Overburdened, the duffel strap slipping on her shoulder, she climbed out of the Jeep and bumped the door shut with her hip. The load in her arm shifted precariously. As she came around the back of the Jeep, the shoe slipped off the pile and took the dinner garbage with it. The duffel strap fell, the weight of the bag jerking her right arm so that the files and other junk spilled to the ground.
"Shit," she muttered, dropping to her knees.
The sound of the rifle shot registered in her mind a split second before the bullet hit.
36
The bullet ripped through the plastic back window of the Jeep, destroyed the windshield, and shattered the front window of the store. All in less time than it took to draw a breath-not that Annie was breathing.
She dropped flat on the ground, the crushed shell biting into her bare arms as she scooted under the Jeep, dragging her duffel bag with her. She couldn't hear a damn thing for the pounding of her pulse in her ears. The heat from the Jeep pressed down on her. Hands fumbling, she dug her Sig Sauer out of the bag, twitched the safety off and waited.
She couldn't see anything but the ground. If she crawled out from under the Jeep at the front, she could make it up onto the gallery. Using the Jeep for cover, she could climb through the broken front window, get to the phone, and call 911.
A screen door slapped in the distance.
"Who's there?" Sos called, racking the shotgun. "Me, I shoot trespassers! And survivors-I shoot them twice!"
"Uncle Sos!" Annie yelled. "Go back inside! Call 911!"
"I'd rather unload this buckshot in some rascal's ass! Where y'at, chère?"
"Go back in the house! Call 911!"
"The hell I will! Your tante, she already called! Cops are on the way!"
And if they were lucky, Annie thought, a deputy might arrive in half an hour-unless there already was a deputy right across the road with a rifle in his hands. She thought of Mullen. She thought of Stokes. Donnie Bichon came to mind. She considered the possibility of Renard. She had accused him of shooting into his own home. Maybe this was retribution.
She adjusted her grip on the Sig and scuttled toward the front end of the Jeep. The shot had to have come from the road or the woods beyond. She hadn't heard or seen a car. A shooter in the woods at night would lose himself in a hurry. It would take a dog to track him, and by the time a K-9 unit arrived, he would be long gone.
In the distance she could hear the radio car coming, siren wailing, giving all criminals in the vicinity ample warning of its imminent arrival.
Pitre was the deputy. To Sos and Fanchon, he showed a modicum of respect. To Annie he remarked that he hadn't realized there were so many poor shots in the parish. He made a laconic call back to dispatch to advise everyone of the situation, which was nothing-they had no suspect description, no vehicle description, nothing. At Annie's insistence he called for the K-9 unit and was told the officer was unavailable. A detective would be assigned the case in the morning-if she wanted to pursue the matter, Pitre said.
"Someone tried to kill me," she snapped. "Yeah, I think I don't wanna just drop that."
Pitre shrugged, as if to say, "suit yourself."
The slug had passed through the front window of the store, shattered a display case of jewelry made from nutria teeth, and slammed into the old steel cash register that sat on the tour ticket counter. The cash register had sustained an impressive wound, but still worked. The slug had been mangled beyond recognition. Even if anyone ever went to the trouble of finding a suspect, they would have nothing to match for ballistics.
"Yeah, well, thanks for nothing, again," Annie said, walking Pitre to his car.
He feigned innocence. "Hey, I came with lights and siren!"
Annie scowled at him. "Don't even get me started. Suffice it to say you're just about as big an asshole as Mullen."
"Ooooh! You gonna go after me now?" he said. "I heard you went after Stokes today. What is it with you, Broussard? You think the only way you'll get up the ladder is knocking everybody else off? What ever happened to women who slept their way to the top?"
"I'd rather give bone marrow. Go piss up a rope, Pitre." She flipped him off as he drove away.
After walking Fanchon back to the house, she used the phone in the store to call Fourcade. She chewed at a broken fingernail as she listened to the phone ring on the other end. On the sixth ring his machine picked up. He had asked her to stay the night, now the night was half gone and so was Fourcade. Where was he at one-thirty in the morning? Her mind worried at that question as she helped Sos board up the window to keep out looting raccoons.
It bothered her that she wanted Nick here for emotional reasons and not just as another cop. If she was going to get through this mess with Renard and the department and Fourcade's hearing, she had to be tougher. She needed to learn to separate the issues. She could almost hear him in her mind: You're not dead. Suck it up and focus on your job, 'Toinette.
And then he would put his arms around her and hold her safe against him.
As they worked on the window, she answered Sos's questions as best she could without revealing too much about the situation she had become embroiled in. But he knew she was holding things back from him, and she knew he knew.
He gave her a hard look as they walked out, his temper still up and bubbling. "Look what you got yourself in now, 'tite fille. Why you can't do things no way but the hard way? Why you don't just marry Andre and settle? Give your tante and me some grandbabies? Mais non, you gotta run off and do a man's job! You all the time beatin' on a hornet's nest with a stick! And now you gonna get stung. Sa c'est de la couyonade!"
"It'll work out, Uncle Sos," Annie promised, feeling like a worm for lying to him. She could have been dead.
He made a strangled sound in his throat, but cupped her face in his callused hands. "We worry 'bout you, chérie, your tante and me. You're like our own, you know dat! Why you gotta make life so hard?"
"I don't mean to look for trouble."
Sos heaved a sigh and patted her cheek. "But when trouble comes lookin' for you, you ain't hard to find, c'est vrai."
Annie watched him walk away. She hated that this mess had touched him and Fanchon. If her life was going to stay this complicated, maybe she would have to think about moving away from the Corners.
"If my life is going to stay this complicated, maybe I'll have to think about moving into an asylum," she muttered as she stepped down off the gallery and turned the corner to her stairs.
A small box wrapped in flowered paper with a white bow sat on the third step from the bottom. Renard. Annie recognized the paper. It was the same as what had been wrapped around the box with the scarf in it. A too-familiar sense of unease rippled through her at the idea of him coming here as if he felt entitled to touch her private life.
She stuffed the box into her duffel bag and went up to the apartment.
The sense of violation struck her immediately. The feeling that someone had invaded her home. From her vantage point in the front entry she could see across the living room, could see that the French doors were shut, the bolt turned. The air in the apartment was stifling and stale from an unexpectedly hot day with closed windows. A faint undertone of something earthy and rotten lingered. The swamp, Annie thought. Or maybe she needed to take the garbage out. She set her duffel bag on the bench and pulled out the Sig. With the gun raised and ready, she moved into the living room and hit the message button on the answering machine. If there was someone here, and he thought she was occupied listening to the machine, he might think to take advantage and attack her from behind.