Going All Out (15 page)

“Big trouble, buddy. Sure hope she’s worth it.”

“She is.”

“Then hang on and let me see what comes up. You won’t mind if I don’t want to leave an electronic trail?”

“Not a bit.”

The line went silent, and Lucas watched a bayou cruise boat maneuver past a tourist steamer that sat at anchor waiting for the lunch crowd to disembark from the two-hour-long ride. Across the river he could see an industrial barge emerging from under the bridge.

Business as usual on the Mississippi. The whole scene struck a familiar and long-forgotten chord inside him. He’d grown up next to this river, sailing and fishing with his folks and Max, watching the banks change and grow as the years passed.

Lucas had visited home often over the years since he’d left, so how come he hadn’t missed the place until now?

Or did this feeling have more to do with meeting the woman who made him feel as if he’d come home?

Only a few minutes passed before Shawn came back on the line. “You got something. Orleans Parish. Three years ago.”

Lucas stared out into the busy river, the noon sun glinting off the water, sparking flashes on the muddy current, while Shawn relayed a list of priors from a local con man.

“Small-fry organized crime. Racketeering, commercialized vice, illegal gambling. Nothing stuck until three
years ago when some gaming scam he was running went south. He skipped town and left behind your girl to take the heat.”

“Was she involved?”

“They didn’t cut her any slack, from what I can see. They wanted her ex in a big way and the investigation went on for months. She came up squeaky-clean. You’ve heard it all before. Young girl gets involved with a high-rolling loser. You wrote the program to track down the losers, remember?”

But they were talking about Bree here. “Who’s the bum?”

“You know what I want to hear.”

“Yeah, yeah. I have only honorable intentions.”

“No thoughts about revenge? Defending the lady’s honor or any other crazy shit like that?”

“Just want to protect her. I think this guy might be back in town.”

“If he is, you go to NOPD. There’s a warrant.”

“Scout’s honor.”

There was a beat of silence. “The name’s Jude Robicheaux.”

“I’ll take it from here, Shawn. Thanks. I owe you.”

“Naw. You bailed my ass out when the system started glitching before the conference.”

“So I did.”

“But, Russell, let’s call it square. Make sure your name doesn’t cross my desk because my people are tracking you in and out of places where you shouldn’t be.”

“Ouch. You know me better than that.”

Laughter resounded over the line. “Hence the warning.”

Lucas let the subject drop. Shawn knew firsthand the range of Lucas’s skills, and he’d be lying to say he didn’t intend to use them.

“Nothing stupid, buddy,” Shawn said. “Love is blind.”

“That’s your jaded past talking.”

“Watch your ass.”

“You know it.” Lucas disconnected the call.

Bree hadn’t said much about her past, but from what she had said and from the few things Josie had mentioned, he guessed her upbringing had been pretty hardscrabble.

Despite what he’d told Shawn, prying into her past went against his grain. He would have preferred to let nature take its course and have Bree open up to him if and when she chose.

But they were working on a limited time frame here, and he couldn’t get past the memory of the healing scratches on her legs and the finger marks on her beautiful face.

His gut was on fire. She wasn’t sharing what was going on. Something was holding her back from involving him, and he didn’t know how to get her to open up and trust him. Maybe she figured he’d be gone soon and there was no point. Maybe she hadn’t connected with him the way he had with her, but Lucas didn’t think so.

They might not have discussed anything beyond the coronation ball, but what they’d found together was special. He knew it. He would believe Bree knew it, too.

He respected the fact that she might not be ready to share all her secrets, but if she was in danger, then all bets were off. He wasn’t going to sit by and do nothing, which meant he needed to know more about Jude Robicheaux.

He knew just the place to begin.

If Lucas’s laptop were a car, it would be a NASCAR-worthy racer. With his own custom software, cutting-edge technology and a satellite uplink, he could run just about any program from anywhere. Right now he was on a
search expedition to locate the registrant of a certain tag number.

Dismissing Shawn’s warning about venturing into off-limits systems, he hacked his way into the motor vehicle registry.

Bingo. It didn’t prove much of a test to get the name of the rental-car agency or to cover his cybertracks. Even less to access the records from the rental-car company. He started running names of customers starting the day before Bree had come over his wall.

Harold R. Smith.

The name was common, but except for a social security and credit card number, this Harold R. Smith didn’t appear to exist. Once Lucas began running those numbers through various government databases, the bogus social security number proved a dead end, but the credit card number led to a phony company, which turned up a winding money trail that did an admirable job at hiding the real name of the man behind the alias.

Looked like Jude Robicheaux was back in town.

B
REE’S ALARM BLARED
a static-filled tune, blasting open gritty eyes to be blinded by the sunlight streaming through the window. Jolting upright, she clumsily jabbed at the alarm to halt the racket. Not enough sleep. Not by a long shot.

When she finally managed to sit up and swing her legs around in an attempt to stand, she stepped on something thin and hard. She squinted through heavy eyelids to find a pen, which had apparently rolled off her night table onto her floor.

With a protracted sigh she leaned over to grab it, hoping to shake off this stupor in the shower. Not only was she obligated to devote a few hours to the krewe since everyone was busting their butts to get ready, but she needed to get her ball gown pieced to take along with her to work tonight so she could sew on her break.

It wasn’t until replacing the pen that she noticed her day planner wasn’t open to the daily calendar where she’d left it. Now the journal was open to the section in the very back filled with blank pages for miscellaneous notes. Odd. The pages were no longer blank. Unfamiliar handwriting ran across both sides of the pages.

Bree’s first thought was that a coworker had gotten a hold of her day planner and written a message as a joke.

Except Bree kept the book locked inside her locker.

Her gaze darted to the security system panel beside her bedroom door. Goose bumps sprayed along her skin in an icy wash of premonition. But the display glowed red for both the upper and lower quadrants.

No one had visited since she’d gone to sleep.

With her instincts soaring to life, she glanced back at the book, at the fine writing, almost afraid to read what was written there.

“Oof!” Bree cried. She’d been leaning forward so far to read the words that she slipped off the side of her bed and landed hard on the floor.

She scrambled to her feet in an instant, any trace of drowsiness gone. Shooting a nervous gaze around the room, she forced herself to breathe past her throbbing heartbeat.

The curse?

Was this some sort of practical joke? Tally had the security codes, could easily have visited while Bree had slept. That thought propelled her across the room, and she punched in her access codes to pull up the program display.

Four forty-three.

The alarm had been engaged since she’d set it upon going to bed nearly five hours ago. Tally hadn’t visited.

Now Bree forced her gaze back to the day planner when every instinct screamed for her to bolt from the room.

Bree had forgotten to breathe again and gazed down at the signature, that breath lodged in her throat, every instinct disbelieving as she read:
Captain Gabriel Dampier.

“Whoa!”

The word shot from her lips on a panicked laugh as she leaped back from the night table as if her day planner might jump up and bite her.

She laughed again, a nerved-out, desperate sound.

This had to be some trick of Jude’s.

But how? And why would he warn her about a device he’d planted in her car?

It simply didn’t make sense. She wasn’t Tally, who could make the leap of faith to believe a ghost had contacted her. She wasn’t her mother, who could spend her lifetime wishing a ghost would.

Bree was the practical one, and, clinging to that thought, she forced herself to think practically now.

No one had disabled her security system in the nearly five hours since she’d gone to sleep.

Fact.

Someone could have written in her day planner before today. Maybe not at work while it had been locked away, but Bree didn’t carry the thing around with her 24/7.

Fact.

She also hadn’t checked the blank note pages to see if anyone had written on them—she never used the note pages.

Fact.

The note claimed a dark-haired man had placed a device under her car.

Easy enough to find out.

Darting toward her dresser, Bree dragged the pajamas off and pulled on sweats. She raced downstairs, heart thumping in time with each step, and disabled her security. Pulling her car keys off a rack beside her front door, she bolted out into the court, not realizing that she’d forgotten to put on any shoes until her feet hit the pavement.

Her Jeep sat on the street, under her balcony, accessible to anyone who might happen along. She used a Club device to lock the steering column as a deterrent to car thieves and she’d never had any trouble since her move to Court du Chaud.

Now she had the urge to hop in her car and drive away. She could sense eyes upon her, hated the thought of Jude lurking in the shadows as she checked out her Jeep.

But she damn sure wasn’t getting in and driving anywhere when those words in her day planner played over again and over again in her head.

I fear for your safety.

Kneeling on the curb, she ran her hand under the body as far in as she could reach.

Nothing.

Following the line of her chassis, she worked her way around the front end, fighting off that feeling of unseen eyes on her, reminding herself that if Jude had wanted to hurt her, he easily could have already.

But some part of her resisted that thought. Jude was a lot of things, but she still didn’t think he’d come here to hurt her. Perhaps some pathetic part of her needed to believe he’d cared for her in his own dysfunctional way, that she’d meant something to him at some point, that their whole relationship hadn’t been a total lie.

How sad was that?

Bree didn’t want an answer to the question as she was on her knees under her car trying to find out what Jude had done.

Again. When her fingers caught on something behind the tire on the driver’s side, Bree gingerly grazed the square shape, tried to figure out what it might be.

The wild thought that detonating devices could be so tiny sprang to mind, but she couldn’t shake the thought that if Jude had wanted her dead, he would have never made contact with her.

No, Jude wanted something.

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she tugged until the device came free. The second she saw the tiny electronic instrument, Bree knew what it was.

A global positioning system.

Her legs turned to rubber, and it was a good thing she was already close to the ground or she might have sunk to her knees. She didn’t dare give in to the sensation, though, and forced herself to depress the lock on her key fob, stand up and head back down the alley.

Here she’d thought Jude must have followed her to the den this morning, but it looked as though he’d been tracking her via satellite signal.

Her only consolation was that he hadn’t been tracking her for long. Mark had only returned home the night before she and Lucas had. The letter in her day planner had said…

The letter.

Why would Jude have clued her in that he’d hidden a tracking device on her car?

When would Jude have gotten a hold of her day planner to write that note?

The logic didn’t work, but neither did the only other explanation she had right now.

Captain Gabriel Dampier.

“No, no, no! That’s crazy!” She threw the device across the street so hard it pinged against the gate of the music store.

Then she wheeled around….

And found herself staring at Madame Alain.

“Bree, honey, are you all right?” the older woman asked solicitously, her gaze dropping pointedly to Bree’s bare feet.

“I, um…yes, I’m fine, Madame Alain. How nice to run into you.”

What freaking bad luck to run into her!

Madame Alain was a nice old lady, even if loneliness had turned her into sort of the court busybody. She’d lived
here for well over half a century, and during the past few years she’d lost her husband and her other longtime friends, including Bree’s uncle Guidry and the lady from Number Seventeen.

Bree knew she must look like a train wreck with her bed head and no makeup, a raving madwoman, which is basically what she was right now. She hadn’t needed Madame Alain to notice. Bree could just hear the woman now.

Do you have any idea why the twin in Number One would be running around in the middle of the day like she’d just jumped out of bed? She looked upset. Any idea why she’d be upset?

No doubt the questions would be flying through the court by dinnertime.

“You’re sure you’re all right, my dear? You look flustered.”

Argh!

“I’m fine, Madame Alain. Really. I was just working out. Then I wanted to do Pilates, but I couldn’t find my video. I’ve got the greatest workout video. I thought I might have left it in my car, but I didn’t. Tally must have borrowed it.” She sidestepped the woman with a wave. “You have a nice day.”

She could feel Madame Alain’s gaze on her, no question, and sure enough, she didn’t get far before that tremulous voice rang out, “Wait a minute. I want to say thanks for the flowers.”

“Enjoy them,” Bree called back over her shoulder before racing back down her walkway.

She didn’t stop until she’d made it inside her house and upstairs to where her day planner still sat innocuously on the night table. Staring hard at the message, Bree willed
herself to concentrate, to detect any hint of the handwriting that she’d been so familiar with long ago.

If Jude had sent this message, he’d had someone else write it for him, because it simply wasn’t familiar. But the more she stared, the more Bree noticed something else odd.

The letters scrawled boldly across the pages, but the way the ink faded, grew darker, then faded again gave her the impression the writer hadn’t used steady pressure with the pen. Had someone tried to mask familiar handwriting?

Or had a ghost had trouble holding a pen?

Argh!

Bree loved her sister more than anything. For so long it had been just the two of them against the world, the two of them shouldering responsibilities that had felt heavier than they could handle alone. She would never have called Tally crazy no matter what crazy things came out of her sister’s mouth.

But Bree hadn’t believed Tally when she’d claimed to see their pirate ancestor. She’d thought Tally was simply too caught up in the treasure hunt, too head over heels with Christien.

It wasn’t even that she didn’t believe in ghosts; Bree had never really considered them. Not seriously. Of course she’d taken all the late-night tours through the French Quarter with her girlfriends while growing up, had heard all the stories of hauntings in the Ursuline convent and in the various buildings where murder victims routinely appeared to protest their deaths.

But she’d never seen a thing in all her life to lead her to believe all those gris-gris-wielding priests and priestesses in the Quarter were real.

“There is no such thing as a ghost!” she cried out to no
one in particular, stubbornly, desperately refusing to consider something so ridiculous.

But then, as she stood there alone, her day planner shifted of its own accord and pitched off the night table.

Followed by the alarm clock.

And the lamp.

By the time a pillow flew off her bed, Bree had already backed up against the wall, her heart lodged in her throat.

Or is there?

A
FTER WRAPPING UP WORK
at the den, Lucas took Bree to dinner. But she wanted to unwind before work, and to his surprise, she hadn’t wanted to do that at her home. So they’d picked up Chinese takeout and headed to his place.

“What time do Josie and Max come in tonight?” she asked.

“I’m going to the airport after I drop you at work.”

She paused in front of the table and glanced at him over her shoulder. “I don’t need a ride, Lucas.”

“Indulge me. I want to make the most of our time together.”

“I don’t get off until six again.”

“I’m an early riser.”

She plunked down the bag of takeout in the middle of the table and eyed him narrowly. “The last I heard, you worked into the wee hours and forgot to go to sleep.”

“Then I’ll forget again tonight and pick you up when your shift ends.”

This argument was as futile as it had been this morning, and Bree recognized it. She just gave a shrug and began unpacking their dinner.

Lucas let the subject drop, too, content to have won his
way. Bree had arrived back at the den today shortly after his return from the park and had been behaving as if the scene this morning had never happened, as if everything was normal.

He’d attempted to get her to talk about it but wound up frustrated that she kept sidestepping any discussion. She’d finally told him to stop worrying, she was a big girl who could take care of herself.

Lucas didn’t doubt she could. Apparently she’d been caring for herself, her sister and her brother for a long time. But he felt shut out.

He didn’t like the feeling.

He also didn’t know what to do about it, which was another thing he didn’t like. He wanted Bree to share what was going on—if he understood the situation, he could help her deal with it.

But Bree wasn’t sharing, and that bothered him most, Lucas decided as he grabbed plates from the kitchen.