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  I nodded.

  Jake strode over to the man casually, his pace no faster than if he were out for a stroll.

  “Hey, Carl,” Jake called a few steps away. “Carl!”

  The man stopped mid-whack, the stock of the rifle over his head. “Jake?”

  Nodding, Jake took his hat off, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and popped his hat back on. “If you’re done there, I sure could use a cold drink. Je suis chaud. How ‘bout you?”

  Heaving with effort, Carl looked at Jake with confusion. He nodded after a moment, his arms still raised with the rifle. “Yeah, it’s hot all right.”

  Jake nodded towards the office. “Now rumor is Harold keeps a master key to that pop machine tucked in his desk drawer. Bet if we asked him nice, he’d admit it.”

  Carl’s eyes flicked to the battered car. “Right now?”

  “As good a time as any.” Jake smiled easily. “I’ll bet they even have Mr. Pibb. What do you say, Carl? Wanna put that ruined rifle down and come with me?”

  “Ruined?” Carl started, held the rifle down, and frowned. “M—My daddy gave me this when I turned twelve.”

  I could hear the whine in his voice from three doors down.

  “Well. Shouldn’t go around beating things with it then, Carl,” Jake drawled and took the rifle from him.

  Carl watched as Jake walked to the cruiser’s trunk, opened it, and tossed the rifle in.

  “You gonna arrest me, Jake?”

  Jake shook his head. “Not today, Carl. Now, go on inside. I’ll catch up.”

  Carl nodded and walked to the manager’s door as Jake returned to me. The expression on Jake’s face made me step back.

  “What, you’re mad at me?” Shocked, I shook my head. “Figures.”

  “No, Riley,” Jake said. “But maybe now you understand how angry and hurt these people are. My advice is to get out of my parish before someone does that to you instead of your car.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “How am I supposed to do that? Carl killed my car.”

  “I’ll happily drive you to the airport again.” Jake offered and tipped his hat. “As soon as possible.”

  Frustration roiled my stomach. It wasn’t that I was ungrateful for Jake’s protection, I just wished I didn’t need it so much. I was a strong and capable investigative reporter. Yet out here, I felt so vulnerable, so out of step with how people thought.

  I pushed down the fear that still sent my hands trembling. Burying them in my pockets, I nodded out the door. “Is that before or after you have a conversation with Harold about his soda machine theft?”

  Jake pressed his lips together. “After. You have a lot to do here, anyway.”

  “Whatever.” I said quietly and bent to pick up a broken coffee mug. “I’ll be out of your hair soon. I need to find a hotel, anyway.”

  Jake shook his head. “Did you just see what Carl did to your car? I can guarantee you all the rooms you call on will be ‘taken’,” Jake’s slow drawl drove me batty waiting for him to finish his sentence. “No one wants you here.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do, then?”

  “That’s a dilemma, isn’t it, chér?” Tipping his hat, he shrugged again. “If you’re still here when I get done with my conversation, I’ll drive you straight to the airport. Nowhere else.”

  “You are running me out of town.” I stared at him slack-jawed. “I half expect to see a tumbleweed cross our paths about now.”

  Jake chuckled and turned. “Now, I believe that is the Wild West, Riley,” He called back over his shoulder. “You’re in the deep south, now.”

  Stomach tight and thrumming, I watched him go with a sick realization. With what I intended to do, it was only a matter of time before they ran me out of town for real.

  4

  I remember as a young girl standing next to my mother on a dais during an End the Violence rally. Her voice reverberated out through the crowd of men and women, spurring them to shouts and fist-raising cheers. Hand painted signs pumped with every syllable my mother roared from the podium. I remember the excitement and admiration almost moved me to tears.

  “This is not acceptable! Women and children are abused and killed every day by violence in the home. Abuse is not a secret to be suffered in silence. Beatings are not, ‘none of our business’…this treatment of society’s most vulnerable is an outrage to be stopped! Together we are stronger than this…together we can fight back!”

  I clapped so hard my hands stung and went red. I felt the pull of her charisma like so many she called to her cause. The rallying cry that tore from my mother’s small frame gave her the nickname, Lioness. She pounded the podium with her delicate fists, punctuating every sentence and sending the crowd into an uproar of yelling and applause.

  “We will not cower in fear any longer. We will not stand by and watch our loved ones destroyed. We must act because we are able. We must protect because it is right. We must end the violence, now!”

  When she turned to me during a breath and winked, I smiled so wide my face hurt. I remember thinking that this protector, this world changer, this woman, is my mother. Her sister’s violent death at the hands of a boyfriend launched my petite mother to heights of activism rivaled only by the save-the-whales soldiers. She took her heartbreak and anger and turned it into unfailing stamina and courage.

  My father, Randal Drake, a well-known environmental activist, met my mother when she spoke at a rally at his law school. They married after three weeks, thirty years ago. He still looks at her like I did on that dais. She is the most beautiful, most honorable woman I know.

  The two of them combined turned the Drake name into one synonymous with social justice and struck fear into the hearts of those unlucky enough to pass in front of their cross-hairs. An activist mother and an environmentalist father; together they cast a shadow longer and wider than a mushroom cloud and almost as frightening.

  Honor. Truth. Justice. I was knit from these fibers…and still, living up to that kind of standard weighed on me with staggering pressure. I should be stronger than this, but standing here I felt hurt and helpless. Did I have the mettle to do this?

  I stood in Randy’s room shaking my head. The youngest of three kids, Randy was my father’s namesake. He was my mother’s ‘Boy True’, as she called him. Despite being the baby of the family, my parents had great expectations of him.

  Randy struggled with life in general. We knew that, but this? My parents defended the defenseless. Randy blew them up. How had things gone so completely off the rails?

  Standing in Randy’s squalid hotel room, I wiped my eyes with shaking hands and started digging through the pee-stained debris of my brother’s life.

  The FBI didn’t look in the places I did. I knew from growing up with Randy that he squirreled things away in his room out of habit. He liked to keep things close to the bed because even as a kid he liked to lie down and toss a ball at the wall over his headboard while he thought.

  I started my search there. I found his MP3 player tucked into a hollow in his bed’s box spring. His most recent book of sketches, a small one, lay underneath a loosened section of the carpet. I pulled it out and flipped open the cover.

  Swirling darkness engulfed the page. Randy used a charcoal pencil to blacken most of the paper. Silhouetted forms of faceless men blended with shapes reminiscent of shells and coral in bloody crimson. He scratched random symbols and number sequences all along the edges of the paper.

  My heart quickened and the tightness in my chest squeezed the breath from my lips. I stared at Randy’s drawings and my whole body trembled. This looked nothing like Randy’s work. This was angry and lost. What had happened to my baby brother?

  I didn’t know if it was entirely wrong to take Randy’s stuff. Lately, I found it harder and harder to overlook the things I did in the name of my career. My new faith, and my old ambition were at constant odds with each other; I felt more and more at a crossroads. My heart seemed to be slowly tearing in two and I
wondered which half would survive.

  Lost in thought, I heard a car pull up outside. I shoved Randy’s sketchbook under the back of my shirt. I put the thin MP3 player in my pocket. Creeping to the window, I peeked out. Jake stood with the car-killing Carl next to a dirty blue pick-up truck. A woman got out of the driver’s seat and ran around the front of the truck to get to them.

  “What happened?” She cried, her small arms going only halfway around the sobbing Carl. “What did you do to my husband?”

  Jake hooked his thumbs on his gun belt and nodded towards Randy’s room. “Randy Drake’s sister is in the hotel room. Now, Brenda—”

  Her bleached blond hair, woven in a long French braid, whipped as her head swiveled to face Randy’s room. Jutting chin, sunken cheeks, she looked like she’d been crying for weeks. My heart ached. I wondered who she lost.

  Brenda started in my direction, but Jake caught her by the arm and pulled her back.

  “Let me go, Jake!” She yanked against his grip, but her small frame didn’t even shift Jake’s stance.

  Jake pulled her to the truck and then stepped between her and the room with his back to me. “Just simmer down, now.”

  “She could have stopped it! She could have and didn’t!” Her face twisted with grief and sent my stomach quivering. “I just want to ask her why, Jake,” her voice cracked. “I want to know why her family is lying and hiding—”

  “Uh-uh. That’s not happening today, Brenda. You and Carl better just go on home, now.”

  They argued for a few more minutes.

  Finally, Jake tucked Carl and Brenda into their truck and sent them off before returning to me.

  I stood in the doorway with my arms across my chest, waiting. I hated being only five-foot-two.

  Jake towered over me. The scowl playing across his features only made him seem more intimidating. Even I knew that Jake wasn’t someone to trifle with.

  He drew in a frustrated breath as he looked down at me. “You need to leave, Riley.”

  I wrapped my hand around Randy’s MP3 player in my pocket. The last thing I wanted was for Jake to discover what I’d found in the room. I didn’t need to win this battle. I could return later and look without Jake’s watchful eye.

  This isn’t defeat, its strategy.

  “Fine, I’ll go.”

  His eyes narrowed and he scanned Randy’s room. “Fine?”

  I shrugged. “Yes, fine. I’ll leave.”

  “Just like that?”

  Frustration and fatigue pulsed through me and tears escaped despite my best efforts.

  “What do want from me, Jake? I wanted to come get my brother’s things and you gave me grief for it. So I do what you ask and that’s wrong, too?”

  Wiping my eyes angrily, I refused to look at him. I couldn’t cry anymore; the time for that was gone, I needed to keep focused. I needed to act, and Jake wasn’t going to stand in my way.

  “All right, Riley, you just seemed to turn on a dime.” He put hands up in surrender, but his gaze searched my face. “Where’re your things?”

  I hooked a thumb over my shoulder at the boxes in the middle of Randy’s living room. When he bent down to pick them up, I adjusted the sketch book under my shirt to hide the bulge.

  “So can I at least go and get my stuff out of the rental car?”

  “No need.” Jake dropped something in the boxes with a chinking sound. “Already got your press badge and your purse. I also grabbed your suitcase from your trunk. It’s in the squad car.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  I’d wanted to hide my finds in the car and get them later, but I guess that wasn’t going to happen. I followed him out and watched him load the boxes, wondering if he was going to make me sit caged-up in the back seat.

  Jake looked at me over the trunk lid and raised an eyebrow. A crooked smile pulled at his mouth. “You’re not goin’ in back, Riley.”

  “I knew that,” I lied, forcing myself to relax.

  “Sure you did,” he countered, and opened the door for me.

  The chivalry caught me off guard, and I stammered as I slipped into the seat. “O-OK, maybe for a few seconds, I may have thought you were going to throw me in the back and race to the edge of town with the lights and sirens.”

  “That’s still a possibility,” he said evenly as he swung the door shut.

  I kept my eyes on him as he rounded the nose of the car, careful to make sure the sketchbook tucked under my shirt didn’t poke my back. Tall and lean, with the broad shoulders of a swimmer, Jake never failed to capture my attention.

  The memory of what his arms felt like wrapped around my shivering body as we huddled near the fire engines sent a ripple through my chest. He’d saved my life and here I was hiding evidence from him. I felt guilty and sorrowful and a little hopeful that maybe something in Randy’s things might explain what really happened.

  I shook my head, conflicted.

  This is for Randy. Don’t wimp out, Riley.

  Jake got in the patrol car, settled in his seat, and turned to look at me. “Ready?”

  I nodded and kept my eyes straight ahead, terrified that he’d see the betrayal on my face.

  We did a loop around the gravel parking lot and the manager’s office door swung open. An older woman, hair wound into a scraggly grey bun, ran after the car screaming in Cajun.

  Not able to make out what she yelled, I turned to Jake.

  Lips set in a tight line, he shook his head. “I’m not repeating that kind of language.”

  “Oh,” I whispered. My stomach roiled, threatening to make me sick.

  I’d never been hated, truly and completely hated, before. I knew what it meant to face an adversary. Over the years, my mother and father levied dozens of legal and public battles against corporations, politicians, even another country, once.

  We didn’t just exist in some academic world of arguments and legal filings. I knew that battles hurt for real. I remember signing my father’s cast after he rammed his boat, The Mighty Orca, into a Japanese fishing vessel and nearly drowned.

  Adversity fuelled our family, but in those battles, the high-ground made defeating even the most powerful opponent seem feasible.

  I clearly did not have the high ground here.

  Widows and motherless children did not huddle behind me looking for protection. Instead, they screamed for my blood as I skulked away.

  My gaze slid over to Jake’s rough hands on the steering wheel. Did I really want to alienate the one person in this town who didn’t seem to hate me on principle?

  We drove away from town and my heart sank. I’d hoped he was just blustering about driving me to the airport. A few exits down the interstate, though, Jake pulled off the road.

  “What’re you doing?” I looked around, confused.

  We were in the middle of nowhere, outside of Bayou La Foudre, near the swamp.

  A sliver of fear bored its way into my mind. I didn’t really know Jake Ayers that well. A nervous chuckle slipped out. “You’re not going to bury me in the swamp, are you?”

  “No, Riley.” Jake’s face didn’t register amusement.

  “Then why are we pulled over on a dark road?” I tried to make my voice sound light despite my unease.

  “I need to talk to you.” Jakes voice sounded low, almost a growl.

  I tried to hide my apprehension. “What?”

  My fingers pressed the MP3 tighter against my leg inside the pocket. I just wanted to listen to it first, and then I would turn it in.

  Jake’s deep eyes burned through me. “What’re you hiding?”

  My heart paced up, but I stared back at him with the practiced impassivity I learned from my lawyer father. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Riley—,” Jake started, and then stopped. He took his hat off, tossed it on the dashboard, and then rubbed his face with both hands. When he looked at me, he seemed incredibly tired. “Coming here must have been one of the hardest decisions you ever made.”
/>   You have no idea. Going against Willow Drake’s wishes is scary…especially if you’re her daughter.

  “It was.” I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  “You had to know people would not greet you with kindness here, and yet you drove right into the parish without a second thought.”

  I didn’t like where this was going and cleared my throat nervously. “What is your point, Sheriff Ayers?”

  “Sheriff?” He raised one brow. “Do you really think I believe you’d agree to leave just like that? What do you take me for, Riley?”

  “’Just like that?’” I made air quotes with my fingers. “A lunatic shot at my car and then beat it when he ran out of bullets!”

  “Carl isn’t a lunatic, Riley. He lost his son and his brother when your brother blew up that plant.” Jake leaned in. “Besides, you’re more stubborn than that.”

  “Oh, really?” I shot back. “And what do you know about me, anyway?”

  Jake moved so fast, that I didn’t have time to yelp. He grabbed the sketchbook from my waistband.

  “I know you’re really bad at hiding things,” He muttered and flipped through the book.

  “Hey!” I reached for it, but he pushed his elbow out, blocking me.

  “What in the…”

  Panic rose as Jakes face went from confusion to shock as he took in Randy’s crazed drawings.

  “Listen,” I started. “It’s not what you—”

  He stopped on the picture I’d seen. All black and crimson with the stabbing strokes of a mad man, Randy’s art screamed insane. Closing the sketchbook, Jake looked at it like one would stare at a bloody knife at a crime scene.

  My stomach flopped.

  “Cela est mauvais,”He turned, his eyes filled with anger. “You’re hiding evidence from a federal investigation, Riley. I should arrest you for obstruction.”

  “I know, this is bad, you’re right. I don’t know—”

  “You better start talking, Riley Drake, or so help me, I’ll drive to Carl’s right now and let him finish what he started.”

  “Jake –” My mind raced to stall him, to somehow go back to when he still seemed concerned with my well-being. “I just need a few days to figure out what this is. Just a few—”