“It damn well should,” Terrill said, back to rubbing at his eyes. “Waiting lets the trail grow cold.”
“My man specializes in cold trails. He’ll sniff out any clues we’ve missed.”
“We haven’t missed a thing. There’s nothing. She was here. And then she wasn’t.”
“Meaning, if she left of her own accord, someone somewhere has seen her or her car.”
How many times were they going to have to cover this ground?
“And if she didn’t? Leave of her own accord?”
“Then someone somewhere would stil
l
have seen her or her car. All we have to do is find that someone.”
“Needle in a haystack.”
Bear wasn’t about to disagree. But then, Vermilion Parish and Bayou Allain in particular were neither one population rich. “It’s time to start thinking beyond what we know to what we don’t, Terril .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
It had to be the beers talking. His son was a deputy sheriff. He was not a deputy buffoon. “Do you know anyone who might want to get to Lisa? Anyone from her past?
Anyone she might have talked to while doing her research?”
“No one,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Bear. We’ve already been through this.”
“We haven’t been through enough,” Bear told his son. “If we had, we wouldn’t be looking for only the second person known to disappear from Bayou Allain.”
Four
K ingdom Trahan sat bellied up to the bar, two fingers hooked around the neck of his beer bottle, his eyes shifting from the mirror on the wall to Red, the owner and barkeep who was busy pointing out to the eighteen-year-old trying to pass himself off as twentyone how easy it was to spot a fake I.D. King remembered eighteen all too wel
l
. It wasn’t a year he looked back on fondly, and the several that followed hadn’t been any better, spent as they were in Angola, where he’d been confined in Louisiana’s state pen.
At the end of his time served and along with his freedom, he’d come away with skil
l
s that went beyond sorting laundry and stamping out license plates. One was a heightened sixth sense. Another amounted to a pair of eyes in the back of his head. And both were working overtime tonight.
He didn’t know what it was in the air, but there was a buzz prickling at his nape that had nothing to do with his beer. He could see Terrill 1 and Terril 2 in the older Landry’s usual booth. Terrill 2 had just come off duty, the parish’s finest, protecting and serving as long as doing so didn’t get in Terrill 1’s way.
It wasn’t so much a case of like father like son, the off-spring turning out to be as crooked as the man who’d spawned him, but more a case of the spawn being as cowed by the Big Bear as everyone who lived in Bayou Allain. Most everyone, anyway. King would’ve thought the Landry men were discussing news of junior’s wife, except what he was feeling was bigger than Lisa. King didn’t believe Bear’s claims of knowing nothing about what had happened to his daughter-in-law. Bear Landry knew everything that went on in the parish whether the information was made public or not. Whatever had the air humming, King was certain he’d find out soon because the strange energy wasn’t confined to the back corner where the Landry men huddled. It was up front, blowing in on the wind along with the soft vanilla scent from the clematis every time the front door swung open.
If he came to town for a beer more often instead of drinking alone in his trailer at Le Hasard…maybe that’s what the electricity was all about. How Simon would finally see for himself what had become of his land—land that by rights should’ve belonged to King but by law did not.
Then again, King didn’t notice anyone paying him any more mind than usual. Red had greeted him with a cold beer, not a word about his cousin finally stepping foot back in Bayou Allain, just bul shit about work biting the big one and the well on Le Hasard sitting there waiting for the workover he’d been promising for years now to get to. The life and times of a wannabe roughneck…
It was when Red’s front door opened a couple of minutes later that King latched on to the fuss. Red’s was by no stretch of any imagination a place a woman might come for a cocktail, and in a million years King couldn’t see the one walking through the door palming a mug of suds.
Then again, he didn’t have to think hard to picture the fingers toying with the ends of the scarf draped around her neck fondling the stem of a martini glass, or, for that matter, his dick.
That said, he figured his hands would be too callused to touch her in return, and why his thoughts were going to places he never would proved that he really did need more than one night a month out in public.
He raised his bottle to his mouth, kept his gaze focused on her face in the mirror, watched her take in the band in the corner, the three couples groping on the stamp-sized dance floor, the rows of booths and pool tables on the other side, and the bar against the back wall.
It was a weeknight. The crowd small. He and T-Beaux Gentry the only ones cracking their way through Red’s basket of peanuts at the bar. All the other patrons gawking at her had someone at their elbow or across their table or in their arms to whisper with. King did not. He was sitting there all by his lonesome, and roughneck or not, he knew he had a look that brought women close. Something dangerous, he’d been told. Something earthy and raw. This one, after meeting his eyes in the mirror and seeing that for herself, headed toward him—a fact that had ol’ T-Beaux snarling at Red for another damn beer.
King, he just chuckled beneath his breath, cracked open another peanut, and swept the dust and the hul from the bar to the floor as she climbed onto the stool at his side.
“Let me guess,” he said, taking in her cleavage and the lacy edge of her bra where the neckline of her black top gaped beneath her scarf. “A fruity martini or champagne.”
She snorted. It was a sound he had to think back on to make sure he’d heard it right. He did that as she was saying, “Until I sweat out last night’s tequila, I’m sticking to coffee, thanks.”
“Coffee, huh?” King glanced toward the far end of the bar where Red huddled with TBeaux, wadding the towel he used to wipe spills and making no move toward the princess who might as well have climbed into a fishbowl as onto a stool. Pushing away from his own seat as wel
l
as from the imagined picture of her damp skin sweating out tequila, King stepped through the swinging gate into the service alley, where he lifted the carafe of brown sludge Red had brewed hours ago and brought it to his nose.
“This stuff ’s good for nothing but tarring roofs,” he told her. “I’ll make a fresh pot.”
He went about doing so, waiting for her to tell him not to bother, it wasn’t necessary, she’d pick up a cup at the first Starbucks she hit on her way out of town—since he couldn’t think she was here on purpose; she had to be lost—instead of putting him out. But she didn’t.
She sat there wearing at least a grand in a designer’s idea of casual duds, her black hair snipped and clipped to fal
l
around her shoulders and down her back just so. What? Just because he’d farmed, ranched, netted shrimp, worked on a rig, and collected unemployment he didn’t know an expensive woman when one sat down beside him smelling like a field of flowers in Tuscany?
He finished with the coffeepot and turned to see her eyes on the mirror, searching through the reflections of Red’s crowd. Interesting, he mused, leaning closer, his forearms crossed on the edge of the bar.
“Lookin’ for anyone in particular or just a good time,
mon ami
?”
The look she gave him would have withered the bal
l
s on a lot of men. King took it as a challenge.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine.” She left it at that.
King prompted, “That so,
chère
? Someone living in Bayou Allain?”
“Last I knew, yes. But no one answered the door at the address I have. No one answered at any of the neighbors’ doors, either.” She paused as if weighing the wisdom of what she wanted to say before adding, “Lots of drafty houses you’ve got here.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way the curtains swing back and forth in the windows.”
King laughed. At the end of the bar, Red looked up. T-Beaux’s glare turned to a grimace. Even Bear Landry, sitting across the room in his booth surveying all, shook his head.
No one liked it when King laughed. They’d come to know the sound, what it meant, and how the only one who would find the joke funny was him.
This was a good one. King knew all about folks here staying far away from all parts of a man’s trouble save for the gossip.
“I’m glad one of us is amused,” she finally said.
“What’s your name, chère?” he asked, reaching beneath the bar for a mug he hoped was clean and pouring her a cup of coffee.
“Michelina Ferrer.” She waited a few seconds, as if expecting recognition, before adding, “Micky. You?”
“Kingdom Trahan.” He offered her cream and sugar. She took both, and he told her to cal
l
him King.
“Kingdom?” she teased—a stranger, yet she had to get in a dig.
“Michelina?” he came back with, used to the response. “Who is it you’ve come to Bayou Allain to see,
chère
?”
“A girlfriend from college,” she said, and King tensed against barking out another laugh.
There was only one woman down here who could possibly have gone to school with someone who looked like this and was named Michelina Ferrer. “Oh, yeah?”
He didn’t say anything else, just waited for her to confirm his suspicions. She did, nodding. “Lisa Weston. Do you know her? Though she’d be Lisa Landry to you.”
“Terrill’s wife,” he said, his voice stiff.
“I cal
l
ed the sheriff ’s office. The girl there told me he was already off duty and if he wasn’t at home, he’d be here or at Bear’s place, whatever that means. She didn’t know anything about where Lisa might be.”
That would be because no one knows what happened to Lisa. Or at least those who do ain’t talking.
King thought it, but he didn’t say it, casting another glance toward Bear Landry’s booth and wondering if he should walk Micky Ferrer over, or if he could stretch out Bear’s discomfort a while, because he didn’t think there was anything he enjoyed more than watching the bastard sweat.
“Terrill was here. You just missed him. Bear’s what everyone around here calls Terril , Sr.”
“So maybe Terril ,” she paused, then added, “the son,” as if he couldn’t figure it out for himself, “is on his way to Bear’s place?”
“I doubt that.” He took another drink of his beer, his eyes on hers, watching them take his measure as someone she wasn’t sure she liked, someone she wasn’t easily going to trust. Someone she stil
l
wasn’t ready to write off.
Not just yet.
“Why is that? Or do I have to jump through hoops for an answer?”
He didn’t have the patience to linger any longer, no matter how much he enjoyed the game and her eyes. He wanted to see this woman go up against Bear Landry in the worst way, because for the first time that he could remember, King wasn’t so sure Bear would win.
He shook his head, then gave a nod toward the room’s back corner. “No hoops required. There’s no reason for Terrill to head out to the old man’s place when the old man is sitting right there.”
Five
T errill Landry sat behind the wheel of his patrol car in Red’s parking lot. He was out of control. He knew it. The fact that he was about to drive home not caring about his blood alcohol level proved how far out in left field he was standing. But since he had nothing to go home to, no reason to be there, he really couldn’t make himself give a shit. Lisa was the best thing that had ever happened in his life. He’d grown up in this nothing of a backwater, raised by a father who ran every show in town. He’d spent four years at Louisiana State University, served four more at the feet of good ol’ Uncle Sam. Then he’d come back to Bayou Allain because this is where the Landrys lived. This is where they’d always lived. And right now, without Lisa, he couldn’t think of anyplace he wanted to live less, or any reason to live at all.
He met her not long out of the service. He’d spent a week after his discharge on a Florida beach, wanting to get his game on, knowing the future he’d be returning to in Bayou Allain—a future his father would determine no matter any plans he made for himself. Living in the bayou meant living under Bear Landry’s thumb. That’s how it had always been.
It had been that way for his mother, too. It had been the reason she left. The people in town had seen a woman deserting her husband and son and called it abandonment. From his distance of twenty-five years, Terrill was now able to see more of the truth, that of a woman married to a man who gave her no say in raising their child, a woman never allowed to be the mother she wanted to be.
He didn’t have to stay. He knew that, just as he knew it hadn’t taken much to beckon his mother away. Yet he stil
l
hadn’t been able to leave his father alone. Terril hoped that made him a good son instead of a sucker, though feeling like the latter was where he spent most of his time.