A Thin Dark Line

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 toward 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."

"You think it was Fourcade?" he demanded. "That bastard! I'll get his bail revoked-"

"It wasn't Fourcade."

"How do you know that?"

"It just wasn't," she insisted. "Leave it alone, A.J. You don't know anything about this."

"Because you won't tell me! Christ, somebody tries to shoot you and I have to hear about it from Uncle Sos! You don't even bother to call me back when I try to check up on you-"

"Look," she said, reining back her temper. "Can we have this fight another time? I'm 10-7. Hooker's gonna chew me out if I don't go and get back."

"I don't want to fight," A.J. said wearily. He caught hold of her hand and hung on when she would have backed away. "Just a minute, Annie. Please."

"I'm on duty."

"You're 10-7. Personal time. This is personal."

She drew in a breath to protest and he pressed a finger against her lips. His expression was earnest in the filtered light of the streetlamp.

"I need to say this, Annie. I care about you. I don't want to see you hurt by anyone for any reason. I don't want to see you taking crazy chances. I want to take care of you. I want to protect you. I don't know who this other guy is-"

"A.J., don't-"

"And I don't know what he's got that I don't. But I love you, Annie. And I'm not gonna just walk away from this, from us. I love you."

His admission stunned her silent. They hadn't been that close lately. There had been a time when she had expected him to say it, and he never had. Now he wanted her to say it and she couldn't-not with the meaning he wanted. The story of their lives. They were never quite in the same place at the same time. He wanted something from her she couldn't give, and she wanted a man she might just send on the road to prison in a week's time.

"I know you better than anyone, Annie," he murmured. "I won't give you up without a fight."

He lowered his head and kissed her, slowly, sweetly, deeply. He pulled her against him, heedless of her beer-soaked shirt, and pressed her to him-breast to chest, belly to groin. Longing to regret.

"God, you think you mean it, don't you?" he whispered as he raised his head. "That it's over."

The hurt in his eyes brought tears to Annie's. "I'm sorry, A.J."

He shook his head. "It's not over," he pledged quietly. "I won't let it be."

Just like Donnie Bichon, Annie thought. Determined to hold on to Pam even after she'd served him with papers. Like Renard-seeing what he wanted to see, bending reality to open possibilities for the outcome he wanted. The difference was that she felt only frustration with A.J.'s bullheadedness, not fear. He hadn't crossed the line from tenacity to terror.

"Fair warning," he said. Stepping back from her, he picked up his fried oysters and his beer. "I'll see you around."

Annie sat back against the car as he walked away. "I need this like I need a hole in my head."

She gave herself a moment to try to clear away the thought that she had somehow managed to become part of a romantic triangle, an idea that was too absurd for words. Instead, she tried to focus once again on the world around her: the noise of the band, the intermittent bang of firecrackers, the warm moist air, the silver light from the streetlamp, and the darkness beyond its reach.

The sensation of being watched crawled over her. The feeling that she suddenly wasn't alone on the deserted side street. She straightened slowly away from the car and strained to see into the shadows at the back of the paint store she had parked beside. At the mouth of the dark alley a white face seemed to float in the air.

"Marcus?" Annie said, straightening away from the cruiser, moving cautiously toward the building.

"You kissed him," he said. "That filthy lawyer. You kissed him!"

Anger vibrated in his voice. He took a step toward her.

"Yes, he kissed me," Annie said. Pulse racing, she tried to settle her hands casually on her hips-the right one within reach of her baton, a can of Mace, the butt of her Sig. The tip of her middle finger pressed against the stem of the rose Renard had given her and a thorn bit deep into her skin, the pain sharp and surprising.

"Does that upset you, Marcus? That I let him kiss me?"

"He's-he's one of Them!" he stammered, the words slurring as he forced them through his teeth. "He's against me. Like Pritchett. Like Fourcade. How could you do this, Annie?"

"I'm one of 'them' too, Marcus," she said simply. "I've told you that all along."

He shook his head in denial, the grinning mask a macabre contrast to the shock and fury vibrating from him in waves. "No. You're trying to help me. The work you've done. The way you've come to my aid. You saved my life- twice!"

"And I keep telling you, Marcus, I'm only doing my job."

"I'm not your job," he said. "You came to help me time and again when you didn't have to. You didn't want anyone to know. I thought…"

He trailed oft, unable to bring himself to say the words. Annie waited, marveling at the ease with which he had turned everything in his mind to fit his own wishes. It was crazy, and yet he sounded perfectly rational, as if any man would have made the same assumptions, as if he had every right to be angry with her for leading him on.

"You thought what?" she prodded.

"I thought you were special."

"Like you thought Pam was special?"

"You're just like her after all," he muttered, reaching into the deep pocket of his baggy black trousers.

Annie's hand moved to the butt of the Sig and slipped the lock strap free. A thousand people were having a party two hundred feet away, and she was standing alone with a probable murderer. The noise of the band seemed to fade to nothing.

"How do you mean?" she asked while her mind raced forward. Would he pull a knife? Would she have to take him down right here, right now? That wasn't how she thought it would go down. She didn't know what she had expected. A taped confession? The murder weapon surrendered without a fight?

"She took my friendship," he said. "She took my heart. And then she turned on me. And you're doing the same."

"She was afraid of you, Marcus. That was you calling her, prowling around her house, slashing her tires-wasn't it?"

"I would never have hurt her," he said, and Annie wondered if the answer was denial or guilt. "She took my gifts. I thought she enjoyed my company."

"And when she told you to get lost, you thought what -that maybe you could scare her anonymously and offer her comfort in person?"

"No. They turned her against me. She couldn't see how much I really cared. I tried to show her."

"Who turned her against you?"

"Her sorry excuse for a husband. And Stokes. They both wanted her and they turned her against me. What's your excuse, Annie?" he asked, bitterly. "You want that lawyer? He's using you to do his dirty work for him. Can't you see that?"

"He's got nothing to do with this, Marcus. I want to solve Pam's murder. I told you that from the first."

"You'll be sorry," he said quietly. "In the end, you'll be sorry."

He started to pull his hand from his pocket. Heart pounding, Annie pulled the Sig and pointed it at his chest.

"Slowly, Marcus," she ordered.

Slowly he drew his hand free, balled into a fist, and held it out to the side.

"Whatever it is, drop it."

He opened his fingers, letting fall something small that hit the sidewalk with a soft rattle. With her left hand, Annie pulled her flashlight from her belt and took a step closer, the Sig still raised. Renard moved back toward the alley.

"Stand right there."

She swept the beam of the flashlight down on the concrete and it reflected back off a strand of gold chain, a necklace lying like a length of discarded string with a heart-shaped locket attached.

"I thought you were special," he said again.

Annie holstered the Sig and picked the necklace up.

"Is this the necklace you tried to give Pam?"

He stared at her through the empty eyes of the smiling mask and took another step back from her. "I don't have to answer your questions, Deputy Broussard," he said coldly. "And I believe I'm free to go."

With that, he turned and went back down the alley.

"Great," Annie said under her breath, closing her fist on the locket.

Her edge with him had been her similarity to Pam, the woman he had fallen in love with. She had gained his trust, his respect, his attraction. In a heartbeat that was gone. Now she was more like Pam, the woman he may have butchered.

The two-way crackled against her hip and she jumped half a foot. "Broussard? Where the fuck are you? Are you back on or what?"

Annie plucked at her wet shirt and bit back a groan. "On my way, Sarge. Out."

Sucking on the fingertip the thorn had lacerated, she wove her way through the crowd across France to the old Canal gas station. The place had been closed since the oil bust, and the old pumps had been taken out long ago, leaving weeds to sprout where they had once stood. The BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR SALE sign had been propped in the front window so long it had turned yellow. A herd of teenage boys in baggy clothes and backward baseball caps milled around on the cracked concrete, drinking Mountain Dew and smoking cigarettes. Eyeing Annie with suspicion, they scattered like a pack of scruffy young dogs as she passed through their midst.

She went to the side of the building, where a pay phone was still in service. She dialed Fourcade and flapped her wet shirtfront as the phone on the other end rang. His machine clicked on with a curt "Leave a message."

"It's Annie. I just had a run-in with Renard. It's a long story, but the bottom line is I might have pushed him over the edge. He said some things that make me nervous. Um- I'm stuck working the dance, then I'm going home. I'm off tomorrow. I'll see you when I see you."

She hung up feeling vaguely sick. She may have pushed a killer over the line from love to hate. Now what?

She watched the party from the corner of the vacant station, as removed from it as if she were standing behind a wall of glass. Inside her mind, she didn't hear the music of the band or the sounds from the crowd.

"I would never have hurt her."

Not that he hadn't hurt Pam. He had made that verbal distinction before.

"She couldn't see how much I really cared. I tried to show her."

How had he tried to show her? With his gifts or with the concern he had shown after he had scared her half to death? The same creepy, voyeuristic concern he had shown Annie when she'd told him about someone taking a shot at her.

"Were you alone? You must have been frightened… Having a stranger reach into your life and commit an act of violence -it's a violation. It's rape. You feel so vulnerable, so powerless … so alone… Don't you?"

Words of comfort that weren't comforting at all. He had made her feel vulnerable, made her feel violated, and he had done the same to Pam. She knew he had.

"I thought you were special"

"Like you thought Pam was special?"

"You're just like her, after all… You'll be sorry… In the end, you'll be sorry."

In the same way Pam must have been sorry? Sorry no one else could have seen the monster in him. Sorry no one had listened to her pleas for help. Sorry no one had heard her screams that night out on Pony Bayou.

Annie dug the necklace out of her pocket and held it up, watching the small gold locket sway back and forth. Renard had tried to give Pam a necklace for her birthday two weeks before she was killed.

"Officer Broussard?"

The soft voice broke Annie's concentration. She caught the locket in her fist and turned. Doll Renard stood beside her in a prison gray June Cleaver shirtwaist that had been intended for a woman with breasts and hips. In her hands she played nervously with the stem of a delicate butterfly-shaped mask covered in iridescent sequins. The elegant beauty of the mask seemed at odds with the woman holding it-plain, unadorned, her mouth a bitter knot.

"Mrs. Renard. Can I help you?"

Doll glanced away, anxious. "I don't know if you can. I swear, I don't know what I'm doing here. It's a nightmare, that's what. A terrible nightmare."

"What is?"

Tears glazed across the woman's eyes. One hand left the stem of her mask to pat at her heart. "I don't know. I don't know what to do. All this time I thought we'd been wronged. All this time. My boys are all I have, you know. Their father betrayed us, and now they're all I have in the world."

Annie waited. In her previous meetings with Doll she had found the woman melodramatic and shrill, but the stress stretched taut in Doll Renard's voice now had the ring of genuineness. Her small, sharp nose was red at the tip, her eyes rimmed in crimson from crying.

"I knew motherhood would be a joy and a trial," she said, rubbing a hankie under her nose. "But all the joy of it has been robbed from me. And now I fear it's become a nightmare." Tears skimmed down her thin, pale cheeks. "I'm so afraid."

"Afraid of what, Mrs. Renard?"

"Of Marcus," she confessed. "I'm afraid my son has done something terribly wrong."