Midnight Fantasy

Midnight Fantasy

Ann Major

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Aaron Clark, my late cousin, and his widow, Glenda Clark. There are lessons in life, both dark and bright. Sometimes the dark ones teach us what we most need to know.

Aaron, you have blazed bright with love.

You have taught me about courage.

You have taught me that it is never too late

to begin anew. You have become

everything and more than you ever dreamed.

You are one of my real-life heroes.

To Glenda, who taught me more about real love than almost anyone I know.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Coming Next Month

Prologue

Get the hell out of here, you half-wild, no-good bastard!

The van swerved off the asphalt. A rumble of bumps and rattles jolted the prisoner on the floorboards back to queasy consciousness. Murky, gray light filtered through his blindfold.

He saw his father’s face, mottled with rage.

You’re damn sure no son of mine!

He’d turned away, knowing what he’d always felt deep down, that he was nothing. He’d gotten his start in the gutter. That’s where he should have stayed.

The stench of dank air made him shudder.

God, he was scared. So scared.

They were in the swamp now, in that eerie, primeval kingdom of cypress trees, stagnant brown bayous, knobby-headed gators and mud deep enough to swallow a man whole.

Cajun music whined through bursts of static. He was bound hand and foot, sprawled on top of smelly fast-food boxes, Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers.

The waxy-faced driver with the spider tattoo was driving faster than he had in New Orleans. “You’re gonna be gator food, boy.”

A surge of fresh fear shook the captive.

Another voice. “You know what gators do, don’t you, no?”

A boot nudged the prisoner’s hip. “They’ll drag you to some underground hole, stuff you inside, yes, and tear off little bits of you for days.”

A strange terror gripped the blindfolded man. When he shifted on top of the garbage, something squished against his clean-shaven face. Only yesterday he’d sat with his father in the best restaurant in the French Quarter. He swallowed carefully against the gag, fighting not to choke on the oily rag in his mouth and the coppery flavor of his own blood. He tried not to breathe because every tortured breath made weird, gargling noises in his broken nose.

His assailants’ mood was quiet, tense, electric.

The road got bumpier, wetter; the pungent odor of still, dark waters and rotting vegetation stronger.

Big tires sloshed to a standstill.

“Let’s dump him. Sack him up, throw those concrete blocks in. Haul him out deep so he sinks.”

The back doors were thrown open. His fine Italian loafers came off when they grasped him around the ankles and pulled him roughly over garbage, tools, and bits of wood. They flung him onto the muddy ground, and his head struck a rotten log. When he regained consciousness, they were waist deep, pushing him under.

He fought to stand up in the gummy mud, but a boot sent him reeling in the warm, soupy water. Panic surged through him when big hands clamped around his shoulders and pressed him deeper.

He fought. His lungs burned with the fierce will to breathe. He pushed harder and was stunned when their grip on his neck miraculously loosened. His head broke the surface, and he choked on watery breaths as a shell was racked into a chamber. A shotgun blast exploded. Then everything got quiet.

He reeled backwards, flopping helplessly as the weights pulled him under. Strangely, as he began to sink, dying, his terror subsided.

All was peace and darkness.

Was this how she’d felt when her alarm went off and she couldn’t get up?

Again he was a frightened, guilt-stricken boy shivering in wet pajamas. Bear tucked under his arm, he’d padded into his mother’s dark bedroom. Bright sunshine lit her black, tangled hair. Lost in shadows her body was a slovenly heap, half on, half off the bed.

Her alarm kept ringing. He’d lain for hours, listening to that ringing till it had become a roar in his head. She was mean most mornings. Mean every night. How he lived for those rare moments when she tried to be nice, when she read to him from the books Miss Ancil loaned him from the library.

As always her bedroom stank of booze and cigarettes.

“Mommy! I—I’s sorry, so sorry…I wet….”

He’d called her name after this confession and promised the way he did every morning never ever to do it again.

Only she hadn’t cussed him. Nor had she gathered him into her arms and clung to him as if he were very dear which she sometimes did. She’d just lain there.

Finally, he’d gone to her and shaken her. “Open your eyes. Please, Mommy.” He’d touched her cheek. She’d felt so stiff and cold…like his frosted window-pane in winter. Her alarm clock kept ringing.

He hadn’t thought of that morning in years. Then here it was, his last thought on earth.

After her funeral his aunts had marched him over to his father’s house. A man with black hair and blazing silver eyes had thrown open the door. His aunts had pushed him forward just as the door had slammed.

He’d been shuffled among distant kinfolk who had too many kids of their own. He’d done time in foster homes with other throwaways like himself, gotten in trouble at school. Then, miraculously, his father had had a change of heart and adopted him. He’d done everything in the world to please his father, eventually, even going into business with him.

Then one night he’d worked late and without warning opened the wrong file on a computer.

A gush of water soaked his gag, slid down his throat, up his nostrils, burning, strangling. He was dying when brutal hands manacled his waist, maneuvered his head forcefully to the surface, dragged him out of the water and flung him onto the muddy bank.

A rough voice cursed him in Cajun French. Gnarled fingers tore off his soggy blindfold, ripped at the duct tape over his mouth, then yanked the gag out.

“Jesus.” His rescuer’s breath stank of gin and tobacco as he pounded his back. Water trickled out of the drowning man’s lips in spurts.

“Damn it,” he pleaded.

The hard palm froze. “Ha! So! You’re alive!”

He was rolled over and a flashlight jammed under his chin. “You don’t look too good.”

“Damn it!” He grabbed the light and shone it at his rescuer.

The stranger had wrinkled brown skin, white hair, and soulless black eyes. “You don’t look so good yourself.”

Yellow teeth flashed in an irreverent grin. “The name’s Frenchy.” Frenchy seized his long black flashlight and turned it off. “Frenchy LeBlanc. I was just helping my brother check his trotlines. We fell out…. He’s kinda cranky.”

“Not like you…sweet as sugarcane.”

With a grin, Frenchy ripped off the tape at the prisoner’s ankles along with a wad of dark body hair.

“Ouch!”

“You need a ride home? A hospital? Or the police station?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re beat up pretty bad—” When he said nothing, Frenchy held out his hand and helped him to his feet. “You gotta name, boy?”

He hesitated. Then, just like that, a name popped up from his childhood. But his voice sounded rusty when he used it. “Tag…”

The older man eyed him. “Tag. Tag what?”

Right. Right. Last name. “Campbell…Tag…Campbell.”

“Like hell!” The yellow grin brightened. “You been to Texas…Tag?”

Tag shook his head.

The older man’s gaze appraised his tall, muscular body. “You got soft hands for a big guy…and a hard face…and eyes that don’t quite match it. That suit, even trashed, looks like it set you back some.”

Tag said nothing.

“Real work might do you good—”

“Damn it…if you’re going to insult me—”

“I fish. I could use a deckhand.”

Tag turned away helplessly, and stared at the lurid shadows the cypress trees with their draperies of moss made. A deckhand. Minimum wage. For years he’d been on the fast track. His education. His career. His high-flying plans for his father’s company. He’d been good, really really good at one thing.

But he couldn’t go back.

“I’ve always worked in an office, but I lift weights in my gym every afternoon. I’ve never had time to fish,” he said. Never wanted to. But he didn’t say that.

Frenchy nodded, taking in more than was said. “I don’t blame you for saying no to such hard, thankless work.”

“I didn’t say no, old man…. You’d have to teach me.”

Frenchy patted his shoulder. “You gotta job.”

“Thanks.” Tag’s voice was hoarse. He was disgusted that it might betray eagerness and gratitude. He knew better than to believe that this crude stranger or his casual offer and his kindness tonight meant anything.

He was through with ambition, through with dreams, through with false hopes that led nowhere. Again he was staring into his father’s cold gray eyes. He was through with family and dreams of real love, too.

A deckhand. A trashy job working for a crude, trashy guy.

Get the hell out of here, you half-wild, no-good bastard.

“Thanks, Frenchy,” Tag repeated in a colder, darker tone.

One

Five years later…

Stay with me, Frenchy. I need you.

That’s as close as Tag had come to telling the best friend he’d ever had, he loved him.

But maybe Frenchy had known.

Tag had clasped him in his arms long after Frenchy’s eyes had gone as glassy as the still bay, long after his skin had grown as cool as his dead mother’s that awful morning when the alarm clock had kept ringing.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

He’d lashed the wheel of the shrimp boat to starboard with a nylon sheet…his makeshift autopilot…and headed home, cradling Frenchy’s limp, grizzled head in his lap.

Stay with me, Frenchy.

But Frenchy’s eyes had remained closed.

The deck had rolled under them.

It was midnight. The full moon shone through the twisted live oaks and tall grasses, casting eerie shadows across Frenchy’s tombstone. Tag was all alone in that small, picturesque, historical cemetery located on a mound of higher earth that overlooked Rockport’s moonwashed bay. Come morning, this time of year, the graves would be ablaze with wildflowers. Funny, how death could make you see the truth you didn’t want to see. Tag had been living so hard and fast for so long, he hadn’t admitted he’d loved the old bastard, till he’d held his friend’s limp body and begun to weep.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen! Damn your hide, Frenchy, for leaving me like everybody else…. But most of all I damn you for making me give a damn. It should be me who’s dead.”

They’d buried Frenchy beside his son, the son he’d lost right before Frenchy had saved Tag’s life.

Tag was glad the cemetery was deserted. He didn’t want anybody to see how profoundly Frenchy’s death had upset him.

Sunken black circles ringed Tag’s bloodshot eyes; his jaw was shadowed with several days of dark stubble. His stomach rumbled painfully from too much liquor and too little food.

The moon shone high in a cloudless, bright sky. The salt-laden sea air smelled of dry earth and newly mown grass. Frenchy’s favorite kind of night. The shrimp would be running. Not that Tag could bear the thought of shrimping under a full moon without Frenchy.

Tag’s big black bike was parked a little way from Frenchy’s tombstone under a live oak tree that had been sculpted by the southeasterly prevailing winds that blew off the gulf, cooling its protected bays and low-lying coastal prairies.

Tag was kneeling before the pink tombstone. Soft as a prayer, his deep voice whispered. “Haunt me, Frenchy. Damn you, haunt me. Stay with me.”

“You don’t need an old man past his prime. You need a woman, kids,” Frenchy had pointed out, in that maddening know-it-all way of his, a few nights ago.

“Strange advice coming from a man who’s failed at marriage four times.”

“Nothing like a pretty woman to make a man old enough to know better hope for the best. Life’s a circle, constantly repeating itself.”

God, I hope not.

“You’re young. But you’ll get old. You’ll die. Life’s short. You gotta fall in love, get married, spawn kids, repeat the circle.”

“There’s places in my circle I don’t want to revisit.”

“You’re not the tough guy you pretend. You’re the marrying kind.”

“Where’d you get a damn fool notion like that?”

“You’re either sulkin’ or ragin’ mad.”

“Which is why you think I’d make a delightful husband.”

“You don’t fit in here. Your heart’s not in bars or fights or gambling…or even in fishing. Or even in getting laid by those rich, wild girls who come to Shorty’s looking for a fast tumble in the back seat of their car with a tough guy like you.”

“What if I said I like what they do to me? And what if I said I can do without a heart, old man?”

“You’re a liar. You got a heart, a big one, whether you want it or not. It’s just busted all to pieces same as your pretty, sissy-boy face. Only the right woman can fix what ails you.”

“You’re getting mighty mushy, old man.”

“You think you can stay dead forever?”

The wind drifting through moss and honeysuckle brought the scent of the sea, reminding him of the long hours of brutal work on a shrimp boat. The work numbed him. The beauty of the sea and its wildlife comforted him, made this hellish exile in an alien world somehow more endurable. Just as those women and what they did to him in their cars gave him a taste of what he’d once had, so that he could endure this life. But always after the women left, he felt darker, as if everything that was good in him had been used up. Which was what he wanted. Maybe if they used him long enough, he wouldn’t feel anything.

Tag knelt in the soft earth and studied the snapshot of a younger Frenchy framed in cracked plastic in the center of the pink stone.

“You’re a coward to run from who you are and what you want, Tag Campbell—a coward, pure and simple.”

Tag had sprung out of his chair so fast, he’d knocked it over. “You lowdown, ignorant cuss! Every time you drink, your jaw pops like that loose shutter.”

Frenchy laughed. “What’s the point of wisdom, if I can’t pass it on to a blockhead like you? Life’s a circle….”

“Don’t start that circle garbage.”

Tag had slammed out of the beach house, taken the boat out, stayed gone the rest of the night on that glassy, moonlit sea. He hadn’t apologized when he saw Frenchy waiting for him on the dock.

Then Frenchy had collapsed on the boat a few hours later when they were setting their nets.

Guilt swamped Tag. He’d never thanked the old man for anything he’d done.

The wind roared up from the bay, murmuring in the oak trees, mocking Tag as his empty silver eyes studied the grave. It was difficult to imagine the hard-living, advice-giving meddler lying still and quiet, to imagine him inside that box, dead. Emotions built inside Tag—guilt, grief—but he bottled them, the way he always did when he wasn’t driving fast, fighting, chasing women, or drinking.

The dangerous-looking man who knelt at his friend’s grave bore little resemblance to the younger man whose life Frenchy had saved in a Louisiana swamp. That man had been elegantly handsome before the beating, his smooth features classically designed, the aquiline nose straight, his trusting silver eyes warm and friendly.

That man was dead. As dead as Frenchy.

The powerfully-built man beside the grave was burned dark from the sun. On the inside his heart had charred an even blacker shade. Fists had smashed and rearranged his once handsome features into a ruggedly-brutal composition. The broken nose had been flattened. There was a narrow, white ridge above one brow. Despite these changes, or perhaps because of them, an aura of violence clung to him. Maybe it was this reckless, outlaw attitude that made him so lethally attractive, at least to women of a certain class. Such women cared little about his inner wounds. They came on strong, wanting nothing from him except to use his body for quick, uncomplicated sex.

His guarded silver eyes beneath black arcing brows missed nothing, trusted no one. Especially not such women—women who made him burn, but left him feeling even colder and lonelier when they were done with him and drove off in their fancy cars to their big houses and safe men.

His muscles were heavy from hard, manual labor. He wore scuffed black cowboy boots, tight jeans, a worn white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket.

Frenchy.

Death triggered deep, primal needs.

Death. Violence. Sex. Somehow they went together.

Alone with his demons, without Frenchy to irritate and distract him, Tag needed a bar fight or a woman—bad. So bad, he almost wished he’d gone to the funeral and wrestled some shrimper for a topless waitress. So bad, he almost wished he was in jail nursing a hellish hangover with the rest of Frenchy’s wild bunch.

Instead he’d driven his motorcycle—too fast and over such rough roads, he’d almost rolled. He’d scared himself. Which was a sign that cold as he was in his lonely life, he wasn’t ready to end it. When he’d calmed down, he’d come to the cemetery to pay his last respects.

The silvery night was warm and lovely.

Perfect kind of weather to hang out in a cemetery perfumed by wild flowers and glistening with moonlight.

If you could stand cemeteries.

Which Tag couldn’t. Any more than he could stand funerals. Especially the funeral of his best friend. Not when his own mood was as brittle and hopeless as the morning his mother had died, as the afternoon his father had slammed the door in his face.

Frenchy’s funeral had been a blowout brawl at Shorty’s. The cocktail waitresses, even Mabel, had danced topless on the pool tables. Some of the shrimpers had found their dance inspiring, and since there weren’t ever enough women to go around in Shorty’s, the “funeral” had gotten so wild, two of Frenchy’s ex-wives had called the cops who hauled the shrimpers and barmaids to jail.

It had been just the sort of uproar that gave shrimpers and the industry a bad name.

Then Frenchy’s will had been read. Everybody really got mad when they found out that, fool that he was, Frenchy had left that black dog, Tag Campbell, everything.

Everything. Boats. Restaurant. Fishhouses. Wharves. Even the beach house which was practically an historic landmark. Everything.

Campbell.

That snobby bastard! He didn’t even like to fish! Still, he was the best fisherman any of them had ever seen. Just as he was way too popular with their women even though he secretly despised them. The bastard preferred books to beer even though he could drink any one of them under the table. Tag Campbell was too proud and high-and-mighty to hang out with the likes of them at Shorty’s. How in the hell had he outsmarted them all—even Frenchy?

Everything was his.

There was lots of angry muttering.

“It isn’t right! Frenchy dead on that boat with just that lying Tag Campbell to tell the tale.”

“If you ask me, the bastard killed him.”

“You heard the coroner. Autopsy report says massive coronary. Says Frenchy smoked and drank too much. Says it’s a miracle Frenchy lived as long as he did.”

“I say it was murder. Frenchy was fit as a fiddle. Why just two nights ago he was drunker than a skunk dancing on that table with Mabel.”

Rusty and Hank, two of the rougher prisoners, deckhands Tag had fired for laziness and pure meanness, vowed that as soon as they got loose, they’d see their friend, Frenchy, avenged.

Frenchy had a lot more money than the shrimpers suspected. The sheriff paid Tag a visit just to tell him he’d be smart to leave town, at least till Rusty and Hank cooled off.

At the sight of the sheriff’s car in his drive and Trousers, his Border collie, slinking off to the woods, Tag grimaced. No wonder Trousers was scared. The big man cut an impressive figure in his uniform and silvered sunglasses. He had heavy features, squared-off shoulders, and a big black gun hanging from his thick belt.

Tag had dealt with more than his share of armed bullies in uniforms. The law, they called themselves.

Self-righteous bullies, strutting around in their shiny boots like they owned the world. They’d boarded his boats, slashed his nets, kicked his ice chests over and swept his catch overboard, fined his captains. No sooner had Sheriff Jeffries slammed his meaty fist against his screen door and bellowed Tag’s name, than sweat started trickling under his collar. A lot of his cats scurried under the house or after the cowardly Trousers. Others hunkered low behind pot plants to watch the suspicious character stomping down their breezeway.

“I just let Rusty and Hank out. They’re calling you a murderer.”

You half-wild, no-good bastard.

His own father had wrongly accused him of embezzlement and grand larceny. Anger burned in Tag’s throat, but he smiled as if he didn’t give a damn and saluted the man with a whiskey bottle. “You got a warrant—”

“Sometimes, Campbell, the smart thing is to walk away.”

Tag stared at his own reflection in the silver glasses and then pushed the door wider. “I ain’t runnin’.”

The sheriff planted himself on his thick legs and then leaned against the doorway.

“Jeffries, those guys talk big when they’re safe in jail, but they’re like dogs barking from inside a fence. You let ’em out, and they’ll lick my hand like puppies.”

“Just a friendly warning, Campbell.”

“Thanks, amigo.”

Still, Tag had opened a drawer, loaded his automatic and stuffed it in the waistband of his jeans before setting out on his bike alone.

Numbly Tag studied his friend’s tombstone. Frenchy had been mighty proud of the pink stone. He’d chosen it himself on a lark five years earlier right after he’d brought Tag home. Frenchy was known for cheating at cards, and had won the plot off one of Rockport’s most respectable citizens in a drunken poker game at Shorty’s.

“You cheated him,” the man’s indignant wife had ranted, and the whole town, at least the women, had believed her. “You got him drunk, so you could cheat him.”

Now Frenchy was as ashamed of his lack of talent at cards which made cheating a necessity as he was proud of his drinking skills. He might have gallantly returned the plot had she not accused him of cheating.

“We wuz drinking his whiskey, I’ll have you know, and I was even drunker than he was, lady,” Frenchy had declared almost proudly. “Could be he cheated me.”

The lady sued, but the judge, a poker player, had sided with Frenchy.

Tag studied Frenchy’s name and the date of his birth and the single line etched in caps on the bottom of the stone—IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED.

Slowly Tag lowered his gaze. Instead of flowers, a mountain of beer cans and baseball caps were piled high on the mound of clods. Indeed, every baseball cap that had been nailed to the ceiling of Shorty’s had been enthusiastically ripped off and reverently placed on his grave.

Tag’s eyes stung. Frenchy would’ve been mighty proud.

Grief tore a hole in Tag’s wide chest as he slowly rose and stalked over to his bike. He pulled on his black leather jacket, zipped it. Next came his gloves, his black helmet. Straddling the big black monster, jumping down hard, revving the engine, he made enough noise to wake the dead.