Cole gave an exasperated squint at the ceiling. She was playing the gender card? “Jena, you aren’t running away—you’re our best bet for getting help fast. You said it last night. You’re lighter. You can move faster. You have a badge.”
Jena still looked pissed, but not quite as pissed.
He softened his tone. “And yeah, let’s talk gender. If you show up asking for help from a stranger, looking like you’ve been dragged through the mud, I’m pretty damned sure you’re gonna get help. If I show up with this hair, covered in mud, asking for help, I might get help or I might get run over. We don’t have time to wonder which it’ll be.”
He leaned over, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her, not caring that Mac was watching. “I’m staying with Mac. He can’t go through that marsh again, and this area’s trickier than what we went through last night—lots of flotons, lots of drop-offs. It has to be you that gets us out of this.”
The depth of her sigh told him he’d convinced her. Jena was practical, and he’d spoken the truth.
She looked at Mac. “What say you, Junior?”
His smile was weak but sincere. “I say Cole’s right.”
Cole looked at him and laughed. “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever called me by my first name, Agent Griffin.”
Mac snorted. “After falling asleep in your arms several times recently, I figure we might as well be on a first-name basis.”
“And what is your first name?” Cole didn’t remember Jena referring to him in any way other than Mac.
“McKenzie.”
“Ah. I think I’ll call you Mac.”
“Good move.”
He looked at Jena. “You ready?”
She shook her head. “No, but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
CHAPTER 32
Jena had agreed to Cole’s sudden change of plans because they made perfect sense to her head. Her heart did not like them. It went against everything she held inside her to leave her partner injured while she made a safe escape. It was wrong to leave a civilian in charge of dealing with the criminals while she took the easy way out.
Still, her head argued, the only way Mac and Cole—and she—could survive was if Cole was forced to commit murder or if she made a safe escape.
For that reason as much as any other, she’d agreed to go.
Cole thought he was comfortable shooting Ray Naquin, and he might be okay with it today or tomorrow or for the next month. But one day, eventually, it would haunt him. He’d been haunted enough.
So she agreed.
“Please be careful,” she said.
“You think you need to tell me that? We have unfinished personal business, I do believe.” He smiled. “And I do love to make you blush.”
“It clashes with my hair.”
He kissed her long and deep, promising what might be—if she made a safe escape.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
Damned overplanning type-A male. He had to ruin a perfect kiss by adding stipulations.
“What?”
“Once you start going, Jena, and it should be now, because it’s light enough to see, do not come back here alone. Remember what you told me last night at the house? If you hear gunshots, don’t turn around. Keep going as fast as you can.”
Was he insane? “But if—”
“I’m serious. It might be me shooting Ray, in which case you don’t need to know right away. It might be Ray shooting me, and you don’t need to know that either. I’m not saying you will hear gunshots. Those idiots might not even show up. But for my sake, and for Mac’s, don’t turn around no matter what. Request medical help if you hear shots fired, but don’t turn back. I want a promise on that.”
Damn him. She gritted her teeth and nodded because, again, he was right. “I promise.”
They kissed again, and she tried to memorize every movement of his lips and sweep of his tongue before he stepped back, gave her a long look with those deep-blue eyes, and ducked into the tall grass, headed to the cabin’s west side.
It wasn’t yet dawn, but Jena could see. So she sent up prayers for both Cole and Mac, and set off as fast as she could. This time, she could look for possible deep spots where a broken ankle would surely ruin all of Cole’s plans.
Cole’s plans.
Damn it, Jena, you’re an idiot. She hadn’t been mad because Cole had to talk her into being the one to go for help. She was mad because it should’ve been her idea. She was the senior agent here, not to mention the only uninjured one.
So she gave herself a good talking-to as she instinctively followed the dawn. She’d read an article once about how women were more apt to be people pleasers than men. They learned to play dumb so they wouldn’t show up their male colleagues. They learned to giggle because people thought it was cute. They learned to play up their looks because prettiness earned praise. Take the cultural bias and add it to her own childhood, which she’d spent constantly trying to please a mother whose MO was displeasure, and she’d been wired to distrust herself and step to the background by instinct.
She didn’t entirely blame her mother. That was too easy a cop-out. It accounted for a lot when Jena was six or even sixteen, but not at thirty. She had to own her reluctance to take a leadership role. Maybe she hadn’t started the pattern of being a follower, but she’d perpetuated it. No more.
She spotted the early light glinting on the water of Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes while still a quarter mile away. It was choppy from last night’s storm, and it looked like she’d be emerging in one of its wider areas, which meant the chance of finding a boat was good. She hadn’t seen traffic on the highway, but it was the only north-south route in the area, so somebody would be on it soon.
Jena tripped and fell to her hands and knees by instinct at the sound of a gunshot behind her. Chills ran up her spine and spread around the back of her neck. Every facet of her training told her to run as fast as she could back toward that cabin.
Instead, when two more shots rang out—one a rifle, she thought, and the second a .45—she ran toward the bayou as fast as she could. She didn’t care how much noise she made, or how hard she splashed, or whether she stepped into an abyss, or if mud sucked the sturdy boots off her feet. She had to reach the water.
When she got to the road, the bayou alongside it was wide, brown, and choppy, and there were no boats to be seen. Cole was right, though—if she ran farther south, she’d run into boats or cars, even if it took her all the way to the lands occupied by the indigenous people of Pointe-aux-Chenes, a band of Native Americans that continued to live in the disappearing marshes of the lower bayou.
She didn’t have to go nearly that far. In less than five minutes, she came across a trailer on stilts and a dark-skinned woman watering the profusion of blooms spilling out of the boxes on her deck.
She turned in alarm at the sight of Jena running up her stairs and stood there with an open mouth—but not an ounce of fear. Had it been Cole, the woman might have beaten him over the head or run inside.
The woman met her at the top of the stairs. “What’s wrong wit’ you, sha?”
“Please, I have an emergency. Do you have a phone I could use?”
Within fifteen minutes, Mille Ardoin had quite an entourage of neighbors gathered around to see the tall, muddy redhead who’d shown up on her doorstep, but Jena didn’t mind. What mattered was that Warren had quickly assessed her rambling account of the evening and told her to stay put. He was sending help, both to her and to the old cabin.
Meanwhile, Jena had been taken care of by Mille, who’d shooed her inside without her boots and given her a chance to clean the mud off her face. Cole’s sweater was a goner. By the time she’d returned to the deck, there was a plate of diced potatoes and andouille, cooked up together in a skillet, that Jena felt guilty eating, but she managed to get down a little to make sure Mille knew how grateful she was.
“Are you really a game warden, sha?” Mille asked. She was broad,
bronze-skinned, and black-haired, and had been joined by her best friend, Beatriz, from next door.
Jena was saved from having to answer by the arrival of an LDWF truck coming fast down the highway and lurching to a stop in front of Mille’s house. Thank God, now there was somebody more exciting than her for them to focus on.
Jena had been trying to act cool, but she was worried. Her hands shook so badly she’d been forced to eat the few bites of food with her fingers because she couldn’t hold the fork still.
She hauled herself to her feet, looked over the edge of the balcony, and smiled. Part of her had hoped for Gentry to get here first, but the sight of Paul came as a relief. Paul wasn’t one for chatter. He’d get in and get out, and things would happen.
By the time he got out of the truck, Mille and Beatriz were trying to make a fuss over him, but his gaze latched onto Jena as she hobbled down the steps.
“You okay, Sinclair?” He pulled her into a hug, which was surprising, not only because Paul wasn’t a hugger, but because she was filthy and if she’d ever seen a man who’d fidget over filth, it was Paul Billiot.
He hung back a few seconds, talking to the women in their own patois—Paul himself was descended from another of the indigenous tribes in the area and active in their communities.
But only for a few seconds. They were headed north again before Jena had her seat belt fastened. “Here’s what I know,” he said, pulling the truck out onto the highway, running lights without sirens and moving fast. “Broussard and Knight—the new guy—are on their way to the old Connor cabin in a boat. Is there any way for us to get there in the truck?”
Jena shook her head. “No way. It’s by boat or on foot.”
Paul’s jaw clenched. “We’ll head back toward Ray Naquin’s place, then. Warren has called in the troops—SO, state police, whoever’s available—to start an all-out manhunt in the span between Chauvin and that cabin. They should have APBs out for both Naquin and the Patout kid.”
“They need to be looking for Amelia too.” Jena went through her rationale about neither Ray nor Marty having the brains to run this kind of operation. “I mean, the woman had to be pretty sharp to keep that processing business open year-round on her own after she lost her husband. And she’s dying, Paul. Her older son doesn’t want to process seafood, probably because it’s hard work and he’s just a kid himself, and the younger son will need care. She might be desperate enough to do something like this.”
Paul shook his head. “That situation sucks any way you look at it, but there have to be other ways. And desperate or not, you think she knows how deep into this her older son is?” He glanced over at her. “You remember any details about when her husband was killed?”
“Only that it was a murder and one of our agents found the body.” Jena frowned at Paul. “I don’t think it was ever solved. Why?”
“There were rumors in the community—nothing anybody could substantiate, mind you—that Martin Sr. was moving drugs through their processing plant. They do as good a business as anybody during gator season and have their retail store, but that’s a big operation to keep up year-round. And they always seemed to have money.”
Jena processed that information. “So you think maybe Amelia or Ray picked up the business after Martin Sr. was killed?”
Paul shrugged. “Maybe Amelia. I knew her when she was younger, and she was a smart woman—everybody up around Theriot, where she’s from, thought she could do better than Martin Patout. So she’s smart enough. Not Ray Naquin, though. He could follow orders, but he isn’t smart enough to run the show.”
Jena watched the flat marshland fly past her window. “I can’t see her letting her son get involved.”
“Maybe Ray brought him in and not her. Who knows?”
Jena sure didn’t know. All she knew was that Marty had been the one to set Cole’s house on fire. She’d seen him lighting the Molotov cocktails. She might cut him some slack for being young and stupid, but was he innocent? No.
“We need to get to Patout’s.”
“That’s where we’re headed then. I’ll call Warren to send Houma PD their way too. We’ll come down on them like a Cat Five.”
Jena nodded. That was good. She felt really sorry for Amelia Patout, but if her suspicions were true, the woman had a lot to answer for.
“Warren gave me a bare-bones account of the past twenty-four hours, so fill in the blanks,” Paul said.
She gave him the rundown, to which his general response was a deepening frown. Finally, when she got to the part about leaving Cole and Mac, and Ray’s promise to attack at dawn, he shocked her with a “fucking asshole,” which she assumed was aimed at Ray.
She stared at him open-mouthed for a few seconds. Paul rarely cursed—she’d heard rumors of it happening once during the manhunt after Ceelie Savoie had been kidnapped, but this was her second personal experience this week.
She didn’t smile, though, because she had to ask a question that was already haunting her.
“Did I do the right thing, Paul? What would you have done in that situation? Would you have left your partner behind and in danger? Would you have left him with a civilian and kept yourself safe?” She didn’t share Cole’s rationale, or her agreement with it, because she wanted no excuses.
She considered Paul Billiot the consummate professional enforcement agent. What would he have done?
Paul and Gentry were the only ones she’d ask that question of. They wouldn’t sugarcoat it if she’d made the wrong call. Gentry would be honest but kind. Paul? He’d tell the blunt truth even if it stung.
He thought about it a while before answering, and she imagined the scenarios playing out in his head.
Finally, he nodded, his Native American features—dark hair, black eyes, strong jaw—emanating confidence and competence.
“You did exactly what I’d have done in your situation. You wanna know why?”
Relief washed through her, seeking out the guilt and stomping it flat. “Yes, please.”
“Well, I figure Ryan’s a smart guy. He’d made a nice little place for himself out there all alone. That takes a mental fortitude I admire. He also has to be physically strong and able to take care of himself. That’s the only kind of person I’d trust my partner with.”
Paul thought a moment longer. “Plus, I have to look at logistics, which I assume you did. I am smaller than Ryan, and faster. I have the authority to enforce the law if I have to force somebody to stop and help me.”
Jena shrugged. “Cole also said someone would be more likely to help a woman than a big muddy dude with waist-length hair.”
Paul laughed, earning another stare from Jena. She’d seen him smile a little but didn’t know he laughed. Ever.
“Your Cole sounds like a smart guy.”
“He’s not my Cole.” Where would he get such an idea? Mac hadn’t had a chance to talk, and if Gentry Broussard had been gossiping, she was going to wipe those dimples right off his cheeks, even if he was her best friend.
“Sinclair, this ain’t a big parish and there ain’t that many tall female redheads who are enforcement agents. Actually, there’s only one. So when she hangs around the jail in Houma till midnight so she can take a witness home with her . . . well.” Paul laughed again, but sobered quickly. “I just hope they’re okay. I told Gentry to call or text when they found the cabin.”
“There were three gunshots back there after I left,” she said, looking out the window and trying to embrace her professional calm. “One rifle, one pistol. The first shot took me by surprise so I’m not sure what fired it.”
“Mac has his SIG Sauer?”
Jena nodded. “And Cole has mine. Ray was using a rifle last night.”
A generic ringtone sounded from the dash, and Paul grabbed his mobile phone. He put Gentry on speaker.
“Billiot here, and Sinclair. Where are you?”
“At the old Connor place,” Gentry said. “Looks like quite a fight went on here, but no sign of anybody
now.”
Jena sat up straight. “What? Mac’s not there? Cole Ryan’s not there?”
“Nobody. Spent casings, lots of blood on the interior and the porch of the cabin. One area of the cabin near a window where it looked like a Molotov cocktail went off course and ended up in the water. Just singed one spot and didn’t catch.
“We can tell by the foliage there was a boat in here recently, so we have to assume Ray Naquin and Marty Patout are on the water. Jena, give me a description of Ray’s boat.”
She told him everything she could. She’d lost the notebook where she’d written it down, but Gentry could easily look up the license plates.
Paul ended the call, with Gentry and EZ headed for Patout’s. They’d have to pass Ray Naquin’s house along the way.
Paul glanced at her. “What do you think?”
She thought she might die. She thought about how much she’d come to respect Mac Griffin and how she’d given him such a hard time at first. She thought about how much she cared about Cole Ryan. She didn’t know if she loved him. Theirs was the ultimate foxhole relationship between two wounded people under stress both from the outside and from their own pasts. But she wanted to find out if it was as real as it felt.
She couldn’t lose either one of them.
Jena rubbed her temples and tried to put herself in Ray Naquin’s head, which wasn’t a pretty place to be. Ever.
“If I’m Ray, I know people are onto me now because one of the wildlife agents who knows about me has escaped”—namely, one Jena Sinclair—“so I’m desperate. If I were smarter, I’d get the hell out of Dodge and sail to some Caribbean outpost and spend all my hard-earned drug money. But because I’m a dumb, arrogant jerk, that doesn’t occur to me.”
She ignored Paul’s chuckle. The man had turned into a laughing fool all of a sudden. “So I’m desperate and I want leverage. What’s a better bargaining chip than an injured wildlife agent?”
Paul glanced over at her. “What about the civilian?”
Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2) Page 22