“Well, it sure as shootin’ doan sound like a bank. Have you gone to the police?”
“Hell’s bells, no! I’d be deader’n a Dorchat duck within the hour if I did that.”
“How ’bout Luc?” Lucien LeDeux was Charmaine’s half brother and a well-known local lawyer.
She nodded. “He’s working on it. In the meantime, he suggested, maybe facetiously, that I hire a bodyguard.”
Tante Lulu brightened. “I could be yer bodyguard. Me, I got a rifle in the trunk of my T-bird outside. You want I should off Bobby Doucet? Bam-bam! I could do it. I think.”
Off? Where does she get this stuff? Charmaine groaned. That’s all I need… a senior-citizen, one-woman posse. “Uh, no thanks.” With those words, Charmaine tossed back another shot glass filled with a raw oyster drowning in Tabasco sauce, better known with good reason as Cajun Lightning, then followed it immediately with a chaser of pure one-hundred-proof bourbon. “Whoo-ee!” she said, accompanied by a full-body shiver.
“Back to that other thing,” Tante Lulu said. “Charmaine, honey, you caint jist decide to be a virgin again. It’s like tryin’ to put the egg back together once the shell’s been cracked. Like Humpty Dumpty.”
Hump me, dump me. That oughta be my slogan. Oughta have it branded on my forehead.
A more upbeat song, “Cajun Born,” came on the jukebox, and Charmaine jerked upright. Shaking her fifty-pound head slowly from side to side, she licked her lips, which were starting to get numb. “Can so,” she argued irrationally. Or was that rationally? Whatever. “Be a virgin again, I mean. It’s a big trend. Some lady even wrote a book about it. There’s Web sites all over the Internet where girls promise to be celibate till their wedding day. Born-again virgins.”
“Hmpfh!” was Tante Lulu’s only response as she sipped on her straw.
“Besides, I might even have my hymen surgically replaced.”
Tante Lulu was a noted traiteur, or healer, all along the bayou, and she was outrageous beyond belief in her antics and attire. For once, Charmaine had managed to shock her. “Is hey-man what I think it is?”
“It’s hi-man, and yes, it is what you think.”
“Hey, hi… big difference! You are goin’ off the deep end, girlie, iffen yer thinkin’ of havin’ some quack sew you up there.”
Deep end is right. “I didn’t say I was going to do it, for sure. Just considering it. But born-again virgin, that I am gonna do, for sure.”
“Hmmm. I really do doubt that, sweetie,” Tante Lulu said, peering off toward the front of the tavern, which was mostly empty in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.
Frankly, I shouldn’t be here, either, Charmaine thought. She should be at one of her shops, but she was afraid Mafia thugs would catch up with her in advance of the deadline.
“Seems to me that all yer resolutions are ’bout to melt,” Tante Lulu chortled.
Charmaine turned to see what Tante Lulu was gawking at with that strange little smirk on her face. Then Charmaine did a double take.
It was Raoul Lanier, her first ex-husband. Some people called him Rusty, a nickname he’d gained as an adolescent when his changing voice had sounded like a creaking, rusty door. She’d preferred his real name in the past. He always said he liked the way it sounded on her tongue, slow and sexy, especially when…
She’d been a nineteen-year-old student at LSU and former Miss Louisiana when she’d married Rusty. He’d been twenty-one and a hotshot football player and premed student at the same school. As good as he’d been at football, which earned him a scholarship, his dream had always been to be a veterinarian. His last words to her before they’d parted had been, “Once a bimbo, always a bimbo.” She would never forgive or forget those words. Never.
Charmaine had been avoiding Rusty for weeks, ever since he got released from prison. And, yes, she was bound and determined to think of him as Rusty now. She thought about ducking under the table, but he’d already seen her. And he had a look in his dark Cajun eyes, unusually grim today, that said, “Here I come, baby. Batten down the hatches.”