to his small farm at three in the morning. Archie Johnson was in his late seventies, and he didn’t mind running around in the middle of the night in his underwear. The man was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a thin white T-shirt. His hair was wild and his glasses threatened to fall off his face.
“I’m confused. Who do you think is in your barn?” She’d gotten the call as she was working the night shift. She worked days, but she took the occasional night shift when the normal guys needed time off. Usually it involved catching up on paperwork and breaking up the occasional bar brawl. It sometimes ended up being a weird therapy session with the participants of the aforementioned brawls. She’d taken more than one person in custody straight from jail to their first AA meeting.
Sometimes the person in jail was merely a dumbass who pushed her until she couldn’t ignore him and she tossed him in the back of her cruiser because she couldn’t let herself do what she wanted to do with him.
She was not going to think about Zep Guidry. No. She was concentrating on this very important breaking-and-entering call.
“It’s the rougarou,” Archie said, pointing toward the barn. He’d said the word like it had some magical power and he didn’t want to be too loud about it.
“Rouga-what?” She didn’t recognize anyone by that name, but then Cajun ways were still a mystery to her and she was several years into this job.
How the hell she’d ended up in a tiny parish in Southern Louisiana she had no idea. To say her new home was a big dose of culture shock would be underplaying the experience.
“Archie! Archie!” The diminutive Caroline Johnson made her way down the steps, a robe in her hand. Unlike her husband, Caroline was dressed from head to toe in a housedress, slippers, and robe, her hair in a silky-looking wrapper. She held the extra robe out. “You put this on.”
Archie frowned his wife’s way. “It’s hot as stink out here, woman.”
Caroline shook her head. “No. You’re showing off for the ladies. You be a gentleman. You know how I feel about other women appreciating your body.”
Roxie was sure Archie was in fine shape for his age, but the sight of his skinny body did not inspire lust.
“You keep your jealousy to yourself,” Archie proclaimed. “It’s hot and I’m not covering up because the deputy might get the wrong idea. I’ve never cheated on you in fifty-two years.”
They started to argue about the prospect of Archie’s skinny body causing the women of Papillon to lose their minds with desire, and Roxie again wondered how she’d gotten here. She’d been on a fast track. She’d been one of the first female snipers ever to serve in ESU. One man who couldn’t be a decent human being and here she was refereeing bar fights and calming down tourists who thought Otis was going to eat them—calling a gator by his given name, and somehow that being the most normal part of her day.
This was her life. Her whole life.
A light pierced the darkness of the night around them—a vehicle coming up the long road that led from the highway. The Johnson farm was remote, but then most places in the parish could be considered remote. The Johnson farm was on the north end of town, and there was no ambient light out here. When she’d first moved to Papillon, that darkness had been a foreign thing. A moonless night had felt almost oppressive. Now she appreciated the contrast. There was night here in a way she’d never experienced, and somehow the darkness of the night made the day brighter.
Yeah, she was becoming quite the poet, but one of the things she’d learned was that when she wasn’t constantly on the move, she thought way, way too much.
The car turned up the long drive, but she couldn’t make out what kind of vehicle it was. The lights weren’t the new super-bright kind, but then most of the vehicles around the parish were older. When the Burtons had gotten their brand-new F-150 complete with LED headlights, the number of UFO sightings had gone through the roof. And it wasn’t like there hadn’t been many before.
“Woman, why are you worried about my naked knees when we’ve got a rougarou on our land?” Archie asked, pointing to the barn. “You should give me back my shotgun.”