A Thin Dark Line

by Tami Hoag

  Nick blew smoke out his nostrils. "Oh, no. Me, I learned my lesson the first time. That's why I'm here tonight as adviser to my good friend Donnie, who bailed me out of jail not long ago."

  "A poor choice," Marcotte said.

  "Well, Donnie, he's none too bright for a college boy. Are you, Tulane? I keep telling him he doesn't want the devil playing in his backyard, but I don't know if he's hearing me. He's too preoccupied by the sound of money fanning in his ear."

  "I don't feel well," Donnie muttered, starting to rise. Sweat beaded on his pasty forehead.

  Nick put a hand on his shoulder. "Sit down, Donnie. Last time I saw you near a toilet, you had your head in it. We don't want you to drown ... just yet."

  "Adding coercion to your list of crimes now, Nick?" Marcotte said with an indulgent chuckle.

  "Not at all. I'm just pointing out to my friend Donnie here the disadvantages of doing business with you. The scrutiny a deal with you would bring to bear on him and on the untimely death of his lovely wife."

  Tears welled in Donnie's eyes. "I didn't kill Pam."

  His denial drew stares from two other tables.

  Nick's gaze never wavered from Marcotte. He tapped the ash off his cigarette into Donnie's drink and took another long drag. "You don't have to be guilty of something to have it ruin your life, Tulane. Nor do the guilty necessarily pay for their crimes. See how well I learn my lessons, Marcotte?

  "It looks cold, Donnie—you trying to swing this deal," he went on. "Hell, that business ain't even yours to sell yet, technically speaking. This looks like something my friends in the sheriff's office would want to go over with a fine-tooth comb. They'll wanna dig through all your records and whatnot. You been wheeling and dealing for a while now. Who knows what else they might come up with?

  "Folks catch wind of that kind of thing, they start thinking maybe you cheated them, and then they wanna sue. And, hey, you got all that money what Duval Marcotte paid you, so why shouldn't they try to get themselves a piece of it? Meanwhile, the Davidsons are talking to a lawyer about custody of your daughter.

  "You see where this is going, Donnie?" he asked, still looking at Marcotte. "Donnie, he doesn't always see the big picture. He fails to recognize the potential for disaster."

  "And you, Nick my boy, see that train coming and throw yourself in front of it anyway," Marcotte said, shaking his head. "You were born out of time, Fourcade. Chivalry went out a while back. It's called foolhardiness now."

  "Really?" The picture of disinterest, Nick crushed his smoke out and dropped the butt in Donnie's whiskey. "I don't keep up with trends."

  "I have to go to the bathroom," Donnie muttered, turning gray around the gills.

  Nick slid out of the banquette. "Take your time, Tulane. Do some thinking while you're in there."

  Donnie shuffled away from the table with one hand pressed to his stomach. Nick sat back down and stared at Marcotte. Marcotte sat back against the padded seat and crossed his arms. His dark eyes shone like polished stones.

  "I believe you may have succeeded in ruining my chances for a deal, Nick."

  "I sincerely hope so. It's the least I can do, all things considered."

  "Yes, I suppose it is. And the least I can do is be gracious in defeat. For the moment."

  "You're giving up easily."

  Marcotte gave a shrug, pursing his lips. "Que sera sera. It's been a diversion. I would never have come out here looking if it hadn't been for you rousing my interest, Nick. I'll draw some satisfaction from knowing you have that to dwell on. And you know what? Coming out here has just reminded me how much I like the country. Simple life, simple pleasures. I just may come back."

  Nick said nothing. He had thought he'd cut Marcotte out of his life like a cancer. But just enough of the old obsession had remained to pull him back across that line, and now Marcotte would be drooling at the edge of his sanctuary like a wolf biding his time.

  The waitress edged toward the table, looking at Nick with suspicion. "Can I get you a drink, sir?"

  "No, thank you," he said, easing himself up. "I won't be staying. The company here turns my stomach."

  Donnie was bent over the sink, crying and gagging when Nick entered the men's room.

  "You fit to drive home, Tulane?"

  "I'm ruined, you son of a bitch!" he sobbed. "I'm fucking broke! Marcotte would have advanced me money."

  "And you'd still be ruined—for all the reasons I just told you out there. You don't listen so good, Donnie," Nick said, washing his hands. Every encounter with Marcotte left him feeling as if he'd been handling snakes. "There's better ways out of trouble than selling your soul."

  "You don't understand. Pam's life insurance isn't coming through. I've lost two big jobs and I've got a loan coming due. I need money."

  "Quit your whining and be a man for once," Nick snapped. "You don't have your wife here to bail your ass out anymore. It's time to grow up, Donnie."

  He cranked a paper towel out of the machine on the wall, dried his hands carefully. "Listen—you don't know it, but me, I'm the best friend you've got tonight, Tulane. But I'm telling you, cher, I find out you've turned on me in this, I find out you're trying to get back in bed with Marcotte, I find out you took that shot at Broussard the other night, you're sure as hell gonna wish I'd never been born."

  Donnie leaned his head against the mirror, too weak to stand unaided. "I been wishing that for days now, Fourcade."

  Behind him, Nick heard the men's room door swish open. He could see the reflection of Brutus in a wedge of mirror. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and remained still.

  "Everything all right in here, Mr. Bichon?" the thug asked.

  "Hardly," Donnie moaned.

  "Everything's fine, Brutus," Nick said. "Mr. Bichon, he's just having some growing pains, that's all."

  "I didn't ask you, coonass." Reaching inside his black jacket, Brutus pulled out a set of brass knuckles and slipped them over the thick fingers of his right hand. Nick watched in the mirror.

  "I wouldn't go knocking family trees, King Kong," he said. "You're about to fall out of yours."

  He spun and kicked as Brutus stepped toward him, catching the big man on the side of the head. Brutus hit the paper towel machine face-first with a crash that reverberated off the tile walls. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth, and he dropped to the floor, out cold.

  Nick shook his head as the manager rushed into the room to stare in horror, first at his broken towel dispenser, then at the mass of bleeding humanity lying on the tile.

  "Floor's wet," Nick said, moving casually for the door. "He slipped."

  44

  Big Dick Dugas and the Iota Playboys cranked up the volume on their battle-scarred guitars and launched into a fast and frantic rendition of "C'est Chaud." A cheer went up from the crowd and bodies began to move—young, old, drunk, sober, black, white, poor, and planter class.

  There were easily a thousand people in the five-block length of La Rue France cordoned off for the annual event, all of them moving some part of their anatomy to the beat. Mouths smiling, faces shiny with the uncommon heat of the evening and the joy of liberation. The workweek was over, the five-day party was just starting, and the source of a collective fear had been obliterated from the planet.

  The party atmosphere struck Annie as grotesque, a reaction she resented mightily. She had always loved the Mardi Gras festivities in Bayou Breaux. Unfettered pagan fun and frivolity before the dour days of Lent. The street dance, the food stands, the vendors selling balloons and cheap trinkets, the pageants and parade. It was a rite of spring and a thread of continuity that had run through her life from her earliest memories.

  She remembered coming to the dance as a child, running around with her Doucet cousins while her mother stood off just to the side of the crowd, enjoying the music in her own quiet way, but never a part of the mass joy.

  The memory brought an extra pang tonight. Annie felt she was in her own way apart from the rest of
the revelers here. Not because of the uniform she was wearing, but because of the things she had experienced in the last ten days.

  A burly bearded man tricked out in a pink dress and pearls, a cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth, tried to grab hold of her hand and drag her off the sidewalk into a two-step. Annie waved him off.

  "I'm not that kind of girl!" she called, grinning.

  "Neither am I, darlin'!" He flipped his skirt up, flashing a glimpse of baggy heart-covered boxer shorts.

  The crowd around him roared and hooted. A woman dressed as a male construction worker gave a wolf whistle and tried to pinch his ass. He howled, grabbed her, and they danced off.

  Annie managed a chuckle at the scene. As she started to turn away, she was detained by another costumed partyer, this one dressed in black with a white painted smiling mask, the classic theatrical portrayal of comedy. He held out a single rose to her and bowed stiffly when she accepted it.

  "Thank you." She tucked the stem of the rose through her duty belt, next to her baton as she walked away.

  She loved the street dance less as a cop than as a civilian. Personnel from both the Bayou Breaux PD and the sheriff's office worked the Carnival events. A united front against hooliganism. The standing rule was to break up the fistfights, but arrest only the drunks stupid enough to swing at the cops. Anyone with a weapon went in the can for the night, and the DA's office had their pick of the litter come morning.

  But even with the drunks and knife fights, the exuberant innocence of a small-town celebration usually outweighed the bad moments. Tonight it seemed that everyone was celebrating the shooting of Willard Roache more than they were celebrating Carnival. The air was crackling with the heady excitement of victorious vigilantism, and that struck Annie as a dangerous thing.

  Crime in South Louisiana tended to be personal, confrontational. Folks here had their own sense of justice and an abundant supply of firearms. She thought of Marcus Renard and the incidents at his home in the past ten days. The shooting, the rock through the window. If he hadn't staged those incidents himself, if they had been the work of one of the many people who thought Fourcade should have been allowed to finish him off, then there was a real possibility that same someone might get carried away in the excitement of one criminal's demise and try for another's. And who in the SO, besides her, would even care?

  God, maybe I am his guardian angel, after all.

  The thought was not a comforting one, but neither could she let it go. The deeper she went into this case, the more complicated it became, the more options there seemed to be. It only became clearer to Annie that justice needed to be conducted through the proper channels, not doled out at random by the uninformed.

  How popular that opinion would make her tonight, she thought, when everyone in the parish was heralding Kim Young as a heroine of the common folk.

  She tried to look for a bright side to the shooting, thinking what a powder keg this street dance would have been if not for Kim Young and her trusty cut-down. The majority of revelers came to the dance in full Mardi Gras regalia: costumes, makeup, masks that ran the gamut from dead presidents to monsters to medieval fertility gods. Sequins and feather masks were in abundance. The celebration had its roots in ancient spring fertility rites and had retained a pervasive air of sexuality down through the centuries. Though it wasn't nearly so bawdy out here in the Cajun parishes as it was in the French Quarter of New Orleans, there would be plenty of flashes of bare skin before the night was through.

  To think of a predator like Willard Roache running loose in this atmosphere was enough to make Annie's blood run cold. A rapist in a Mardi Gras mask amid a sea of masks ... and a heavily armed citizenry twitching at every shadow ... They could certainly have ended up with a morgue full of bullet-ridden corpses instead of one dead Roache.

  Annie edged her way along between the crowd and the storefronts, keeping her eyes open for anyone taking an undue interest in merchandise in the display windows. A knot of little boys of nine or ten stampeded past, blasting squirt guns. She fended off a stream with her hand, turning away and coming face-to-face again with the white painted mask.

  He stood no more than a foot from her, near enough that she started at the sight of him.

  "Do I know you?" she asked.

  His painted face grinned at her as he handed her the string of a heart-shaped helium balloon. He pressed his hands to his chest dramatically then held them out to her, symbolically giving her his heart.

  Puzzled, Annie sized up her masked admirer—his height, his build. Realization dawned with an eerie chill.

  "Marcus?"

  He raised a finger to his painted mouth and backed away, melting into the crowd, anonymous. But she knew who it was. It made perfect sense. The mask offered both freedom and secrecy. He hadn't been able to walk down the street in this town for months without drawing unwanted attention. Now he moved unnoticed past people who would have spit on him or worse had they known he was behind the smiling mask.

  And what would the good townsfolk of Bayou Breaux do to her if they saw her taking romantic tokens from Marcus Renard? What would her fellow cops do? She would be further ridiculed and punished. They already had that in common, she and Marcus.

  Annie looked at the balloon. He had given her his heart, and she had accepted it. God only knew how significant that would be in his mind. He wanted to believe she cared for him, just as he had wanted to believe Pam had cared for him. He believed the job was what kept her from him, just as he had believed Donnie had been the barrier between himself and Pam. Juliet and Romeo.

  She handed the balloon to a little girl with a Pocahontas T-shirt and chocolate all over her face, and moved down the street.

  A clown in a rainbow fright wig staggered toward her on the narrow band of sidewalk. The painted smile was lopsided beneath a rubber hog snout. Annie stepped right. The clown moved with her. She stepped left the same time he did. She turned to the side to motion him past. He swayed toward her instead, hitting her shoulder and spilling his beer down the front of her uniform.

  "Hey, Bozo, watch it!" she snapped.

  "Sorry, ociffer!" he declared, unrepentant.

  From her left side a second drunk stumbled into her, this one wearing a Reagan mask with a vacuous idiot grin. Another eight ounces of beer cascaded down her back.

  "Shit!" she yelped. "Watch where you're going!"

  "Sorry, ociffer!" he said with singsong insincerity. He looked at the clown and the pair of them chuckled like Beavis and Butthead.

  Annie glared at the rubber face, which sat atop a pair of bony shoulders. She looked down at the skinny stick legs in tight jeans.

  "Son of a bitch!" she swore, grabbing hold of him by the shirtfront. "Mullen, is that you inside that empty head?"

  The clown hollered, "Shit!"

  Reagan stumbled back from her, pulling himself free. The two plunged into the gyrating crowd, laughing.

  "Dammit!" Annie said, half under her breath, plucking at her saturated shirtfront.

  The beer trickled down into the waistband of her pants, front and back. It ran down inside her body armor in front and soaked through the back. Anyone getting a whiff of her was going to think the stories about her recent sad decline into alcoholism were more than just rumors.

  "Sarge, it's Broussard," she said into the two-way as she started up the street. "I just got doused. I'm 10-7 at the station. Back in a few. Out."

  "Hurry the hell up."

  She made her way north along the back side of the crowd, intending to cut east at the corner of Seventh, where she had parked her cruiser on the side street.

  "Annie!"

  A.J.'s voice caught her ear and she pulled up. He had left three messages on her machine at home and had tried to get her at work twice since she had been shot at, and she had avoided calling him back. She didn't want to explain. She didn't want to lie. She didn't want him trying to tie a knot in the connection she had severed between them.

  He came towa
rd her from the yellow light of a vendor's stand, a red-checked cardboard basket of fried oysters cradled in one hand, a bottle of Abita in the other. He was still in his suit from the day's business, though his tie was jerked loose.

  "I thought you were off the street."

  Annie shrugged. "I go where they tell me. I'm on my way to the station now. I just got a beer bath."

  "I'll walk you to your car."

  He fell in step beside her and she glanced up at him, trying to gauge his mood. His face was drawn and a deep line dug in between his brows. The noise of the band and the crowd faded as they turned the corner and walked away from the bright yellow light of the party.

  "Why'd you work late?" Annie asked. "Friday night. Big dance and all."

  "I—ah—sorta lost my standing date."

  She kicked herself mentally for opening that door.

  "Task force moved at the speed of light to get the background on Roache, didn't they?"

  "Yeah," she said. "Too bad they couldn't have found that enthusiasm earlier. Maybe they could have nailed his ass after Jennifer Nolan."

  "You would have," he said, setting his supper on the hood of her cruiser.

  "I would have tried, at least. That's the thing that galls me most about Stokes—he skates over everything and still comes out smelling like a rose. I wouldn't care how big a jerk he was if he did the job."

  A.J. shrugged. "Some people do the job, some people live the job."

  "I don't live the job," she snapped, not liking the correlation to Fourcade that A.J. couldn't possibly have known. "But I hustle when I'm on it. That should count for something."

  "It should."

  But they both knew the thing that would count for her would be taking the witness stand on Thursday. Annie looked away and sighed.

  "So, are you gonna tell me what that was all about the other night?" he asked. "Someone taking a shot at you? My God, Annie."

  "Trying to scare me, that's all," she said, still avoiding his gaze.

  "That's all? You could have been killed!"

  "It was a scare tactic. I'm not very popular as a witness for the prosecution."