Showdown in Mudbug Read online

  Maryse stared out the driver’s window at the mansion across the street. Sonny Hebert’s mansion. “Trying to get ourselves killed?”

  “God, you’re such a whiner,” Helena bitched from the backseat. “All that shit you went through in the last couple of months, and you’re getting all worried about sitting in a car on a public street.”

  Maryse turned around and glared at Helena. “Do I need to remind you that all the ‘shit’ I went through the last couple of months was your fault, and I never did anything to put myself in the middle of it? And that I’m still taking antacids?”

  “When you put it that way…” Helena grumbled. “Maybe you should double your dose, just for to night.”

  “I’d love to, but the pharmacy was out…again.”

  “The pharmacy is always out of medicine. Call Dr. Breaux and ask for samples. I don’t think I paid for medicine the last three years.” Helena looked over at Raissa. “You want to help me out here? I’m sorta getting killed on this one.”

  Raissa smiled. “Don’t worry about your stomach, Maryse. We’re not getting any closer than this, and his security cameras don’t scan farther than the curb in front of his house. Besides, it’s not like we’re going to walk up to the door and ring the bell.”

  Maryse turned in her seat to face Raissa. “Do you honestly believe sending Helena in there is a better option? The Harbinger of Death? The Master of Disaster?”

  Raissa laughed and handed Helena a little round piece of plastic. “All she has to do is hide this somewhere in Sonny’s office, preferably not a plant, as they are prone to being watered, and take a peek in a storage closet. Piece of cake.”

  Helena tucked the plastic piece in the front pocket of her black leather jacket, then took the second piece Raissa handed her and popped it in her ear. “Are we ready to go?”

  “One second.” Raissa tapped more keys on her laptop. “Say something, Helena.”

  “Something.”

  “Smart-ass,” Maryse mumbled as Helena’s voice screeched from the laptop.

  Raissa adjusted the volume and gave Helena a thumbs-up. “All set. When you get inside, turn right, then let me know when you’re in the big hallway. I’ll guide you from there. And everyone pray that Sonny hasn’t rearranged his house since last time I was there, or it’s going to be a long night.”

  Raissa gave Helena the once-over. “So what’s with the outfit? You still doing the classic-movie thing?”

  “Yep,” Helena said and climbed out of the car, tugging her spandex pants out of the crack of her butt as soon as she hit the sidewalk.

  Raissa grimaced. “Should I even ask?”

  Helena rolled her eyes. “Grease 2.” She crossed in front of the car, the neon blue of the pants creating a glare from the streetlight.

  Raissa studied her for a minute. “She’s wearing a T-Birds jacket and motorcycle boots. Is she supposed to be a guy or a girl?”

  Maryse shook her head. “I don’t even want to know. Just be glad that lately her outfits cover most of her body. The MTV years were far less kind on the rest of us.”

  “Yuck.” Raissa fitted a microphone around her ear and positioned it to the side of her mouth as Helena walked through the front wall of the house. “Helena, can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” Helena replied. “I’m in the hallway. There’s five doors on the right and three on the left. Jesus, this guy’s house is bigger than mine.”

  “Try the third door on the right. That should be the office.”

  “Hold on…yeah, office furniture, computer. This is it.”

  “Great. Now find somewhere you can slip the device. A central location is better.” There was a second of silence, then rustling.

  “Let’s see…plant, no that’s real…might need the paper clips…crystal bowl of bullets—What the hell? Why can’t he keep mints like the rest of us?”

  “Just find a place. And not the bullet bowl. It’s probably used a lot.”

  Maryse paled and made the sign of the cross.

  “Yeah, yeah…there’s a little flowerpot with a sad, fake flower in it. Looks like something a kid made. Will that work?”

  “Perfect,” Raissa said. “I remember that vase. Sonny’s daughter made it.”

  “Well, he really ought to pay for some lessons. Kid can’t even spell correctly.”

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to, but she died when she was five. Leukemia.”

  There was a pause on the other end. Then Helena said, “Oh shit, now I’m really going to hell, with that statement. Making fun of a dead kid’s spelling. You could warn me about these things before I go putting my eternal soul at risk, you know?”

  “I’m pretty sure God will overlook your anal-retentive spelling issues. Just stick the device in there and check that closet. Sonny’s guys walk the grounds several times a night. I don’t want them to see us sitting here for very long.”

  Maryse shot Raissa a dirty look. “That’s information that might have been good to know. I could have borrowed someone else’s car or something.”

  “And put someone else at risk instead?” Raissa asked.

  Maryse crossed her arms and slumped down in her seat, looking warily across the street at the house. “I would have picked someone I didn’t like.”

  Raissa grinned. “Well, that would narrow down your selection to human beings as a species. We can always drive around the block and pick someone at random.”

  “You know, you were a lot less scary when I thought you talked to spirits.”

  “Helena,” Raissa directed, “check the closet.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got my head stuck in there. There’s a bunch of file boxes and a trunk with a padlock on it. Has letters on the front…hold on…says ‘Monk.’ Hey, you ain’t got me breaking into some preacher’s shit, do you?”

  Raissa felt her pulse quicken. “The trunk. Can you look inside? I mean, through the side or something?”

  “I can try. It’s awfully small and dark, so no guarantees on what I can see. I can pull the whole thing out—”

  “No! Sonny is beyond anal-retentive. If anything is out of place, he’ll sweep the office and find the bug.”

  “Okay, okay…hold on…It’s dark in the closet and even darker in the trunk. I’m going to have to open the closet door and get some light in somewhere. I’m no vampire.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Yeah…okay, I got some light in here and I’m peeking through the top of the trunk. What the hell…I don’t know…Are you sure I can’t pull this stuff out for a better look?”

  Raissa bit her lip, wondering if it was worth the risk, when Maryse grabbed her sleeve and pointed. “Lights! Someone is awake and coming down the stairs.”

  “Shit! Helena, close the closet door and make sure everything is perfect. Someone’s coming downstairs.”

  Raissa heard the squeak of the closet door and held her breath, hoping the lights in the house continued in the direction of the kitchen and not the office. Seconds later, a light beamed on at the opposite end of the house, and Raissa let her breath out in a whoosh. “They’re in the kitchen. It’s probably Sonny. He has problems sleeping.”

  “You think?” Maryse grumbled.

  “Helena, I think you should get out of there. Unless things have changed enormously, Sonny will grab something to eat and go to his office. I know he can’t see you, but I’d really feel better if you were out of there before he gets in.”

  “No problem. I’m leaving now. Okay, I’m in the hall. Holy shit, Sonny Hebert is walking down the hall toward me. Crap, crap, crap.”

  “Don’t panic. He can’t see you.”

  “But it’s Sonny Hebert. How the hell can I not panic?”

  “Breathe in and out and ease by him.”

  “This is not good,” Maryse said. “When Helena panics, things tend to go very wrong. Maybe I should start the car. Hey, maybe we should just leave now. She can find her way home.”

  “Sit tight,” Raissa said, tr
ying not to let Maryse and Helena’s nerves affect her own. “Everything will be fine.”

  And that’s when a crash echoed through the laptop.

  “What the fuck!” Sonny Hebert’s voice boomed.

  “Damn it to hell,” Helena said. “I hit that table and the vase and oh, shit, here he comes. Think fast, something to do, think fast, the cat—” There was a piercing wail, and more cussing from Sonny, but no clear indication of what was happening in the house.

  Maryse sat frozen in her seat, and the thought flashed through Raissa’s mind that her friend might have had a heart attack right where she sat. “Get the hell out of there,” Raissa said to Helena, and grabbed Maryse’s shoulder with her hand and shook her friend.

  Maryse seemed to leap into consciousness and started the car just as Helena burst through the front wall of the house and ran across the lawn as fast as hot pants, motorcycle boots, and sixty pounds of excess, ghostly flesh allowed. Lights flashed on all over the mansion, and Raissa knew it was only a matter of minutes before the house, grounds, and street were covered with Sonny’s men.

  Helena jumped through the car door and crashed into the backseat as Maryse pulled away from the curb. “Don’t speed,” Raissa cautioned. “Make it look like we were just passing by. Don’t draw attention.”

  Maryse’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel as she eased the car down the block and around the corner. When she’d made it another block away, she took a hard left and floored the accelerator, pushing the car onto the freeway as fast as she could possibly go.

  “What happened?” Raissa asked.

  Helena huffed and wheezed in the backseat, far more than someone who was already dead should. “When I get nervous, sometimes I touch things when I don’t mean to. It’s a pain in the ass, I tell you. Normally I have to concentrate to touch stuff, but when I need to be transparent, it just happens.”

  “I tried to tell you,” Maryse said. “When it comes to being a ghost, Helena is an amateur.”

  Raissa shook her head, trying to absorb the concept of a ghost having to learn how to be a ghost. “Okay. That’s weird and something I’ll definitely remember going forward, but it will have to wait. What happened, Helena?”

  “I hit a table in the hallway and it had a vase on it. The whole thing crashed to the ground, and Sonny was getting closer. Then I saw a cat in the bedroom next to the table, so I grabbed the cat and threw it at Sonny.”

  A clear mental picture of what had happened flashed through Raissa’s mind and she began to laugh. “Oh, my God. You threw a cat at him? The biggest mob boss in the state, and you attacked him with his own cat. Priceless.”

  “Well, I figured he’d think the cat did it all,” Helena defended as Maryse began to chuckle along with Raissa.

  “Oh, it was a brilliant move,” Raissa agreed, “but just not the normal plan of attack for someone like Sonny.”

  Helena pouted for a couple seconds more, then started to grin. “Okay, so it might have been a little funny. Well, a lot funny. If you could have seen the look on his face.”

  Raissa tapped on her laptop. “We can at least hear it.”

  She hit a key and Sonny’s voice resounded through the speakers, “That fucking cat! I swear to God, if my wife didn’t love that animal, I’d kill it now.”

  “You’re sure it was the cat?” one of Sonny’s men asked.

  “Yeah, the alarm is on, and nothing’s out of place, except the vase, which I never liked anyway.”

  “So maybe the cat did you a favor.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But still. Damn cat usually spends all its time sleeping. I can’t imagine what got into it.”

  “Maybe something spooked it. We’ll take a look around, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s a good idea.”

  Raissa clicked on the laptop and the voices stopped. “Cool. It’s coming through great.”

  Maryse glanced over at her. “How are you getting a signal this far away?”

  “I put a receiver in the abandoned building across the street this afternoon. It’s recording everything and I can stream the audio anywhere I can get a decent satellite connection.”

  Maryse shook her head. “I’m not sure if I was more impressed with your alleged psychic ability or your computer genius.”

  “Ultimately, it’s all the same thing.” Raissa turned in her seat to look at Helena. “Were you able to see anything in the trunk?”

  Helena shrugged. “Yeah, sorta. I mean, I guess. Hell, I saw something, but I don’t think I saw it right. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Raissa’s skin began to tingle. “Tell me.”

  Helena frowned. “That fancy trunk and high-tech lock, and all that was inside was a broken crucifix necklace and a Halloween costume. A gray alien suit.”

  Zach stared out of his windshield and shook his head. Almost midnight. Four hours outside Raissa’s shop and no sign of the voodoo princess. Oh, but he’d seen plenty of signs of Agent Fields. If the FBI’s finest had been trained at the art of surveillance, it certainly didn’t show. Agent Fields had parked his car directly in front of Raissa’s shop hours ago, and every fifteen minutes or so, he got out of his car and banged on the shop door.

  Stupid. Raissa knew Zach would run her print as soon as he could get it done, so he seriously doubted she was out on a hot date or tossing back beignets and coffee. No, if he had to guess, Raissa had flown the coop—whether permanently or temporarily remained to be seen—but he wasn’t going to waste any more time watching Agent Fields doing nothing.

  Zach tapped the keyboard on his laptop once more and got the name he was looking for—the owner of Raissa’s building. He entered the name into the police database and finally came up with a phone number for the man. He was obviously asleep when Zach called but woke right up when Zach identified himself and asked about his building. It took him a couple of minutes to assure the man that the building was fine, and as far as he knew the tenant was fine, but she was a possible witness to a crime and he needed to speak with her as soon as possible.

  The owner was only too happy to provide him with Raissa’s emergency contact—Sabine LaVeche.

  Zach hesitated for a moment, then told the owner that there was a bum outside Raissa’s shop banging on the door, and if he moved a bit to the left, the owner might end up replacing that plateglass window. He hung up before the owner could ask for details.

  A few more minutes of laptop whirling and one more rather enjoyable round of watching Agent Fields make yet another pass on assaulting Raissa’s door, and he had the information he was looking for. Sabine LaVeche, Mudbug, Louisiana. And unlike her friend, Sabine had pages and pages of information. He scanned the info for anything that might be able to help him find Raissa, even if it was only something he could threaten Sabine with.

  Another psychic. Great.

  And apparently a psychic with a death wish, he decided as he read the police report on what had to be one of the strangest and most convoluted cases he’d ever heard of. Faked deaths and war crimes and crazy aunts and people buried in the backyard of some of the wealthiest people in the parish. Zach would bet anything that Sabine regretted the day she’d decided to go on a manhunt for her family. He imagined that all the inheritance in the world wasn’t going to erase that trauma from her mind.

  He continued to scan the screen, hoping for a weak link, something he could use to his advantage. The last couple of sentences made him groan. Cancer. Jesus H. Christ! How was he supposed to strong-arm a dying woman who’d discovered dead bodies in her newly found family’s backyard? That was a level of asshole even he wasn’t going to be able to manage.

  He shut the laptop and took one final look at Agent Fields pacing the sidewalk and yelling at someone on his cell phone. Enough of this. Cancer and dead-body-finding aside, he was going to locate Sabine LaVeche and tell her he had an emergency. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  A little less than an hour later, he pulled into the town of Mudbug, what there was of it. It was ti
ny, just a single row of buildings and a neighborhood that stretched in front of the bayou, the houses there the sort that only old money could buy. He had no trouble locating Sabine’s shop and parked in front. The building was dark, but then that hardly surprised him, as midnight had come and gone over an hour before.

  He peeked in the store window, but all he saw was a replica of Raissa’s store in New Orleans. This building had been listed as her home address, so he pressed the doorbell, hoping if she was asleep upstairs she’d hear it. He waited for a while, staring up at the second story to see if a light came on, but the building remained black and silent. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and was just about to dial Sabine’s home phone when a car turned onto Main Street, tires squealing as it rounded the corner.

  The car slid to a stop in front of the hotel, and the driver jumped out, looking frightened and frustrated all at the same time. Zach felt his skin tingle and ducked behind his car, peering over the roof. The passenger finally stepped out, and he smiled. He knew it—Raissa Bordeaux. And whatever her middle-of-the-night adventure had been, it apparently required a laptop and an unhappy getaway driver.

  He watched as the two women entered the hotel, then hurried across the street, careful to stay out of the glow of the streetlamps. The blinds were closed on the hotel windows, so he slipped by and stopped at the door. Locked. But then, that wasn’t really unexpected. He bent down for a closer look at the handle and realized it was an old model and one easily opened with a credit card.

  He pulled his driver’s license out of his wallet and slipped it down the crack between the door and the doorframe. It hung in the frame for just a minute, and Zach mentally cursed himself for choosing his license instead of his grocery-store discount card. At least that didn’t have his name printed on it. He wiggled the license a bit and pressed it down again. There was an audible click and he froze, listening for any noise inside the hotel. When several seconds passed with no reaction from inside, he eased open the door and slipped inside.