FF Devon Marshall - Voodoo Woman (New Orleans Mysteries #1)

Seduction and murder in the city of New Orleans.

Once a killer for hire, Willie Rae Flynn turned her back on this profession and now makes her living as a private investigator in the city where the good times always roll. For Flynn, the need to keep her past secret means that she must live a solitary existence in which she denies herself anything but the most fleeting contact with other women.

Then a client is made the victim of a brutal ritual murder and Flynn is drawn into the investigation. Finding herself exploring the dark underbelly of Voodoo that few know exist and which demands that the good times be paid for in blood, Flynn is forced, by the actions of a crazed mambo who thinks she can control the old gods through human sacrifice, to enter into a pact with an FBI agent who hunts her, in order to save the life of the woman she loves but is afraid to have a relationship with.



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PROLOGUE
New Orleans. August, 2005

A long time ago Willie Rae Flynn had learned that the first rule of life is: shit always happens.

Flynn drove through the watery, darkened streets of the city, a shrieking wind sucking at her Pontiac Trans Am; rain spattered the windshield like handfuls of watery grit thrown by a malicious child. Teeth gritted, knuckles bone-white on the steering wheel, she rocketed the car through the deserted intersection of two streets as a garish pink umbrella flew over the hood and scooted away through the opposite side of the intersection.

“ Come on, come on,” she muttered, ducking her head over the steering wheel and twisting it this way and that, peering through the rain-smeared windshield for the house she sought. The hurricane had taken out much of the power in this part of the city, making Flynn’s task that much more difficult. She brought the vehicle to a lurching halt at the curb, grabbed a cat transporter and a heavy-duty flashlight from the passenger seat, and forced the driver’s door open against the screaming wind that wanted to both rip it from her grasp and slam it back on her all at once.

On the street, the wind sucked the breath from her lungs and flattened the clothing against her skin. Needles of slat- and mud-tasting rain whipped into her face. A plastic garbage can went bumping across a lawn, chased by the torn-down signage from a corner store; it seemed like everything was in fucking motion tonight.

Many houses in the projects had strange esoteric designs painted on the doors: veves. Signs used to call for assistance from the Loa, the gods of the Voodoo pantheon. Flynn glanced at these crude drawings as she jogged up the sidewalk, and shivered involuntarily. Her knowledge of Voodoo and the Loa was not extensive by any means, but she could recognize the more common veves that she saw on many of the doors. There was Baron Samedi, the keeper of cemeteries and protector of the dead; and Papa Legba, the chief Loa guide who interceded with the rest of the pantheon for favors.

The logical place for a scared cat to hide out would be beneath the porch, Flynn reasoned, and she veered across the front yard of her friends’ home, hunkering down in front of the latticed sides of the porch and switching on the flashlight. As the powerful beam pierced the darkness underneath the porch, something small and boneless squirted away from the intrusion of the light, reminding Flynn that scared cats were not the only creatures liked to hide out beneath porches. She gritted her teeth; the very last thing she needed was to get snake-bit whilst trying to rescue this damned moggy.

“ Here, kitty. Here, Charlie. Come to Flynn. There’s a nice pussy.”

‘Charlie’ was kind of a stupid name for a cat, in Flynn’s opinion. But it wasn’t her cat, and therefore none of her business what its name was. She called on the cat again, this time rewarded with a faint “ Meow!” that she only just heard above the demented howl of the wind. A pair of yellow eyes glinted in the flashlight’s beam.

“ That’s it,” Flynn coaxed the scared feline. “ Come on, kitty. Come to Flynn. I won’t hurt you. Gonna take you back to your family. They miss you.”

The cat approached one cautious step at a time until it caught a whiff of the open can of cat food Flynn had placed inside the transporter, and then it shot the rest of the way forward, dived inside the plastic crate. Food trumped fear every time. Flynn slapped the metal gate shut. Charlie looked out at her through the bars, his mouth crammed with tasty, meaty chunks. “ Okay, you little fucker, let’s get you reunited with your family,” Flynn told him. “ Then maybe I can get my own dumb-ass self to higher ground.” She ran back to the Trans Am, slid the transporter containing Charlie onto the rear seat, and hurried around to the driver’s side. Somewhere nearby glass shattered and metal squealed as the wind hurled something large through a window.

Flynn had driven less than a block from her friends’ home when she saw a car stopped at the side of the road. A telephone pole had fallen across the hood, pinning the vehicle. From amidst the twisted wreckage of metal and wood, steam belched out of a broken radiator. A woman in a yellow rain slicker and gumboots was lifting stuff out of the open trunk. She turned as Flynn drew to a halt alongside and wound down her window.

“ Help y’all?”

The woman narrowed a look at her. Even in the midst of the worst hurricane to hit New Orleans in decades, people still treated a Good Samaritan with suspicion. It made Flynn a little sad, but she also realized it was a realistic survival mechanism; not everybody was such a good Samaritan.

The woman seemed to decide that Flynn intended her no harm. She gestured toward the row of shotgun houses on the same side of the street. “ My friends - I heard they were stranded and came to see what I could do. Some help, eh?” Her cheeks pinked inside of the slicker hood.

“ If y’all need a ride, I got room,” Flynn offered. She smiled. “ So long as you don’t mind sharing with a cat.”

The woman hesitated, but only for a moment, before nodding gratefully. “ Thanks. Let me just get this stuff -” and she bent once more into the open trunk.

Flynn got out, telling Charlie to ‘stay put’, like the cat had a choice. She stepped up to the open trunk as the woman in the slicker hefted a camera bag and a laptop case from inside.

“ Let me take that for you.”

The woman glanced around at her. Flynn saw large dark eyes, and a wide, sensuous mouth. Even windswept and soaked, dressed in the unflattering slicker, she was breathtakingly attractive.

“ I won’t steal ’em,” Flynn promised. She cocked a curious look at the camera bag. “ I never was much use with cameras anyway. And I got my own laptop.”

That earned her a laugh. The woman also handed both camera bag and laptop case to her before following Flynn to the Trans Am. She didn’t bother to close the trunk of her own vehicle. That would have been like shutting the barn door after the horses - and all the cattle, too - had bolted. “ I’m a reporter,” she explained as Flynn popped the rear door. “ With the Orleans Weekly. Dana Jordan, by the way.”

“ Flynn. I read your paper a lot. I like the reporting.”

“ You and the other three people then. Flynn? Is that a first name or a second name?”

“ It’s Willie Rae Flynn. People just call me Flynn.”

“ Ah. And your cat, does he have a name?”

“ Charlie. But he isn’t mine. I came to rescue him for some friends.”

Dana Jordan’s eyebrows rose. “ That’s noble of you.”

Flynn shrugged. “ They’re good friends.”

As she started to close the door, Flynn noticed Charlie move to the back of his transporter and crouch low, ears flattening to his head, yellow eyes wide and bright. A low hissing emanated from his throat.

“ I don’t think he likes sharing his space with my gear,” Dana Jordan remarked with a smile.

Flynn stared at the cat.

Every human being has a ‘lizard brain’, a remnant of the species’ origins. It is the part of the brain where the primal instincts still reside, albeit buried beneath the many civilizing layers of cerebral cortex which humans have evolved, and as such it is the part of the brain where the deepest, most primal instincts lie. As Flynn stared into the alarmed eyes of the cat, her own lizard-brain began to scream a warning at her. Uncertain why, knowing only that she was agitated and instinctively aware that speed was suddenly of the essence, she slammed the door and turned to the reporter. “ We need to get out of here.”

“ What’s wrong?”

Flynn started to say “ I’m not sure - ” but a sound like an explosion ripping through the night drowned her words, and dried the saliva up in her throat.

Dana jerked a look at her. “ What was that?” Charlie began to yowl like a thing possessed and the reporter‘s frightened gaze pin-balled momentarily between the rear window of the car and Flynn’s clenched expression.

“ Get in the car. Now.”

Every fiber in Flynn’s body felt as though it were vibrating with an invisible electrical current; a pulse beat in back of her dry throat. She jerked her chin in the direction of the levee that followed the snaking course of the Mississippi. “ The levee is breaching. It’s happening - everything the government was warned about.”

Dana’s face became impossibly pale. “ Christ, I thought that was just - talk.”

A second explosion boomed through the night.

“ We need to go,” Flynn insisted.

Without another word, they both dived into the car and Flynn stepped on the gas, her gaze rising automatically to the rearview mirror as they shot forward. Hot, tight patches of fear blossomed beneath her eyes as she saw a wall of water bearing down on them from the top of the street.

“ Shit always happens,” she muttered.



CHAPTER ONE
New Orleans. April, 2010

One morning Willie Rae Flynn woke up and simply realized that killing people was no longer how she wanted to make her living, that it was time for her to get out of the hired assassin game.

Unlike other professions, where retirement meant a golden handshake and an embarrassing party thrown by one’s soon-to-be erstwhile colleagues, one did not simply walk away from being a hired assassin: there was a protocol had to be followed. Flynn contacted certain people to this end, and with their assistance she set about erasing all trace of her life as a hired killer and creating a new personal history for herself. She left New York where she had been based for over a decade, and headed to New Orleans, the city in which she was born and raised. In New Orleans she purchased an office and an apartment in the French Quarter. It seemed a fitting spot for Flynn to work and reside; the existence of the French Quarter was based in as much fakery and artifice as Flynn’s own. The architecture wasn’t French, it was Spanish, and although many of the buildings had the appearance of great antiquity, none had been constructed later than the latter half of the eighteenth century. New Orleans in general, and the Vieux Ca
rré in particular, were a triumph of smoke and mirrors. Flynn could well appreciate the irony in that.

She applied for a private investigator’s license and a permit to carry a concealed weapon, both of which required a police check. Flynn was not unduly concerned. The New Orleans Police Department, pre-Katrina, were notoriously lax and open to looking the other way for the right amount of cash pressed into the proper hands. Someone whose previous profession had been, to all intents and purposes, a ‘security consultant’, someone who had cash to spare, was a shoo-in to get both her PI’s license and all of the necessary gun permits in such a city.

Then, just a few months later, the wrath of a hell-bat named Hurricane Katrina visited itself upon the Gulf coast. Flynn stayed on in New Orleans throughout the hurricane and the catastrophic levee breaches, and when the shock died down afterwards and people began looking to rebuild, work suddenly was pouring her way from over-stretched insurance companies. It was often the aim of these companies to deprive their clients of a few dollars in compensation. People whose homes and livelihoods, and in many cases, their loved ones, had been lost or destroyed in the hurricane, found themselves locked in interminable, petty legal battles with insurance companies unwilling to pay out. Flynn, disinterested in helping the insurance companies to screw their clients, worked instead with the people to get their pay outs.

At times she would pause to ask herself whether this desire to help improve the lives of underdogs were not symptomatic of a deeper and more complex desire to atone for those lives she had snuffed out in her previous profession?

During one of her first non-insurance cases, Flynn made contact with an NOPD detective named Pierce Boudreau. An attractive woman with skin the color of café au lait and dark, flashing eyes, Boudreau was born and raised in the tough, hardscrabble Lower Ninth Ward, giving her that much in common with Flynn, whose origins lay in the equally tough Irish Channel. That Boudreau was black did not make her a minority in the NOPD: that she was a woman made her a minority there. At least until Katrina changed the game. With the NOPD down to forty percent of its ideal working capacity in the wake of the hurricane, the brass were forced to reassess hiring policies and to start promoting more female officers through the ranks. Boudreau had made detective in 2004, pre-Katrina, but she still caught a little of her male colleagues’ resentment now and then. The attraction was instant between them.

“ I know there’s something about you isn’t quite right, Flynn,” Boudreau said at the beginning of their acquaintance. “ But it’s okay. I’m not going to ask you to explain anything to me. Not yet anyway. Maybe some other time.”

“ What makes you so sure that I’ll answer your questions honestly if you do ask them?” Flynn wanted to know.

Boudreau considered that, then simply shrugged. “ I don’t know. I’ll just have to trust that you will, I guess.”

Possibly because Boudreau had a steady girlfriend and no apparent desire to screw that relationship up, Flynn found spending time with her to be the kind of fun and uncomplicated that she handled best. She preferred to avoid those deeply intimate, personal situations where the other person thought they had the right to know everything about you.

On a mild, wet spring day five years since Flynn had arrived in New Orleans, she sat in her office awaiting a client, idly tossing wadded up balls of paper at the ceiling, her mind drifting from thoughts of Pierce Boudreau to thoughts about Dana Jordan. Ever since their first meeting had almost been their last when the London Avenue levee breached and a murderous wall of water chased them for nearly six blocks before they made it to safety on higher ground, Flynn and the reporter had enjoyed a flirtatious friendship. There might have been something more than just friendship developed, had Flynn allowed it. Every time she was around the reporter Flynn would start to feel all rucked up inside and dangerous notions would enter her head. For five years she had resisted acting upon those notions because she was afraid that the strength of her own feelings would override even the ingrained caution of keeping people at arm’s length, lest they discover her past. But it wasn’t getting any easier.

With a sigh, she glanced at her wrist watch, wondering how much longer she ought to give this client before she called it a day. The woman had telephoned three days ago, in something of a tizzy, pleading with Flynn to find her daughter, missing for just over one week. The police had been of very little help, inclining to the belief that the girl had run away from home. Flynn agreed to meet with the distraught mother, although she didn’t expect to be able to do much. It did seem likel