A Thin Dark Line

by Tami Hoag

  The smell of dead fish was strong as she crept down the slope, holding herself steady against the foundation of the building with one hand and stepping with caution to keep from skidding on the crushed rock and clamshell. At the corner post of the gallery a cat hunched over scavenged fish entrails, growling low in its throat.

  Annie could see no movement in the direction of the house. Adjusting her grip on the gun, she took a deep breath and stuck her head out around the corner. Nothing. Another deep breath and she turned the corner, leading with the Sig. The Dumpsters sat past the south end of the gallery.

  She moved quickly toward them, still close to the building. Sweat beaded on her forehead and she resisted the urge to wipe it away. She was close now, she could feel it, could feel the presence of another being. Her senses sharpened, heightened. The sound of water dripping somewhere near seemed loud in her ears. The stench of gutted fish nearly made her gag. The scent seemed wrong somehow, but this wasn't the time to process that information.

  She held up at the southeastern corner of the building, listening for the scrape of a foot on the ground or on the staircase to her apartment. She gathered herself to move around the corner, her mind racing ahead to visualize leading with the gun, focusing on her target, shouting out the warning to hold it. But as she drew breath to call out, a voice boomed behind her.

  "Sheriff's deputy! Drop the gun!"

  "I'm on the job!" Annie yelled, uncocking the Sig and tossing it to the side.

  "On the ground! Now! Down on the ground!"

  "I live here!" she called, dropping to her knees. "The prowler's around the side!"

  The cop didn't want to hear it. He rushed up like a charging bull and clocked her between the shoulders with his stick. "I said, get down! Get the fuck down!"

  Annie sprawled headlong on the ground, starbursts lighting up behind her eyes. The deputy yanked her left hand around behind her back and slapped on the cuff, twisted her right arm back and did the same.

  "I'm Deputy Broussard! Annie Broussard."

  "Broussard? Really?" The surprise wasn't quite genuine. He rolled her onto her back and shone his flashlight in her face, blinding her. "Well, what d'ya know? If it ain't our own little turncoat in the flesh."

  "Fuck yourself, Pitre," Annie snapped. "And get the cuffs off while you're at it." She struggled to sit up. "What the hell took you so long? I called this in twenty minutes ago."

  He shrugged, unconcerned, as he unlocked the handcuffs. "You know how it is. We gotta prioritize calls."

  "And where did this rank? Somewhere below you paging through the latest Penthouse?"

  "You really shouldn't insult your local patrol officer, Broussard," he said, rising, dusting off the knees of his uniform. "You never know when you might need him."

  "Yeah, right."

  Annie scooped up the Sig and pushed to her feet, biting back a groan.

  She rolled her shoulders to try to dissipate the burning pain. "Great job, Pitre. How many home owners do you normally assault in the course of a shift?"

  "I thought you was a burglar. You didn't obey my commands to get down. You oughta know better."

  "Fine. It's my fault you whacked me. Now how about helping me look for the crook? Though I'm sure he's long gone after all your bellowing."

  Pitre ignored the gibe, sniffing the air as they walked up around the corner to the south side of the building. "Jesus, what's that smell?" he said, shining the light ahead of them. "You been killing hogs or something?"

  Annie pulled her own flashlight from the back waistband of her jeans. Dripping. She could still hear dripping. It hit her as she walked beneath the staircase—a drop, and then another—falling from the stairs that led up to her apartment. She held her hand out and shone the beam of the flashlight on her palm as another drop hit, and another. Blood.

  "Oh my God," she breathed, bolting out from under the grisly shower.

  "Christ Almighty," Pitre muttered, backing up.

  The crushed shell beneath the staircase was red with it, as if someone had rolled an open can of paint down the steps. And hanging down between the treads like ghoulish tinsel were animal entrails.

  Annie wiped her hand on her T-shirt and moved to the end of the staircase. Shining her light up to the landing, she illuminated a trail of bloody carnage, intestines strung like a garland down the steps.

  "Oh my God," she said again.

  A memory surfaced from a dark corner of her mind: Pam Bichon—stabbed and eviscerated. Then a possibility struck her like a bolt of lightning and the horror was magnified tenfold. Sos. Fanchon.

  "Oh, God. Oh, no. No!" she screamed.

  She wheeled away from Pitre and ran, feet slipping and skidding on the crushed shell, down the slope toward the dock. The beam of the flashlight waved erratically in front of her. Sos. Fanchon. Her family.

  "Broussard!" Pitre shouted behind her.

  Annie threw herself at the front door of the ranch house, pounding with the flashlight, twisting the doorknob with her bloody hand. The door swung open and she fell into Sos as a living room lamp went on.

  "Oh God! Oh God!" she stammered, wrapping her arms around him in a frantic embrace. "Oh, thank God!"

  "It's pig innards," Pitre announced, poking at an intestine with his baton. "Lotta pigs getting butchered this time of year."

  Annie was still shaking. She paced back and forth at the base of her steps, fuming. Pitre had found the five-gallon plastic bucket the stuff had come in and set it off to the side, in view by the light now coming from the front window of the store. Annie wanted to kick it. She wanted to pick it up and beat Pitre with it because he was handy and he was a jerk. He was probably in on the joke. If it was a joke.

  "I wanna hear it from the lab," she said.

  "What? Why?"

  "Because if a human body turns up two days from now missing its plumbing, someone's gonna want it back, Einstein."

  Pitre made a disgruntled sound. If it was evidence, he would have to deal with it, scrape it back into the bucket, and haul it away in his car.

  "It's pig innards," he insisted again.

  Annie glared up into his face. "Are you so sure because you don't wanna deal with it or because you know?"

  "I don't know nothin'," he grumbled.

  "If Mullen is behind this, you tell him I'll kick his ass all the way to Lafayette!"

  "I don't know nothing about it!" Pitre griped. "I answered your call. That's all I did!"

  "Who's this Mullen, chère?" Sos demanded. "Why for he'd do somethin' like dis to you?"

  Annie rubbed a hand across her forehead. How could she possibly explain? Sos had never been happy with her choice of profession in the first place. He'd love to hear how deputies were trying to run her out of the department. And if it wasn't Mullen, then who?

  "A bad joke, Uncle Sos."

  "A joke?" he huffed, incredulous. "Mais non. You didn' come laughin' to me, chérie. Ain' nothin' funny 'bout dis."

  "No, there isn't," Annie agreed.

  Fanchon looked up the stairs where half a dozen cats had come to feast on the entrails. "Dat's some mess, dat's for sure."

  "Deputy Pitre and I will clean it up, Tante. It's evidence," Annie said. "You both go on back to bed. This is my mess. I'm sorry I woke you."

  It took another five minutes of arguing to convince them to go home and leave the mess. Annie didn't want them touched by this act any more than they had been. As they finally walked away, a residual wave of the panic she had felt for them washed through her. The world had gone mad. That she could have thought someone could have butchered Sos and Fanchon was proof of it. Deep inside, she was just as afraid as everyone else in the parish that evil had leached up from hell to contaminate their world and devour them all.

  She wished for more reasons than one that she could pin this undeniably on Mullen. But the more she thought on it, the less certain she felt. Keying her out on the radio was simple, anonymous. The snake in her Jeep had been easily managed, but this ... Too m
uch chance of being caught red-handed, literally. And the correlation to Pam Bichon was unnerving.

  At Annie's insistence, Pitre hiked up onto the levee road with her and shone his light around. Animal eyes glowed red as the beam cut across woods and brush. If there had ever been a car parked along here, it was long gone now. There were no bloody footprints. Tires made no useable impression on the rock road.

  It was nearly three A.M. by the time Annie trudged back up to her apartment via the in-store stairs. Her muscles ached. The pain between her shoulder blades where Pitre had struck her had a knifelike quality. At the same time, she was too wired to sleep.

  She pulled another Abita from the fridge, washed down some Tylenol, and plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table, where her own notes on Pam Bichon's homicide were still spread out.

  She picked up the chronology and glanced over the entries.

  10/9 1:45 A.M.: Pam again reports a prowler. No suspect apprehended.

  10/10: On leaving house for school bus, Josie Bichon discovers the mutilated remains of a raccoon on the front step.

  Marcus Renard wanted to be her friend. He had wanted to be Pam Bichon's friend, too. Pam had rejected him. Annie had called him a killer to his face. Pam was dead. And Annie was lining herself up to take Pam's place in his life. Because she wanted to play detective, because she needed to find justice for a woman trapped in the shadowland of victims.

  She had never imagined she might run the risk of ending up there herself.

  25

  "I was thinking maybe I could go into Records and Evidence," Annie said as she slid into the chair in front of Noblier's desk. She'd had all of three hours' sleep. She looked like hell already; lack of sleep wasn't going to alter the package noticeably.

  The sheriff had apparently spent Sunday recuperating from the lousy past week. His cheeks and nose were sunburned, evidence of a day in his bass boat. He looked up at her as if she'd volunteered to clean toilets.

  "Records? You want to go to Records?"

  "No, sir. I want to stay on patrol. But if I can't do that, I'd like to go somewhere I haven't been. Learn something new."

  Annie struggled for visible enthusiasm. Sworn personnel were seldom wasted on jobs like records, but he was going to waste her no matter where he put her.

  "I suppose you can't hardly cause any trouble there," he muttered, petting his coffee mug.

  "No, sir. I'll try not to, sir."

  He mulled it over while he took a bite out of his blueberry muffin, then nodded. "All right, Annie, Records it is. But I've got something else I need you to do first today. Another learning experience, you might say. Go see my secretary. She'll lay it all out for you."

  "McGruff the Crime Dog?"

  Annie stared in horror at the costume hanging before her in the storage room: furry limbs and a trench coat. The giant dog head sat on top of the giant dog feet.

  Valerie Comb smirked. "Tony Antoine usually does it, but he called in sick."

  "Yeah, I bet he did."

  Noblier's secretary handed her a schedule. "Two appearances this morning and two this afternoon. Deputy York will do the presentation. All you have to do is stand around."

  "Dressed up like a giant dog."

  Valerie sniffed and fussed with the chiffon scarf she had tied around her throat in a poor attempt to hide a hickey. "You're lucky you got a job at all, you ask me."

  "I didn't."

  "You got ten minutes to get to Wee Tots," she said, sauntering toward the door. "Better shake a leg, Deputy. Or is that wag your tail?"

  "You'd know more about that than I would," Annie muttered under her breath as the door closed, leaving her with her new alter ego.

  A learning experience.

  She learned she would rather have worn the giant head out of the closet and down the halls of the station, thereby disguising herself completely and avoiding humiliation. But she also learned that she couldn't put the head on without help. It was as heavy and unwieldy as a Volkswagen bug. Her one attempt to get it on threw her off balance, and she staggered into a steel shelving unit, bounced off, and went dog head—first into the paper recycling bin.

  She learned she couldn't drive wearing giant dog feet. She learned there was no ventilation inside the suit, and the thing smelled worse than any real dog she'd ever encountered.

  She learned York the Dork took his McGruff-detail duties far too seriously.

  "Can you bark?" he asked as he adjusted her head. They stood in the small side parking lot at the Wee Tots Nursery School. His uniform was spotless, starched stiff. The creases in his pants looked sharp enough to slice cheese.

  Annie glared out of the tiny eyeholes in McGruff's partly opened mouth. "Can I what?" she asked, her voice muffled.

  "Bark. Bark like a dog for me."

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that to me."

  York's little paintbrush mustache twitched with impatience. He moved around behind her and adjusted the brown tail that stuck out the back vent on the trench coat. "This is important, Deputy Broussard. These children are depending on us. It's our job to teach them safety and to teach them that law enforcement personnel are their friends. Now say something the way McGruff might."

  "Get your hands off my tail or I'll bite you."

  "You can't say that! You'll frighten the children!"

  "I was talking to you."

  "And your voice has to be much deeper, more growly. Like this." He moved before her once again and prepared himself physically for the role, hunching his shoulders and making a face that looked like Nixon. "Hello, boys and girrrls," he said in his best cartoon dog voice, which sounded like Nixon. "I'm McGrrruff the Crime Dog! Together we can all take a bite out of crrrime!"

  "Yeah, you're a regular Scooby-Doo, York. You wanna wear this outfit?"

  He straightened himself at the affront. "No."

  "Then shut up and leave me alone. I'm in no mood."

  "You have an attitude problem, Deputy," he declared, then turned on his heel and marched toward the side entrance of the school in his stick-up-the-butt gait.

  Annie waddled along behind, tripped on the steps, landed on her giant dog snout. York heaved a long-suffering sigh, righted her, and guided her into the building.

  A learning experience.

  She learned that she had no mobility in a dog suit and no dexterity wearing paws. She learned that she was at a gross disadvantage being able to see only a small square of the world through McGruff's mouth. Toddlers existed entirely beneath that field of vision—and they knew it. They stomped on her feet and pulled her tail. One leapt from a desktop, yodeling like Tarzan and grabbed the big pink tongue lolling out of McGruff's mouth. Another sneaked in close and peed on her foot.

  By the time they finished their program at Sacred Heart Elementary that afternoon, Annie felt like a pinata that had weathered the beating of one too many birthday revelers. York had stopped speaking to her altogether—but not before assuring her he would be reporting her uncooperative behavior to Sergeant Hooker and possibly even to the sheriff. According to him, she was a disgrace to crime dogs everywhere.

  Annie stood on the sidewalk outside Sacred Heart with her McGruff head under her arm and watched York storm off to his cruiser. School was letting out. A herd of third graders dashed past her, barking. A bigger kid grabbed her tail and spun her around, never breaking stride on his way to the bus.

  "This doesn't look good," Josie said soberly. She stood on the steps with her arms around her backpack, her hair swept away from her face with a wide purple band.

  "Hey, Jose, where y'at?" Annie said.

  The girl shrugged, casting her gaze at the ground.

  "You're gonna miss your bus."

  Josie shook her head. "I'm supposed to go to the lawyer's office. Grandma and Grandpa Hunt are having a meeting. They let him out of jail yesterday, you know. We went to get him instead of going to church. I guess hardly anybody that breaks the law has to stay in jail, huh?"

  "They let
him out on bail?" Annie asked. Who would have thought Pritchett would move on Sunday? No one— that was the point. The offices were officially shut down, which made it a perfect day for clandestine maneuvers. The family didn't want the press making hay off them. Pritchett didn't want to upset the Davidsons any more than necessary. The Davidsons had a great many more friends among the voting constituency than Marcus Renard.

  Josie shrugged again as she descended the steps and headed for the playground. "I guess. I don't understand, but nobody wanted to talk about it. Grandpa Hunt especially. When he got home, he went fishing all alone, and when he came back he went into his study and didn't come out."

  Instead of going to the empty swing set, she sat down on a fat railroad tie that edged a patch of pansies beneath the shade of a live oak. Annie dropped the McGruff head on the asphalt and sat down beside her, rearranging her tail as best she could. On the other side of the school, the buses were roaring off.

  "I know it's confusing for you, Jose. This is confusing for a lot of grown-ups, too."

  "Grandma says that detective tried to beat up the guy that killed my mom, but you stopped him."

  "He was breaking the law. Cops are supposed to enforce the law; they shouldn't ever break it. But just because I stopped Detective Fourcade doesn't mean I won't still try to get the guy that killed your mom. Do you understand?"

  Josie turned sideways and reached out to touch a lavender pansy with her fingertip. A single tear slipped down her cheek and she whispered, "No."

  She hung her head a little lower, her curtain of dark hair falling to hide her face. When she finally spoke, her voice was tiny and trembling. "I ... I really miss my mom."

  Annie reached out with a paw and gathered Josie close to her side. "I know you miss her, sweetheart," she said against the top of Josie's head. "I know exactly how much you miss her. I'm so sorry any of this had to happen to you."