Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Gentry leaned back in the chair but his posture remained tense. “Before we deal with Jackson, tell me how much truth he was talking back there.”

  Jena sighed and rubbed her throbbing temples with the tips of her fingers. “I had a prescription for painkillers, but I’ve already gotten rid of them as well as the antianxiety meds. I haven’t taken any prescription painkillers since I went back on duty; you know I’d never do that. I’ve been getting by on ibuprofen. The muscles are still sore sometimes from the gunshot wounds.”

  “What about the rest?” Gentry hadn’t taken his eyes off hers. He was testing her, and it was a test she needed to pass.

  She looked down at her hands. “It was so awful there, back in my parents’ house. I fell into a dark, dark place, Gentry. The damage from the gunshot wounds left me disfigured and . . . damaged.” She just couldn’t go into the details yet, not even with him. “I’m not proud of what I did, but I’ll get over it and it will be okay. You don’t know how good it’s been to get out on patrol again this week. It’s helped me see my way back into the light.”

  He moved next to her on the sofa, gently reached over, and took her left hand. He turned it palm side up and raised her sleeve to expose the vertical cuts on her wrists. “I fucking hate your parents, you know that?”

  Jena gave a weak laugh. She wished she could truly hate them, but they were her parents. Like it or not, they were part of her life. “They love us in their own way. But they’re control freaks, and it drives them crazy that they can’t control Jackson or me.” As a result, they behaved like entitled bullies. “How’d you know to look on my left wrist?”

  “Because you’re right-handed.” Gentry leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. “Do you need to be back on duty? Do I need to be worrying about you? Honest answer.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve felt more alive and more like myself in the last few days than since I was shot. If I even suspect it’s getting the better of me, I’ll take myself off duty and get help. I promise.”

  Gentry looked at her with a long, probing question in his deep-brown eyes. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him. “Okay, that’s all we’ll say about it. Does Warren know?”

  Jena nodded. “I didn’t feel right even talking to him about coming back on duty if he didn’t know.” He was the only one besides her parents who knew everything. She smiled. “The lieutenant’s keeping an eye on me.”

  Gentry gave her a hug. “So am I, Red. And if I see something I don’t like, we’re gonna revisit this conversation. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Okay then.” Gentry’s gaze flicked toward the front door and back to Jena. “Tell me how long Jackson’s been acting this way. He doesn’t even seem like the same guy I met after you got shot.”

  “He’s not.” Jena rubbed her eyes, which stung from too little sleep. “I don’t recognize the person Adam just hauled out of here.”

  They both looked toward the front window. Meizel still stood outside his unit, arms crossed, face blank. Inside the patrol car, her brother’s mouth moved in violent, dramatic motions. He was trying to give the deputy an earful of crap and the deputy wasn’t listening, or at least he wasn’t reacting.

  “This drug is ugly. It’s so damned addictive, and it works fast.” Gentry turned back to Jena. “It doesn’t work that fast, though. No way last night was his first encounter with Black Diamond.”

  Jena nodded. “As much as I want to think it was a one-time thing, I realized this morning that it couldn’t be. We’ve hardly been here a month, though. Think he got started on it back in New Orleans?”

  Gentry’s gaze on her was serious and steady. “You’re the one who knows him best. What’s your take on it?”

  Jena thought about her parents sending Jackson to stay with her at least until summer semester at UNO started in June, which had been weird. They’d let him skip a semester of college. As much as she might like to believe Jackson’s presence was prompted by parental concern—so Jackson could take care of his stubborn older sister—she didn’t think so. That dog didn’t hunt.

  “I think Jacks was in some kind of trouble in New Orleans, and that’s why my parents sent him here to cool his heels for a few months.” She thought it through as she talked. “I don’t think it was Black Diamond, though. He’s a pothead—has been since he hit fifteen. He’s too smart for his own good. He’s spoiled rotten and unmotivated and doesn’t even know the meaning of ambition. But he’s never been violent. I’ve never, ever seen that side of him.”

  Wouldn’t have believed he was capable of it.

  “So you think your parents sent him here with some ulterior motive, but that he didn’t get into the Black Diamond until he hit a local source?”

  Jena nodded. “When we first got here, he was his same old normal slob of a self. I wish I could say when he started changing, but”—and it sure hurt to admit this—“I was too preoccupied with my own crap.”

  Which meant she had to do something that, for her, was worse than spending time in ICU with bullet wounds or being chewed out by her lieutenant for not following protocol with Gentry and Ceelie’s situation six months ago. Or just about anything.

  She had to talk to her parents.

  Maybe she’d better go ahead and do it now, while Gentry was here for moral support. Pulling out her cell phone, she paused, weighing the pros and cons between calling home for an unpleasant conversation with Mom or calling the firm for an unpleasant conversation with Dad.

  In the end, it didn’t really matter. She called the law office of Sinclair and Mattingly and recognized Dad’s longtime secretary when she answered.

  “Hey, hon, your dad’s in a meeting with Mr. Mattingly. You want me to have him call you back?”

  Oh hell, why not just piss him off even more? She rolled her eyes for Gentry’s benefit and said, “It’s important, Sandy. I need to talk to him now. Interrupt their meeting and tell Dad I said it was urgent.”

  Jackson Sr.’s polished uptown New Orleans voice came on the line in a surprisingly short time. “Jena. Sandy said you had a problem. Have you had a . . . relapse?”

  Which was probably as close to an admission of fatherly concern as she’d get, but she would take it. “No, I’m fine. It’s about Jackson. He’s been arrested, or will be soon.”

  The pause hung heavy between them. “On what charges?”

  “Don’t know yet. Probably battery on an officer. Felony drug possession.” Gentry wouldn’t press charges, but that didn’t matter. The fact that he had marks on his throat and Jacks’s chin was bleeding meant her brother would be booked. What happened to the charges after that would be up to the sheriff and Jacks’s attorney. Plus, there was the drug issue.

  Dad’s voice grew more irate. “Damn it, Jena. Couldn’t you keep him in line for three months without letting him fuck things up?” The clear response was Obviously not, but Jena wasn’t leaving it at that.

  “It might have helped if you’d told me I needed to keep him in line. Why did you send him here in the first place?”

  Another pause passed before her father spoke, back in his unflappable attorney mode. “Tell Jackson to keep his mouth shut, if you can manage that much. I’m on my way to make this cluster-fuck disappear. First Jackson knocks up a street punk with social aspirations and now this. Your mother will have a few words for you.”

  Jena disconnected the call without responding and glanced at Gentry’s raised eyebrows.

  She shrugged. “That went well.”

  And she was going to be an aunt.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cole sat at the eastern edge of his weathered wooden porch, the side nearest the branch of water that intersected with Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes and the path to his workhouse. He sipped from a cold bottle of water, letting the sweat run down the sides of the plastic container and send cooling streams over his tired hands.

  For the past three hours, he’d been in the workhouse, taking care of his newest culinary and f
inancial acquisition. He’d trimmed the lean gator meat into chunks and strips, lined the pieces up on cheap tin cookie sheets, then set them in his freezer. Once they were frozen, he’d bag them up and take out only as much as he needed for a meal. One day next week, when he could catch the neighbors away from home and didn’t have to worry about arousing their curiosity with the smell of smoked meat, he’d thaw the longer strips and smoke and cure them for jerky. Never knew when hard times or emergencies might hit, plus he could take them on his jaunts through the parish.

  Splendid isolation, as the old Warren Zevon song said. That had been Cole’s sole purpose in life the past five years. Learning the fine art of self-sufficiency. Learning to live with himself, to come to terms with who he’d become and the life he’d chosen. Learning to need no one and have no one need him.

  He’d made peace with his choices.

  This little corner of Terrebonne Parish, hidden between the abandoned sugarcane fields and the bayou, had afforded him those choices, along with the blood money that kept the lights on and the water running. The blood money that paid for his commercial freezer and truck and freaking Wi-Fi. The blood money that bought what he couldn’t catch or build himself.

  The gator hide, he’d slowly scraped free of meat and sinew. He’d found another bucket to toss the remains in and, after dark, he would take them down the inlet to Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes and dispose of them, feeding whatever was around and hungry. It was far enough from his house that he didn’t worry about creating nuisance animals.

  The skull and feet, he stuck in the cooler to deal with later. For now, Cole spread a thick layer of salt over the inside of the leathery hide with reverence. He took no joy in the death of such an amazing animal, especially while such ugly human beasts walked the earth freely. He didn’t hold the ingested arm against the gator; it had simply been following the instincts God had given it.

  As for the guy who’d once called the arm his own, well, bad shit happened to people who didn’t deserve it. Where God fit into that equation, Cole had no clue. Once, he’d believed everything happened for a reason. Until he came across a thing whose reason escaped him.

  Finally, his work done, feeling hot and sweaty despite the pleasant high sixties of the late afternoon, he’d settled onto the porch with the water. Next to him, propped against the house, rested his shotgun. A man never knew when he might need a shotgun.

  Down the inlet, where it joined Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes, Cole spotted a small boat. It held only one person, as near as he could tell from almost a half mile away. All he could tell about the guy was that he had light hair, maybe a light hooded jacket, and appeared to be looking through binoculars—toward Sugarcane Lane.

  A chill ran along Cole’s shoulders—a sign of danger he’d learned not to discount. His first instinct was to grab his shotgun, but that could get him shot as well. Instead, he shifted the position of a big, ancient aluminum bucket he kept on the porch in which he grew tomatoes. He’d planted them early because he knew he could always drag them inside in the case of a rare freeze. The thick, fuzzy vines didn’t have anything on them but leaves, but they made a decent camouflage.

  Paranoid much, Ryan?

  Well, yeah. He glanced through the heavy leaves of the tomato plant, held upright by a wooden stake to which he’d attached the vine with a strip of cloth, and decided his spy’s attention was not directed at his house after all.

  Instead, the binoculars seemed to be pointed toward the other side of Sugarcane Lane, so he relaxed, leaned against the side of the house, and closed his eyes. His tomato plant would keep him safely hidden.

  All was quiet for a couple of minutes, until a cringing screech from down the dirt road interrupted his reverie on the meaning of life—mainly, that he was no longer convinced it had a meaning.

  Damn it, the witch was home. That must be who the guy with the binoculars had been watching.

  An empty shack sat to the left of Cole’s house, the edge of the bayou branch sat at its right, and a small empty lot took up the space across the dirt road—he’d bought both pieces of property, along with the one he lived in, to make sure they stayed empty. But next to the vacant lot was a small wooden house on stilts high enough for the occupants to store their small boat and, next to the boat, a pickup almost as decrepit as his own.

  He hated to tell them, but it wouldn’t take a flood of biblical proportions to bring down their elevated palace. A good gust of wind would blow it to hell.

  Hopefully, it would take the witch with it. Cole’s neighbor—he had no idea of her real name, only that she referred to him as The Hermit—sported a straw-like mop of bleached hair, a sharp nose and chin, a perpetual cigarette hanging from her mouth at a forty-five-degree angle, and a voice that would make a joyful noise unto no one.

  “Chewie, you get away from that goddamned gator right now. Chewbacca—here, now, you good-for-nothing mutt!”

  Cole leaned forward for a better look. They’d had a brief, hard shower not long before and, sure enough, a gator sat in the middle of the mud pit that now made up Sugarcane Lane. The gator hissed and backed up a few inches as the witch waved a big stick of some kind in its direction. Chewbacca, a cross between a poodle and something reddish-brown and hairy, barked in a high-pitched yip.

  If the damned gator had any sense, it would turn around and head back toward the water as quickly as possible. Cole might join it, just to dull the noise. He glanced around at the shotgun. He could probably shoot the ground near enough to scare the gator back toward the water, but with his luck, he’d hit the witch and get his ass arrested.

  “Chewie, hush.” The witch’s voice rose another octave, making Cole glad he’d gotten the double-paned glass for his windows; otherwise, they might shatter from the pitch. “Ronnie, call them game wardens this time. That no-good Ray Naquin couldn’t find a gator if it was sitting on top’a his ass.”

  A man’s gruff voice rang out from the vicinity of the house. “Done called ’em—dey’s on da way.”

  Great. Wildlife agents, after Cole had spent the afternoon butchering an out-of-season gator and the morning burying some guy’s chewed-up arm. He sighed, looked down the bayou to make sure the guy with the binoculars was gone, and climbed to his feet, holding the water bottle in one hand and the shotgun in the other.

  “Chewie, you . . .” The witch spotted Cole. “You there! Hermit! Bring that shotgun over here and kill this gator.” She paused and assumed what she must have thought was a coy tone. “You can eat it after you kill it. Ain’t nobody has to know.”

  “It’s illegal, and hermits don’t break the law,” he called, against his better judgment. Don’t engage. Engagement leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to obligation.

  And with that, he went inside his house and slammed the door behind him, ignoring the outraged outpourings of one angry witch.

  A shower couldn’t wash away everything, but it could scrub off the stench of gator and drown out a lot of noise.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Where the heck is this place?” Jena leaned forward, trying to spot a dirt road that cut through the cane fields. “I’ve never heard of Sugarcane Lane, and I swear I’ve driven every road in this parish.”

  Mac squinted through the mud-spattered windshield. “I’m not quite sure. Maybe we should’ve gone in by boat, eh? I think it’s pretty close to that part of Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes where we found the body.”

  Great. She felt as if she’d spent the past eight hours with a pack of hungry pit bulls, aka lawyers, as her father and two of his assistants had descended on the Terrebonne Parish Detention Center en masse. They had left, hours later, with an arrangement for an emergency hearing that would no doubt have Jackson on his way back to New Orleans in record time.

  It had been Jena’s first experience on the receiving end of an official interrogation by her father, and she hoped it would be the last. To Dad’s credit, he didn’t give any credence to Jackson’s insistence that the drugs were hers. He’d simply
buy his only son out of trouble again, probably thinking a pregnant girl with social ambitions paled beside drug possession and assault.

  Now she could wrangle an aggressive alligator on a backwater dirt road to top her highlight reel for the week.

  “Damn it. This is a mud hole and I just washed this truck.” Mac took a slow turn onto a wide swath of brown that, before the midafternoon gulley washer a half hour ago, had probably been a road. He switched the truck into all-wheel drive and weaved around the worst of the puddles, trying to keep at least one wheel at a time on ground that looked vaguely solid.

  Around them, crowded against the road on both sides, stretched sugarcane fields that in years past would already be lush and green, the stalks about shoulder high. Maybe a quarter of the cane still stood sentinel against automation, economics, and saltwater from too much oil drilling. The rest was a mass of black dirt and scraggly ground cover.

  “You’re from here,” Mac said. “What kind of person would want to live sandwiched between these empty cane fields and the water? They’d have a hard time getting out of here after even a small rain.”

  Jena glanced over to see if he was joking, but he looked serious. “Mac, first of all, I’m from New Orleans, not Terrebonne Parish. Same state, different world. Not better or worse, just different. Why does anybody want to live in an isolated place?”

  Mac was silent for a few moments, then seemed to realize it wasn’t a hypothetical question. “Well, maybe it’s convenient for the way they live—fishing from that inlet off the bayou, maybe, or working the cane fields.”

  Jena nodded. “Except most of the sugarcane harvest is done by machine now. What else?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe they got something to hide. Or maybe they’re crazy. You know, like some kind of anarchist. The Unabomber, only hiding in the swamps instead of the mountains.”