"Always."
"Who ever thought life could be so complicated?"
"Not you."
"That's a fact." He glanced at his watch. "Well, I suppose I should go home and take a cold shower or page through the Victoria 's Secret catalog or something."
"No work?" Annie asked, following him to the door.
"Tons. You don't want to hear about it."
"Why not?"
He turned and faced her, serious. "Fourcade's bond hearing tomorrow."
"Oh."
"Told you so." He started to open the door, then hesitated. "You know, Annie, you're gonna have to decide whose side you're on in this thing."
"I'm either for you or against you?"
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah," she admitted, "but I don't want to talk about it tonight."
A.J. accepted that with a nod. "If you decide you do want to talk, and you want to talk to a friend… we'll work around the rest."
Annie kept her doubts to herself. A.J. pulled the door open, and three cats darted into the entry and pounced on the muskrat box, growling.
"What is in that box?"
"Dead muskrat."
"Jeez, Broussard, anybody ever tell you you've got a morbid sense of humor?"
"A million times, but I'm also in denial."
He smiled and winked at her as he stepped out onto the landing. "I'll see you around, kiddo. I'm glad we're friends again."
"Me, too," Annie murmured. "And thanks for the flowers."
"Ah-sorry." He pulled a face. "I didn't send them. Uncle Sos assumed…"
Annie held a hand up. " 'Nough said. That's okay. I wouldn't expect you to."
"But feel free to let me know who did, so I can go punch the guy in the nose."
"Please. One assault a week is my limit."
He leaned down and brushed a kiss to her cheek. "Lock your door. There's bad guys running around out there."
She shooed the cats out of the entry and went back into the apartment. The bouquet sat dead center on her kitchen table, looking almost as out of place there as it had in the store. Her apartment was a place for wildflowers in jelly jars, not the elegance of roses. She plucked the white envelope from its plastic stem and extracted the card.
Dear Ms. Broussard, I hope you don't think roses inappropriate, but you saved my life and I want to thank you properly.
Yours truly, Marcus Renard
11
He wondered what she'd thought of the flowers. She should have seen them by now. She worked the day shift. He knew because the news reports about his beating identified her as "an off-duty sheriff's deputy." She had been on duty at the courthouse yesterday, and had helped save him from Davidson's attack. She had been on duty the morning Pam's body had been found. She had been the one to find it.
There was a thread of continuity running through all this, Marcus reflected as he gazed out the window of his workroom. He had been in love with Pam; Annie had discovered Pam's body. Pam's father had tried to kill him; Annie had stopped him. The detective in charge of Pam's case had tried to kill him; Annie had again come to his rescue. Continuity. In his drug-numbed mind he pictured the letters of the word unraveling and tying themselves into a perfect circle, a thin black line with no beginning and no ending. Continuity.
He moved his pencil over the paper with careful, featherlight strokes. Fourcade hadn't damaged his hands. There were bruises-defensive wounds-and his knuckles had been skinned when he fell to the ground, but nothing worse. His eyes were still nearly swollen shut. Cotton packing filled both nostrils, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, the air hissing in and out between his chipped teeth because his broken jaw had been wired shut. Stitches crisscrossed his face like seams in a crazy quilt. He looked like a gargoyle, like a monster.
The doctor had given him a prescription for painkillers and sent him home late in the day. None of his injuries were life-threatening or needed further monitoring, for which he was glad. He had no doubt the nurses at Our Lady of Mercy would have killed him if given ample opportunity.
The Percodan dulled the throbbing in his head and face, and took the bite out of the knifing pains in his side where Fourcade had cracked three of his ribs. It also seemed to blur the edges of all sensory perception. He felt insulated, as if he were existing inside a bubble. The volume of his mother's voice had been cut in half. Victor's incessant muttering had been reduced to a low hum.
They had both been right there when Richard Kudrow brought him home. Agitated and irritated by the interruption of their routines.
"Marcus, you had me worried sick," his mother said as he made his way painfully up one step and then another onto the veranda.
Doll stood leaning against a pillar, as if she hadn't the strength to keep herself upright. As tall as both her sons, she still gave the impression of being a birdlike woman, fine boned, almost frail. She had a habit of fluttering one hand against her breastbone like a broken wing. Despite the fact that she was an excellent seamstress, she wore dowdy five-and-dime housedresses that swallowed her up and made her look older than her fiftysome years.
"I didn't know what to think when the hospital called. I was just terrified you might die. I barely slept for worrying on it. What would I do without you? How would I cope with Victor? I was nearly ill with worry."
"I'm not dead, Mother," Marcus pointed out.
He didn't ask why she hadn't come to the hospital to see him, because he didn't want to hear how she hated to drive, especially at night-on account of her undiagnosed night blindness. Never mind that she had hounded him to buy her a car years ago so that she wouldn't have to feel dependent upon him. She rarely took the thing out of the carriage shed they used as a garage. And he didn't want to hear how she was afraid to leave Victor, and how she disliked hospitals and believed them to be the breeding grounds for all fatal disease. The last would set Victor off into his germ litany.
His brother stood to one side of the door, his face turned away, but his eyes glancing back at Marcus, wary. Victor had a way of holding himself that was stiff and slightly cockeyed, as if gravity affected him differently from normal people.
"It's me, Victor," Marcus said, knowing it was hopeless to attempt to put Victor at ease.
Victor had been in his teens before he figured out that putting on a hat didn't turn one person into another being. Voices coming from a telephone had baffled him into his twenties, and sometimes still did. For years he would never do anything more than breathe into the receiver because he couldn't see the person speaking to him, and, therefore, that person did not exist. Only crazy people responded to the voices of people who did not exist, and Victor was not crazy; therefore, he would not speak to faceless voices.
"Mask, no mask," he mumbled. "The mockingbird. Mimus polyglottos. Nine to eleven inches tall. No mask. Sound and sound alike. More common than similar shrikes. The common raven. Corvus corax. Very clever. Very shrewd. Like the crow, but not a crow. A mask, but no mask."
"Victor, stop it!" Doll said, her voice scratching up toward shrillness. She sent Marcus a long-suffering look. "He's been on his rantings all day long. I'd like to have lost my mind worrying about you, and here was Victor droning on and on and on. It was enough to make me see red."
"Red, red, very red," Victor said, shaking his head as if a bug had crawled into his ear.
"That lawyer of yours had better make the sheriff's department pay for the suffering they've caused this family," Doll harped, following Marcus into the house. "Those people are rotten to the core, every last one of them."
"Annie Broussard saved my life," Marcus pointed out. "Twice."
Doll made a sour face. "Annie Broussard. I'm sure she's no better than any of the rest. I saw her on the television. She didn't have a thing to say about you. You blow everything out of proportion, Marcus. You always have."