82 Desire

all.”
    “Blood!” someone shouted.
    And then Seaberry said, “Why don’t we just screw ’em out of their damn leases?”
    There were all sorts of legal tricks possible with leases. The jokes that went on that night were of a somewhat technical nature, but nonetheless jocular in the extreme.
    “Hey, here’s one,” Seaberry had said, with regard to some dude who wouldn’t sell—call him Smith. “We get him for discrimination. We find some person of color who used to work for him and we just pay him to start a lawsuit that’ll wipe Smith out.”
    “How about this one?” Cavignac added. “You know how nobody’s very careful about paying their royalties? Well, we just stir up the landowners. Simple as that—a bug in the right ear, and voila, an audit—followed by a lost lease.”
    “Beautiful,” Russell said. “Magnificent in its simplicity. But why go simple when you can be devious? We hire our own accountant, see. And his job is to sign on with Smith.”
    “Hey, wait,” Favret objected. “Maybe Smith doesn’t need an accountant.”
    “Well, we kill his or something. And then we say to our guy, all you have to do is cook this dude’s books, and United’s business is yours till the end of your days.”
    “What does that do?” Cavignac asked.
    But Seaberry had already put it together: “Leases have to produce in ‘paying quantities,’ or they terminate. Suddenly the books show losses.”
    “Goddamn, let’s do it! Let’s just goddamn do it.”
    Well, they had. It had started out as absurdity, and then they’d simply done it—done all the things they thought of that night and more. Everything they could think of, in fact, over the next few years—except for the murders, that is. Even the Skinners had drawn the line at that.
    They’d given themselves the name after Cavignac’s cat-skinning remark. At the time, it had some resonance involving wildcatting, but all that had been lost in the mists of time.
    They had a system. Whenever they had a problem, they’d get drunk and get loose, and let their criminal sides take over. It never failed to amaze them all how inventive they could be. And if it was outrageous enough, they did it.
    For Russell, at any rate, it was like that giddy time when he was first learning to sail. What a high! What a sense of exhilaration!
    He hadn’t given a thought to the people they were hurting, or to their families—he had seen them only as the enemy, had seen each problem as a challenge.
    And it paid off. Oh, did it pay off—in raises and bonuses and promotions.
    They were high rollers who couldn’t lose, and the other three were still doing it right now, unless Boudreaux had succeeded with his plan to expose them all and right their wrongs—if in fact, that was what he wanted to do. Russell wasn’t all that sure. They’d offered Boudreaux money to go away, but apparently it wasn’t enough. Maybe they would kill him.
    Russell had already started to come apart when Boudreaux surfaced. By that time, he was just getting through, having lost the heart to be a corporate criminal.
    But if he didn’t continue, if he joined Ray in his whistle-blowing, he’d end up in jail. Worse, though, where did it leave Bebe? She couldn’t help but be tainted by it.
    He’d done enough, and hurt enough people without dragging Bebe down. Sure, he wanted to be Dean Woolverton—start a new life, take the sloop cruising, all that glamorous stuff. Sure he did.
    But also, he had no choice.
    Dina Wolf stirred. “I’m hungry.”
    Russell said, “I’ve got a nice sausage for you.”
    “Oh, please. It’s first thing in the morning.” She stretched. “I’d kill for a bagel.”
    “Okay. Let’s go out and find one.”
    “I’ve got plenty in the freezer. All you have to do is somehow cut them and heat them. I can wait. I’ve got some eggs in there, too.”
    “Hey, how’d this get to be my responsibility?”
    “I thought you volunteered.” She looked at him with those huge blue eyes, her bangs covering her eyebrows, her nose a bit sharp for his taste, and she reminded him of his daughter—so cute and innocent, he couldn’t imagine her manipulating him into making breakfast.
    ***
    Ray could remember it like it was yesterday—the first time he ever met Russell Fortier. He and Lucille and Margaret Ann had been on one of those scouting weekends families go on to scope out colleges. They had had two days away from Ronnie, who was in what Cille called a “bad stage