Longarm and the Voodoo Queen

CHAPTER 1

The sun was just peeking over the moss-draped cypresses when the children came running along the bank of the bayou, laughing and capering, waving the bamboo poles they clutched in their hands. They came to a stop at their favorite fishing spot. Hands were plunged into the wooden bucket full of chopped mullet, and the slimy little bits of dead sea creatures were carefully impaled on bent pins that served as hooks. Here under the trees, the air was already hot and still despite the early hour, and the surface of the bayou lay flat and silent, broken only by an occasional ring of concentric ripples caused by insects landing on the water and then taking off again. The soft, liquid voices of the boys were the only sounds.

Hooks baited, they cast out into the water, and the bent pins made more ripples as they struck the placid surface. The ripples ran outward from the points of impact and gradually died away. The boys fell silent, content in their companionship and in this time and place.

The water roiled suddenly. Bubbles rose and burst, and following them came the humped shape of something foul, arching up out of the bayou. All the boys let out a common yell of alarm and scrambled backward on the nearby bank. They all managed to hang on to their fishing poles, despite their fear.

The shape in the water moved slowly toward shore. One of the boys, the tallest and oldest--who, because of those things, felt that he had to be the bravest as well--stepped forward tentatively. His eyes narrowed as he saw that the mysterious hump-backed shape was covered with some sort of cloth. A moment later, he realized it had to be a shirt.

"Hey! That be a man in the water!"

Now the boys clustered closer to the edge of the bayou. Part of the mystery had been explained. Young as they were, all of them had seen death before. It was a part of everyday life for those who lived on and around the waters of the great river and the gulf into which it flowed. They were Delta boys, and they knew death, all right, and feared it only slightly.

The oldest and tallest boy pulled his line from the water and cast out toward the floating shape. It took him a couple of tries, but then he hooked the shirt. "He'p me pull 'im in," he told his friends, and eager hands reached for the line. "Careful, careful," he cautioned. "This here line, he ain't gon' hold too much weight."

Slowly, they hauled the floating thing toward the shore. A few moments later, it bumped against the bank, and the tallest, oldest boy said, "Hold 'im there. Maurice, Richard, you gimme a hand."

The three of them reached down and caught hold of the waterlogged shirt and pulled. An arm broke from the water and flopped onto the bank. The hand at the end of that arm was as white and pale as the belly of a gar. The flesh had been gnawed in places by small fish.

The boys pulled harder and the man's head came out of the water, his long, lank hair streaming water as it fell over the empty holes where his eyes had been. All the boys felt a fresh surge of fear as they saw the tattered, incomplete face of the dead man. But they kept pulling, the weight of the body heavy from all the water it had absorbed, and the other arm came out, and the torso down to the waist, and then the boys fell backward on the bank because that was all that was left of the man and there was nothing to hold him in the water. They let go of him and scrambled away, and all of them looked in horror at the ragged place where the corpse ended, and knew that more than likely a gator had chomped the man plumb in two.

Released of their hold, the half of the dead man that they had pulled from the bayou rolled from its side onto its back in a ghastly semblance of life. A shaft of sunlight, green-tinged from the thick vegetation through which it filtered, struck the chest of the dead man and reflected dully from the bit of tarnished metal that was pinned there. The tallest, oldest boy saw the reflection and edged closer to take a look, the need to be the leader once again overcoming his fear. He put his hands on his bony knees, bare beneath the cut-off trousers that were his only garment, and his lips moved a little as he read the words engraved on the piece of metal. He'd had enough schooling so that he could make some sense of them, though he had no idea why such a man--or at least, part of such a man--had been floating in the bayou.

The dead man was wearing the badge of a United States deputy marshal.

CHAPTER 2

"You a superstitious man, Custis?" asked Billy Vail as he dropped a thin sheaf of papers on his desk.

Longarm cocked his right ankle on his left knee and leaned back in the leather chair in front of Vail's desk. He took a puff on the cheroot he had just lit and then said, "Not so's you'd notice, I don't reckon."

The chief marshal, whose pink face and balding pate made him appear deceptively cherubic, said, "Black cats don't scare you when they cross your path?"

Longarm frowned, wondering what in tarnation Vail was getting at. "I ain't overly fond of the critters," he said, "but I don't run home and stay in bed for the rest of the day whenever I see one. Leastways not alone." He grinned, but Vail didn't seem to notice.

"Good, because I'm sending you to New Orleans."

Longarm didn't see what that had to do with superstition. True, there were parts of Louisiana that could be downright spooky: the swamps and the bayous and those mossy old plantation houses that had been abandoned to rot with only ghostly memories left to inhabit them. Longarm had never considered himself an overly imaginative man, but as he thought of such places, he had to admit that a tiny shiver went through him deep inside. But he had been to Louisiana and New Orleans itself many times, and he certainly didn't feel nervous about going there again.

"That's a little out of our usual territory, ain't it?"

"That's why you're going," said Vail. "I know some of your cases have taken you to New Orleans in the past, but you're not well known there, by any means. You wouldn't be as likely to be recognized as you would be in, say, Cheyenne or Deadwood."

Longarm inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment of his boss's point. "I reckon that's right."

"We got a request from the U.S. marshal's office in New Orleans-"

"For somebody to work on a case incognito, as they say," Longarm concluded for Vail.

"That's right." Vail shoved the stack of papers across the desk toward Longarm. "Take a look at these reports, Custis."

Longarm leaned forward and picked up the documents, then began reading them quickly. He was long since accustomed to scanning official reports like these and picking out the essential elements in them, so that he could mentally digest the important information without wasting any time. In this case, he saw right away that the reports concerned the murder of a U.S. deputy marshal named Douglas Ramsey.

Longarm's eyes narrowed as he read how Ramsey's body had been pulled from a bayou by some boys who had been out fishing before making their grisly discovery. Half of Ramsey's body had been pulled from the bayou, Longarm realized as he read further. That was all that had been left. The rest of the lawman had undoubtedly wound up as alligator bait.

"Damn," breathed Longarm. "That's one hell of a way to go."

"Ramsey didn't die from the alligator attack," said Vail, not needing to ask which part of the report had prompted Longarm's comment. "The coroner down there established that he had been murdered. He had a knife wound in his back, and he was dead before he ever went into the water. Feeding him to the gators was just the killer's way of disposing of the body."

"But it didn't work," Longarm pointed out.

"Nope. For some reason, part of the body was left in the water, and when it filled up with enough gas, it bobbed to the surface just in time to scare a couple of years' growth out of those boys who found it."

Longarm paged through the reports. "According to this, Ramsey was working on a smuggling case. There's always been a heap of smuggling all over that Mississippi Delta. What was important enough about this one to start a federal deputy poking around?"

Vail grimaced as he said, "Politics. You know how corrupt the city government of New Orleans has always been--before the war, during the war, during Reconstruction. And now, a few years after the Reconstructionists were chased out, everything's still just about the same. Only the names and the faces change, and the graft goes on. That's led to a strong reform movement in the city. It never really seems to accomplish much, mind you, except to swap one set of rascals for another, but it's there anyway."

Longarm nodded, even though he wasn't sure where this conversation was going. Vail wasn't really telling him anything he didn't already know.

"One of the reformers managed to get himself appointed as a special prosecutor, and he petitioned the federal government asking for help in cleaning things up. One of the groups he's been going after are the smugglers. The legitimate merchants in New Orleans have always been frustrated because it's easier to buy just about anything from the smugglers, rather than through legal channels."

"So the deputy marshal who wound up in the bayou, this fella Ramsey, he was working for the special prosecutor?"

Vail nodded. "That's right."

"And that's what you want me to do," Longarm said, his voice flat.

"The difference is, nobody in New Orleans knows you, like I said before. You'll be able to find out who's behind the smuggling by working in amongst the people who are carrying it out."

Longarm sighed, unsure what to tell Vail. He had never turned down an assignment outright, and he didn't want to start now. He had a reputation, whether justified or not, for being able to handle the tough cases. Longarm figured he was good at his job. He wasn't given to false modesty. But he knew as well how often luck had been on his side, and from everything he had read in those reports and everything Billy Vail had told him, this case was going to require an extra amount of good fortune.

To gain himself a little extra time to think about it, Longarm said, "I still don't understand why you asked me if I was superstitious, Billy. I reckon Ramsey ran into some bad luck and all, what with being knifed and then half-eaten by a gator, but that was just the doing of the crooks he was trying to chase down."

"I suppose so," Vail said heavily, "but there's one thing that's not in those reports, Custis. The chief marshal in the New Orleans office wired me personally about it when he asked for the loan of my best man. Ramsey's body was found day before yesterday. Yesterday morning, something else turned up on the doorstep of the marshal's office."

Vail looked down at the desk, and Longarm waited in silence for him to go on.

"It was a little cloth doll," Vail said when he finally looked up again. "It was made to look sort of like Ramsey, right down to the badge pinned on his chest. And it was cut in half, Custis. The bottom half was nowhere to be found."

Well, thought Longarm a few days later as he stepped onto the wharf where the riverboat Dixie Belle had tied up, nobody had ever accused him of being overly smart. Some men would have refused this job, even if it had meant turning in their badges. Not him. He had come to the Crescent City to take over the case that had gotten the last man not only killed but also hexed somehow. That crude doll left at the chief marshal's office had been an unmistakable warning. Some kind of evil voodoo magic was at work in New Orleans.

Or at least that was what somebody wanted the authorities to believe. As Longarm had told Billy Vail, he wasn't a superstitious man. He was much more worried about a knife in the back or a hidden gunman than he was about witchcraft.

From Denver he had taken a train to St. Louis, and there boarded the riverboat that had brought him down the Mississippi. Now, as he stepped off the boat, a hot, humid wind hit him in the face. He frowned. As accustomed as he was to the high, dry air of Colorado, it always took him a while to adjust every time a case brought him to the Gulf Coast. He recalled a couple of jobs that had taken him to the Corpus Christi area, over in Texas. Pretty country once you got used to it, but the weather sure made a man sweat.