Chapter Fifteen

After the chief deputized Raven, and gave her the badge and service weapon he so desperately wanted to give to her weeks ago, she drove with Billy Ray in a BLPD unmarked Dodge to her rooms at Mama Anna’s. While Billy Ray waited outside, she raced up the wide staircase to change clothes. She didn’t want to notify Clyde Darling’s parents in the purple and gold LSU sweatshirt she had been wearing when she got the call about Noe. She had told Billy Ray that she would be no longer than ten minutes.

She wasn’t in her rooms five before there was a knock on her door. She knew who it was. Wynn. She had been ignoring his repeated calls all through the conversation with Cameron and the identification of Clyde Darling’s body. She opened the door and greeted him with an absentminded kiss on the cheek before striding back to the bedroom, stripping off her faded jeans as she went.

He followed her, saying, “Whoa, whoa, I just got here.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said without turning around. “Noe’s missing.”

Now back in the bedroom but in matching bra and panties, she withdrew a holstered six-inch hunting knife from beneath a stack of obsessively folded T-shirts in the last drawer of a tall antique chifforobe. Next came a .22 revolver in a holster fitted for the small of her back. She threw both on the bed. They landed with a thud next to the shoulder holster with the Smith & Wesson and the BLPD detective’s badge the chief had given her at the station earlier.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘missing’?” Wynn said, his eyes narrowing at the small arsenal on the bed.

“I mean missing. Maybe dead missing,” she answered as she pulled on a pair of tight black jeans and a white spotless T-shirt. “And Clyde’s dead.”

Wynn let out a breath and crossed both arms over his head. “Fuck,” he whispered. “That poor boy. What happened?”

“Byrd’s Landing happened.”

She sat down on the bed to put on her socks before reaching back for the holstered hunting knife. She strapped it to her ankle, pulled on her boots and stood up. She removed the Smith & Wesson service weapon from the shoulder holster and swapped it with her own Glock that she kept in her nightstand drawer. She made sure both weapons were loaded before doing so. The shoulder holster went on so easily that it felt like reattaching a lost limb. Next she placed the backup weapon at the small of her back, then clipped the badge to her waistband. And finally, the suit jacket from way back in her closet, the one she thought she would never wear again. The weapons and the clothes she hadn’t worn for over a year didn’t feel alien to her. They felt like home. Just like that, she was back. Detective Raven Burns.

Wynn stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. His eyes moved fast and worried from the badge, to the Glock in the holster, to her ankle where the knife was.

“What?” she said. “I told you that I used to be a cop.”

“You said used to be. You also said that it gutted you.”

She went to the bathroom to throw water on her face, and shake out her curls in the mirror. She was probably imagining it, but the suit jacket smelled musty. In the medicine cabinet she found an old bottle of perfume left by a previous tenant. She sniffed and shrugged before spritzing a small amount around the cuffs.

“No choice. I’ve got to find Noe,” she said as she walked back to the bedroom. “Chief’s bringing me back on temporarily until we catch this creeper.”

Wynn folded his arms across his chest. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the corner of his frowning mouth. It was like kissing stone. She pulled back so she could look into his face.

“You even smell different,” he said.

“You can’t be serious?”

“This isn’t what I signed up for,” he said.

“You had to sign something?”

“Not funny, Raven. I never thought I’d be dating a maniac who feels the need to carry three deadly weapons strapped to her body.”

Her laugh was without humor. “Never took you for being deer skittish, Wynn. What are you? A scaredy cat?”

“That’s insulting.”

“Okay,” she said, not wanting to talk about it anymore. She walked to the bedroom door, stood there waiting for him to follow.

“Are the rumors true, then?” he spat at her. “Did you kill Lamont Lovelle?”

She drew back at the question. “Where in the left field did that come from?”

“I think I have a right to know,” he said. “It’s all over town.”

“How would you know what’s all over town when you’ve only been here for about a minute and a half?”

“I have a right to know,” he insisted.

Her laugh was filled with humor, a lot of Floyd humor. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a right to know anything.”

“I thought we were having a relationship here? Was I wrong?”

“You do this now when my nephew is missing and his best friend is dead? You want me to sit down with you and cite chapter and verse about my career as a cop?”

“I think you owe it to me.”

“I owe you nothing. Get real.”

“Just tell me.”

She looked at the door, the time on her Android and back at him. Almost fifteen minutes had passed. “Now?”

“I need to know if I’m wasting my time.”

“You giving me an ultimatum?”

“I want to know the real you.”

“Who the heck do you think you’ve been sleeping with these last few months? You got the real me.”

“You keep me at arm’s length.”

“No time, Wynn.”

He took a tiny step back from her, which led him further back in the bedroom. She wanted to scream.

“If we’re going to have a serious relationship, I need to know everything about you,” he said.

“And you’ll tell me everything about you?”

“Yes.”

“Even the times you skipped school, or stole a Snickers bar from the Fast Mart? Are you going to tell me about the first time you masturbated? The first time you banged a girl?”

“You don’t have to be so crude.”

“I’m just asking,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re being combative.”

“Combative? Try confused. Clyde Darling is lying on a slab in the morgue. My nephew is missing and maybe dead, and all of a sudden you want a dissertation about my life?”

“I just want to know who I’m dealing with.”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Cut your throat with a straight razor while you sleep? Gut you while we’re making love in the shower? You think I’m going to shoot you in the back of the head and dismember your body with a chainsaw?”

“That’s sick.”

“Sure it’s sick. But that’s what you’re calling me, right, sick?”

“No, no, no,” he said, backing off and, to her now immense impatience and irritation, backing up.

She took a deep breath to control her anger. This was why she dated infrequently when she was a cop. She had managed to find partners who wanted to know everything, or those who wanted to know nothing. She could never find someone who was content to walk the middle of the road in her life. She took several more deep breaths before counting up to ten and then back down again. She couldn’t let this anger overtake her. Not with so much on the line. She scratched the side of her head in the silence, woke up her Android to check the time. It was getting late and the longer it took to find Noe, the grimmer his chances of survival became.

“Look,” she said, “this isn’t working. Get out.”

His eyes widened and he started shaking his head. She could have sworn that his nostrils flared.

“Are you dumping me?”

“Yes,” she answered. “And when you find your Girl Scout, have her call me to give me some pointers.”

“Just like that.”

“Yes. Just like that.”

He gave her a look that she didn’t care for, one that felt like a slap. For not the first time she wondered what she really knew about this man who wanted her life story along with the footnotes now that she was a cop again. A part of her, deep down, knew, had always known. But she would deal with that later. Right now, she needed to find Noe.