Wages of Sin Read Online Free

murdered.
    Fio raised his eyebrows at Rourke, but he didn't say anything more. His face had its perpetually tired look, deep creases lining it like the rings of a seasoned tree.
    He lifted his hat to Remy. “Miss Lelourie,” he said, but his voice was flat, his eyes hard and flat as well. Fio remained convinced that the most beautiful woman in the world had slashed her husband to death with a cane knife last summer and had gotten away with it.
    The reporter was still hovering at the top of the stairs. Rourke gave him his mean cop look. “Aren't you lost yet?”
    “Say, Day, can I see you for a while?” Fio said, stepping between Rourke and the reporter, serious now, and Rourke sensed the tension in him. Whatever had happened, it must be bad, if Fio didn't want anyone else to hear about it.
    Rourke turned to Remy. He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I got to go, darlin'.”
    “I know. You're working, too,” she said, and she seemed all right with it. Her eyes might have looked haunted a little, but then they always did. It was what the camera caught and was part of her appeal. Her seduction.
    He and Fio left the gallery by the outside stairs. The wind was tossing the moss-laden branches of the huge live oaks and rattling the fronds of the tall palms. Rourke looked back up at the house, where the party went on in flashes of jazz and light. Remy Lelourie still stood where he'd left her, and he was thinking now that there had been something in her kiss, something that would worry him if he poked at it hard enough, and so he probably ought to just let it lie.
    For one sweet summer eleven years ago they had been lovers, until she'd left both him and New Orleans and gone off to make herself rich and famous. Four months ago they'd gotten back together and ever since then he'd been waiting for the day when she would leave him again, looking for signs of it in everything she did and said, and if he wasn't careful, if he didn't stop, he would only end up bringing on the thing that he most feared and he'd be sorry then, uh-huh. Like picking up a stick and poking it at a cottonmouth.
    Still, that kiss…there'd been something. Not goodbye yet, but something.
    “Let's take the 'Cat,” Rourke said.
    “Let me get the crime scene stuff from the squad car then,” Fio said, veering off down the shell drive that wrapped in a half circle around the front grounds of the house.
    Rourke waited for Fio by his own car, a canary yellow Stutz Bearcat roadster. A group of men stood on the lawn within the black pools of shadow cast by the oaks. They were talking loudly, laughing and passing around a bottle in a brown bag. Most of them had cameras, and Rourke saw that the reporter whose camera he had wrecked had found another somewhere. The guy from
The Movies.
Rourke thought he'd seen him hanging around before this. Since the murder of her husband, the gentlemen of the press had been making Remy Lelourie's life a misery.
    Rourke helped Fio dump the forensics gear into the Bearcat's trunk and then they slid into the plush, buffed Spanish leather seats. The six-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin engine caught with a low growl.
    Rourke stood on the gas pedal, and the roadster leapt forward, its tires spitting out loose shells behind them. He spun the wheel, aiming the Bearcat's silver hood ornament at the knot of reporters beneath the oaks. Light from his headlamps caught them frozen in a tableau of astonishment, before they scattered, screaming and bellowing as they dove and rolled to get out of the way. Rourke smiled.
    The Bearcat bounded toward a gap in the big oaks, its engine roaring, its tires clawing grooves in the soft grass, but the space between the tree trunks suddenly looked too narrow and beyond the gap another tree loomed square in their path.
    Rourke began to hum beneath his breath.
    He gripped the steering wheel hard as the Bearcat surged between the trees, missing the trunks on both sides by less than an inch. The oak in front