But now their curiosity was stronger than their fighting spirit. ‘You the guy, mister?’
‘Forget it,’ Ben said. He picked up his bags, turned and kept walking. Dwayne Skinner and his pals instantly started up a chorus of chicken sounds, strutting and flapping bent arms like wings. They would never, ever know how lucky they were.
‘Changed your mind, huh?’ Lottie said as he caught up with her, handing him back the Tahoe key with a look of immense relief.
He shrugged and replied, ‘Five against one. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight.’
They walked in silence back to the vehicle. Ben’s arms and legs were tingling and trembly from the pent-up adrenalin that would now slowly start to reabsorb into his system. It was a familiar feeling. All combat soldiers were used to it. Nine times out of ten, whenever his old SAS unit had been all kitted out and psyched up for battle, they’d been stood down and had to return to their quarters to shake off all the tension. But what wasn’t such a familiar feeling, and one he disliked intensely, was being recognised everywhere he went. Damn and blast Dickie Thibodeaux from the Courier, or whatever his rag was called. Ben should have smashed the photographer’s camera when he’d had the chance.
They reached the parked Tahoe, and Ben blipped the central locking and opened the rear hatch and loaded in the mass of groceries, which filled only a fraction of the cargo space. Only when they climbed aboard and Ben started the engine did Lottie reach across to touch his arm and break into a dazzling smile. ‘Wow. There was me thinkin’ there were no gentlemen left in this world. Thank you.’
‘For what? Nothing happened.’
‘You kiddin’ me? A lot happened. You stood up for a lady. Even though you hardly know me and we only just met. And that’s somethin’.’
Ben replied, ‘We’re shopping for groceries together and you’re going to cook me dinner. In some countries that’s the same as being married.’
She laughed. ‘Maybe. But trash like Dwayne Skinner ain’t worth gettin’ beat up over, not for my sake.’
‘Who said anything about getting beaten up?’
By the time they reached Chitimacha, Ben had relaxed and mostly forgotten about it. He helped Lottie unload the groceries and bring everything inside. With her larder replenished and all her ingredients for the cooking session laid out systematically on her gleaming kitchen surfaces, Lottie said, ‘Oh joy.’ She rolled up her sleeves, donned a well-used and appropriately-stained apron that said LEITHS SCHOOL OF FOOD AND WINE, and got to work with a fiercely concentrated gusto that was awesome to behold.
It soon became obvious that Ben’s presence in the kitchen was getting in her way, and so he left her to it and wandered out to the garden for a cigarette. As he smoked, out of a kind of morbid curiosity he googled up ‘Clovis Parish Louisiana local news’ on his burner phone and found the Courier’s website. Sure enough, there next to D. Thibodeaux’s trashy and sensationalistic article on the attempted liquor store holdup was the photo of Ben taken outside the Bayou Inn.
Which, needless to say, was how Dwayne Skinner’s buddy had recognised him.
Damn it, once again.
The rest of the afternoon passed languorously. It still felt odd to Ben to have so little to do except mooch about the guesthouse and wait for evening to come. When it finally did, he was in for an eye-opener. Whatever reservations he might have been holding on to about Cajun cooking were soon to be blown away as Lottie seated him at her immaculately set, candlelit table and began lifting lids off steaming dishes of the most beguiling food he’d ever encountered.
‘So this is gumbo,’ he said, gazing at the vast helping she’d put on his plate.
‘No, this is Lottie’s gumbo,’ she corrected him with a gleeful laugh. ‘I’m spoilin’ you for anyone else. Now, please. Don’t talk. Eat.’
Ben willingly obeyed the command. The gumbo was a rich, sumptuous meat stew made from chicken and andouille sausage cooked with celery and bell peppers and onion, all melted together on a glutinous and indecently flavoursome bed of what Lottie called dirty rice. If this was dirt, he was happy to gobble it down, three or four heaped forkfuls to Lottie’s every one.
‘What’s that seasoning?’ he tried to ask, but his mouth was too crammed full to speak. He chewed, swallowed and repeated the question more coherently, and Lottie explained that it was something called filé, which was a classic Cajun spice that came from dried leaves of the sassafras tree and was used for flavour and thickening. She said, ‘My opinion, some Louisiana cooks, like those Creole folks along the Cane River, lay on the filé till you can’t taste nothin’ else. I like to mix it up with okra for a more subtle effect.’
The delicious concoction was accompanied by a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc so chilled that it numbed the tongue. Ben was generally more of a red wine person, but the pairing was perfect. He ate and drank, but especially ate. Lottie seemed delighted with his enthusiasm for her cooking. After two platefuls he wanted to stop, though somehow the fork just wouldn’t leave his hand. Or stop shovelling food up to his mouth.
It was just as well he didn’t live here. Too much of this stuff, and his daily runs would start to become a waddling stagger.
‘So, you like it, huh?’ Lottie said. Fishing for compliments, naturally.
Ben managed to pause between mouthfuls and looked her in the eye across the table. ‘When I get home, you know the first thing I’m going to do? I’m going to call up whoever compiles the Oxford English Dictionary.’
‘Oh really, and why’s that?’ she said, showing every one of her white teeth in a beaming smile, knowing a compliment was coming and loving the anticipation.
‘Because if they’re not specifically mentioning your cooking, they’re seriously misdefining the word “tasty”.’
For dessert Lottie had whipped up a Southern-style chocolate gravy sauce, which she poured over beignets so rich in eggs and butter that Ben was amazed he didn’t drop dead right there of heart failure. What a way to die, though, if he had. When the last crumb was gone he leaned back in his chair, clutched his belly and said, ‘That’s it. That’s all I can take.’
Lottie said, ‘How ’bout we retreat to the salon for a lil’ drink?’
She put on an Aretha Franklin CD and they sat in her soft, comfortable armchairs either side of a coffee table. When she proposed an after-dinner tot of rum, Ben had a better idea. He’d eaten so much that he wasn’t sure he could haul himself out of the armchair, but with a manful effort managed to lurch to his feet and run up to the top floor to unbuckle his bag and fetch out the bottle of twelve-year-old Glenmorangie he’d bought from Elmo Gillis. It was still unopened. Tonight seemed like the ideal occasion. He carried the bottle back downstairs. Lottie grabbed a pair of crystal tumblers from a sideboard and they happily attacked the Scottish nectar as Aretha sang about r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
In between refills of whisky, of which there were many, Lottie filled in the gaps in her life story. Her first ten years had been spent growing up as an only child on a tiny chicken farm just outside Chitimacha. It was right on the site of a Civil War battlefield, where a bloody little skirmish had taken place between rebel holdouts and a superior force of invading Union troops in the final days before Lee’s surrender. She remembered how the chickens were always scratching old musket bullets up out of the ground.
‘Poppy could’ve made more money from sellin’ the lead for fishin’ weights