"She arrested me," Nick stated flatly, impatient with Stokes. The man had no focus.
"Well, yeah, she'll be a bad lesbian in my fantasies. A black leather bitch with a whip. Man hater."
"How'd she happen to be there?" Nick asked.
"Damn bad luck, that's for sure."
Nick had mixed feelings about that. If Annie Broussard hadn't come along, he would have killed Renard. She had, in fact, saved him from himself, and for that he was thankful. But her motives troubled him.
"She thinks I should be held accountable."
Maybe it was as simple as that. Maybe she was that idealistic. Having never been an idealist himself, he had a hard time accepting the prospect. In his experience, people were usually motivated by one thing: self-gain. They could couch their intentions in a million different guises, give no end of excuses, but most everything came down to one thought: What's in it for me? What was in it for Annie Broussard? Why had she suddenly popped up in his life?
"She's a pain in the ass," Stokes said. "Little Miss By-the-Book. I caught a rape case this morning out in that white-trash trailer park going toward Luck. She's out there butting into every damn thing. 'You gonna send that nose hair to the lab?' " he mocked in a high falsetto. " 'Maybe it's rapist nose hair. Maybe this guy did Bichon. Maybe he's the Bayou Strangler.' "
"What made her think it was tied to Bichon?"
Chaz rolled his eyes. "The guy wore a mask. Like that's an original idea. Christ," he muttered. "Whoever thought they should let broads on the job?"
He glanced over his shoulder, checking the door. The city jail was about a thousand years old and had no surveillance cameras in its holding cell areas. City cops had to listen in on conversations the old-fashioned way.
"Well, she's damn near the only one who thinks you should pay for this, man," he muttered. "Not even God himself would call you on it. An eye for an eye, you know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean. I'm supposed to be an avenging angel."
"Hell, you should have been the Invisible Man. No one would have been the wiser if Broussard hadn't stuck her nose in it. Renard would be roasting in hell, case closed."
"That's what you thought?" Nick said softly, stepping toward the chain-link that caged him in. "When you called me at Laveau's-you thought I'd go over to Bowen and Briggs and kill him?"
"Jesus!" Stokes hissed. "Keep your voice down!"
Nick leaned close to the wire mesh, slipping his fingers through just above Stokes's. "Whatsa matter, pard?" he whispered. "You worried about a conspiracy beef?"
Stokes jerked back, looking shocked, offended, hurt even. "Conspiracy? Shit, man, we were drunk and talking trash. Even when I called you and told you he was over there, I never thought you'd really do it! I'm just saying I wouldn't blame you if you had. I mean, good riddance-am I right or am I right?"
"You're the one wanted to go to that particular bar."
" 'Cause no one else hangs there, man! You can't think I was setting you up! Jesus, Nicky! We're brothers of the badge, man. I'm the closest thing to a friend you got. I don't know how you can even think it. It wounds me, Nicky. Truly."
"I'll wound you, Chaz. I find out you fucked me over, you'll wish your mama and daddy never got past first base."
Stokes stepped away from the cell. "I don't believe what I'm hearing. Man oh man! Stop being so fuckin' paranoid. I'm not your enemy here." He tapped his breastbone with one long forefinger. "Hell, I called you a lawyer. The guys are gonna cover it. They all agreed-"
"I pay my own way."
"You didn't do anything the rest of us hadn't had wet dreams about for the last three months."
"What lawyer?"
"Wily Tallant from St. Martinville."
"That bastard-"
"-is slick as snot," Stokes finished. "Don't think of him as being on the other side of the fence. Think of him as the man who's gonna open the gate so you can get back on your own side. That ol' boy can make Lucifer look like the poor misunderstood neglected child of a dysfunctional family. By the time he's through, you'll probably end up with a commendation and the keys to the fucking city, which is what you deserve."
He leaned toward the mesh again, slipping a hand inside his jacket and pulling out a cigarette like a magician. "That's all I want, pard," he said, passing the cigarette through the wire. "I want everybody to get what they deserve."
Annie stayed in the locker room for twenty minutes fighting to compose herself. Twenty minutes of staring at that skinned muskrat.
There was no way of knowing where it had come from or who had hung it, not without questioning people, looking for witnesses, making a fuss. Mullen was a sound bet, but she knew a half dozen deputies who did some trapping for extra income. Still, skinning would have been Mullen's touch. Annie had always pegged him for the sort of kid who had pulled the wings off flies.
Turncoat bitch.
Holding her breath against the sweet-putrid scent of decaying rodent, she cut the thing down with her pocketknife and grimaced as it hit the floor with a soft thud. She tore up the note, then pilfered a cardboard box from the garbage in the office supply room and used it for a coffin. She had no intention of taking the thing to Noblier and making a bad situation worse. And there was no leaving it. After she rewrote her final report on the cemetery vandalism and filed it, she grabbed the box and her duffel bag and left. She could toss the corpse in the woods after she got home, and Mother Nature would give it a proper disposal.
The drive home usually calmed her after a bad day. Today it only made her feel more alienated. Daylight was nearly gone, casting the world in the strange gray twilight of bad dreams. The woods looked forbidding, uninviting; the cane fields were vast, unpopulated seas of green. Lamps burned in the windows of the houses she passed; inside families were together, eating supper, watching television.
Always in times like this, she became acutely aware of her lack of a traditional family. This was when the memories crept up from childhood: her mother sitting in a rocking chair looking out at the swamp, a wraithlike woman, surreal, pale, detached, never quite in the present. There had always been a distance between Marie Broussard and the world around her. Annie had been keenly aware of it and frightened by it, fearing that one day her mother would just slip away into another dimension and she would be left alone. Which was exactly what had happened.
She had had Uncle Sos and Tante Fanchon to look after her, and she couldn't have loved them more, but there was always, would always be, a place inside her where she felt like an orphan, disconnected, separate from the people around her… as her mother had been. The door to that place was wide open tonight.
"You're on the air with Owen Onofrio, KJUN, all talk all the time. Home of the giant jackpot giveaway. We're up over nine hundred dollars now. What lucky listener will pocket that check? It could happen any time, any day.
"On our agenda tonight: Murder suspect Marcus Renard was allegedly attacked and beaten last night by a Partout Parish sheriff's detective. What do you have to say about that, Kay on line one?"
"I say there ain't no justice, that's what I say. The world's gone crazy. They put that dead woman's daddy in jail, too, and everyone I know says he's a hero for trying to do what the courts wouldn't. Killers and rapists have more rights than decent people. It's crazy!"
Annie switched the radio off as she turned in at the Corners. There were three cars in the crushed shell lot. Uncle Sos's pickup, the night clerk's rusty Fiesta, and off to one side, a shiny maroon Grand Am that made her groan aloud. A.J.
She sat for a moment just staring at the place she had called home her whole life: a simple two-story wood-frame building with a corrugated tin roof. The wide front window acted as a billboard, with half a dozen various ads and messages for products and services. A red neon sign for Bud, a placard that read ICI ON PARLE FRANCAIS, another sign handwritten in Magic Marker HOT Boudin amp; Cracklins.