Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

But not soon enough for Annie.

T-Grace looked her square in the face, a glimmer of her old fire flickering in her eyes. "You gonna help us wit' dat, chère, or what?"

Panic booted Laurel in the stomach. "What can I do, T-Grace? I'm not a deputy. You don't need a lawyer." You don't need me. Please, please, don't ask me to get involved in this.

"My Ovide and me, we don' trust dat jackass Kenner," T-Grace said. "You go, you make sure he's doin' right by our poor bébé Annick."

Laurel shook her head. "Oh, T-Grace-"

T-Grace gathered the last of her strength and lunged ahead, grasping at Laurel with hands as cold and bony as death. "Please, Laurel, help us!" she exclaimed, desperation ragged in her voice. "Please, chère, s'il vous plait!"

The words rang in Laurel 's head, clashing with the pleas she heard every night in her sleep. She pushed herself to her feet as T-Grace fell back on the pillows, and backed away from the bed, fighting to keep herself from running out. Tears crowded her eyes and throat, and she tried to fight them back with reason. This wasn't the same as Scott County. She wouldn't be taking on the investigation or trying to shoulder the burden of proof. All they were asking was that she keep an eye on things for them.

Still, her first, her strongest instinct was to say no, to protect herself.

Selfish. Coward. Weak.

"Please, help us, Laurel…"

"You'll never be able to get justice for those children… go and get justice for somebody else…"

She looked at T-Grace, lying on the bed like a corpse, her incredible energy sapped from her by grief. Then she turned to Ovide, who stood in the doorway, looking old and lost and helpless. She had the power to help them in some small way-if she could get past her own weakness.

"I'll do what I can."

Jack had forsaken the accordion for the piano by the time Laurel came back to the bar. His fingers moved slowly, restlessly, caressing the keys. His head was tipped back, his eyes closed. The old upright piano that was more accustomed to belting out boogie-woogie whispered the opening movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, dark, brooding, quiet, sad.

The last of the people who had gathered to talk were on their way out the front door as Laurel walked in the side. Only Jack remained, and Leonce, who was turning out lights and putting the chairs up, sweeping as he went.

He glanced up at her, leaning against his broom, his scarred face in the shadows, a Dixie sign glowing red neon behind him. "Hey, chère, you want a ride home?" he asked softly. "Me, I don' think ol' Jack oughta get behind a wheel, you know?"

"That's okay, Leonce," she murmured. "We didn't drive. A long walk will do us both good."

He dropped his gaze to the broom bristles and started sweeping again before she could read anything in his expression. "Suit yourself."

Laurel tucked her hands in the pockets of her shorts and wandered to the stage. Jack made no move to acknowledge her presence, even when she sat down beside him on the piano bench. He went on playing like a man in a trance, his long fingers stroking the yellowed keys with the care of a lover. The song rose and fell, melodies twining around one another, wrapping around Laurel and drawing her into another world, a world of stark poignancy and bittersweet emotion. Every note swelled with longing. A crushing pain filled the silences in between.

This was what hid behind the other Jack, the man with the haunted eyes and the aura of danger-loneliness, anguish, artistry. The realization struck a chord deep within her, and she closed her eyes against the pain. How many other layers were there? How many Jacks? Which one was at the core of the man? Which one held his heart?

She closed her mind to the questions and lay her head against his shoulder, too overwhelmed by feelings to think. She had held herself in tight check all evening, not allowing herself to react to Annie's murder or any of the emotions that had tried to surface since. But now, with no witnesses except a man who had already seen her cry, she stopped fighting. The feelings rushed up through her chest to her throat and clogged there in a hard lump. The tears came, not in a torrent, but in a painful, stingy trickle, spiking her lashes and dampening her cheeks.

Jack's hands slowed on the keyboard as the piece softened to its close. His fingers crept down to touch the final note, a low minor chord that vibrated and hung in the air like the echo of a voice from the dark past.

"Did you care about her?" Laurel asked, the question slipping out without her permission. Her breath held fast in anticipation of his answer.

"You mean, did I sleep with her?" Jack corrected her. He stared at the black upper panel of the piano, willing himself to see nothing, not the wood, not the ghost of Annie's sunny smile, nothing. "Yeah, sure," he said, his voice flat, emotionless. "A couple times."

His answer stung, though she told herself it shouldn't have. He was a rake, a womanizer. He'd probably slept with half the women in the parish. It shouldn't have meant anything to her. She pushed the reaction aside and tried to decipher what he might be feeling in the aftermath of the death of a woman he had known-intimately-whose parents were friends of his.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Be sorry for Annie, not for me. I'm alive." For all the good he did anybody. His mouth twisted at the irony, and he reached for his whiskey to numb the ache. The liquor went down, as smooth as silk, to pool in his belly and send a familiar warmth radiating outward.

"I'm sorry for T-Grace and Ovide," Laurel said, recalling too vividly the scene that had been played out on the gallery, remembering too clearly the desperation in T-Grace as she begged for help. "They asked me to be their liaison with the sheriff."

"And you agreed."

"Yes."

"Naturally."

Even though he settled his fingers on the piano keys once again and started to play something slow and bluesy, she caught the caustic note in his voice. Slowly she straightened away from him, her gaze hard and direct. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Jack didn't bother looking at her. He could feel the defensiveness going up like a wall around her, just as he had intended. "It means you're a good little girl, doin' the right thing."

"They're friends," she said shortly. "They asked me for a favor. It seemed a small enough thing to give them in light of the fact that their daughter has just been murdered. They don't understand police procedure. They don't trust the system to work for them."

"Imagine that," he drawled sardonically.

Laurel bristled. "You know, I'm sick of your smart-ass remarks, Jack. It may not be perfect, but it's the only system we've got. It's up to people like you and me to make it work."

He went on playing, wishing it would release some of the tension that was coiling inside him like a copperhead about to strike. He was feeling mean. He was feeling too sensitive, as if all his nerve endings had been exposed and rubbed raw. His strongest instinct was not to let anyone near. He wanted to draw himself into that small, dark room inside himself, as he had when he'd been a boy waiting for the thundering hand of Blackie Boudreaux to come down on him. He wanted to go to that place where no one could touch him, no one could hurt him, where he couldn't feel and didn't care.

But Laurel Chandler sat beside him, prim and properly affronted by his lack of faith in her precious system of jurisprudence. Damn her.

"It didn't work very well for you, did it, 'tite chatte?"

The slyness in his tone cut Laurel to the quick, and pain flowed through her at the thought that she had shared that experience with him-had trusted him with that fragile, damaged part of her heart-only to have him use it against her.