Lethal (Lee Coburn)

As expected, she was prostrate with grief. Female relatives hovered around her, pressing her hands and applying damp cloths to her forehead. Rosary beads clacked as they prayed for Fred’s soul and petitioned for comfort for the loved ones he’d left behind.

There was no more room in the kitchen for all the food that had been brought by friends, family, and neighbors. The air-conditioning fought a losing battle against an approaching storm, which had lowered the barometric pressure and raised the humidity.

The male faction, to escape the drama inside the house, carried their overloaded plates out into the yard. They sat in lawn chairs, stroking the rifles and shotguns that lay across their laps, which was as second nature to them as scratching the ears of their hunting dogs. They passed around bottles of cheap whiskey and, in low voices, plotted revenge against Fred’s killer.

“He’d better hope the law catches up to him before I do,” said one uncle, a mean son of a bitch who’d lost an eye in Vietnam but could still outshoot most anybody, except possibly Doral.

“By this time tomorrow, I’ll have this Coburn’s balls in a Mason jar. See if I don’t,” vowed one cousin who was below the legal drinking age but was so drunk he was nearly falling off the tree stump on which he sat.

One of Doral’s younger brothers yelled at his rowdy kids, who were chasing each other in the yard. “Show some fucking respect!” he shouted, then pledged not to rest until Coburn was dead. “I don’t take kindly to people messin’ with our fam’ly.”

As soon as they’d eaten their fill and drunk the bottles dry, they piled into pickup trucks and set out to assigned territories to resume the search for their kinsman’s killer.

Doral said goodbye to his weeping mother, pulled himself free of her clammy, clutching hands, and left along with the rest, except that he went alone. Despite being half drunk, he easily navigated the winding back roads at a high rate of speed. He’d traveled these roads all his life and knew them intimately. He’d driven them a lot drunker than he was tonight. He and Fred. He and Eddie.

Thoughts of Eddie called to mind that fishing trip that had been captured in the framed photo that Crawford had bagged as evidence. Doral remembered that excursion as one of the best times the four of them had had together.

From thoughts of that day, his mind drifted to his fishing boat and his pre-Bookkeeper years. He and Fred had been born poor, and it had been an uphill struggle all their lives to make ends meet. Fred had sought financial stability by signing on with the police department. But wearing a uniform, working a shift, wasn’t for Doral. He enjoyed flexibility.

He’d bought his boat on credit extended to him by a banker so tight-assed he squeaked when he walked. The rate of interest had been usurious, but Doral had never even been late on a payment.

Then for years he had run charters into the Gulf, putting up with groups of rich, drunken sons of bitches—doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and such—who thought of themselves as far above a fishing guide with callused hands and a Cajun accent. He had endured their verbal abuse, and their vomiting up their expensive booze, and their griping about the heat and the sun, rough seas, and uncooperative fish. He’d tolerated their crap because his livelihood had depended on it.

In a way, he’d been grateful to Katrina for destroying his boat and putting an end to it. No more kissing up to abusive assholes for Doral Hawkins, thank you very much.

That’s when The Bookkeeper had approached him and Fred with a moneymaking idea. The work was going to be a lot more exciting and lucrative than any enterprise they could have dreamed up on their own. Even in a state where taking graft was as commonplace as crawfish, the scheme was a way to get filthy rich.

Doral hadn’t shied away from the danger involved. The payoff was worth the risks. He liked walking a tightrope and enjoyed the inside joke of being a public official by day and something else entirely by night.

His job description was to intimidate, maim, or kill if necessary. He had a natural propensity for stalking and hunting, and now he could make a living at it. The only difference was that the prey was human.

So here he was speeding along back roads, his prey Lee Coburn. And his best friend’s widow and child.

When his cell phone rang, he slowed down only marginally in order to answer the call, but after hearing the urgent message the caller imparted, he floorboarded his brake pedal and skidded to a stop, sending up a cloud of dust that enveloped his car. “Are you shitting me?”

There was a lot of background noise, but the whispering caller made himself heard above it. Not that Doral wanted to hear anything of what he had to report.

“I thought you should know so you could pass it along to The Bookkeeper.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Doral muttered. He disconnected and pulled his car off the road, letting it idle on the edge of a ditch as he first lit a much-needed cigarette, then called The Bookkeeper.

He was stone cold sober now.

He skipped traditional greetings. “It’s rumored that Coburn is a federal agent.”

The Bookkeeper said nothing, just breathed slowly and deeply. Malevolently.

Doral, envisioning a seething volcano about to erupt, swiped at a bead of sweat rolling down his temple and into the outside corner of his eye.

“When did you hear this?”

“Ten seconds before I called you.”

“Who told you?”

“One of our plants in the P.D. He heard it from a feeb who’s working with them and the sheriff’s office on the kidnapping. The buzz is that Coburn is an agent who’s been working undercover.”

A long silence ensued. Then, “Well, as you so astutely pointed out this morning, he does seem unusually smart for a dock worker. I only wish you had realized that before you let him escape the warehouse.”