Swish.
Acadia had known those sounds her whole life: the swish of an armored tail against cattails, the plop of a ten-foot body submerging, and the blip of a creature coming to the surface. Each noise cut deeper than Sunday’s blade.
Swish.
Swish.
Swish, plop.
That last noise felt like a hot sword jabbed in her back.
Acadia strained against her lashings, looking down at the bank and the clouded water of the back channel, seeing it swirl like cream in coffee.
Blip.
The prehistoric head breached first.
CHAPTER
76
SHORTLY AFTER ELEVEN, TESS AALIYAH and I raced out of Jennings on the Evangeline Highway heading north behind the flashing lights of the cruiser Sheriff Paul Gauvin was driving. Behind us roared three more cruisers, each with two deputies and one with a police dog too. None of the cars had sirens on.
We had ample reason for our urgency and our stealth. I had kept Sunday on the phone long enough for the triangulation to work, and it put the man within a five-mile radius of the cabin where Acadia Le Duc’s mother lived. Not a hint of doubt now. Sunday was Mulch and was the man responsible for multiple murders, not to mention my torture and my family’s peril. And Acadia Le Duc was definitely in the area as well. Hertz had run the GPS locator and put her rental car within three miles of the cabin.
It seemed logical to us that if Sunday and Le Duc were coming together at a remote cabin out on the Bayou des Cannes, there was a good chance that was where Bree, Damon, Jannie, Ali, and Nana Mama were being held.
“You okay, Alex?” Aaliyah asked.
I shook my head, said, “If I’d known he was here before I called, I never would have mentioned Acadia. I may have played my hand too hard.”
“You needed to keep him on as long as possible,” she said. “It was the right thing to do. We know he’s there.”
“But what’s he doing?” I asked. “What are he and Acadia doing?”
Before Aaliyah could answer, Sheriff Gauvin shut down his lights and tapped his brakes and then turned onto a slick clay road that led off into forest. Two miles on, he pulled in behind a late-model Ford pickup and unfolded himself from the driver’s seat. A long, ropy man in his midfifties with jug ears and a straw cowboy hat, the sheriff looked like a Hollywood version of a cracker cop.
But Gauvin had exhibited no prejudice toward me, and from our short, succinct conversations, I could tell he was certainly nobody’s fool. He was smart, well trained, and uninterested in turf wars. If he could help save my family and take down Acadia Le Duc in the process, he and his department were more than happy to oblige.
Aaliyah and I climbed out and went to the sheriff, who was talking with the undercover deputy in the pickup.
“Tony says no one’s been in or out since he got here,” Gauvin said.
“Real quiet,” the deputy agreed. “Except for the wind and all.”
“So they came in expecting that the road might be watched,” Aaliyah said.
“Looks that way,” the sheriff said. “From where Acadia left her rental to here is all wild swamp. No easy thing to get in that way.”
“But we have no idea how Sunday got in here,” I said.
“Could have done it by shallow-draft boat,” Gauvin said. “There’s an arm of the bayou comes right past the cabin, but you’d have to know what you were doing to get there in the dark on a night like this.”
Five other deputies, all young, fresh-faced kids, came up wearing body armor and carrying shotguns. I wondered how much training they’d had and said, “No one gets trigger-happy unless it’s warranted. My family could be in there, and I don’t want any of them shot by accident.”
Several of the deputies looked insulted, but I didn’t care. I needed to make the point in spite of bruising their egos. The sixth deputy walked up, a woman named Shields, and she had a muscular German shepherd named Maxwell on a tight leash. I liked police dogs. They’d saved me on more than one occasion.
“The two-track that leads into Le Duc’s is about a hundred yards up the road,” Gauvin said. “I figure it’s better we walk in a piece, spread out, and surround the place.”