Spider Game (9 page)
T
he night air felt cool on Trap’s face as they hurried out of the Huracan Club and down the steps onto the dirt that fronted the building. Humidity often kept the air a little muggy, a little sultry, and the perfumes of the swamp could be cloying. The brief rain left the trees and shrubbery glistening from the half-moon’s beams. Water along the river sparkled liked diamonds.
Trap and Wyatt stayed in the shadows, holding perfectly still. Motion drew the eye and out of habit, neither moved a muscle while they carefully checked the area around them. They had enemies far worse than the Comeaux brothers and never lost their vigilance. As if by mutual consent, without a word¸ Trap stayed in the shadows covering Wyatt while the Cajun sauntered to the boat. The smaller boat was lightweight and fast, able to move easily through shallow water and speed through the deeper channels.
Wyatt was at home in the swamp and bayous. Born and raised there, he’d spent his youth hunting and fishing throughout the entire area. His home had been built from the cypress trees growing on their property – trees that withstood the water and the insects far better than anything else. The other GhostWalkers were just beginning to know their way around the waterway. Trap didn’t mind in the least sitting back and letting Wyatt take the lead.
“She warned me off, Wyatt,” Trap announced, with a small sigh.
“She kissed the heck out of you,” Wyatt pointed out.
“
I
kissed
her
,” Trap corrected.
“She kissed you back, and that kiss didn’t seem like a warnin’ to me.” Wyatt sent him another cocky grin. “Seems to me that was a ‘hello handsome’ kinda kiss. You probably didn’t recognize it, not bein’ Cajun and all.”
Trap shook his head. “She’s going to know we’re following her if you keep yapping.”
“Trap, that woman wouldn’ have stood for you puttin’ your hands on her like that if she didn’ want to kiss you. She was armed. She’s got to be venomous like Pepper and the girls. You took your life in your hands gettin’ that kiss, and she knew it and knew you knew it. She rewarded you with that kiss for your bravery.”
Trap sent Wyatt a quelling look. “Shut the hell up. You’re so full of shit.”
Wyatt laughed softly and turned his attention to maneuvering the waterway. He knew the route the Comeaux brothers would take home. They weren’t subtle or cagey. They knew no one would ever dare follow them for any reason. The Comeaux family had a reputation in the bayou. They were hard drinking and mean. More than anything else, if you tangled with one, you tangled with the entire family. They had a lot of cousins, most every bit as mean as the brothers.
“I’m not certain how she thinks she can lure them off their boat to shore,” Trap mused aloud. He didn’t care whether Wyatt heard him or not. He was trying to figure out exactly what Cayenne would do. He had to get ahead of her. His brain came up with one too many ideas. The idea of her standing naked on the shore of the island rose all too vivid in his mind to torture him.
“Trap.” Wyatt’s voice was pitched low. Very low. Edgy.
Irritated at the interruption, but recognizing the warning in Wyatt’s voice, Trap swung his head around to glare at his teammate.
“Let it go, you’re rockin’ the boat and you’ve got the water churnin’. Seriously, man, get it under control.”
No one in his life had ever told him that other than his older sister, Dru. He could almost hear her, there in the quiet of the swamp, laughter surrounding him, telling him to “get it under control.” She didn’t mean the same thing, but still, it was a good memory. One he cherished. She always laughed when he annoyed every other person around him. His mother loved him, but she mostly had no idea what to do with him. Dru had a mind like his and a sense of humor that got both of them through the first part of their childhood with a drunken father and an absent mother.
He forced himself to nod. To breathe. The volcano of rage inside of him subsided and became buried under the glacier of ice he had painstakingly built to protect himself and the rest of the world from what he knew he’d become. He sank onto the bench, turning his back once again on Wyatt. What was he doing? He had to think it through. Nothing disturbed him. He didn’t allow it. He sure as hell had never experienced jealousy, especially jealousy brought on by his own imagination.
Ever since he’d laid eyes on Cayenne he’d been intrigued. He had gone with his team members to rescue two of Wyatt’s little daughters. They were locked in cells, scheduled for termination in Whitney’s facility there in the swamp. He had gotten them out and then gone to the other side of what essentially was a jail to find Cayenne.
She’d taken his breath away, but more importantly, she’d taken something else from him, some part of him he knew he was never going to get back. It was hers now. Each time he saw her, the longing in him for a home of his own, one like Wyatt had, filled with love and laughter and warmth, grew in him. With all that, just what was he doing? What did he expect? The woman had spent her entire life in a laboratory. She’d been
used
as a lab rat. She’d never tasted freedom and had no idea what to do with it.
Trap was certain she was making the building where she’d been scheduled for termination her home, and she’d practically admitted it to him. She hadn’t left the swamp when she could have. She should have. She was trained as a soldier – all the children Whitney had taken from orphanages around the world had intense combat training as well as combat experience. She might not have practical experience, but she’d had the training. If they were skilled as assassins, he always made certain they were tested in the field, just as he’d tested Cayenne by putting her in the maze with a team of supersoldiers.
Pepper, Wyatt’s wife, was a seductress, able to kill with one bite, but they lost control of her, not factoring in that she might be too stubborn, abhor violence and be too moral to control. She had a code, and that code didn’t include killing innocents. Trap hadn’t been able to read the file on Cayenne. When they’d rescued the children, Wyatt had removed as much as he could from the labs, but Cayenne’s file was corrupted. All he knew was that she was deemed too dangerous for anyone to handle her. Every single handler apparently was too terrified to work with her. He had a couple of experts working to recover the data, but it was going to take time.
So how would she get the two brothers off the waterway where she could more easily rob them? And why wouldn’t they remember she had been the one to take their wallets? She had to either cloak herself – and that made no sense when she had to lure them to her – or she had a way of completely wiping their memories. In the bar, she’d used her voice to dull the memory of her presence, but what if she could actually wipe out incidents entirely? That was the scariest answer to him because he never wanted her to try that shit with him.
“She’s ahead of them, Wyatt. She has to pick her victim weeks in advance and then figure out a route they’re going to take to get home,” Trap said. That had to be how she did it and why she didn’t rob often in spite of her need for money. She set everything up far in advance, including her own escape route. She was a GhostWalker, and GhostWalkers always prepared for everything to go south.
“She somehow gets ahead of them and her boat ‘breaks’ down,” he continued. “She plays the damsel in distress. She was in that cage, and she used her voice to draw me in. She whispered to come closer. She’s good at what she does, but she doesn’t want to make a mistake. That’s why she didn’t hang with them longer. She’d already chosen the brothers and was just making certain she’d been right about them being slime buckets.”
“So I need to figure where she’s going to draw them to the bank and stop before they hear the boat.” Wyatt frowned. “Best place would be right before they turn into the canal heading to their homes. The Comeaux brothers all built next to one another, just off of Honey Island. You have to turn off the main canal right where it gets extremely shallow, and there’s a narrow canal that leads back to their homes. No one uses that canal but them, so she wouldn’t have any business there. I’m betting she gets herself hung up in the shallows on purpose so they have to help her.”
“Would they? They don’t seem like good Samaritans to me.”
“A woman alone at night? Hell yeah, they’re going to stop. No one around. They figure they can do anything they want to her and she won’ say a word because she’ll be too afraid of them. They’d tell each other she had it comin’. She flirted with them. She wanted it. Whatever it takes to make them live with themselves. Who knows? Maybe they just get off on hurtin’ a woman. Their brother Vicq certainly did.” There was not only distaste in Wyatt’s voice, but an edge of anger.
Trap turned on the bench seat. “You never talked much about that, Wyatt. He had your girlfriend…” He trailed off, giving Wyatt the option to tell him or not.
Wyatt shook his head. “I went to school with her. She was beautiful to me. I put her up on a pedestal and didn’ see what she was really like. She had a singin’ voice that was so amazin’, everyone would stop whatever they were doin’ and listen. She refused to go out with me in school. I was younger than her because I’d skipped a couple of grades. She didn’ think I’d amount to much…”
“Are you shitting me?” Trap couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Wyatt was brilliant. How could a woman get it in her head he wouldn’t amount to much?
Wyatt shrugged. “I went off to the university and came back a doctor. I came back. To the swamp. To the bayou. She didn’ like that. She thought I should be a big city doctor. Make the bucks. She still wouldn’ go out with me. Then Vicq and his buddies got ahold of her. My brother and his wife rescued her, and I guess she wanted company. She strung me along for a while. I didn’ touch her because she was so fragile. I just wanted to take care of her after what they did to her. That lasted until I found out she was sleepin’ with a big city boy with tons of money.”
“Women fuck up a man’s life,” Trap said.
“I thought so until Pepper came along. She suits me in every way. I’m a wild man and I belong here. I’m stayin’ here and raisin’ my family. I love Nonny, and Pepper does too. Joy didn’ like
ma grand-mere
at all. She pretended to, and of course our families were friends, but she didn’t like that Nonny smoked a pipe and generally didn’t have the manners Joy thought she should. Pepper doesn’ mind my team runnin’ in and out of the house. Joy would have despised that. She would never, under any circumstances, have taken in my daughters. I’m well shed of her.”
Wyatt slowed the boat as they turned off the river into a narrow canal. Saw grass rose up on either side of the boat and both men were careful not to touch the tall long leaves of the shrub. Razor-sharp, the leaves could easily slice a hand or arm. The boat barely moved through the water, and Trap could see fallen trees beneath the surface Wyatt had to maneuver around. The water was extremely shallow. Because of the constant erosion, the path boats took through the water was continually changing.
Wyatt lowered his voice. “All kiddin’ aside, Trap. I have to ask you this question, and you have to really think about it before you do this. You certain you know what you’re doin’? You take on this woman, you can’ just walk away from her when the goin’ gets rough or you’re caught up in the lab workin’ on some project that takes over your mind. She’s real and human and will need help adjustin’ to life outside a lab. She’ll have gaps in her knowledge you won’ think about. Pepper still has to fight feelin’ inferior because of what they did to her. As her partner, you’re goin’ to have to give her that confidence and protect her from outsiders.”
Trap sighed. He couldn’t blame Wyatt for asking. He was asking himself the same thing over and over. He had his uncles somewhere out there, and he knew they would try to kill Cayenne. He knew that with every certainty. If he were at all a decent man, he’d turn away from her. He also knew he wasn’t nearly as easygoing as everyone thought him. He knew he wouldn’t be the least bit laid-back with her. Not when he hadn’t had anyone of his own since his aunt had been taken from him.
It didn’t matter that he had all the money in the world, not when he didn’t have anyone to share his life with. Cayenne was his chance. His only chance. She was lethal. His uncles came at her, they’d be in for a nasty surprise. More, they had no idea what he’d become. He could protect his own now. He wasn’t the boy who had picked up a gun and shot his own father, but was too weak to follow up. This time, no matter what shape he was in, he could take them. He was a GhostWalker, and even running on empty, he could continue with his mission. He knew, he’d been practicing for a while now.
“I’m not giving her up, Wyatt,” Trap said. “I go back and forth in my mind, but seeing her, kissing her, looking into her mind and her eyes, she’s worth whatever it takes.”
“It’s not goin’ to be easy.” Wyatt stilled the engine, stepped into the shallow water and dragged the boat to the edge. “She’ll probably fight you every step of the way. Pepper did a lot of runnin’ before she settled down and committed to me. Your woman’s likely to do more than run, you scare her too much.”