and immediately spit the contents back out into her hand. She might as well have bitten into a black jelly bean.

  Now what?

  She returned to the central part of the house and tucked the plastic bag into the locked drawer in the foyer, taking out her SIG Sauer. Deep inside, she didn’t think Jackson would come back into the house and hurt her. But the gun was sleeping with her tonight anyway.

  If she slept at all.

  She walked into the spotless white-tiled kitchen with its pale-gray granite countertops and glass-paned white cabinets, and pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she thought better of it. She’d taken the ibuprofen and alprazolam earlier, plus she’d just fallen. Who knows—could that tiny taste of the drug have had an effect on her?

  No point in taking chances, and seeing Jacks’s dilated pupils had convinced her: she didn’t need drugs in this house. She no longer needed them, and Jacks sure didn’t need to add painkillers to his drug cocktail. She grabbed a bottle of water instead, pulled one of the stools to the kitchen’s large island, and sat. From the junk drawer, she removed the bottle containing the rest of her hydrocodone prescription, then took a knife and crushed each one. Finally, she poured the mound of ground powder into the trash. She didn’t want to flush the drugs or wash them down the drain where they’d enter the water supply. While she was at it, she did the same to the remaining antianxiety meds.

  She’d keep the ibuprofen.

  Jena had to talk to someone about Jacks, and it had to be someone she trusted on a personal level. He might not be her partner at the moment, but senior agent Gentry Broussard was still number two on her speed-dial list, right behind her lieutenant. Gentry was honest and, because he’d made his own share of mistakes, nonjudgmental.

  He answered on the second ring, and in the background, Jena could make out shouts of “two more Bud Lights” and “wings and sauce on table three.”

  Damn. It must be his night off. Since the DEA investigation had begun, and she’d spent that month on desk duty in Thibodaux, she’d lost track of everybody’s schedules.

  “Sinclair? Is that you?”

  Jena shook her head, trying to clear the cobwebs and what-ifs spun from fatigue and fear. “Hey, Gentry, sorry, I forgot it was your night off. This can wait.”

  “I’m just hanging out with Ceelie and Mac. Tell me what’s up.”

  Jena closed her eyes. This isn’t selling Jacks out. This is for Jacks.

  “I found some drugs in the house, in my brother’s room. I think it might be Black Diamond.”

  During a brief pause, exuberant voices filled the line. Gentry’s tone, when he finally spoke, was nowhere near exuberant. More like downright terse.

  “Is he there now?”

  Jena took a deep breath. “No, he just stormed out of here. He was acting crazy.” BSC. Batshit crazy.

  “I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Cole Ryan stepped out the back door of his solid early-century wooden house at the end of a dirt road optimistically named Sugarcane Lane, taking in the thick, cool air of morning. He still wasn’t sure Sugarcane Lane was an official name since the street sign had been painted by hand. The “lane,” only a block long, sat behind the back edge of a couple of no-longer-viable sugarcane fields the size of football fields and at the dead end of an inlet off Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes in eastern Terrebonne Parish.

  He’d found the place almost five years ago, although it might as well have been a thousand. Big blocks of time like months and years had ceased to have much meaning in Cole’s quiet days and quieter nights. Now, he was guided by the hours and days and seasons as revealed to him by nature.

  The little one-bedroom house met his needs. It had been cheap. Nothing had been wrong with it that he couldn’t fix himself. It was private. Only one other house on the lane was occupied, thanks to those who’d eventually been run to higher ground by frequent flooding or moved to greener pastures by the disappearing need for manual labor in sugarcane harvesting. He didn’t know the couple who lived catty-cornered across the lane but figured them to be people who had their own pas
ts and their own secrets. They stayed in their place, and he stayed in his.

  Cole was aware he’d become known as The Hermit by his female neighbor, who was likely both Catholic and highly superstitious—a common combination of beliefs in this land at the bottom of the United States. He’d never even seen her husband, only the hairball on legs she called a dog. She yelled at both in equal measure. The husband was Ron; the dog was Chewbacca.

  Cole didn’t figure there was much difference between a formal religion like Catholicism and superstition. At least not anymore. He’d given up on God about the time God gave up on him. They were even.

  He took a deep breath of damp morning air and could tell it was going to be a hot one. Might hit eighty for a few days before a big front moved through and cooled things down again.

  He wanted to get some fish in the cooler before noon, maybe enough to smoke and take out with him into the bayous for two or three weeks. The water and overgrown cane fields always made him claustrophobic by the time winter was done.

  Cole pulled on the muddy boots he’d left sitting on the back stoop, and it was then that he saw the alligator. He had no issues with gators. They’d usually leave people alone unless some damned fool had been feeding them, in which case they’d keep coming back in search of an easy snack until they had to be caught and relocated or some gun-happy imbecile killed them.

  He respected alligators. They weren’t afraid to show their teeth when backed up against the wall, and they were survivors. Except maybe this one.

  This guy—a big gator, maybe eleven or twelve feet long with a broad, thick head—wasn’t moving. It lay at the water’s edge, between Cole’s house and the spot where he tied off his small hand-carved pirogue.

  He sighed and went back into the house, pulling his shotgun off its rack inside the back door. Hopefully, he could just scare the damned thing away if it didn’t run when it saw him. Cole liked gator meat as well as the next guy out here in the wilds, but the state had a one-month gator-hunting season and this wasn’t it. The rest of the year, the once-endangered animals were off-limits. The last thing he wanted was a state wildlife agent sniffing around and getting in his business for something like killing a gator out of season.

  He was off society’s radar and had no intention of changing that.

  Only this gator wasn’t going to be frightened away; it was already dead. Cole nudged it with his boot a couple of times to make sure, then knelt beside it and slipped a hand on the softer flesh underneath its bony head. Judging by its body temperature, it hadn’t been dead long.

  He hadn’t killed the thing, so he technically wasn’t breaking any laws by keeping it—at least he didn’t think so. He could freeze or cure the meat and sell the hide and bones to one of the local processors. He didn’t really need the money, but no sense in throwing it away either. He respected what the gator’s life could represent to whoever found it. No death should be meaningless, human or animal.

  Looking around to make sure no fishermen were visible and his neighbor’s yappy dog hadn’t wandered too close, Cole wrapped strong hands around the gator’s tail and pulled it slowly into the square cinder-block building behind the house—the workhouse, as Cole called the structure he’d erected himself four years ago. The reptile easily weighed three hundred pounds or more, so by the time Cole got it inside, he’d broken out in a clammy, cold sweat.

  Scratch the fishing trip; taking care of the gator would have to be his first priority today. And maybe tomorrow. Fully dressing a gator this size would take a while.

  He searched the body for a clue as to what killed it. Bull gators didn’t crawl into the mud to die as they sensed death approaching, and they could live to a ripe old age of fifty. They grew about a foot a year their first decade before growth slowed, so it was hard to gauge this gator’s age. Maybe as young as fifteen, maybe as old as forty. Often, weak gators got attacked and eaten by other gators. As a carnivorous species, they weren’t too picky when it came to diet, and if another, weaker gator was hanging around at dinnertime? Oh well.

  But this gator didn’t look weak, nor could Cole find any indication that it had been shot. If he couldn’t find a hook in its gullet, he’d have to scrap the whole idea. Eating bad meat out of season could not only bring him onto the wildlife agents’ radar, but onto the medical establishment’s. Health insurance wasn’t as high on his list of priorities as staying healthy.

  Since moving to Terrebonne Parish five years ago, Cole had lived his own life on his own terms. He lived it alone. That had been his choice regarding how to deal with the hand life had dealt him. No regrets.

  There was only one way to know for sure about the gator. Cole relished the burn in his thigh and shoulder muscles, and the strain of his biceps, as he took hold of the massive head, dragged the alligator onto his wooden cutting table on wheels, and rolled the reptile onto its back. He worked hard to stay in shape and keep his body running like the machine it was. If only he could keep his head running like his body—a reliable, well-made bit of mastery—but he found his brain a much harder machine to master. Most days, it ran more like a rusty bicycle wheel with a warped rim.

  The hard, bony plate of the gator’s skull had hit the table with a resounding crack when he turned it over, and Cole waited a few moments before proceeding. The noise didn’t seem to have aroused any attention from neighbor or dog.

  From the shelf beneath the table, he pulled out a one-by-two-foot length of tanned leather and unrolled it to reveal a dozen steel knives of different sizes, weights, and edges, each attached to the leather by a hand-sewn strap.

  Removing the largest serrated blade from the set, he ran it across a honing rod a few times and set to work. The gator had been dead even less time than Cole had originally thought; its guts steamed in the cool air when he reached in gloved hands to remove them and throw them into an old blue plastic bin sitting beside the table. He didn’t look at them—bad enough just to smell them.

  Damn, but this thing reeked.

  Cole used the knife to expertly finish splaying open the belly of the gator, then stopped to examine what was left. The meat was pink and firm. Nothing looked diseased or smelled worse than any other gator did. They were all on the aromatic side.

  Cole opened the commercial walk-in combo cooler-freezer at the back of the workhouse and cleared some space on the cooler floor. Other than the house and the land, this refrigeration-and-freezer unit was one of the biggest purchases he’d made since moving here, especially if you factored in the cost of running an electric line to the workhouse.

  He rolled the worktable inside, left the gator, and locked the door behind him when he came back out. Next thing he had to do was dispose of the guts before the smell of decomposed food—whatever the hell that gator had eaten—attracted some of its family members in search of a snack. From a gator’s point of view, the more rotten the meat, the better it tasted. But he hadn’t found a treble hook in the gator’s gullet to have caused its death. Unless he found one in the stomach, he couldn’t risk eating the meat and would have to settle for selling the hide.

  Only one way to find out how this big boy had died.

  He grabbed the handle of the bin and dragged it down to the small dock, then slid it into his pirogue. By the time Cole dug out a pair of heavy rubber gloves and joined the gator guts in the boat, the pirogue sat low in the water. It was slow going as he used a heavy pole to propel himself up the branch toward Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes and northward along the bank.

  After about twenty minutes of poling, Cole tied off the boat to the trunk of a spindly husk of an oak tree that hung over the water, and used a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe the sweat off his forehead and the back of his neck. The air around him had already grown hotter and, as always here, thick and humid.

  From his other pocket, he pulled a makeshift headband-cum-scarf, unrolled it, and used it to tie back his long hair, some of the thick blond strands woven into braids. It almost reached his waist now. Then he w
rapped the whole thing around his forehead, turban style, and tucked in the ends.

  It would keep the worst of the sun off his face and let some air hit his neck. If anyone saw a blond-haired, blue-eyed man with a turban of braids, well, it would only add to his reputation as a crazy hermit and keep them away.

  Cole kept himself clean, but he had no use for barbershops or people. He kept thinking he’d use one of his knives and cut his hair off one of these days, but so far, that day hadn’t come. In a way, he guessed it had come to symbolize his determination to play by his own rules and stay in his own sandbox. Its length was his measure of the passage of time.

  He pulled on a pair of fresh plastic gloves and hauled the noxious bin onto the bank, then dragged it inland ten or twenty yards until it was in thick marshland—real land, not the deceptively soft marsh grass beds or flotons that might as well be quicksand.

  Returning to the boat, he procured a short shovel, traced his steps back to the area next to the bin, and dug until the burn in his shoulders and upper back became almost unbearable. Once the hole was deep enough, Cole buried the entire bin inside it. He was pretty sure that the bin had no usable life after hauling this foul-smelling shit, so no point in taking it home.

  First, however, he needed to feel around in its stinky contents and determine if there was anything in the guts to make him think the gator wasn’t edible. Hopefully, he’d find the treble hook and all would be safe.

  He made sure his elbow-length rubber gloves were firmly on and had no holes, then eased his hands into the mass of blood and gore. He held them there for only a few seconds before jerking them back out, his traitorous mind filled with scenes of blood and horror, shiny glass shards like jewels in a sea of crimson blood spread across a tile floor.

  Stop being a pussy, Coleman Ryan. It’s an alligator, not her. Not them.