The Kingdom - A Val Bosanquet Mystery

Chapter One

Rosie’s coffee shop, on St. Francisville’s Commerce Street, had been the preferred breakfast stop during the best part of twenty years for the uniformed deputies of the West Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Department. Rosie, a fifty-something, big-boned divorcee from the piney woods of northern Louisiana, served the best coffee in the state and her secret recipe for cooking grits always sent her customers away with a full belly and a smile on their faces knowing that they were well set up for whatever the day would throw at them. She kept her prices low enough so the deputies could afford to eat in her place before signing in for a daytime shift. The wall behind her counter was adorned with framed photographs of former deputies, including three with black-edged mounts for those killed in the line of duty. There was also a smaller picture in a cheap frame, an aerial shot of the nearby Angola State Penitentiary. Rosie claimed it was there so she could keep an eye on her former spouse, serving life without parole for the killing of a young black boy who had sassed him in a gun store’s parking lot.

Deputy Tom Morrow pushed open the door of Rosie’s and entered the coffee shop. The smell of fresh Java and Canadian bacon being crisped on the grill made his stomach feel hollow. But he had no time this morning for a sit down chat with some of his fellow deputies. He asked Rosie for two coffees to go and, as she poured them into cardboard cups, Tom took a look around. He’d arrived earlier than usual, well before most of his colleagues would show up. Only two of the banquettes were occupied. Sheriff Guillory was sharing a table with the night-time dispatcher, his wife’s cousin who had been in the job long before Guillory made sheriff. The other customers were Deputies Jarrod Beauchamp and Bennett Borque, warming their hands on ceramic mugs as they waited for their breakfasts to be served.

Tom gave each of the four men a quick nod and turned back to Rosie who was fitting plastic lids to his coffee cups.

“Nothing to eat?” she asked him. “A man needs something solid in his belly to start the day.”

“I’ll probably make it back for my break. Business first.”

Tom slipped a couple of sachets of sugar into his pocket, not knowing if the man he had arranged to meet possessed a sweet tooth. No creamer, that was a given for anyone in law enforcement, even someone on the periphery, such as the bail-skip tracer he was meeting up with this morning.

Rosie was serving Beauchamp and Borque as Tom left the coffee shop and headed for his cruiser. He wondered briefly about the two deputies eating breakfast together. Borque like to sleep late and was a rare visitor to Rosie’s in the morning. He and Beauchamp weren’t buddies and were about as close as Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The deputies wore the same uniform but were chalk and cheese, not the type to have found much pleasure in each other’s company, though from the set of their faces, pleasure was the last thing on their minds.

Tom stowed the two cups into cup holders fit on the central console of his vehicle and reversed out of his parking bay. He hadn’t far to go, the rendezvous point was Josh Petty’s hog farm just a couple of miles north of town. Bounty hunter Calvin Creel worked for a number of New Orleans bail bondsmen and Tom had got to know him fairly well over the years. Creel had phoned the night before to give him a heads up on the whereabouts of Lil’ Jamarco Armwood. Normally the sheriff’s department would have played no part in Lil’ Jamarco’s apprehension, except Creel knew there was an outstanding parish warrant bearing Armwood’s name. The guy was a steady income stream for Creel. Regular repeat business. He had skipped bail so many times it amazed Tom why any bail firm would entertain him as a client. Still, he reasoned, a bondsman would soon go broke if he only fronted up for honest citizens. Or maybe it was because Armwood was fairly harmless and always made straight for West Feliciana when he jumped, his home parish for his first sixteen years before he headed south to New Orleans to take his first shaky steps on a career as a petty felon. He creeped private houses in the Garden District, traded stolen credit cards, and ran a number of e-mail frauds that only the terminally gullible fell for. His latest bail skip followed an arrest for a fake Facebook page soliciting donations to help fund a costly medical procedure to save a promising female high school student from crippling spinal deformity. Armwood had posted a number of pictures showing the girl with her horrendously twisted back. Money had poured in and Armwood kept a running tally on the Facebook page, which always seemed to edge near the target yet never quite reached it. Then The Times-Picayune carried a story about a high school sophomore who was making a name for herself on the basketball courts as a cheerleader for her school team. Her flexibility and suppleness were legendary and there were plenty of photographs to prove it.