Slow Heat in Heaven (9 page)

"Stuff it, Miss Schyler. I don't want your goddamn money."

"Then what?"

His lecherous grin was as good as an invoice. And the sum total of it couldn't be measured in dollars and cents. "Read my mind."

Furious, Schyler shoved past him on her way to the door. "Jerk. I should have known better than to ask you."

He closed his fingers around her upper arm and brought her up against him hard. "You're quite a hothead, aren't you?" His eyes rapaciously scanned her face. "Are you just as eager to make love as you are to make war?"

"Not with you."

"Never say never."

"Let me go," she said through her teeth.

"Come with me."

 
"Come with you? Where?"

"I'll show you why no sane person would kill one of Jigger's dogs."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

 
"How come? What are you afraid of?"

"Where are we going?"

Cash was behind the steering wheel of his faded blue pickup truck. Schyler still couldn't guess what had prompted her to accept his invitation. Perhaps because it had been posed in the form of a challenge. Before she took into account the possible consequences, she had locked the office, left her car parked at the landing, and stepped up into the cab of Cash's battered truck.

In answer to her question, he consulted the watch strapped to his right wrist. "It's early yet. Hungry?"

"I thought this had to do with Jigger Flynn."

"It does. Be patient. That's a common trait with you people. You're always in a hurry."

"'You people'?"

He looked at her across the stained, threadbare upholstery. "Rich folks, Miss Schyler."

She refused to acknowledge or address the disparity between their economic levels, so she took issue with the appositive he continued to use with such phony obsequiousness. "Why don't you drop the Miss and call me just plain Schyler?"

He casually took a hairpin curve in the road before turning his sly grin on her. "Because I know it annoys the shit out of you."

"And is that your main goal in life? To be annoying?"

"How come you don't spell it like it sounds?" he asked, ignoring her question. "Why not S-k-y-l-e-r?"

"I didn't have any choice. That's how Mother and Daddy entered my name on my birth certificate."

"When they adopted you?"

She wasn't surprised that he knew. Everybody in the parish knew. She was, however, automatically defensive. "I was only three days old."

"That's still not the same, is it?"

"The same as what?"

"As being their natural born."

Deliberately or not, Cash was rubbing salt into an old wound. "It's the same to me."

He shook his head. "Nope. It's not the same." Before Schyler could argue with him, he whipped the pickup off the road and braked to a hard stop. "There it is."

Schyler hadn't realized where they were going and drew in a sharp, quick breath when she noticed the ramshackle house. It had been in disrepair for as long as she could remember. It was constructed of unpainted cypress. The
gray, weathered wood added to the overall dreary appearance of the place.

The window screens were torn; they curled outward toward the snaggle-toothed batten shutters. Forlorn lace curtains hung in the windows. They were tattered and dingy, as pathetic as an aging whore's last fancy dress.

A collection of hubcaps had been nailed on the exterior walls. Once shiny, they were now corroded. A potpourri of junk littered the yard. Tools and utensils lay neglected in the grassless dirt. A disemboweled car was providing a roost for several scraggly hens. An empty Frigidaire on the sagging porch was serving no purpose except to support a dusty wisteria vine, which valiantly struggled for life amid the decay. Behind the house was a dog kennel made of rusty, cyclone fencing. There were no dogs in it presently. In fact, the place appeared to be deserted.

"We picked a good time to come calling. Jigger's not at home."

Schyler rubbed her arms as though chilled. "I used to be afraid to even drive past this place."

"I don't blame you. Jigger's been known to do target practice on motorists from his front porch out of sheer meanness."

"How does he get by with things like that?" Schyler cried angrily. "I didn't know that the saying, 'Justice is blind,' meant that it turned a blind eye? Why hasn't he ever been prosecuted?"

"Simple. People are afraid of him."

"I'm not."

"Well, you damn sure ought to be." Cash slipped the truck into first gear and set off down the rough gravel road in the direction of town. "You didn't answer my question. Are you hungry?"

Schyler was glad to leave Flynn's place behind. Even deserted, it unnerved her. "I hadn't thought about it. I guess I am."

"I'll treat you to supper at a place you've never been to before."

"Oh?"

"Red Broussard's."

"Is the floor still covered with peanut shells?" she asked with a mischievous smile.

He looked at her with astonishment. "Don't tell me."

"Oh, yes. Daddy used to take me to Broussard's often."

Cash's grin faded gradually. "I forgot. Cotton likes Cajun food, doesn't he?"

"Yes, he does. And so do I."

"I never saw you at Broussard's."

"We usually went before sundown."

"Hell, the place doesn't start warming up until after sundown."

She laughed. "That's why he always took me before then."

The accordion music was loud, repetitive, and raucous. It seemed to expand and recess the walls of the clapboard restaurant like the wolf in the tale of the three little pigs, huffing and puffing and trying to blow it down. Cash was humming the French Acadian tune as he came around and
 
opened the passenger door for Schyler.

"Saturday night," he remarked. "They're tuning up for a
fais-dodo.
Drinking, dancing, a party," he said by way of explanation.

She took offense. "I know what it is."

"You're acquainted with Cajun customs?"

"Belle Terre isn't an ivory castle, you know."

"No. I don't know." Having made that oblique statement, he placed his hand in the small of her back and nudged her toward the entrance.

"I hope I'm dressed properly," she remarked uneasily.

"Not quite." When she shot him a swift, worried glance, he added, "They might ask you to take off your shoes."

The square building was set on stilts. Dancing footsteps drummed through the floorboards and echoed in the hollow space underneath. Red Broussard, a barrel-chested, potbellied, bearded man with a Santa Claus countenance and garlic breath, greeted them personally, giving each a» boisterous shout of welcome and a rib-crunching hug. He pressed icy bottles of beer into their hands and ushered them toward a table in the corner of the room, affably elbowing aside dancers who blocked their path.

Schyler moved through the crowd self-consciously, but no one stopped to stare as she feared they might. No one seemed to think it noteworthy that she was with Cash Boudreaux. But then, this was his crowd, not hers. If she'd taken him to the country club tonight it would have caused quite a stir. It was much easier to move down a notch in society than it was to move up.

They reached their table and Red held her chair for her. The upper two-thirds of the walls of the building were screened. The hinged, exterior walls had been raised and propped open by two-by-fours. They were only lowered during a severe Gulf storm and the coldest days of winter. Maddened insects, frantic to reach the lights burning inside, kamikazied themselves against the screens.

"Boudin sausage,
mon cher?
"
Red asked with a beatific smile that split his furry red beard and revealed nicotine-stained teeth.

Schyler smiled up at him. "No thanks." She hadn't been able to eat the sausage since a Cajun rig driver had bartered some timber for a hog and had insisted that Cotton oversee the slaughtering. Schyler had begged to go along. Over Macy's vehement protests Cotton had taken her. She'd regretted it ever since. "Crawfish, please."

Red threw back his rusty head and bellowed a deep laugh. Then, pointing a meaty finger down at her, he teased, "I seen de day you pack away dem crawfish, don't cha know. More dan your papa,
oui."

"Bring us a platter, Red."

Red gave Cash's shoulder an affectionate and mighty wallop, then lumbered off toward the bubbling vats where the day's catch of crawfish was boiling in water seasoned with spices that made one's eyes water and nose itch. Over the music, Red shouted at his patrons to eat and drink some more.

Cash reached for the bowl of peanuts in the center of the table, cracked the shell between his fingers, and shook the roasted nuts out of the pod. He tossed them into his mouth, then took a swig of beer to wash them down. He swal
lowed gustily. His eyes, glowing in the light cast by the red glass candle holder, dared Schyler to do the same.

She accepted the silent dare, dropping the peanut shells onto the floor as Cash and every other customer had done. She didn't request a glass for her beer but drank directly from the bottle.

He said, "I thought you'd be horrified at the thought of coming here."

"Because I'm too snooty and would look down my aristocratic nose at the people here?"

"Something like that." He took a drink of beer, watching her. "So is this an act just to prove me wrong?"

"No. I miss the food."

That's all they had time to say to each other before Red sent a waitress over with a platter of crawfish. She scooted aside the candle and the bowl of peanuts and set the platter between them in the center of the table. Before moving away, she gave Cash a seductive sidelong glance.

Schyler watched her walk away. "Is she one of yours?" She selected a crawfish. Without needing a refresher course on how it was done, she broke off the tail, dug her thumbs into the seam of the shell and split it apart, then used her fingers to pull out the rich, white meat.

Cash followed suit. "She could be if I wanted her." He tossed the remainder of the crustacean body back onto the platter and picked up another.

Schyler blotted her mouth with the paper napkin she took from the metal dispenser. "It's that easy for you? Any woman you want is yours for the taking?"

"Interested?"

"Curious."

"Curious to know what attracts them?"

"No, curious to know what attracts you."

"Curiosity."

With belying composure, Schyler ate another crawfish, took another sip of beer, and blotted her lips before she looked at him.

He took a long drink from his beer bottle first. Then, lowering the bottle back to the table, his eyes captured and held hers. They intimated, "Come and get it."

Up from Schyler's stomach rose a trill of sensation that had nothing to do with the spicy ethnic food and beer. Cash Boudreaux was dangerous in a variety of ways. His allure was undeniable; he was sexually attractive. He was also street smart and cunning, wise in the art of bullshitting. But he was no slouch in serious verbal warfare either.

"You don't like me, do you?"

He answered her intuitive question honestly. "No. I guess I don't. Don't take it personally."

"I'll try to remember that," she said dryly. "Why don't you like me?"

"It's not so much you I dislike. It's what you represent."

"And what is that?"

"An insider."

She hadn't expected so succinct and simple an answer. "That's not so much."

"To an outsider it is."

His prejudice struck her as being unfair. "I had nothing to do with that."

"Didn't you?"

"No. I didn't even know you."

His eyes narrowed accusingly. "You didn't make a point to get to know me either."

"That's not my fault. You weren't ever exactly friendly."

Her flare of temper seemed to amuse him. "You're right,
pichouette.
I guess I wasn't."

She used that to get them off the track the conversation had taken and onto something else. "You've used that word before. What does it mean?"

"Pichouette
?" He hesitated, watching her face. "It means little girl."

"I'm hardly that."

He twirled the neck of the beer bottle between his fingers as he stared at her across the candlelit table. "I remember you as a little girl. You had long blond hair and long skinny legs."

Schyler responded spontaneously and smiled. "How do you know?"

"I used to watch you playing on the lawn at Belle Terre."

She knew better than to ask why he hadn't joined her to play. He would have been ordered off the place by her parents if she hadn't run inside out of fear first. Neither Cotton, nor Macy, nor Veda would have allowed her to play with Monique Boudreaux's boy. Not only had he been several years older, he was an unsuitable companion for a young girl under any circumstances. His reputation as a troublemaker was well founded and well known.

"I remember one particular birthday party you had," Cash said. "I think it was the day you turned four. There must have been fifty kids at that party. Cotton was giving them rides on a pony. A clown performed magic tricks."

"How do you remember that?" she exclaimed.

"I remember because I wasn't invited. But I was there. I watched the whole thing from the woods. I wanted like hell to see those magic tricks up close."