Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) by Susannah Sandlin Read Free Book Online Page B

Deep, throaty, but not in a sexy way. In a haunted way. A voice full of heartbreak and ghosts.
     
    I won’t go back, I won’t go home,
    ’Cause in this place, the dead still roam,
    ’Cause this time, Whiskey Bayou won’t let me go.
     
    “Is that her? The singer?” Jena looked back when her fellow agent didn’t answer.
    His eyes were open, but his expression had changed to match the words and the tone of voice that had captured him.
    Gentry Broussard didn’t wear the face of the cocky guy who kept his emotions close to the vest and often couldn’t find his manners with a map.
    He wore the face of a man both heartbroken and haunted.

CHAPTER 5
    No one would ever mistake Gentry for a music connoisseur, but he knew what moved him. Those stark words in a voice that conveyed a firsthand knowledge of loss and heartbreak? They stabbed his heart like the blood-covered knife he’d seen near Eva Savoie’s body.
    The words summed up the state of his mind: the dead were still roaming.
    Only, what if Lang wasn’t dead? Could that even be possible? There had been a funeral. He’d sat stoically beside his weeping mother at a graveside service in Dulac that no one had attended other than his stepfather, two stepsisters whom he barely knew and who had never even met Langston Broussard, and the guys from his Region 8 enforcement team from Orleans Parish. His real brothers. The ones he hadn’t been forced to put down with two bullets.
    Lang’s body had never been found, the search called off after dragging the uncooperative Mississippi River for days. He couldn’t have survived those shots, the water, that dark night of torrential rain and wind.
    But the face Gentry had seen under that hood had been so like his brother’s.
    “You okay, Broussard?”
    Gentry jolted back to awareness at the touch of Jena’s hand on his arm. He had to pull his shit together or he’d be enjoying some more forced time off courtesy of the state of Louisiana. Only this time, no old friend of his father’s would come to pull him out of the quicksand, as Warren Doucet had done—the lieutenant had started his career as Hank Broussard’s partner.
    This time, there would be no coming back.
    “Yeah, sorry,” he mumbled, opening the truck door and climbing out. God, but he was exhausted. The dreams had become worse since Eva’s murder, but he’d be damned if he would turn to a bottle of pills or alcohol to subdue them. He’d soldier through it, as his dad used to say when things got tough. Of course, soldiering through had cost his dad a heart attack when he was only forty-three years old, eleven years older than Gentry was now.
    “Any particular tactic you want to use in talking to Celestine Savoie?” Jena slammed the truck door, and the haunting music ended abruptly. Gentry found himself longing for it to continue. Maybe he could find out what the recording was, listen to the whole song, and spend the night wallowing in self-pity to his heart’s content.
    “What do you mean by tactic?” He glanced at Jena as they approached the back of the house, skirting around an ancient turquoise-and-white pickup. Not ancient enough to have reached a second life as a cool novelty, but just ancient enough to be ugly and outdated. “You mean like good cop–bad cop? This ain’t an interrogation, Red.”
    Jena rolled her eyes and strode ahead of him. The touch of light banter took the edge off Gentry’s nerves, and he said a silent thanks for his lanky, red-haired partner. She was so earnest and eager to do her job well that it made her an easy mark for teasing. Which meant Gentry didn’t have to do anything unpleasant like talk about his feelings—his initial fear when he’d found out he was being assigned a female LDWF rookie for a partner.
    So sue him. He could be a sexist pig.
    They stepped onto the part of the porch that wrapped around to the back of the house, and Gentry called out, “Ms. Savoie? Agents Broussard and Sinclair, Wildlife and