The judge responded to this litany with the expletive “Jesus Christ on a broomstick, kid,” which effectively put him in contempt of his own court, and presented young Regence with:
Option A: Army.
Or option B: Baker Correctional Institution.
Regence chose A, got his records sealed, signed up, shipped out, killed a passel of folks, and came home some decades later with a ton of medals, then moved three states west to Petit Bateau, Louisiana, which welcomed the decorated veteran with open arms, having zero clue as to the many and varied sins of his past.
And now, aged two score and more, he was constable of the tiny ward and driving his own vehicle with total impunity. Regence could barely credit how rosy things had turned out. His daddy had always told him, “Good things come to the righteous,” so Regence considered every crooked dollar he tucked into his billfold a big screw you to his dead daddy, because he sure as hell had never been righteous.
Regence’s main source of crooked dollars was running errands for Ivory Conti, who was the New Orleans receiving agent for the Los Zetas cartel. Ivory had dozens of cops on the payroll, but Regence was rising through the ranks real fast due to his unflinching nature and willingness to transport whatever would fit in the trunk of his Chevrolet Tahoe across the Pontchartrain Bridge. Regence did not give a shit what Ivory’s boys put in there so long as it didn’t leak or seep or otherwise transfer evidence.
On the night our tale begins, Regence parked up his Chevy at Bodi Irwin’s boatyard and took his beloved cabin cruiser up the Pearl River for a little talk with a guy who had messed up grievously on Ivory’s turf.
It was unfortunate that this talk had to take place at all, because the guy he had to talk with was a useful guy—unique, even. But at the same time, doing this business for Ivory meant he was crossing a line, and crossing a line meant a bump up to a lot more than the usual $2,400 a month.
So fuck you, Daddy, thought Regence and gunned his boat upriver, cutting a swathe through the algae with the Elodie’s aluminum prow.
The Elodie.
After that runt Squib Moreau’s angel of a momma.
Surely to Christ that would bring her around.
Regence knew his own habits well enough to realize that he was on the road to being hung up on that Cajun girl. “Girl”? Hell, she was a full-grown woman, past her sell-by date and with nothing to show for it ’cept that idiot boy of hers, and Hooke counted him a liability rather than an asset.
Don’t get yourself hung up, son, he told himself. Ain’t nothing but pain at the end of that road.
But Regence couldn’t control his yearnings, and it wasn’t just a physical thing. Hooke had plenty of slut shacks he dropped in on regular. His interest in Elodie Moreau was more long-term.
She should count her lucky stars a guy like me is so much as letting my gaze linger, Constable Hooke thought several times a day, which didn’t make him feel one degree less irritated about how his courtship was progressing. He was smart enough to grasp the psychology of the situation, that psychology being he craved what he couldn’t get his mitts on, but knowing the psychology didn’t mitigate his needs none.
Maybe if she hadn’t shot me down in public that way. Looking down on me like I was some swamp rat come slithering in off the river.
Regence had been rejected by women before, but he often found that decision reversed when he approached it different, for example at four in the morning in a dark alley. Shit, one time he didn’t even have to say nothing, just whistled a little off-key and cocked his head to one side.
But Elodie. She had more steel in her than that, the way she stared him down in the Pearl Bar that first time they ran into each other outside the station. Hunched over a mug of coffee, she was still in scrubs after her shift when he came in. Hooke took one look and thought to himself, Elodie is all tuckered out, so mayhaps her defenses are down. So he’d sauntered over and dropped the line, “Morning, sugar. Remember me? The name’s Constable Hooke, and I would surely like to get my hooks into you.”
Cheesy as all hell, but Regence was unaccustomed to making the effort with his sweet talk. Usually just saying any old words did the trick. But not this time. Elodie lifted her head like it weighed a ton with all the troubles in there. She fixed him with those chocolate eyes and responded a bit louder than necessary in front of the breakfast crowd. And what she said was, “Constable, I spent the night scooping old-man crap out of a hypoallergenic bag, and I would one hundred percent rather spend the rest of my life on this earth doing exactly that than let you get a single hook into me.”
It was a zinger, no doubt about that. The boys in the Pearl close to split their guts laughing and Regence left with a red neck. Elodie had said nicer things since then, but Regence still felt that burn under his collar.
Chapter 2
SQUIB OFTEN FELT HARD DONE BY FORTUNE-WISE. EVERYBODY GOT some luck, a bone tossed their way by Mother Nature. Squib’s boon was common among Cajun folk in that the maringouins had never taken a shine to him. Maybe it was the French blood from way back, but more likely the Caribbean had more to do with the situation. Squib never could fathom how a person could even tolerate the bayou after sunset with the mosquitoes ripping chunks out of their flesh. You see those tourists in the morning wandering around welted like they got themselves tortured. Some Guantanamo-looking shit. Nothing took the cool out of a college calf tattoo like half a dozen septic lumps. Squib got maybe a handful of bites a season, and even then it was usually some zirondelle on a rampage.
So that was his luck.
Unblemished skin.
Hard to turn a fella’s life around on that, less’n he got spotted hanging at the mall by some model scout. And that wasn’t overlikely. Squib didn’t really hang per se. He was a not-enough-hours-in-the-day kind of guy. Always working, making a buck.
His Cajun skin made setting crawfish traps more comfortable, at least. Squib would motor up the bayou toward Honey Island and float half a dozen of those cages near telltale lily pads, then spend a few hours trawling with a scoop net until his traps were bursting at the wire. In all his years night fishing, Squib had only ever been bit the one time, and then it wasn’t no mosquito but a moccasin that got itself tangled up in a cage. The snake must have been jizzed out, though, because Squib suffered no more than a nub of swelling around the teeth marks.
Tonight I got bigger fish in my sights, thought Squib, going all melodramatic. A life of crime.
Squib knew that he was stepping over some kind of threshold and there wouldn’t be no crossing back, but Regence Hooke was a devil in a tasseled cap who had his sights set on Elodie Moreau, so it was up to him to buy them some distance.
Maybe if we’re living in the middle of a development with plenty of witnesses, then Hooke might settle down some and back off.
Squib’s warped reasoning was based on a child’s understanding of evil men. He couldn’t know that specimens like Regence Hooke didn’t get settled down; they got riled up.
The only time Hooke ever settled down was with a blister pack of Benzedrine, a quart of Old Forester’s, and a hooker at the door.
The skinny on Squib’s prospective boss was as follows: Willard Carnahan, a purveyor of all things legal and illegal. Wasn’t nothing beneath Carnahan, not so far as Squib knew. There was a story doing the grapevine that Willard had beat a corner-slinger into a coma recently in the French Quarter over a zip of coke that was actually baby powder and turned to rock in his nostrils, so Carnahan wasn’t ever crossing the Twin Span again, on account of the retribution that was waiting for him in New Orleans from the hustler’s higher-ups. Willard was a swamp sailor: He could navigate the Pearl River without ever once skimming a bank. He worked a tour boat during the day and at nighttime ran his own deals through the tiny feeder tribs—even with his eyes closed, if needs be. Carnahan had his own distillery, which was perfectly legal so long as a fella didn’t use it to manufacture white lightning. The official story was that Carnahan was distilling water, but in fact he was engaged in the age-old practice of running ’shine for the alcohol-blind swamp dogs on the bayou. The sheriff’s office in Slidell took their payoffs in a jug, and nobody else gave much of a crap. But those jugs were heavy, and Squib reckoned that Carnahan could use a humper who knew the swamp almost as well as he did.