Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Mac made a note of the name. “Any particular reason you take them there? Isn’t Patout’s bigger and closer?”

  “Yeah, I used to take them there.” Ray picked up his beer and took another sip. “But Amelia Patout—she’s run the place since her husband died—has the cancer, and one of her two boys has some kind of thing . . . I don’t know what you call it. But he don’t quite think right, y’know? So she’s not there a lot and her oldest kid’s trying to run the place. It’s easier to drive a few extra miles to Gateau’s.”

  Mac nodded and got to his feet. “Don Gateau’s a good guy; I’ve met him a couple of times, so maybe I’ll stop by and talk to him. Might stop by Patout’s too, in case they’ve seen something from one of the other hunters.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but like I said, she ain’t there most of the time anymore. But suit yourself.”

  Mac didn’t think he was going to get any more out of Ray Naquin, at least not today, so he headed toward the door. “Thanks for your time. I’ll definitely talk to Mr. Gateau.”

  “Hey,” Ray called from behind him. “I heard Jena Sinclair was already back at work. How’s that long, tall, sweet thang doin’?”

  She was doing well enough to beat the shit out of him if she heard him call her a long, tall, sweet thang. Halfway down the front steps, Mac turned. “She’s been back in the field a week or two. We’re partners right now. You got a message for her?” Since you disappeared after she got shot, asshole?

  “Sure, tell her Ray says he’s still waitin’ on that rain check for dinner one night soon.” He followed Mac down the stairs and stood in front of the porch. “Heard she got that pretty face o’ hers scarred up a little, though. And probably some other body parts.”

  A flush of anger spread over Mac’s skin to the point where he slammed his truck door as soon as he’d climbed in and immediately turned on the air conditioner to cool himself off. Otherwise, he’d be tempted to turn around and punch Ray Naquin square in his stubble. Mac didn’t know the extent of Jena’s scars, so he sure as hell figured Ray Naquin didn’t have a clue—the man was fishing for information that was none of his business.

  Punching someone while in uniform—or even off duty—would not be considered appropriate for a wildlife enforcement agent, his first partner, Paul Billiot, would have told him without a hint of a smile. Not that Paul ever smiled.

  So Mac had to settle for putting on his sunglasses and spearing Ray with his best inscrutable look.

  “On second thought, guess you better deliver that message yourself,” he said through the open window. “I’m sure Jena would be glad to hear from you.” And rip you a new one, asshole. “Have a nice afternoon.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Jena paced the tiled foyer of the house that Daddy bought, wishing she were at work, staking out a poacher, counting fish—anything except waiting for Gentry and a sheriff’s deputy to ambush her little brother and take him in for questioning.

  Jackson didn’t know it was coming. Jena had thought about warning him; she’d spent her whole life serving as the mediator between Jacks and her parents. Taking the blame for his screwups. Standing up for him.

  But he’d scared her last night with his erratic behavior before he’d stormed out, leaving Gentry and Mac to calm her down. She’d always been the tough one and he the mellow one, but last night, she’d felt threatened. Gentry had been through the whole guilt trip over shooting his brother in a drug-related incident several years ago, before he’d transferred to Terrebonne Parish. She’d seen enough of his guilt to know she didn’t want to live through it herself.

  Jacks had slammed into the house about 3:00 a.m. She’d been sleeping fitfully and instinctively had slid her hand beneath her pillow and wrapped her fingers around the familiar handle of her SIG Sauer.

  Then, all had grown quiet. Her brother had slept until noon, and now the soft sounds of his favorite indie folk band wafted down the hall from behind his closed door. She’d heard the shower. She’d heard him humming.

  She hadn’t smelled pot, but if he felt like singing with Mumford and Sons, he must be past his Black Diamond rage. She didn’t know how long it would take the drugs to leave his system, though, and didn’t want to risk setting him off again by admitting she’d turned him in to the sheriff, or at least she’d ratted on him to Gentry, who called the sheriff.

  No, she didn’t want to face Jackson until she had backup.

  Maybe it had been a one-time thing, an experiment. That’s what she kept telling herself. Maybe some dealer had given Jacks the plastic bag of drugs, hoping to get him hooked and to get his claws into a new client.

  Problem was, Black Diamond wasn’t a hook-’em-slow kind of drug, or so said all the reports being issued through the different agencies on an almost-daily basis. Like flakka in South Florida, Black Diamond was cheap, extremely addictive, and lethal. It could be shot up or smoked or swallowed or snorted—an equal-opportunity drug.

  Black Diamond had been streaming into Terrebonne Parish for the past two months, spreading west all the way to Houston and east to New Orleans and beyond. Officials weren’t any closer to figuring how and where it was coming in, or who was behind it, than they had been two months ago.

  A woman high on Black Diamond had run through oncoming traffic on I-10, stripping off every stitch of clothing as she ran from what she described as demons. A guy in Bourg had tied his toddler’s tricycle to the back of his pickup before driving it down Highway 55 at eighty miles per hour. He finally ran into a ditch. Thank God, he’d forgotten to put the child on the trike, although it had taken several very tense hours to establish that and locate the toddler, safe with his mother.

  Then there was the formerly mellow pothead computer genius doing naked cartwheels on top of a brick wall at his sister’s home in Chauvin. Jena guessed she’d gotten off easy, but Jackson wasn’t going to think so.

  The sound of approaching vehicles propelled her to the front window of the ballroom-sized foyer, where she pulled aside the heavy white brocade curtains to see Gentry’s black LDWF pickup followed by a squad car from the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. She was relieved to see Adam Meizel emerge from the TPSO vehicle; he and Gentry were buddies. Adam wouldn’t get too rough with Jacks.

  She opened the door before they could ring the bell. Gentry’s dark-eyed gaze honed in on her face with a serious glint, but his voice was soft. He even gave her a glimpse of his dimples, and his curly dark hair, as usual, needed a trim. “How’re you doing, Red? Any more problems? You look like shit, by the way.”

  Jena laughed for the first time in what seemed like forever. Mac had made her smile when he’d barfed on the boat, and now Gentry had made her laugh in the middle of a family crisis. A real laugh, not the fake one she put on to assure everyone she was okay. And he’d used his favorite nickname for her.

  Only her partner—make that her former partner and forever friend—would tell her how awful she looked and know that’s what she needed to hear.

  She loved these guys, and it made that moment of darkness when she tried to kill herself feel selfish and shortsighted. How had she let the blackness swallow her?

  Because it was so damned hard to climb toward the light when you sank low enough and felt there was no way out, that’s how.

  “It wasn’t my most restful night; let’s leave it at that. Hey, Meizel.” She stepped aside to let the guys in. At almost six feet, Jena was a couple of inches shorter than Gentry and at least two inches taller than Adam. Despite having spent a couple of decades in the parish, the deputy still sounded more like the folks up around Shreveport than a local, which is to say his accent was more Southern than Cajun. At least he didn’t say “eh.”

  He nodded at her. “Glad you’re back on the job, Sinclair. Bein’ on sick leave seems to have been”—he looked around the gaudy foyer, which was almost the size of Jena’s old efficiency apartment in Houma—“prosperous.”

  Jena laughed again. She had missed this, the camaraderie, the incessant
teasing, the family of law enforcement, and vowed to cut Mac Griffin some slack and stop being so judgmental. It wasn’t his fault he was an insanely cute womanizer from Maine. Well, the womanizer part was his fault, but it had nothing to do with Jena.

  The vibe between the three of them grew awkward. Jena couldn’t avoid the issue of Jackson any longer. “Okay, confession time. I didn’t have the guts to warn him you were coming, but I’ll get him now.” She glanced down the hallway, where her brother had shifted into a boisterous sing-along with an old Nickelback song they’d both loved back in the day, “If Everyone Cared.”

  She did care. The instinct to protect Jacks lay deep inside her, born in childhood when she felt the need to take the consequences and criticisms herself so he wouldn’t grow up with her neuroses. She’d always sensed he was more fragile than she, that she was the one who understood their parents’ own peculiar, detached form of love.

  Maybe, in the long run, however, she’d done him no favors. What was about to happen would be best for everyone, even though she was sure Jacks wouldn’t see it that way. He’d feel ambushed, and she couldn’t blame him.

  Jena headed down the hallway to the end room Jacks had claimed as soon as they’d arrived at the White Rhino. She knocked on the door and waited. The music cut off abruptly, and she sent a silent prayer heavenward that the brother who opened the door would be the one she’d loved and protected his whole life. Not the other one.

  The door swung wide and, even then, she wasn’t sure. Jacks’s hair, dark and thick, had been pulled up into one of those man-bun things Jena hated. Somehow, though, it suited him. He wore his orange Let Your Geek Flag Fly T-shirt and a pair of dark-green cargo pants. Black Chuck Taylors.

  In fact, he looked just like Jackson Sinclair usually looked, except for the sullen expression in his blue eyes and the cold tone of his voice. “You took my stash.”

  So this was how they’d play it then, the misunderstood brother and his straight-arrow sibling.

  “I took your drugs, and we need to talk about it.” Jena kept her tone level, using her enforcement-agent voice, not her sister voice. “In the living room. Now.”

  Her attitude seemed to take Jacks by surprise. He’d already turned back toward his bed of white tangled sheets and balled-up pillows, but stopped.

  “Talk about what? Who’s here? I heard cars earlier.”

  “A senior enforcement agent and a sheriff’s deputy, and they’re here to see you. They’re both part of the Black Diamond Task Force.”

  “Of course they are.” Jacks brushed his shoulder against hers on his way out the door, turned, and whispered, “Fuck you, Agent Sinclair.”

  She flinched inside but showed no emotion as she followed him down the hallway. “I’d suggest you drop the attitude.”

  He didn’t respond.

  Gentry and Adam had remained in the foyer-slash-ballroom, looking uncomfortable and out of place. “Gentry, I think you met my brother, Jackson, while I was in the hospital last fall.” She turned to Jacks. “Gentry is a senior enforcement agent and my former partner, and this is Deputy Adam Meizel of the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

  Gentry nodded and remained silent; Adam shook Jackson’s hand, and was also silent. The way things had been going, Jena was thankful Jacks hadn’t refused the polite handshake.

  “Why don’t we go in the living room and talk?” Jena walked ahead of them, cringing at the bright, sterile white of the tile floors, walls, and furniture when she turned on the lights. Her mother’s handiwork. The woman equated color with dirt.

  Jackson walked in behind her and slouched in the overstuffed white leather armchair. “You wanted to talk. Okay, talk.”

  Gentry remained silent and looked at Adam to take the lead, which told Jena more than anything that this was a TPSO case. It wasn’t a family matter. Gentry was there for her, not Jacks.

  “Mr. Sinclair, we have in our possession a small quantity of a synthetic drug known as Diamant Noir, or Black Diamond,” Adam said. “It’s my understanding that your sister found this in your room and turned it over to Agent Broussard, who brought it to the sheriff’s office.”

  Jacks turned cold eyes toward Jena, and she suppressed a shiver. How much of that shit had he done to have changed so much, and how had she been so self-absorbed for the last month that she hadn’t noticed?

  “That’s bullshit,” Jacks said. “If these drugs even exist, Jena found them when I wasn’t at home. They’re probably hers and she’s trying to cover her ass. You might want to follow up on that. You might want to have a talk.”

  A long silence followed. This, Jena hadn’t expected. “Seriously, Jackson?”

  He wouldn’t even look at her.

  “Jena, tell me what happened.” Meizel turned equally impassive eyes toward Jena, but in his, she read only professionalism, not hostility. Well, maybe a little anger, but she knew it was directed at Jacks, not her.

  “Sure.” She went through the exchange of the previous night, including the fact that her brother had been trying to do cartwheels on top of the brick privacy fence in back. “Naked,” she added. “If you make him strip down, you can probably see the scratches from where he fell in the crape myrtles.”

  Only a slight twitch from one tight corner of Meizel’s mouth gave away his urge to smile. Gentry stared at the carpet as if in deep contemplation. Jacks’s face turned the color of a Creole tomato.

  She wasn’t finished with him, the little shit. “I wouldn’t have found the drugs at all if my brother hadn’t shoved me to the floor,” she added, a ball of heat growing behind her eyes. He wasn’t throwing this back on her. “It was tucked beneath the corner of his dresser. You can probably find some residue if you search his room.”

  “My word against hers, dudes,” Jacks said, getting up and walking toward the foyer. “Unless you wanna press charges, I’d suggest you get your asses out of here. I’ve got things to do, places to go, people to see.”

  Gentry caught up with Jacks a foot from the front door and put a hand on his shoulder. “Jackson, we don’t want to arrest you. All we want to do is find out where you got the stuff. Do you think it was easy for Jena to call us when what she wanted was to protect you?”

  Jackson shrugged off Gentry’s hand. “You want to worry about drugs in your parish, Agent Broussard, why don’t you check my sister’s bag? Or is it okay for your agents to be racing around with guns while they’re buzzing on painkillers? Is it okay for her to work four months after she tried to slit her wrists with a fucking utility knife?”

  A chill washed across Jena’s shoulders. Who was this person? The brother she’d known her whole life would never try to throw her under the squad car.

  “We aren’t talking about your sister, who, by the way, is a skilled law enforcement agent who took two bullets in the line of duty a few months ago, son.” Gentry’s voice was low, but serious. “We’re talking about you, an unemployed twenty-four-year-old who had almost an ounce of an illegal synthetic drug stashed in his bedroom, not to mention what’s probably still in your system. All we’d need is one simple blood test.”

  Gentry paused. “We’re talking about jail time, Jackson. Do you understand what kind of trouble you could be in?”

  Time seemed to stretch into slow motion. Jackson turned like an enraged devil, tightened his fingers around Gentry’s throat, and squeezed. He moved so fast that Gentry wasn’t able to get his hands up to protect himself and was left trying to breathe and pry Jacks’s hands off at the same time. Jackson wasn’t nearly as strong as Gentry, so it had to be the drugs. Jena had heard stories of users having almost superhuman strength.

  She ran toward them, but Adam got there first. He kicked Jacks’s legs out from beneath him and, by the time her brother hit the floor, Meizel was kneeling on his back, one hand pressing his head against the tile. The handcuffs clicked shut with a loud scrape of metal, and Meizel jerked Jacks to his feet, with Gentry’s help. It was over in a matter of seconds.

 
; All four of them stood still for a moment. Until Jacks, his chin bleeding from hitting the floor, began spewing more accusations at Jena, laced with a liberal dose of f-bombs. Then life sped up again. Meizel held one of Jacks’s arms while Gentry held the other. The deputy had started his Miranda warning by the time they’d gotten Jacks out the front door, shoving him toward the patrol car none too gently.

  Jena followed them out, torn between being a sister and a cop. She settled somewhere in the middle, not interfering while Meizel shoved a cursing Jackson into the back of the patrol unit but blocking the doorway when the deputy tried to close it.

  “Keep your mouth shut and don’t pull any more crap,” she warned Jackson, who gave her a sullen stare. “I’ll call Dad.”

  “You bitch, don’t pretend you care about—”

  Jena slammed the door, leaving her brother alone in the patrol car to curse to his heart’s content. She turned to Gentry, whose neck already sported the beginnings of finger-shaped bruises. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, let’s go inside a minute. We’ve gotta talk.”

  “Later, Gentry. I need to go to the jail and see about Jacks.”

  “No, you need to sit down and talk to me first. Let Meizel take care of Jackson.” Gentry’s voice softened. “Adam knows he’s your kid brother, Jena. Nothing’s gonna happen to him.”

  Jena drew in an unsteady lungful of air and nodded. Gentry was right and she needed to show him the respect he deserved. She had to tell him the truth that Jackson had begun with such a twisted version. Turning, she went back into the living room, unconsciously straightening a white vase standing atop a white marble stand.

  “This place doesn’t look like you,” Gentry said, sitting in the chair where Jacks had been, his dark-green uniform stark against the white upholstery, the black SIG Sauer tucked into its holster. It reminded Jena of her own gun, which she’d slept with last night for the first time in her life. It reminded her that Gentry and Adam had both shown a lot of restraint by not being a lot rougher when Jacks went off on them.