Read Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) for Free Online Page A

destined for bad nicknames, especially when they worked with a gang of alpha males.
    “So, Broussard, does that mean you want me to call you Curly in honor of those pretty brown locks?” Or sexy as sin, more like, although she’d never admit her opinions to him. Besides, he was way too moody to get involved with, even if she were interested in anything else, which she wasn’t.
    “Hey, Curly was my favorite of the Three Stooges.” Gentry gave her enough smile to flash a quick sight of rarely glimpsed dimples, but it seemed halfhearted. He’d had a couple of long days. After coming up empty on his initial search for the killer, he’d gone out on a couple of extra shifts. Personnel from all law-enforcement agencies were on the lookout for that boat.
    “Figures,” Jena said. “I’ll just call you Stooge.”
    She didn’t push the banter this morning. Gentry had been quieter than usual all night, even before they’d been pulled into the search-and-rescue operation for a kid who’d fallen off a dock. The dock stretched into a lake behind his family’s house, in a rural area near the road that cut off to Isle de Jean Charles, southeast of Montegut.
    After a couple of hours of searching, a neighboring parish LDWF agent had found the little boy’s body washed up on a spit of land a half mile from the dock. That kid should’ve been asleep at midnight, not wandering around outside. Whether any kind of negligence was involved would be the business of the sheriff’s office.
    In Louisiana it was the wildlife agents, not the Coast Guard or sheriff’s deputies, who served as the primary search-and-rescue first responders on waterways. They’d been among the first on the scene after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and they were the first ones called out whenever someone went missing on the water.
    This kind of outcome was the worst part of the job, especially when a child was involved. The absolute worst. No competition.
    She didn’t think that was the only reason Gentry had been so quiet, though. He’d been distant and distracted even before the search got called in.
    “Eva Savoie was buried yesterday.” Jena pulled her sunglasses out and settled them on the bridge of her nose. Daylight had come up fast, and bright glints already reflected off the water. Gentry had pulled out his shades ten minutes earlier.
    His expression didn’t change; he gave good blank face. “Yeah, so I heard.”
    “I went.” She looked out over the bayou, still and peaceful, the hunters not yet out in this spot. “Thought you might be there.”
    “I spent the day in Dulac.” Gentry took off his sunglasses and gave her an intense look. “Why’d you go? You hadn’t even met Eva Savoie.”
    Jena wasn’t sure why she’d felt compelled to go to the woman’s funeral, but the impulse had been strong and she’d followed it. At the heart of things, she’d been afraid no one would be there except the woman’s great-niece. Being so old, dying so badly, and then having no one to mourn you—it was sad. “I think I just went out of respect, you know? She was so alone, and her death was . . .”
    No need to say the words. It had been the worst crime scene she’d ever encountered, and Jena had seen some bad stuff in her three years as a street cop with the New Orleans Police Department.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t have the stomach for blood; her degree was in forensic biology. She spent a lot of time looking at dead things—gators, birds, snakes, even nutria, the gross, orange-toothed rodents the size of a healthy housecat. She’d seen her share of death.
    What she didn’t have the stomach for was the violence one human could willfully inflict on another. That was why she’d left NOPD nine months ago after hearing LDWF had a couple of openings. The six-month training academy had been pure hell, but she’d learned why these agents had the reputation as the state’s best-trained—they had to know how to work in all kinds