A Thin Dark Line

by Tami Hoag

  The crowd was rowdy and drunk, the music loud. The street was filled with costumes and color and movement. Nick looked only for the slate blue uniforms of the SO deputies. He worked systematically down one side of La Rue France and up the other, barely pausing to accept the inane well wishes of his colleagues for the upcoming hearing. He saw no sign of Annie.

  She could have been at the jail, booking in some drunk. He could have missed her in the crowd, she was so little. Or she could be in trouble. In the past ten days, she'd spent more time in trouble than out of it. And tonight she'd called to tell him she might have pushed a killer too far.

  He could see Hooker loitering near a vendor selling fried shrimp, the fat sergeant scowling but tapping his toe to the music. Hooker would know where Annie was, but Nick doubted Hooker would give the information to him. He'd see too much potential for disaster.

  "Nicky! My brother, my man. Where y'at?"

  Stokes swayed toward him, his porkpie hat tipped rakishly over one masked eye. Each arm was occupied around a woman in a cut-to-the-ass miniskirt—a bottle blonde in leather and a brunette in denim. They appeared to be holding one another upright.

  "This is my man, Nick," Stokes said to the women. "He don't no more know what to do with a party than he'd know what to do with a two-headed goat. You want one of these fine ladies to be your spirit guide into the party world, Nicky? We can go somewhere and have us a party of our own. You know what I mean?"

  Nick scowled at him. "You seen Broussard?"

  "Broussard? What the hell you want with her?"

  "Have you seen her?"

  "No, and thank God for it. That chick ain't nothin' but grief, man. You oughta know. She— Oooohhh!" he cooed, as the possibilities dawned in his booze bumbled mind. "Turnabout is fair play, huh? You wanna give her a little scare or somethin'?"

  "Or something."

  "That's cool. I'm cool with that. Yeah. The bitch has it coming to her."

  "So go over there and ask Hooker where she's at. Make up a good excuse."

  The Dudley Do-Right flashed bright across Stokes's face. "Mind my lady friends, Nicky. Girls, you be nice to Nicky. He's a monk."

  The blonde looked up at Nick as Stokes walked away. "You're not really a monk, are you?"

  Nick slipped his shades on, shutting the bimbo out, and said nothing, watching as Stokes approached the sergeant. The two exchanged words, then Stokes bought himself an order of shrimp and came back chewing.

  "You're outta luck, friend. She done packed up her tight little ass and gone home."

  "What?"

  "Hooker says she called in sick a while ago. He thinks maybe she was drinking."

  "Why would he think that?"

  Stokes shrugged. "I don't know, man. These rumors get around. You know what I mean? Anyhow, she ain't here."

  The anxiety in Nick's gut wound tighter. "What's her unit number?"

  "What's the difference? She's not in it."

  "I came past the station. Her Jeep's in the lot. What the hell is her unit number?" Nick demanded.

  Stokes's confusion gave way to concern. He stopped chewing and swallowed. "What're you planning, man?"

  Nick's patience snapped. He grabbed Stokes by both shoulders and shook him, sending fried shrimp scattering on the sidewalk. "What the hell is her unit number!"

  "One Able Charlie!"

  He wheeled and bolted through the crowd, Stokes's voice carrying after him.

  "Hey! Don't do nothin' I wouldn't do!"

  Nick barreled through the partyers, bouncing people out of his way with a lowered shoulder and a stiff forearm. Masks flashed by in his peripheral vision, giving the scene a surreal quality. When he finally reached his truck, his breath was sawing hot in and out of his lungs. The muscles in his ribs and back, still sore from DiMonti's beating, grabbed at him like talons.

  He pulled the radio mike free of its holder, called dispatch, and, identifying himself as Stokes, asked to be patched through to One Able Charlie. The seconds ticked past, each one seeming longer than the last.

  "Detective?" the dispatcher came back. "One Able Charlie is not responding. According to the log that unit is off duty."

  Nick hung up the mike and started the truck. If Annie was off duty and her Jeep was still in the lot at the station, then where the hell was she?

  And where the hell was Renard?

  Leaning her head against the side window, Annie tried to fight off a wave of nausea as Doll put the Cadillac in gear and it lurched forward. As they passed the vacant lot adjacent to Po' Richard's, Annie thought she caught a glimpse of Marcus's smiling white mask in the darkness, laughing at her.

  They crossed France a block above the party. The color and lights glared in the distance, then vanished. Annie groaned a little as the car turned right, the change of direction exacerbating her dizziness. She wondered what the poison was, wondered if there was an antidote, wondered if the blundering morons in the Our Lady lab would be able to figure any of it out before she died a horrible, agonizing death.

  She told herself not to panic. Marcus couldn't have foreseen the events of the evening. He wouldn't have planned for her absolute rejection of him. If he followed his own pattern, he had probably intended only to make her ill so that he could then later offer her comfort. That was his pattern.

  The business district gave way to residences. Blocks of small, neat ranch-style houses, many with a homemade shrine to the Virgin Mary in the front yard. Old claw-foot bathtubs had been cut in half and planted on end in the ground to form grottos for totems of Mary. The totems were mass-produced in a town not far from Bayou Breaux, and lay stacked like cordwood in the manufacturing yard beside the railroad tracks. Having seen that took away some of the mystique, Annie thought, her brain waves fracturing.

  They should be at the hospital soon. The old grounds-keeper would be scrubbing the toes of the giant Virgin Mary statue with a toothbrush.

  "I appreciate this, Mizzuz Renard," she said. "I'll call the sheriff from the hospital. He'll come and pick yyyou up. Youuu did the right thing co-ming to mmme."

  "I know. I had to. I couldn't let it go on," Doll said. "I could see it happening all over again. Marcus becoming infatuated with you. You—a woman who would never have him. A woman who wants only to take my son from me and put him into prison—or worse. I can't let that happen. My boys are all I have."

  She turned and looked straight at Annie as they passed the turnoff for Our Lady of Mercy. The hate in her eyes seemed to glow red in the light of the dashboard.

  "No one takes my boys away from me."

  47

  I'm on my way to hell.

  Civilization passed behind them. The bayou country, ink black, vast and unwelcoming, stretched before them, a wilderness where violent death was the harsh reality of the day. Predator claimed prey here in an endless, bloody cycle, and no survivor mourned the demise of the less fortunate. Only the strong survived.

  Annie had never felt weaker in her life. The nausea came in waves. The dizziness wouldn't abate. Her perceptions were beginning to distort. Sound seemed to come to her down a long tunnel. The world around her looked liquid and animated. Had to have been something in the coffee, she decided, something strong.

  She tried to focus her eyes on the woman across the width of the big car. Doll Renard appeared elongated and so thin she could have been made of sticks. She didn't look as if she could have possessed the physical strength for violent rage. But Annie reminded herself that Doll Renard was younger than she looked, stronger than she looked. She was also a murderer. The frail, frumpy facade was as much a mask as the sequined domino that lay on the seat between them.

  "Yyyou killed Pam? You diiid those things to Pam?" Annie said in disbelief, the gruesome images of the crime scene photos flashing through her mind, bright and bloody. She had dismissed the possibility of a woman perpetrator almost out of hand. Women didn't kill that way—with brutality, with cruelty, with hatred for their own gender.

  "She got what she
deserved, the whore," Doll said bitterly. "Men panting after her like dogs after a bitch in heat."

  "My God," Annie breathed. "But yyyou had to know Mmmarcus would be a sssuspect."

  "But Marcus didn't kill her," Doll reasoned. "He's innocent—of murder, at least. I watched him become obsessed with her," she said with disgust. "Just like with that Ingram woman. It didn't matter to him that she didn't want him. He gets these things in his head, and there's no getting them out. I tried. I tried to make her stop him, but he couldn't believe she would try to have him arrested. Her fear only seemed to draw him toward her."

  "Yyyou were the one ... behiind the stalking?"

  "She would have taken him away from me—one way or the other."

  And so Doll had stabbed to death, crucified, and mutilated Pam Bichon. To end the obsession that had taken her son's attention away from her.

  "I knew the police would question him, of course," she went on. "That was his punishment for trying to betray me. I thought it would teach him a lesson."

  Annie tried to swallow. Her reflexes had gone dull. Slowly she inched her right hand along the armrest, fingertips feeling for the butt of the Sig. The gun was gone. Doll had to have lifted it when she had been "helping" Annie into the car, buckling her safely into the passenger's seat.

  She glanced in the rearview, hoping against hope to see lights on their tail, but the night closed in behind them, and the swamp stretched out in front of them. Plenty of places to dump a body in the swamp.

  The drug pulled at her, dragging her toward unconsciousness.

  "Hhhow did yyou get Pam ... to the house?" she asked, forcing her brain to stay engaged. She couldn't save herself if she wasn't conscious, and no one else was going to do it for her. Shifting her weight, she brought her right arm across her stomach and groaned, surreptitiously moving her fingertips onto the release button of her seat belt.

  "It was pathetically easy. I called her under a false name and asked her to show the property to me," Doll said, smiling at her own cleverness. "Greedy little bitch. She wanted everything—money, beauty, men. She would have taken my son away from me, and she didn't even want him."

  It had been as simple as a phone call. Pam wouldn't have thought twice about meeting an older woman to show a rural property, even at night. Her problems had all been with men—or so she had thought. So they all had thought. Fourcade had been right all along: The trail, the logic, led back to Renard. He just hadn't realized which Renard. No one had given a second thought to Marcus Renard's flighty, strident mother.

  And now that woman is going to kill me. The thought swept around inside Annie's mind like a cyclone. She thought she could see the letters of the sentence floating in the air. She had to do something. Soon. Before the drug pulled her all the way under.

  "You're no better," Doll said. "Marcus wants you. He can't see you're an enemy. His desire for you takes him away from me. I tried to make you stop him from wanting you. Just like I did with that Bichon woman."

  "Youuu were in the carrr that night. You came tooo my house," Annie said, the puzzle pieces floating up to the surface of her brain. She envisioned them rising up through the goo, sticky and wet with blood. "How did youuu ... get in? Hooow did you know ... about the ssstairs?"

  A smirk tugged at Renard's thin lips. "I knew your mother. She did some piecework for me one season, sewing on my costumes. That was before Claude betrayed me, before I had to take the boys away from here. Everyone wanted my costumes then."

  Doll Renard had known her mother. The admission brought another wave of dizziness crashing through Annie. Doll Renard had been in her home when she was a child. She tried to search through her mind for some memory of her and Marcus coming face-to-face as children. Could that have been possible? Could either of them have had any inkling that their paths would cross this way in adulthood? That an acquaintance begun with an innocent encounter so long ago, then forgotten, would end in murder?

  "She was a whore, just like you," Doll said. "Blood will tell."

  Blood will tell. Annie saw the phrase flow from Doll's mouth in the form of a thick red snake.

  She swallowed hard as the nausea came again, then pitched forward toward the dash and vomited on the floor. Doll made a sound of disgust. Annie hung there, free now of the seat belt, trying to get her breath, one hand braced against the dash. She had to do something. The drug was pulling her deeper into its embrace, the velvet blackness of unconsciousness seducing her.

  Gathering what strength she could, she lunged across the width of the car, grabbing for the steering wheel. The Cadillac swerved hard to the right, tires screeching. Annie used the wheel to pull herself across the seat, one hand lying hard on the horn.

  Doll screamed in outrage, slapping at Annie's face with one hand while she attempted to wrestle the wheel back to the left. The car dropped one front wheel off the shoulder of the road and bounced back, careening across the center line. The headlights shone on the glossy surface of black water.

  Annie ducked her head to avoid the blows and clawed at the wheel again. She used her body to crowd Doll against the door, reaching across blindly with her left hand for the door handle. If she could get the door open, maybe she could push Doll out. She could see it happen in her mind's eye: Doll's brittle body hitting the asphalt like a crash-test dummy, bouncing, her head breaking open, her brain spilling out. She snagged the handle with the tips of two fingers.

  The car went into a sudden, screeching skid as Doll jammed on the brakes. Annie flew into the dash, her head bouncing off the windshield, her shoulder slamming into the dashboard. The noise, the motion, the pain, the vertigo tumbled through her in an avalanche. She tried to push herself up from the floor as the car jolted onto the shoulder and stopped. She tried to get hold of something for support and orientation, tried to focus her eyes on something out in front of her—the barrel of a gun.

  Her gun. In Doll Renard's hand. Three inches from her face.

  Swinging wildly, she knocked the gun sideways, and the Sig went off with a deafening pop!, shattering a window somewhere in the car.

  "Bitch!" Doll shrieked.

  She grabbed Annie by the hair with her left hand and brought the gun down hard, slamming it against her temple and cheekbone once, twice.

  Starbursts of color shot through Annie's head like a meteor shower. Surrendering for the moment, she dropped to the floor, crumpled and limp, blood trickling in thin fingers down across her cheek. She could feel consciousness sliding away. She thought she could feel the world sliding beneath her, but it was only the car. They were moving again, off the main road. She could hear the soft swish of grass brushing against the sides of the Cadillac, the popping sound of tires crunching over rock.

  She lay still on the floor, energy spent, knowing she had to find more, had to scrape together another burst or die. Weapons. The thought was a dim light in her mind. Doll has the Sig. Doll has the Sig. Doll has the Sig. She knew there had to be something more, another answer, stupid simple, but she couldn't think.

  So tired.

  Her limbs were as heavy as the branches of a live oak. Her hands felt the size of catcher's mitts. She tried to swallow around a tongue as thick as a copperhead. Maybe the red snake she had seen come out of Doll's mouth had gone into her own to choke her. A taste as bitter as acid filled her mouth.

  Acid. That would be a weapon, she thought. She imagined throwing it in Doll Renard's face, imagined the face burning down to the skull bones while the rest of her body danced a mad jig of death.

  Add.

  The car rolled to a stop. Doll popped the lock on the trunk, got out of the car, and slammed the door. Annie reached slowly down her right side to her duty belt, feeling back from her empty holster to the slim nylon case just behind it. She pried up the Velcro tab and slipped the small cylinder free with clumsy fingers.

  Behind her, the car door opened. Annie's head snapped back as Doll grabbed her by the hair and pulled her backward.

  "Get up! Get up!"


  Annie fell onto the ground, wincing as Doll kicked her in the back and cursed her. Curling into a ball, she tried to protect her head. The fingers of her right hand wrapped tightly around the cylinder in her palm.

  The door of the Cadillac swung shut, just missing Annie's head, then Doll had her by the hair again, dragging her into a sitting position. Annie opened her eyes, reaching out to steady herself against the side of the car as the dizziness spun her brain around and around. The car's headlights provided the only illumination, but it was enough. Tipping and spinning in front of her vision was a house, run-down, with broken windows gaping like toothless spots in an old crone's smile.

  They were on Pony Bayou. This was the house where Pam Bichon had had her life cut out of her.

  "I didn't kill Pam," Marcus said softly.

  Hunter Davidson's broad face twisted with disgust. "Don't stand there and lie to me. There's no judge here but God. There's no technicalities, no loopholes for you and your damn lawyer to jump through."

  "I loved her," Marcus whispered, tears coming again to stream down his cheeks.

  "Loved her?" Davidson's big body quivered with rage. Sweat ringed the underarms of his shirt. His thin hair was dark and shiny-wet. "You don't know what love is. I made her! My wife bore her! She was our child! You don't know a damn thing about that kind of love. She was our baby, and you took her away from us!"

  The irony, Marcus thought, was that he knew all about that kind of love. He had been caught in a sick mutation of it his whole life. Tonight he would have ended it. Now Pam's father would end it for him.

  "You can't know how many times I've killed you," Davidson said softly, moving forward. His eyes were glassy with the fever of hate. "I dreamed of nailing you down and putting you through the hell my baby went through."

  "No," Marcus whispered, crying harder now with fear. Spittle bubbled between his lips and dribbled down his chin. Against his will, his gaze darted to the big wooden table where his utility and X-Acto knives were laid out like surgical instruments. He shook his head. "Please, no."