She twisted in her seat to look at him, her hazel eyes serious. “No. I mean it, Mac. No. There’s something about this guy that’s on the level; I can just feel it. He’s . . . I don’t know . . . fragile.”
“Fragile? Fragile? He’s built like a solid fucking tank, pardon my Français. He’s as fragile as a bull gator in a small bayou.”
“I don’t mean physically fragile. Obviously.” She smiled. “I mean emotionally fragile. We connected in some way the day I talked to him, and I don’t want to scare him off.”
“You are not talking to this guy alone, even if I have to park a half mile away and hide in the bushes.”
At that, she grinned. “Only if I get photos.”
He pointed at the laptop computer lying atop a pile of paperwork on the center armrest of the truck. “In the meantime, have you run a search on him? Even a simple Internet search? See if he shows up?”
“No, things have been too crazy with Jackson and . . .”
Jena pulled the computer into her lap and began to type and scroll. “Oh my God.” Her eyes widened with each click of the keypad.
Mac almost lost control of the truck trying to crane his neck to see the screen. “Did you find him?”
She closed down the page she’d been reading and twisted the laptop back to its usual resting place. “Oh yeah, I found him, all right.”
CHAPTER 17
When Jena and Mac had been trying to figure out what kind of person would live in a middle-of-nowhere outpost like Sugarcane Lane, one of their options had been a guy who was on the run.
She’d been thinking criminal, as most law enforcement officers would. But there were other types of people on the run. She’d bet her next year’s salary that Cole Ryan was running from a past he hadn’t been able to face, something that had shaken his faith in humanity.
Jena was aware that Mac was waiting for an explanation, but she wasn’t sure what to tell him, not until she talked to Cole. It felt too personal.
“For now, will you just accept that I feel even more sure he’s not a drug trafficker, nor is he the least bit dangerous?” Jena finally asked. Trauma could turn victims violent, but she got no violent vibe from him at all. Just the opposite. He wanted to stay as far away from people as possible, which made his willingness to seek her out even more intriguing. “Will you let it go at that for now?”
Not that Mac wouldn’t look Cole up himself the first chance he got.
Mac didn’t like it, she could tell. His brown eyes darkened; there was no light of animation in them. “No matter what you found out about Cole Ryan’s past, people can change. Take my word for it. Something snaps and they can change on a dime. I will be at your house by five, like it or not.”
Damn it. She was trying to navigate a delicate balance. She wanted Mac nearby, but not in the room with them. She’d like him in close range but out of earshot and out of sight, especially since she knew who Cole was now. At the same time, Mac was following protocol. No, he was giving her leeway. Protocol would be to call the lieutenant.
Mac had also injected a lot of fire into his words. Jena knew virtually nothing about his background, but someone, somewhere, had turned on him. Someone had snapped. But Mac Griffin’s past was a topic for another day.
“Okay, fine. But you have to stay out of sight unless something goes wrong. I want him to talk to me on his own. This is not an interrogation.”
That might come later, but not yet. Now that she’d learned who he was, she felt protective. The fact that he’d reached out to her had been a huge step for him. She understood being pulled underwater and deciding how and whether to survive. When she’d hit her own lowest of lows, she’d seen no way out and had tried to end her life. Cole Ryan had ended his life just as drastically, only without the blood or the blade.
Mac didn’t have time to argue more because they had reached Gateau’s, which Jena could immediately tell was a dead end. The parking lot was empty, and there was a handwritten sign on the door. Mac pulled his truck alongside it:
CLOSED UNTIL GATOR SEASON. REOPENING AUGUST 30.
IN AN EMERGENCY, E-MAIL [email protected]
“I’ll e-mail him.” Jena wrote his address in her notebook. “In the meantime, we might as well try Patout’s.”
Located on the far west side of Houma, Patout’s Seafood was a cinder-block building the size of a football field with a small brown-painted public store across part of the front.WE BUY, PROCESS, AND SELL YEAR-ROUND! read a handmade sign taped to the glass front entrance. A big, closed bay door stood next to it; during gator season, Jena had seen lines of pickups and boats full of gators, ready to back up to that bay door, one by one, where they’d unload and weigh their daily hauls. Being near the Lafourche Parish line, Gateau’s catered more to that parish’s hunters, while most Terrebonne hunters working gator season sold their catch to Patout’s.
Mac’s conversation with Ray Naquin had been the first time Jena had heard about Amelia Patout’s cancer, but she knew Amelia’s husband had been murdered about two years ago. As far as she knew, the case had never been solved.
A tinkling bell rang overhead when they opened the glass door to the store. There were no other vehicles in the front lot, but Jena had spotted a van and a pickup in the back, the latter with maybe a fourteen-foot white fishing boat hitched to it.
“Be right with you!” yelled a male voice from somewhere in the back. Not Amelia Patout, obviously. While they waited, Jena scanned the contents of the refrigerated display cases that spanned a room about the size of her bedroom—maybe twelve by fifteen feet. Behind the counter stretched a wide blackboard with various notes scribbled on it: Last day for oysters: April 30. Redfish in season through March 31. Alligators bought only from licensed nuisance hunters through August 29. Hunting season for wild alligators starts August 30 and ends September 30.
Good. They were adhering to the state hunting and fishing laws, or at least their signs said so. It was a pretty big operation to run year-round; Jena had done her homework and hadn’t found any negatives about the owners or their business.
A teenage boy emerged from a door behind the counter. He had close-cropped light-brown hair, wide sky-blue eyes with a telltale slant, and a smile that was filled with sweetness. He wore hearing aids in both ears. “Help you?”
Jena pasted on her professional smile. “Hi, we’re agents Sinclair and Griffin from Wildlife and Fisheries. How’re you doing today?”
The boy smiled wider. “I’m real, real good. My name is Slade. Does that mean you’re game wardens?”
Jena’s homework had told her Amelia’s youngest son was named Slade, but not that he had Down syndrome. “Hi, Slade. Yep, we’re game wardens. We wanted to talk to your mother. Is she here?”
“She is not here, but she will be back.” Slade looked down at the display cases. “I can sell you fish. We have oysters this week.”
“I’ll buy a pound of oysters,” Mac said, taking Jena by surprise. He seemed to do that to her a lot. “How old are you, Slade?”
“I am fifteen,” he said, carefully opening the case and weighing out an exact pound of oysters on his first try. He seemed comfortable behind the counter, as if he worked it a lot. Probably a big help to his mother if she was battling cancer.
“I have a brother about your age,” Mac said. “His name is Lee.”
Slade placed the oysters in a plastic bag and then wrapped the whole thing in white paper.
“Does Lee live in Houma?”
“No, he lives way up north, in Maine.”
“You folks getting what you need?” While Mac paid for his oysters, an older boy came out of the back. Jena judged him to be maybe eighteen or nineteen, with hair so blond it was almost white, cut short and spiky. He’d started his question in a friendly tone, but got less so when he noted their uniforms. “Game wardens. You here on business or just buying?”
The older son, as Jena recalled, was named Martin, and she’d bet this was him. “Are you Martin Patout?”<
br />
“Maybe.” Nothing sweet about this teenager, who had five or six tattoos that weren’t covered by his LSU sweatshirt and blue jeans. “What you guys need?”
Jena handed him a business card. “We actually wanted to talk to your mom, but Slade says she isn’t here.”
“No, she had a doctor’s appointment,” the boy said, looking at her card. “Is it hard to become a wildlife enforcement agent? What’s the difference between that and a regular game warden?”
A lot of hard training that only about 10 percent managed to get through before dropping out, even fewer women, but Jena didn’t feel the need to share that. “They’re the same thing, basically. It’s a great job. If you think you might be interested, I can drop some information by for you one day.”
Finally, he stuck out his hand. “I’m Marty Patout. Slade’s my little brother.”
“I ain’t little.”
“Yeah, you are.” Marty grinned at his brother, and Jena liked the easiness between them.
“Anyway, Mom should be back in a few minutes. Until then, I’m in charge.”
Jena thought his tone held both resentment and pride. “You having to do that a lot these days? I heard your mom had been sick.”
Fighting cancer was hard enough without worrying about a son who might not be able to live independently. Slade Patout was clearly comfortable in these surroundings, but outside his familiar zones? Who knew? She didn’t envy anything about Amelia Patout’s life right now. Maybe Marty was working harder than he thought he should have to these days. She didn’t blame him. He was carrying a heavy load for someone so young.
Again, she couldn’t help a fleeting thought about her own little brother, so lost and void of ambition. What will become of Jackson?
Mac handed Marty a card. “Mac Griffin. Think we could ask you a few questions about gators since your mom’s not here?”
Marty took the card and stuck it in his pocket along with Jena’s. “Suppose so. They ain’t in season right now, but I guess you know that.”
Jena walked around to look in the cases while Mac asked the questions, but she listened closely. Sometimes one could hear a nuance in a voice better if one wasn’t looking at the speaker. Sometimes it worked the other way around.
Business might be a little above normal with nuisance gators but not a lot, and Marty didn’t recall anything odd about them. “You might wanna talk to Eddie Knight from over ’round Dulac—he’s a new nuisance trapper and brings us some business,” Marty said, shooing Slade into the back to pack some newly arrived finfish on ice. “And a lot of folks go to Gateau’s, but he’s closed until gator season starts back up.”
Jena looked over her shoulder. “You know why Don Gateau closed? I thought he was one of the ones who stayed open year-round.”
Marty shrugged. “I dunno. Seems like I heard he was about to retire or something.”
He probably made most of his annual income during gator season anyway, but if Gateau’s was closed, why would Ray Naquin say he took his gators there to sell? Unless Don Gateau made some kind of special deal with him.
And Jena knew Eddie Knight. The man was one of the best-known commercial fishermen in the area; he was licensed as a nuisance hunter, but he was a last resort. He did it because he wanted to, not because he needed the money.
Last Jena had heard, Eddie had landed a lucrative contract with a seafood shipper in Lake Charles. She couldn’t imagine him mixed up in drug running. He had too much to lose.
“What about Raymond Naquin?” she asked. “He said he brings you quite a bit of business because of your mom being sick.” So, maybe she was lying. To his credit, Mac didn’t change expressions.
“Did he?” Marty shrugged, his expression a blank. “Maybe he brings ’em in when I ain’t here.”
“Who would that be?” A woman emerged from the back. She looked about forty going on seventy, pale and thin, with a scarf tied around her hair and dark circles under her eyes.
“They was askin’ questions about Mr. Naquin,” Marty said.
“You go on back and help your brother while I talk to the agents.”
As soon as Marty disappeared, the woman turned to Mac and Jena. “I’m Amelia Patout. Why are you folks asking about Ray Naquin?”
“We’ve had another gator attack in the parish, and I wanted to see if he’d come across any aggressive gators,” Mac said. “He mentioned that he sold some of his nuisance gators to you—the ones that couldn’t be relocated.”
“I don’t think so.” Amelia pulled a laptop from beneath the counter and almost dropped it before Mac reached across and helped steady her.
“Would you like to do this another time?” Jena asked her. “Ray told us you had been sick.”
Amelia laughed, and Jena caught a glimpse of who she might have been even a month ago—an attractive, lively woman with olive skin and smile lines around her mouth. Even the illness hadn’t dulled the spark of intelligence she emitted.
“Honey, might as well call it what it is. Lung cancer.” The smile faded. “Nothing’s working so far. I wouldn’t worry except for the boys, with my husband gone . . .”
She trailed off, then shook her head. “Sorry, you were asking about Ray. Let’s see.” She opened the laptop and began tapping the keyboard. “Moved the whole business onto a spreadsheet last year. My late husband, Martin Sr., he didn’t like computers. Wanted everything written down in those heavy ledgers. I got a room full of those damned things.”
Jena didn’t remember much about Martin Patout’s murder; it had happened about the same time she graduated from the academy and moved to the parish. He’d been the biggest seafood buyer and processor in Terrebonne at that time, so Amelia had to be sharp to pick up the business without missing a step. Or at least it seemed that way, judging by the size of the place and the amount of inventory in their display cases. Jena would have to do some research if she could squeeze it in between clandestine meetings with sexy hermits and fending off sleazy gator hunters.
And helping to plan a wedding. Couldn’t forget that one.
“No, last time I bought a gator from Ray Naquin was in January, one he caught up around Theriot. Guess he’s doing business with somebody else. He and my husband were good friends, but he ain’t come around as much since Marty Sr. died—he’ll usually bring in four or five gators a year. Why you wantin’ to know? Ray done something wrong?”
Jena sidled a look toward Mac and gave him a slight nod. She was far from objective where Ray Naquin was concerned, and Mac was the one who’d gotten the paranoid vibe from him.
“He just had had a few inconsistencies in his account of where he was selling his gators,” Mac said, giving Amelia the full benefit of his baby-faced smile. Who could suspect that face of being anything but transparent? “We thought maybe you could help us clear it up.”
Amelia shrugged. Had Jena seen a flash of anger cross her face, or was she too being paranoid? “I wouldn’t know. Anything else you folks need?”
Which was their cue to leave.
They weren’t going to get any more out of Amelia Patout today, and Jena wanted to e-mail Don Gateau. If his biggest buyer had shut down, why wouldn’t Ray know that?
Besides, Jena wanted to make sure Mac was good and hidden when she talked to Cole Ryan. Not only good and hidden, but out of earshot. The last would be harder to achieve, but she was a firm believer in that whole bit about the key to a man’s heart being through his stomach. Working with Gentry Broussard had taught her it worked just as well with partners.
“Hey, Mac,” she said, climbing back into the truck’s passenger seat. “Let me buy you an early dinner before you stake out my house.”
He handed her his packet of oysters. “Yeah, okay, but first let’s find a Dumpster and get rid of these oysters. I wanted to see what kind of plastic bags Patout’s uses.”
Mac just kept surprising her.
CHAPTER 18
Cole sat on his porch facing the water, swinging his legs off the en
d and pondering the baited gator line he’d seen up on Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes this morning. If the game wardens hadn’t been hiding across the bayou, he’d have stopped to take a closer look at it. He only knew they were there because the sunlight had glinted off something metallic—a belt buckle or binoculars or a gun, maybe—and drawn his attention.
With the line under surveillance, he’d simply turned around and done his morning fishing farther down the bayou. Afterward, he’d cleaned his fish, fried up a few for a late lunch, and frozen the rest. Now it was time to think. He had some decisions to make.
In retrospect, the note he’d left for Jena Sinclair embarrassed him. As foreign as it felt and for reasons he couldn’t identify—or didn’t want to—he cared what she thought of him. He didn’t want her to think he was a psycho, which is exactly how he’d sounded in that note. Downright certifiable. Why hadn’t he left a message on her damned phone like a normal person?
Because he’d stepped away from normal five years ago, that’s why. Since meeting Jena, he had promised to always be honest with himself, so he had to admit that stepping back into normal—hell, just taking a teetering stumble in the general direction of normal—was proving hard for him. Probably because he’d thought his withdrawal from the mainstream would be permanent. He’d intended it to be permanent, this solitary life as the self-reliant man.
One swing of silky red hair and a wistful look at the sunset from a woman with her own damaged heart had apparently killed those intentions. He didn’t know what, or who, had hurt her, but he recognized a kindred spirit in pain. Only hers was fresher and—he had to be honest again—his had begun to fade. It would never disappear. Never.
But it had healed enough for him to voluntarily put himself back among the living, at least on a small scale.
The drugs had made him turn to her. Those goddamned drugs that he couldn’t ignore. He’d never been a cop, but law enforcement had to feel as if they were fighting a losing battle against these synthetic drugs. As soon as they got a handle on one, some asshole cooked up another form.
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