The Cajun Cowboy by Sandra Hill
The Cajun Cowboy by Sandra Hill
Chapter 1
Give me a buzz, baby…
“I’m a born-again virgin.”
Charmaine LeDeux made that pronouncement with a faint feminine belch after downing three of the six oyster shooters sitting on the table before her at The Swamp Tavern. She was halfway to meeting her goal of getting knee-walking buzzed.
The jukebox played a soft Jimmy Newman rendition of “Louisiana, The Key to My Soul.” The jambalaya cooking in the kitchen filled the air with pungent spices. Gater, the bald-headed, longtime bartender, washed glasses behind the bar.
Louise Rivard—better known as Tante Lulu—sat on the opposite side of the booth from Charmaine. She arched a brow at the potent drinks in front of Charmaine compared to her single glass of plain RC cola and looked pointedly at Charmaine’s stretchy red T-shirt with its hairdresser logo I can blow you away. Only then did the old lady declare, “And I’m Salome about to lose a few veils.” In fact, Tante Lulu, who had to be close to eighty, was wearing a harem-style outfit because of a belly dance class she planned to attend on the other side of Houma that afternoon. In the basement of Our Lady of the Bayou Church, no less! But first, she’d agreed to be Charmaine’s designated driver.
“I’m sher… I mean, serious.” Charmaine felt a little woozy already. “My life is a disaster. Twenty-nine years old, and I’ve been married and divorced four times. Haven’t had a date in six months. And I’ve got a loan shark on my tail.”
“A fish? Whass a fish have to do with anything?” Tante Lulu sputtered.
Sometimes Charmaine suspected that Tante Lulu was deliberately dense. But she was precious to Charmaine, who teared up just thinking about all the times the old lady’s cottage had been a refuge to her whenever she’d run away from unbearable home conditions. Being the illegitimate daughter of a stripper and the notorious womanizer Valcour LeDeux had made for a rocky childhood, with Tante Lulu being a little girl’s only anchor. She wasn’t even Charmaine’s blood relative; she was blood aunt only to Charmaine’s half brothers, Luc, René, and Remy.
So, it was with loving patience that Charmaine explained, “Not just any fish. A shark. Bobby Doucet wants fifty thousand dollars by next Friday or he’s gonna put a Mafia hit on me; I didn’t even know they had a Mafia in southern Loo-zee-anna. Or maybe they’ll just break my knees. Jeesh! Yep, I’d say it’s time for some new beginnings. I’m gonna be a born-again virgin.”
“What? You doan think the Sopranos kill virgins?” Tante Lulu remarked drolly. “And, yeah, there’s a Mafia in Louisiana. Ain’t you never heard of the Dixie Mafia?”
“The born-again-virgin thingee is a personal change. The loan-shark thingee would require a different kind of change… like fifty thousand dollars, and it’s going up a thousand dollars a day in interest. I gotta get out of Dodge fast.”
Tante Lulu did a few quick calculations in her head. “Charmaine! Thass 10 percent per day. What were you thinkin’?” Tante Lulu might talk a little dumb sometimes, but she was no dummy.
Charmaine shrugged. “I thought I’d be able to pay it off in a few days. It started out at twenty thousand, by the way.”
“Tsk-tsk-tsk!”
“I don’t suppose you could lend me the money?”
“Me, I ain’t got that kind of money. I thought yer biz-ness was goin’ good. What happened?”
“The business is great.” Charmaine owned two beauty shops, one in Lafayette and the other a spa here in Houma. Both of them prospered, even in a slow economy, or at least broke even. Apparently, women didn’t consider personal appearance a luxury. Nope, her spas were not the problem. “I made a lot of money in the stock market a few years back. That’s when I bought my second shop. But I got careless this year and bought some technology stocks on margin. I lost more money than I put in. It was a temporary problem, which spiraled out of control when I borrowed money from Bucks ‘r Us. Who knew it was a loan-shark operation?”