The Cajun Doctor

  What I cost him? How about what he cost himself? Did the jerk ever take responsibility for his own actions? Why was it always someone else’s fault that he was: a) born poor, b) had a professor who had it in for him just because he skipped five classes, c) messed up that one operation during his residency and had to repeat the whole year, d) had an overactive libido, e) couldn’t help but cheat with a dog of a wife like Samantha, f) drank too much at the hospital Christmas party and hustled the director’s daughter, g) etc., etc., etc.

  But now she understood where they were going. Nick was still fixated on the gold bullion in her bank deposit box. Did he really think he could get away with that? “Nick, that gold has to weigh more than a hundred pounds. How in hell are you going to remove it without sticking out like the thief that you are?”

  He pressed the revolver harder against her back, causing her to trip and almost go forward, flat on her face. Which would probably be a good thing, if he fell forward, too, except she might very well break her neck in the process.

  “You’ll be with me, Sammie dear. All the bank employees will see is my lovely ex-wife who has reunited with me. And I have a small, wheeled luggage I keep in my trunk for spontaneous, weekend trips. A Louis Vuitton.”

  “Spontaneous, as in getting lucky with some young bimbo?”

  This time, he pinched her arm, hard.

  She yelped.

  They had gone down three flights of stairs by now, and Nick opened a door, shoving her into the tunnel-like corridor, where the overhead lighting, after all that darkness, blinded her, at first. Nick frog-marched her the short distance to the lower level of the parking garage. She fully expected . . . no, hoped . . . to have a SWAT team waiting for them with weapons raised. But, no, there weren’t even any people around. Just a couple dozen vehicles.

  “Where does Angus have the computer that was receiving your transmissions?” he asked suddenly.

  “Uh,” she hesitated. She couldn’t say her house because he had already been there. Or Angus’s apartment, which he’d probably also ransacked.

  He pinched her arm again.

  She was going to be black and blue . . . and purple. “At my office at Starr Foods,” she lied.

  “Shit!” he said. “No way we’re going there. Well, there’s nothing to be done about the laptop then. Just need to get the gold and leave the country.” He was talking to himself, not her.

  He steered her toward his Mercedes, opened the passenger door, then forced her to slide over the gearshift and onto the driver’s seat, then he followed after her. Apparently, she was going to be driving the getaway car. He clicked the lock lever on a remote he held in one hand. The other hand still held the pistol, aimed at her. He shoved the remote into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone which he manipulated with one thumb, calling someone.

  “Misty, where are you?”

  “Good. Don’t go near the medical building. Pack a bag for both of us.”

  “Yeah, a major fuck-up, caused by my ex-wife.”

  She said something that made him laugh. “I agree. Listen, call Jerry at the airfield and tell him to have the plane ready in—” he glanced at his Rolex“—an hour. I’ll meet you there. It might take me a little longer than that, but we’ll leave immediately once I hit the tarmac.”

  How could Nick think he had an hour to get the gold out of the bank and get to an airfield without the cops picking him up? But wait. Nick didn’t know the FBI and law enforcement were already on-site. He must think it would take a while for the receptionist to go into the office and discover Angus’s body. He would speculate that the receptionist’s first reaction would be to call an ambulance and then the police to whom she would report that her boss was missing.

  She felt somewhat relieved to know what Nick didn’t. The good guys were probably already tailing them. She hoped.

  “Love you, too, babe,” Nick said into his phone.

  When he clicked off and shoved the phone back in his pocket, she asked, “Is that your muscle-bound marathoner girlfriend?”

  “Angus talks too much,” Nick said and motioned for her to start the car. It had a keyless ignition, and he had the key remote on his person; so, it was easy to start. The Mercedes motor purred like Maddie after a tasty meal of Starr Foods albacore tuna. Why wouldn’t it? The vehicle had to cost a hundred thousand dollars. But it was probably leased. Otherwise, Nick wouldn’t leave it behind. He’d find some way to stow it on an airplane or arrange its transport.

  “Where to now? The bank?”

  He grinned evilly at her. “No, darlin’. We’re going to visit dear ol’ Aunt Maire.”

  “What?”

  “The pink lady is going to be the grease on the wheels of my escape. Pink grease. Ha, ha, ha.”

  “What are you up to, Nick?”

  “Your sweet aunt is going to sit in her pink Cadillac in her pink garage with the motor running. I figure it will take forty-five minutes for her to die from the carbon monoxide poisoning. A little added incentive for you to help me get the gold out fast and return to rescue your aunt. Ingenious, huh? And I just thought it up now.”

  Samantha was becoming very, very afraid. This was not one of the possible scenarios that the feds had sketched out for her. Not even close.

  And suddenly Samantha wished she’d listened to Daniel and let him come with her. How much more dangerous could it have been? Would she ever have the chance to tell him, “You were right, honey.”

  In fact, would she ever see Daniel again?

  Because, sure as sin, Nick was never going to leave her alive as a witness to his crimes.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Storms come, and storms go . . .

  When Daniel stomped off, he was so blindingly angry that he stomped in the wrong direction. Instead of heading for his car, he ended up by the ice cream truck, which was, in fact, an ice cream truck and not a tricked-out FBI surveillance vehicle. He’d been watching too many Die Hard movies with Aaron.

  “Whatcha want, bud?” some old codger at the window asked him. He wore a Polly’s Pralines cap and a T-shirt advertising his ice cream, Sweet Scoops. He had little or no teeth. Too much of his own product, Daniel assumed.

  He ordered a vanilla waffle cone. Yes, boring vanilla for a boring ex-doctor who’d made a boring effort to rescue his woman, who wasn’t his woman, at all. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Boring, boring, boring.

  “Dontcha want sprinkles on that?”

  “No, I don’t want sprinkles,” Daniel said, barely restraining himself from saying something rude. It wasn’t the old guy’s fault that Daniel was in a foul mood.

  Fuming, he leaned against the wagon. He watched as Samantha exited the Comcast van and headed toward the building, unaware that he was still hanging around like a . . . boring . . . stalker. For once, he wasn’t ogling her ass as she walked in those high heels, not even thinking of Aaron’s theory of women and high heels. Well, hardly at all.

  Instead, he watched as the landscaper moved closer to the building, and the jogger entered one of the side doors. All was quiet in the parking lot then with normal activity. People coming to and leaving doctor appointments. A few coming up to the ice cream truck.

  Vacillating between extreme anger and extreme worry over Samantha, he stood there for fifteen minutes before he gave it up and tossed the remainder of his dripping cone in a waste bin and wiped his hand on a napkin, discarding that, too. He considered heading to the fishing camp, hiding out, till this whole fiasco with Samantha blew over. But, no, he needed to return to the plantation and see what he could do about fixing one of the slave cabins for Molly’s father.

  Just then, he heard a popping noise. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but all hell was breaking loose in the parking lot. Brad and Sonny and cops with SWAT T-shirts, and the landscaper, were running toward the building, all with weapons visible. Daniel saw Luc following on the melee and yelled in a panic, “What’s up?”

  “A gunshot from inside the building,” Luc said as he ran pas
t.

  So, Daniel ran, too. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God! I should have stopped her from getting involved in this debacle. I should have tied her down, if I had to. If she’s dead, I’m going to kill someone. Nick, and then the FBI agents who conned her into this mess. But she’s not dead. She can’t be dead. Why think the worst? Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!

  Daniel made it inside just before the cops began pulling out the crime scene tape and barring people from entering or exiting the building. He swerved away from the elevators where a bunch of cops were filing in, and instead followed those going up the stairway. One of them with earbuds, reported to the others. “The kid’s been shot. Head wound. Non-fatal. The perp has the sting out in the parking garage.”

  The kid . . . that would be Angus. And the sting . . . son of a bitch! Coltrane had Samantha. In the parking garage.

  As he assimilated those words, Daniel swiveled on his heels and headed back down to the first floor and the door leading to the parking garage. He was at a full-out sprint through the connecting corridor, but was unprepared for the sound of gunfire that he heard ahead of him. He might have cried out in dismay. Too late! He was too late!

  Some cops tried to hold him back, but he struggled against their restraining arms and hollered, “I’m a doctor. Let me through.”

  He was unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. A cop with an apparent thigh wound was being helped upright by his fellow cops. Daniel started to go to the cop, but he was waved over to the other wounded, instead. The other wounded being Nick Coltrane, who lay on the stone floor of the garage, blood pouring from his face, his chest, and one thigh. Maybe even more places. Samantha was standing off to the side, sobbing with shock, her face pressed against John LeDeux’s flak vest, his arms around her heaving shoulders. She appeared unharmed.

  Daniel dropped to his knees beside Nick, and someone handed him a pair of disposable gloves which he pulled on with expert speed. He checked for a pulse. None. Heartbeat. None. Then he pulled Coltrane’s eyelids back. Pupils constricted. With a weary exhale, he glanced at his wristwatch and declared, “T.O.D. Three twenty-seven.” He stood up, tossed his gloves aside, then looked toward Samantha, who was still plastered against LeDeux’s chest as he murmured some words of comfort to her. She hadn’t even noticed Daniel’s presence. Without a word, he left the building.

  Once outside, he saw Angus being helped toward an ambulance. He appeared to be arguing with an EMT about getting into a wheelchair. A bunch of gauze bandages circled his scalp, but he was ambulatory. So, that was good. He waved at Angus, and the boy waved back. The cops were rushing Angus and the EMT’s to avoid the news vans that were already barreling into the parking lot. They would want to keep Angus’s . . . and Samantha’s names out of the press until the mob bosses were no longer a threat. And on the remote possibility that Coltrane might have associates involved with him, other than the Misty person.

  Daniel was probably in shock as he drove back to Bayou Rose. Death was traumatizing, even when the victim was a bad guy. He was too upset to think beyond the moment. Driving his car. Watching the highway, that’s all he was capable of. He did think about what would happen next in terms of the FBI and the cops. With Coltrane’s death, the baby trafficking case was over as far as Angus and Lily Beth and Samantha having to be in hiding, although the feds would be working to arrest his overseas connections, those people facilitating the sale of the babies. But, more than that, there was still the Dixie Mob situation that required Angus to remain hidden, and by association, Samantha and Lily Beth would stay, too.

  Well, Daniel couldn’t stay himself. He just couldn’t be around Samantha and pretend there was nothing between them. There wasn’t, apparently, from her end. Other than the one-night/one-week stand business. But he was a fool for love, as the old song went, and if he ever said that out loud, he was going to surgically remove his own tongue.

  On the other hand, he had things to do at Bayou Rose.

  When he got back to the plantation, Lily Beth and Tante Lulu were the only ones there. Emily, at least, was glad to see him. She oinked and oinked and oinked until he picked her up and gave her a kiss. No, not on her mouth, but on the top of her snout. And, really, it was only a sort of air kiss. Axel and Maddie barely gave him a glance, considering him of no importance. Clarence, on the other hand, greeted him with the usual, “Holy shit!” But then the bird let loose with a whole string of new words, “I’m a Ragin’ Cajun!”

  Daniel glanced at Tante Lulu who shrugged. “I dint have nothin’ ta do whilst y’all were gone.”

  He set Emily down with an admonition to stay put. Ignoring her woeful eyes, he left the room and went down the back stairs with Tante Lulu and Lily Beth.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked.

  “We already know,” Lily Beth said. “Angus called us from the hospital.”

  “Samantha is at the hospital, too. Jist ta be checked over,” Tante Lulu added.

  “You should be relieved that there is no more threat from Dr. Coltrane,” Daniel said to Lilly Beth. “Now you can do whatever you want about the baby.”

  Which caused Lily Beth to burst into tears and leave the kitchen.

  “What did I do?” Daniel asked Tante Lulu.

  “Nuthin’. The girl is jist confused, and her hormones is hummin’, givin’ her the blue moodies.”

  “Did Angus say when they’d be back?”

  “In an hour or two,” Tante Lulu answered. “Where’s all mah groceries, by the way. I knew I shoulda gone ta the store myself.”

  “Just hold your horses. Aaron is bringing them.”

  Daniel went into an anteroom where he grabbed a broom, dustpan, some rags, and cleaning products. “I have a little job to do,” he explained to Tante Lulu, whose eyebrows were raised with curiosity.

  Which, of course, was like raising a Cheez Doodle before her pet gator, because Tante Lulu immediately followed after him as he went out the back door. “Whatcha gotta do?”

  “I need to see if one of the slave cabins is liveable for a few days . . . or weeks.”

  “Why? Ya gonna turn it inta a honeymoon cottage?”

  “What? No! Geez, where do you get these ideas?”

  Tante raised her eyes heavenward.

  Great! She has connections to the Great Beyond! He tried to explain, “The father of one of the kids at the cancer center in Houma needs a place to stay. I volunteered one of these cabins. The guy has construction experience; so, he might be able to fix the electricity and plumbing, if there is any.”

  Tante Lulu asked some questions and he found himself telling her about Molly and the lack of housing for men like Molly’s father, Edgar Gillotte, who had less than a pristine rap sheet.

  “So, yer bringin’ ex-cons here now.”

  “He’s not an ex-con. He’s just a guy who made some mistakes, minor mistakes, and needs a break. It’s as much for his kid, as for him.”

  “Ah,” Tante Lulu said.

  “What does ‘Ah’ mean?”

  “Jist that life has a way of workin’ things out.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Sometimes we doan know why things happen the way they do. Like you and Aaron buying this ol’ plantation. Ya thought it was ta open an animal rescue mission.”

  “That was never my intention.”

  Tante Lulu waved his contradiction away. “But God . . . and St. Jude . . . had other plans in mind fer you.”

  “I swear, following your mind is like traveling down a Louisiana bayou. So many twists and turns, you get lost.”

  “Huh?”

  He should know better than to encourage her with questions, but he had to ask, “What do God and St. Jude have to do with me and Aaron buying this plantation?”

  “It’s obvious, ain’t it? I kin see it all clear now. Yer supposed ta open a refuge fer sick kids and their families, lak Ronald McDonald House, ’cept yers will be Rose House, or sumpin’ lak that.”

  “Whoa,
whoa, whoa! You are way ahead of me here. All I’m doing is fixing up one cabin. One. And it’s only for a short period.”

  “Uh-huh!” Tante Lulu said, not convinced.

  Even she was a bit taken aback at their first sight of the interior of the first cabin. Dogs had run free rein here at one time, both inside the cottage and in the fenced yard, but that had been thirty or so years ago when the former owner was raising Redbone Coonhounds, according to Tante Lulu. Whatever feces or urine stains there might have been were all dried up now, but the whole place would need a good scrubbing and a bleach disinfecting. Even so, Tante Lulu declared it had possibilities. No wonder she was a fan of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes.

  In fact, Tante Lulu told him she was going to call her niece, who was at her Houma beauty shop today. She apparently had other salons or spas, as well, including one at the ranch where she lived with her husband Raoul Lanier, better known as Rusty. And another which did everything for a woman’s body except plastic surgery . . . waxing, massaging, exfoliating, manicuring, pedicuring, hairstyling, braiding, corn rows, eyebrow shaping. He knew all this because Tante Lulu told him so, in enough detail that his eyes started to roll back in his head.

  She pulled a cell phone out of her apron pocket.

  “Charmaine, honey, kin ya do me a favor?”

  “Yes, I know yer allus willin’ ta help me. Kin ya go ta that used furniture store down the street from yer salon. See if they have enough stuff ta furnish a small cottage.” She turned to Daniel and asked, “How much ya willin’ ta spend?”

  He waved a hand as if it didn’t matter but then he immediately amended, worrying that giving a woman like Tante Lulu an open checkbook would be like leaving an open door on an alligator farm, insanity, in other words. “Two thousand, maybe three.” Tante Lulu repeated the amount to Charmaine.

  “I doan s’pose Rusty is in town and he could bring the stuff over in his pickup truck?”

  “He is? Oh, good!”

  Oh, crap! He never intended for Tante Lulu to impose on someone like that for his benefit. In fact, he never intended to involve her at all. But there was no stopping the living bulldozer. Several times, he tried to interrupt her call, but she just ignored him.