A Thin Dark Line

5

You can't arrest Fourcade. He's a detective, for Christ's sake!" Gus ranted, pacing behind his desk.

The desk sergeant had called him in from a Rotary Club dinner where he had been ingesting calories in the liquid form, trying to dull the barbed comments of Rotarians unhappy with the day's court ruling. The civic leaders of Bayou Breaux had wanted Renard's indictment as something extra to celebrate for Mardi Gras. Even with half a pint of Amaretto in him, Gus felt as if his blood pressure just might cause his head to explode.

"What the hell were you thinking, Broussard?" he demanded.

Annie's jaw dropped. "I was thinking he committed assault! I saw him with my own eyes!"

"Well, there's got to be more to this story than what you know."

"I saw what I saw. Ask him yourself, Sheriff. He won't deny it. Renard looks like he put his face in a Waring blender."

"Fuck a duck," Gus muttered. "I told him, I told him! Where's he at now?"

"Interview B."

It had been a fight getting him in there. Not that Fourcade had resisted in any way. It was Rodrigue, the desk sergeant, and Degas and Pitre-deputies just hanging around. "Arresting Fourcade? Naw. Must be some mistake. Quit screwing around, Broussard. What'd he do-pinch your ass? We don't arrest our own. Nick, he's part of the Brotherhood. Whatsa matter with you, Broussard-you on the rag or somethin'? He beat up Renard? Christ, we oughta get him a medal! Is Renard dead? Can we throw a party?"

In the end, Fourcade had pushed past them through the doorway and let himself into Interview B.

The sheriff stalked past Annie and out the door. She hustled after him, a choke hold on her temper. If she'd hauled in a civilian, no one would have questioned her judgment or her perception of facts.

The door to the interview room was wide open. Rodrigue stood with one hand on the frame and one eye on his abandoned desk, grinning as he traded comments with someone inside the room, his mustache wriggling like a woolly caterpillar on his upper lip.

"Hey, Sheriff, we're thinking maybe Nick oughta get a ticker-tape parade."

"Shut up," Gus barked as he bulled his way past the desk sergeant and into the room where Degas and Pitre had sprawled into chairs. Coffee cups sat steaming on the small table. Fourcade sat on the far side, smoking a cigarette and looking detached.

Gus cut a scathing look at his deputies. "Y'all don't have nothing better to do, then why are you on my payroll? Get outta here! You too!" he snapped at Annie. "Go home."

"Go home? But-but, Sheriff," she stammered, "I was there. I'm the-"

"So was he." He pointed at Fourcade. "I talked to you, now I'm gonna talk to him. You got a problem with that, Deputy?"

"No, sir," Annie said tightly. She looked at Fourcade, wanting him to meet her eyes, wanting to see… what? Innocence? She knew he wasn't innocent. Apology? He didn't owe her anything. He took a drag on his cigarette and focused on the stream of smoke.

Gus planted his hands on the back of a vacant chair and leaned on it, waiting to hear the door close behind him. And when the door closed, he waited some more, wishing he would come to in his own cozy bed with his plump, snoring wife and realize this day had all been a bad dream and nothing more.

"What do you have to say for yourself, Detective?" he asked at last.

Nick stubbed out the butt in the ashtray Pitre had obligingly fetched him. What was he supposed to say? He had no explanation, only excuses.

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing. Nothing?" Noblier repeated, as if the word were foreign to his tongue. "Look at me, Nick."

He did so and wondered which was the better choice: to allow himself an emotional response to the disappointment he saw or to block it. Emotion was what unfailingly landed him in trouble. He had spent the last year of his life learning to hold it in an iron fist deep within him. Tonight it had broken free, and here he sat.

"I took a big chance bringing you on board here," Gus said quietly. "I did it because I knew your papa, and I owed him something from way back. And because I believed you about that business in New Orleans, and I thought you could do a good job here.

"This is how you pay me back?" he asked, voice rising.

"You screw up an investigation and beat the hell out of a suspect? You better have something more than nothing to say for yourself, or, by God, I'll throw your ass to the wolves!

"Why'd you go near Renard when I told you not to? Why'd you have to get in his face? Jesus Christ, do you have any idea what him and that anorexic lawyer of his are gonna do to this office? Tell me you had some kind of cause to go near him. What were you even doing in that part of town?"

"Drinking."

"Oh, great! Good answer! You left my office in a flaming temper and went and threw alcohol on it!"

He shoved the chair into the table. "Damage control," he muttered. "How the fuck do we spin this? I can say you were on surveillance."

"You told the press you pulled the surveillance."

"Fuck the press. I tell ' em what I want 'em to think. Renard is still a suspect. We got reason to watch him. That gives you cause to be there, and it shows I believe in your innocence on that evidence-tampering bullshit Kudrow's trying to stir up. So then what? Did he provoke you?"

"Does it matter?" Nick asked. "Never mind that he's a murderer, and the goddamn court shoulda punched his ticket for him-"

"Yeah, the court should have, but it didn't. Then Hunter Davidson tried to and you stopped him. It looks like you just wanted the job all for yourself."

"I know what it looks like."

"It looks like assault, at the very least. Broussard thinks I should throw your ass in jail."

Broussard. Nick pushed to his feet, the anger stirring anew. Broussard, who hadn't said ten words to him in the six months he'd been in Bayou Breaux. Who suddenly sought him out at Laveau's. Who appeared out of nowhere with a gun and the power to arrest him.

"Will you?" he asked.

"Not if I don't have to."

"Renard'll press charges."

"You bet your balls he will." Gus rubbed a hand over his face and secretly wished he'd stayed in geology all those years ago. "He's no shit-for-brains lowlife you can stick his head in a toilet and flush a confession outta him and won't nobody listen to him when he screams about it. Kudrow's been threatening a lawsuit all along. Harassment, he says. Unlawful arrest, he says. Well, I sure as hell know what he'll say about this."

He dropped down onto a chair. "All in all, I think I'm gonna wish you'd finished the job and fed Renard to the gators."

"What you hanging around for, Broussard?" Rodrigue asked. Blocky and nearly bald, he stood behind his desk shuffling papers with an air of false importance, as if he hadn't been kicked out of the interview room himself.

Annie gave the sergeant a defiant glare. "I'm the arresting officer. I've got a suspect to book, a report to file, and evidence to log in."

Rodrigue snorted. "There ain't gonna be no arrest, darlin'. Fourcade, he didn't do nothing ever'body in this parish hasn't wanted to do."

"Last time I looked, assault was against the law."

"Dat wasn't no assault. Dat was justice. Oh, yeah."

"Yeah," Degas chimed in. "And you interrupted it, Broussard. There's the crime. Why didn't you let him finish the job?"

Because that would have been murder, Annie thought. That Renard deserved killing didn't enter into it. The law was the law, and she was sworn to uphold it, as were Fourcade and Rodrigue and Degas, and Gus Noblier.

"That's right," Pitre said, swaggering toward her, pulling the handcuffs off his belt. "Maybe we oughta be arresting you, Broussard. Obstruction of justice."

"Interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty," Degas added.

"I think a strip search is in order here," Pitre suggested, reaching for her arm.

"Fuck you, Pitre," she snapped, jerking away from him.

A salacious sneer lit his face. "I'm up for it, sugar, if you think it'll help your case."

"Go piss up a rope."

"The sheriff told you to go home, Broussard," Rodrigue said. "You're disobeying an order. You wanna go on report?"

Annie shook her head in disbelief. He would condone brutality, and write her up for loitering. She looked at the door to the interview room, uncertain. Procedure dictated one course of action, her sheriff had ordered another. She would have given anything to know what was being said on the other side of that door, but no one was going to let her in either literally or figuratively. Gus had taken over, and Gus Noblier was absolute ruler of the Partout Parish Sheriff's Office, if not of Partout Parish itself.

"Fine," she said grudgingly. "I'll do the paperwork in the morning."

She felt their eyes burning into her back all the way to the door, their hostility a tangible thing. The sensation made her feel ill. These were men she had known for two years, men she had joked with.

The mist had evolved into a steady, cold rain. Annie pulled her denim jacket up over her head and ran to the Jeep, where her ice cream had melted and was seeping through the carton into a milky puddle on the driver's side floor. A fitting end to her evening.

She sat behind the wheel, trying to imagine what would happen tomorrow, but nothing came. She had no frame of reference. She had never arrested a fellow officer.

"We don't arrest our own. Nick, he's part of the Brotherhood."

The Brotherhood. The Code.

I broke the Code.

"Well, what the hell was I supposed to do?" she asked aloud.

The plastic alligator that hung from the mirror stared back at her with a mocking leer. Annie snapped at him with a forefinger and sat back as he danced on the end of his tether. She glanced at the paper bag she had tucked between the bucket seats. The bag her ice cream had come in. The bag she had used to collect Fourcade's bloody gloves. Each glove should have been bagged individually, but she'd made do with what she had on hand, slipping one glove in, then folding the bag and inserting the other in the top pocket created by the fold. Procedure dictated she log in the evidence, see to it that it was secured in the evidence room. Instinct kept her from running back into the station with the bag. She could still feel the burning gazes of Rodrigue and Degas and Pitre boring into her. She had broken the Code.

And yet, she had bent rules, had made concessions for Fourcade she wouldn't have made with a civilian. She should have called a unit to the scene, but she hadn't. The jurisdiction was City of Bayou Breaux, not Partout Parish, but it seemed like betrayal to turn Fourcade over to another department. She had called an ambulance for Renard, explained nothing to the paramedics, and hauled Fourcade to the station in her own vehicle. She hadn't even called in to dispatch to warn them, because she didn't want it on the radio.

She had made concessions to Fourcade because he was a cop, and still she was being made the heavy. Men she would have joked with last night suddenly looked at her as if she were a hostile and unwelcome stranger.

She started the Jeep and rolled out of the parking lot as two cars turned in. Deputies coming on for the midnight shift. The news of Fourcade's run-in would spread like hot oil in a skillet. Her world had suddenly turned 180 degrees.

Everything simple had become complex. Everything familiar had become unfamiliar. Everything light had gone dark. She looked at the rain and remembered Fourcade's whispered word: Shadowland.

The streets were deserted, making the traffic lights seem an extravagance. The majority of Bayou Breaux's seven thousand residents were working-class people who went to bed at a decent hour weeknights and saved their hell-raising for the weekends. Commercial fishermen, oil workers, cane farmers. What industry there was in town supported those same professions.

The core of Bayou Breaux was old. A couple of the buildings on La Rue Dumas had been standing there since before the first Acadians got off the boats from le grand derangement in the eighteenth century, when the British confiscated their property in Nova Scotia and kicked them out. Many more buildings dated to the nineteenth century- some clapboard, some brick with false fronts, some in good shape, some not. Annie drove past them, temporarily oblivious to their history.

A neon light for Dixie beer glowed red in the window of T-Neg's, the nightspot in what was still called the colored part of town. The modern rage for political correctness had yet to sift into the deeper recesses of South Louisiana. She hung a right at Canray's Garage, a tumbledown filling station that looked like something from a bleak postapocalyptic sci-fi movie, with junked cars and disemboweled engines abandoned all around. The houses down this street didn't look much better. Tatty one-story cottages rose off the ground on leaning brick pilings, the houses crammed shoulder to shoulder with yards the size of postage stamps.

The properties gradually became larger, the homes more respectable and more modern the farther west she drove. The old neighborhoods gave way to subdivisions on the southwest side of town, where contractors had lined cul-de-sacs with brick pseudo-Acadian and pseudo-Caribbean plantation cottages. A.J. lived out here.

But how could she go to him? He worked for the DA. The cops and the prosecutors may have technically been on the same big team for justice, but the reality was often more adversarial than congenial. If she went over the sheriff's head and crossed the line into the DA's camp, there would be hell to pay with Noblier, and the rest of the department would see it only as further proof that she had turned on them.

And if she went to A.J. as a friend, then what? Could she expect him to separate who they were from what they did when a possible felony charge hung in the balance?

Annie pulled a U-turn and headed for the hospital. Marcus Renard's beating was her case until someone told her differently. She had a victim's statement to take.

Apristine white statue of the Virgin Mary welcomed the afflicted to Our Lady of Mercy with open arms. Spotlights nestled in the hibiscus shrubs at the base of her pedestal illuminated her all night long, a beacon to the battered. The hospital itself had been built in the seventies, during the oil boom, when ready money and philanthropy were in abundant supply. A two-story brick L, it sprawled over a manicured lawn that was set back just far enough from the bayou to be both scenic and prudent in flood season.

Annie parked in the red zone in front of the ER entrance, flipping down her visor with the insignia of the sheriff's department clipped to it. Notebook in hand, she headed into the hospital, wondering if Renard would be in any condition to speak to her. If he died, would that make life easier or harder?

"We just got him moved into a room." Nurse Jolie led her down a corridor that glowed like pearl under the soft night lighting. "I voted for the boiler room-the boiler itself, to be precise. Do you know who beat him up? I wanna kiss that man all over."

"He's in jail," Annie lied.

Nurse Jolie arched a finely curved brow. "What for?"

Annie bit back a sigh as they stopped before the door to room 118. "Is he awake? Sedated? Can he talk?"

"He can talk through what's left of his teeth. Dr. Van Allen used a local on his nose and jaw. He hasn't been given any painkillers." A slyly sadistic smile turned the nurse's mouth. "We don't want to mask the symptoms of a serious head trauma with narcotics."

"Never piss off medical people," Annie said, pretending to jot herself a note.

"Damn straight, girl."

Jolie pushed open the door to Renard's room and held it. The room was set up as a double, but only one bed was occupied. Renard lay with the head of the bed tipped up slightly, the fluorescent light glaring down into his eyes, which were nearly swollen shut. His face looked like a mutant pomegranate. Just two hours after his beating and already the swelling and bruising made him unrecognizable. One eyebrow was stitched together. Another line of stitches ran up his chin and over his lower lip like a millipede. Cotton had been crammed up his nostrils, and what was left of his nose was swathed in bandaging and adhesive tape.

"Not a plug to be pulled," the nurse said regretfully. She cut a glance at Annie. "You couldn't have just hung back until Whoever put this asshole in a coma?"

"Timing has never been my strong suit," Annie muttered with bitter irony.

"Too bad."

Annie watched her glide away, heading back for the nurses' station.

"Mr. Renard, I'm Deputy Broussard," she said, uncapping her pen as she moved toward the bed. "If it's at all possible, I'd like to get a statement from you as to what happened this evening."

Marcus studied her through the slits left open in the swelling around his eyes. His angel of mercy. Beside the elevated hospital bed, she looked small. The denim jacket she wore swallowed her up. She was pretty in a tomboy-next-door kind of way, with a blackening bruise high on one cheek and her brown hair hanging in disarray. Her eyes were the color of cafe noir, slightly exotic in shape, their expression dead serious as she waited for him to speak.

"You were there," he whispered, setting off a stabbing pain in his face. What little lidocaine the doctor had bothered to use was wearing off. The packing in his nose forced him to breathe through his mouth, and only added to the feeling that his head was twice its normal size. His sinuses were draining down the back of his throat, half choking him.

"I need to know what happened before I got there," she said. "What precipitated the fight?"

"Attack."

"You're saying Detective Fourcade simply attacked you? No words were exchanged?"

"I came out… of the building," he said haltingly. Tape bound his cracked ribs so tightly he wasn't able to take in more than a teaspoon of air at a time. "He was there. Angry… about the ruling. Said it wasn't over. Hit me. Again… and again."

"You didn't say anything to him?"

"He wants me dead."

She glanced up at him from her notebook. "He's hardly the only one, Mr. Renard."

"Not you," Marcus said. "You… saved me."

"I was doing my job."

"And Fourcade?"

"I don't speak for Detective Fourcade."

"He tried… to kill me."

"Did he state that he meant to kill you?"

"Look at me."

"It's not my place to draw conclusions, Mr. Renard."

"But you did," he insisted. "I heard you say, 'You're killing him.' You saved me. Thank you."

"I don't want your thanks," Annie said bluntly.

"I didn't… kill Pam. I loved her… like a friend."

"Friends don't stalk other friends."

Marcus lifted a finger to admonish her. "Conclusion…"

"That's not my case. I'm free to review the facts and come to any conclusion I like. Did you provoke Detective Fourcade in any way?"

"No. He was irrational… and drunk."

He tried to moisten his lips, his tongue butting into the jagged edges of several chipped teeth and a blank space where a tooth had been. He shifted his gaze to a plastic water pitcher on his right.

"Could you please… pour me a drink… Annie?"

"Deputy Broussard," Annie said, too sharply. His use of her name unnerved her. She wanted to deny his request, but he already had enough to file suit against the department. There was no sense exacerbating the situation over so simple a task.

She set her notebook on the bedside stand, poured half a glass of water, and handed it to him. The knuckles of his right hand were skinned raw and painted orange with iodine. This was the hand he would have held the knife in as he butchered a woman he claimed to love as a friend.

He tried to sip at the water, avoiding the mended split in his lip by pressing the glass against the left corner of his mouth. A stream dribbled down his chin onto his hospital gown. He should have had a straw, but the nurses hadn't left him one. Annie supposed he'd be lucky if they hadn't poisoned the water.

"Thank you, again… Deputy," he said, attempting a smile that made him look more ghoulish. "You're very kind."

"Do you want to press charges?" Annie asked abruptly.

He made a choking sound that might have been a laugh. "He tried to kill me. Yes… I want to press charges. He should be… in prison. You'll help me put him there… Deputy. You're my witness."

The pen stilled in Annie's hand as the prospect went through her like a skewer. "You know something, Renard? I wish I'd never turned down that street tonight."

He tried to shake his head. "You don't… want me dead… Annie. You saved me today. Twice."

"I already wish I hadn't."

"You don't… look for revenge. You look… for justice… for truth. I'm not… a bad man… Annie."

"I'll feel better if a court decides that," she said, closing her notebook. "Someone from the department will get back to you."

Marcus watched her walk away, then closed his eyes and conjured up her face in his mind's eye. Pretty, rectangular, a hint of a cleft in the chin, skin the color of fresh cream and new Georgia peaches. She believed in the good in people. She liked to help. He imagined her voice-soft, a little husky. He thought of what she might have said to him if she hadn't come in her capacity as deputy. Words of sympathy and comfort, meant to soothe his pain.

Annie Broussard. His angel of mercy.