The Vodka Boys made half the guns disappear. The rest went back on the table, holding down the maps. Men and their toys. Of course, I had a vamp-killer in a boot sheath and six stakes in my bun, so maybe I wasn’t much better.
Lucky sauntered over, put a hand on the table, and rested his weight on it as the tattoos danced. “Dat right dere”—he tapped a page—“is Clermont Doucette place.” The rooftop was reflective aluminum, making it hard to see anything except that there were lots of angles and offshoots, as if the Clan Home had been added onto by whim and caprice for years. The house sat on a narrow tongue of land, a bayou winding around the house on three sides and what looked like swamp on the other. Trash was everywhere, piles of unidentifiable things, but what we could see was not going to make any outright attack easy. Docks large and small were positioned around the house, sticking out into the water, and there were a half dozen outbuildings, animal pens, and even a rusted school bus under the trees. I almost asked how they got the bus out into the bayou, and then changed my mind. More important were the boats; at least six were pulled up to the dock and on shore, and I figured the tree canopy hid more. There were a lot of people at the house.
“I figure he keeping Shauna here.” Lucky pointed to a room away from the moving water, next to the swampy side and sticking out all by itself.
Derek looked at me, his eyes saying what I had figured out. We had way too few men. I stifled a sigh but decided I had to address that now, right up front. “Lucky, we don’t have enough men to launch an attack and get Shauna.” The witch’s eyes flashed fire and his power sparked painfully across my skin, like brushing against cacti. I added quickly, “So I’m going in to talk.”
“Talk is nothin’ to dese suckheads,” he spat. The power in the room swirled like flames and wind, hot, and pulling all the moisture out of the air.
Derek sat back, his arms outstretched along the chair arms, and looked at me, ignoring the angry father. I took his cue and repositioned so Lucky was visible only in my peripheral vision. Sometimes ignoring people’s anger made them calm down. Of course, sometimes it made them shoot everyone in sight. “We can go in just before dusk,” Derek said to me, “when the vamps are waking up and eating breakfast and the blood-servants are busiest. Disable the boats, set up a perimeter. Then you can come in, making a lot of noise. Distract them from anything we might do.” Meaning that if they saw the girl, they’d take her if it was possible, with me being the distraction.
I nodded. “How are you getting in?” I asked. “They’ll hear motors for miles in the flat water and land.”
Derek pointed to what looked like a trail on the map; it was marked with the designation Brown Fox Road. “We drive into there this afternoon and pole in on johnboats.”
Lucky snorted, a very Gaelic and totally dismissive sound, but the burning sensation diminished again. “Polin’ johnboat a skill, not somethin’ you pick up and do.”
Derek lifted a brow. “I poled my first boat when I was five, white boy. I think I still remember how. And my men will do fine,” he added to me.
I nodded. “Okay. Lucky, we need johnboats and something motorized for me to show up in. And before you ask or demand, no. You can’t go with us.” Instantly I felt that spiky power skitter hotly along my skin. “And that’s precisely why.” I pointed at him. “You’re too emotionally involved. You’ll end up getting the men hurt, and maybe Shauna killed.”
Lucky blinked, started to say or do something, then the magic twirled away and died. He dropped his head and stared at the floor for long seconds, his hands opening and closing in fists. “Yeah. Okay. My wife say de same. But I don’ like it.”
I felt it was much too fast a capitulation, but I didn’t smell an outright lie. I said, “Instead I need you to get the equipment for us and find us two former military men who still hunt, who still use their skills, and get one to be Derek’s guide and one to be my guide. If you can’t do that and keep out of our way, then the gig is off. You understand?”
“I’m not stupid.”
Which didn’t answer my question, but I let it go. He gave me a time when he’d have the equipment ready, picked up Miz Onie’s landline phone, and made two calls. When he hung up he said, “Auguste and Beno?t twins, in army dey was. Dey hunt alligator, most years. Dis year dey mama broke hip. Dey not have time to get tags.”
I understood. In Louisiana there was a lottery for the alligator harvest program, and tags to hunt on public swamp and land in gator country were issued only at certain times. If you missed that time, you didn’t hunt, or you paid your hunting license fee and hunted on private lands. The twins didn’t have access to private land, so this year they were sitting around. “Sober?” I asked.
“Mostly,” Lucky said. I figured that was the best I was gonna get.