Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) by Susannah Sandlin

with a loser crowd here in Dulac. He’d gotten his first taste of alcohol and drugs here. It was home. It was where he’d go if he needed to hide out and regroup.
    For the next hour, Gentry cruised up and down streets and alleyways along Bayou Dulac, looking for the beat-up shitpile of a boat that had been at Eva’s house last Saturday morning. He drove to Lang’s old haunts, or at least the ones he knew about that were still there. Many had been washed away by the steady procession of hurricanes that had flooded the parish over the last decade: Lili, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Isaac.
    He pulled the truck into a convenience-store lot and went inside to buy a soft drink; the sight of a skinny kid with buzzed white-blond hair and an armful of tats reminded Gentry of a name he hadn’t thought about in years. Tommy Mason had been Lang’s best buddy back in the days after high school. Gentry would be sweating on the football practice field with the Terrebonne Tigers as a sophomore running back and see Lang and Tommy through the fence, hanging out in the parking lot, smoking Marlboros and who knows what else. Even then, they’d been on different life tracks, and Gentry’s idolatry of his older brother had long faded.
    Using the computerized unit mounted to his truck’s center console, Gentry ran a simple Internet search for a Thomas Mason in the parish and got three hits—one with a Dulac address.
    He had a lot of reports to write, but Gentry couldn’t resist tracking down the current home of Tommy Mason, if it was even the same guy. The house was a raised modular rectangle on Shrimpers Row, about a mile south of town and west of the bayou. Like the rest of the parish, Dulac had been dealt a hard blow by Hurricane Ike in 2008. The whole parish had been underwater, and, as was usual in hurricane flooding situations, LDWF agents were all-in with search-and-rescue efforts.
    Those who stayed rebuilt higher, and it looked like Tommy Mason had been one of them. Gentry’s place in Montegut was a little bigger and a little higher, but not by much. The house was dark, and no vehicles were home. Also no boat. It might be a long shot, but Gentry’s gut told him that if Lang were somehow alive and back in the parish, Tommy would know.
    Gentry wanted the element of surprise, though, so he wouldn’t leave a business card as he’d do if his visit were any kind of official matter. Instead, he’d try again tomorrow before going on shift. This highly unofficial call needed to be done on his own time, and if he got even a whiff that Tommy was lying or covering for Lang, he wouldn’t promise to follow the rules.

CHAPTER 8
    Ceelie woke up with her cheek resting on an ax handle and a handle-shaped indentation on her face that took a lot of scrubbing to erase. She’d slept with the rusty ax and two knives—a fish-cleaning blade under her pillow and a butcher knife beneath the mattress, handle out.
    Near the top of her to-do list today, following visits to the health department to pick up Tante Eva’s death certificate and the parish probate office to talk about the estate: buy a gun, or at least a new ax.
    She knew how to shoot. Her dad had never been a hunter, but he’d indulged his daughter’s desire to learn and signed her up for a gun-safety class offered by the sheriff’s office when she was fourteen or fifteen. She was rusty, but figured she could practice on any buzzards that happened to show up outside her door.
    Because if the appearance of a carencro had freaked her out enough to make her sleep with an ax, she figured her subconscious was not-so-subtly telling her to find an adequate means of self-protection. She might be Eva Savoie’s great-niece, but she was also Gary Savoie’s daughter, which meant she was practical enough to understand that salt would only protect her so far.
    The probate office didn’t open until ten, so Ceelie had a couple of hours to kill before leaving; she’d always been an early riser.