kind of blanks?’ Ben asked.
‘Call it satisfyin’ my curiosity. I like to keep tabs on what’s happenin’ in my parish, just like I like to know who comes and goes. See you around, Mister Hope. Don’t you leave without payin’ me a visit, now, you heah?’
‘Something for me to look forward to,’ Ben said.
The sheriff pulled another half-smile. He tipped his hat to Elmo. ‘Y’all have a peaceful rest of the night.’
After the police were gone, the liquor store and the street fell back into tranquil silence. Only the mess and the blood remained to bear witness to what had happened there that night. Ben felt bad about leaving the old man to clear it all up himself, and spent an hour helping him. When Elmo asked ‘Say, you really a soldier?’ Ben replied, ‘Your sheriff has a heck of an imagination.’
Finally, well after 1.30 a.m., Ben returned to the Bayou Inn with an intact bottle of twelve-year-old Glenmorangie tucked under his arm. He encountered no more armed robbers on the way back. The night was fresh and fragrant, and all seemed well with the world.
And that was the end of all the trouble.
Or, it should have been.
Because trouble would waste little time in finding him again. Sooner than he might have thought.
By the time Ben got back to his room at the Bayou Inn, the urge to spend a couple of the wee small hours enjoying the Glenmorangie had left him and all he wanted to do was go to bed. He rose early the next morning, as the dawn was breaking over the town and painting the white houses vermilion and gold.
Feeling that last night’s meal had been a little overindulgent, he spent longer than usual on his morning exercise routine, clicking off set after set of press-ups and sit-ups on the floor. He showered and dressed, then used his new burner phone to fire off that text message to Jeff asking how things were going at Le Val, and one to Sandrine to say nothing much in particular except that he’d arrived safe and sound in Louisiana.
Nobody needed to know about last night’s spot of bother. It was already a fading memory, soon to be forgotten altogether.
Standing on his balcony afterwards he smoked a Gauloise and watched the sun climb and the streets come to life, as much as they seemed to do in Villeneuve. Most people around here appeared to drive pickup trucks. A skinny African-American kid on a bicycle with a bulging mailbag swinging from his shoulder worked his way down the street lobbing rolled-up morning newspapers into front yards. Clovis Parish was obviously the last place on Earth where folks hadn’t yet gone all digital. Ben liked that.
Ben was a coffee addict and could pick up its scent from any distance the way a German shepherd smells raw steak. His nose began to twitch just after seven, by which time he was dying for his first caffeine fix of the day, and he followed the enticing aroma downstairs to the kitchen where Mary-Lou Mouton was preparing breakfast.
The morning meal at Le Val tended to be a rushed, hectic, on-the-hoof affair that involved slurping down four or five coffees in between cigarettes while organising trainees, feeding guard dogs and prepping a variety of weaponry for the day’s busy class schedule. That wasn’t how things were done here at the Bayou Inn. Mary-Lou directed him to a white pine table covered with an embroidered cloth and set for one, since he was the only guest, and he sat quietly sipping a cup of excellent black coffee as she bustled about the kitchen.
Mary-Lou was a devout believer in the old saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The plate she shoved under Ben’s nose was piled high with eggs, bacon and sausage patties, home fries, grits and toast, and she stood over him like a prison guard to make sure he finished every bite. He’d have to triple his exercise regime to work it off. Maybe go for a twenty-mile run, too.
Mary-Lou finally left him alone to wash down his breakfast with a second cup of coffee. The copy of the Clovis Parish Times that the bicycle kid had delivered lay unread on the kitchen table. Out of curiosity he picked it up and unfolded it in front of him. Then nearly sprayed a mouthful of coffee all down his shirt as he saw the front-page headline.
BRITISH ARMY VETERAN FOILS LIQUOR STORE HOLDUP
‘What the—?’
He had to blink several times before he could bring himself to believe it. Reading on, he almost choked all over again at the reference to the ‘intrepid stranger’, believed to be an English military veteran, who had ‘heroically intervened’ during an armed robbery at Elmo’s Liquor Locker on West Rue Evangeline Street late Thursday night.
Clovis Parish Sheriff’s Dept. sources had released the names of the two men taken into custody: Billy Bob Lafleur, 34, and Kyle Fillios, 32. Lafleur and Fillios had entered the store ‘brandishing’ (that favourite word of the media) lethal firearms (was there any other kind, Ben wondered) and demanded its proprietor, Mr E. Gillis, hand over the contents of the cash register, threatening his life. Whereupon the two thugs had been tackled and disarmed and the police called to the scene.
Fillios had been rushed to the nearby Clovis Parish Medical Center requiring surgery for ‘a self-inflicted injury’ while Lafleur was now locked up in the Clovis Parish jail awaiting a trial date. A quote from Mr Gillis proclaimed, ‘I thought I was dead, for sure’ and praised the unnamed hero for his actions. The Sheriff’s Department was unavailable for further comment.
Ben re-scanned the article three times, more perplexed with every reading. The Times had moved pretty damn fast to get the story out for the next morning’s edition. Some intrepid reporter must have dragged poor old Elmo Gillis out of bed before daybreak to get the quote.
Ben couldn’t blame the local press for being eager to jump on such a sensational story, considering how news-starved their sleepy little town likely was the rest of the time. He also had to be thankful that his name wasn’t mentioned. But the ‘British army veteran’ reference bothered him a lot. He doubted the reporter had got that from Elmo, as the old guy had no reason for spreading such rumours. No. Ben was certain that information had leaked from the mouth of Sheriff Waylon Roque himself. Ben had the impression that once Roque got an idea into his head, he’d let go of it as easily as a starving dog gives up a meaty bone.
Not to mention the fact that Roque’s instinct about Ben was perfectly accurate. An ordinary tourist, a teacher no less, wouldn’t have stood a chance against two desperate trigger-happy imbeciles like Lafleur and Fillios.
If Sheriff Roque had divulged that much to the Times reporter, what else had he told them? That the hero of the liquor store holdup was in town for the Woody McCoy gig tomorrow night? Or that he was staying at the Bayou Inn?
Ben valued privacy above most things, and he disliked being talked about or, worse, written about. It was his nature to be that way, a character trait that had fitted very well with his covert, secretive life in Special Forces. Anonymity was an obsession with SF operatives. While his own SAS background and Jeff Dekker’s history with its sister outfit the Special Boat Service were part of the attraction that drew hundreds of delegates from all over the world to train at Le Val, outside of his work Ben never voluntarily shared that side of his past with anyone. Sandrine knew virtually nothing of it. Even Brooke Marcel, to whom Ben had been engaged for a while before it all went south, had been kept in the dark about a lot of things.
And now he’d allowed himself to become the subject of gossip in a small town where nothing ever happened. Bad move. The word would spread faster than pneumonic plague. He was irritated with himself; and yet what else could he have done but intervene in the robbery? What was he supposed to do, stand by and let an innocent old man get killed just to satisfy his sense of discretion? How could he have predicted that some hick sheriff would turn out to be so wily and perceptive?
As these worrisome thoughts swirled around in Ben’s mind, Mary-Lou reappeared, looking somewhat bemused, to say there were two men at the door