Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

"I'm not interested in your technicalities." She unlocked the car door with one hand while balancing her clipboard, files, and ticket books in the other arm. "It's my sergeant who's gonna kick my butt if I don't get to work."

"Your sergeant? Or Gus Noblier-for talking to me?"

"I don't know what you mean," she lied. She added the car keys to the pile on her arm and started to pull the cruiser's door open.

"Can I hold something for you?" Kudrow offered gallantly, reaching toward her.

"No," Annie snapped, twisting away.

The sudden movement sent the pile sliding off the clipboard. The keys, the ticket books, the files tumbled to the ground, the Renard file spilling its contents. Panicking, Annie dropped the clipboard and fell to the blacktop on her hands and knees, chanting expletives, scrambling to scrape the papers back into the folder before the wind could take them. Kudrow crouched down, reaching for the notebook that had blown open, its pages of details and observations and interview notes fluttering, as tantalizing to a lawyer as a glimpse of lacy underwear. Annie snatched it out of his hand, then saw his liver-spotted hand reach next for the arrest form she hadn't filed and hadn't shredded.

She lunged for it, cracking her elbow hard on the blacktop, crumpling the form in her fist as she grabbed it.

"I've got it. I've got it," she stammered. Turning her face away from Kudrow, she closed her eyes and mouthed a silent thank-you to God. She clutched the mess of papers and folders and clipboard to her chest, rose awkwardly, and backed around the open door of the squad car.

Kudrow watched her with interest. "Something I shouldn't see, Miss Broussard?"

Annie's fingers tightened on the crumpled arrest form. "I have to go."

"You were the officer on the scene last night. My client claims you saved his life. It took courage for you to stop Fourcade," he said, bracing the car door open as Annie slid behind the wheel. "It takes courage to do the right thing."

"How would you know?" Annie grumbled. "You're a lawyer."

The gibe bounced off his jaundiced hide. She could feel the heat of his gaze on her face, though she refused to look at him. A faint, fetid scent of decay touched her nose, and she wondered if it was the bayou or Kudrow.

"The abuse of power, the abuse of office, the abuse of public trust-those are terrible things, Miss Broussard."

"So are stalking and murder. It's Deputy Broussard." She turned the key in the ignition and slammed the door shut.

Kudrow stepped back as the car rolled forward. He pulled his coat closed around him as the spring breeze swept across the parking lot. Disease had skewed his internal thermometer to where he was always either freezing or on fire. Today he was cold to the marrow, but his soul was burning up with purpose. If he could have been half a step quicker, he would have been holding an arrest report in his hand. An arrest report on Nick Fourcade, the thug who was not sitting in a jail cell this morning, thanks to August F. Noblier.

"I'll ruin you both," he murmured as he watched the squad car turn onto the street. "And there's the lady who's going to help me do it."

As Annie had suspected, word of Renard's run-in with Fourcade had already hit the streets. Late-shift cops and nurses from Our Lady had carried what pieces of the tale they had to Madame Collette's diner, where the breakfast waitresses doled it out with announcements of the morning blue plate special. The smell of gossip and dissatisfaction was as thick in the air as the scent of bacon grease and coffee.

Annie endured a hail of barbed comments as she went to the counter for her coffee, only to be told by a hostile waitress the restaurant was "out of coffee." The patrons of Madame Collette's had passed judgment. The rest of Bayou Breaux would not be far behind.

They wanted someone to be guilty-in their minds if not in the courts, Annie thought. People felt betrayed, cheated by a system that seemed suddenly to favor the wrong side. They wanted to put this latest atrocity behind them and go on as if it hadn't happened. They were afraid they never would be able to do so. Afraid that maybe evil ran under the parish like an aquifer someone had tapped into by mistake, and no one knew how to plug the leak and send the force back underground.

At Po ' Richard's, the woman at the drive-up window handed Annie her coffee and wished her a nice day, obviously out of the news loop. The brew was Po ' Richard's usual: too black, too strong, and bitter with the taste of chicory. Annie dumped it into her spill-proof mug, added three fake creams, and headed out of town.

The radio crackled to life, reminding her that she was hardly the only person in the parish with trouble.

"All units in the vicinity: Y'all got a possible 261 out to the Country Estates trailer park. Over."

Annie grabbed her mike as she punched the accelerator. "One Able Charlie responding. I'm two minutes away. Out."

When no response came back, she tried the mike again. The radio crackled back at her.

"10-1, One Able Charlie. You're breaking up. Must be something wrong with your radio. You're where? Out."

"I'm responding to that 261 in Country Estates. Out."

Nothing came back. Annie hung up the mike, annoyed with the glitch, but more concerned with the call: a sexual assault. She'd caught a handful of rape cases in her career. There was always an extra emotional element to deal with at a rape call. She wasn't just another cop. It wasn't just another call. She went in not only as an officer, but as a woman, able to provide the victim with the kind of support and sympathy no male officer could offer.

The Country Estates mobile-home park sat in exactly the middle of nowhere between Bayou Breaux and Luck, which qualified it as country. The place bore no resemblance to an estate. The name suggested a certain tidy gentility. Reality was a dozen rusting relic trailer houses that had been plunked down on a two-acre weed patch back in the early seventies.

Jennifer Nolan's trailer was at the back of the lot, a pink and once-white model with an OPERATION ID crime-watch sticker on the front door. Annie knocked on the storm door and announced herself as a deputy. The inside door cracked open two inches, then five.

If the face that stared out at her had ever been pretty, Annie doubted it ever would be again. Both lips were ballooning, both split open. The brown eyes were nearly swollen shut.

"Thank God, you're a woman," Jennifer Nolan mumbled. Her red hair hung in frizzy strings. She had wrapped herself in a pink chenille robe that she clutched together over her heart as she shuffled painfully away from the door.

"Ms. Nolan, have you called an ambulance?" Annie asked, following her into the small living room.

The trailer reeked of tobacco smoke and the kind of mildew that grows under old carpets. Jennifer Nolan lowered herself with great care to a boxy plaid sofa.

"No, no," she mumbled. "I don't want… Everyone will look."

"Jennifer, you need medical attention."

Annie squatted down in front of her, taking in the obvious signs of psychological shock. There was a good chance Jennifer Nolan wasn't fully aware of the extent of her injuries. She probably felt numb, stunned. The mental self-protection mechanisms of denial may have kicked in: How could this terrible thing have happened to her, it couldn't be real, it was just a terrible nightmare. Already her logic was skewed: She worried about the appearance of an ambulance, but not the cop car.

"Jennifer, I'm going to call an ambulance for you. Your neighbors won't know what it's coming here for. Our main concern is your well-being. Do you understand? We want to make sure you're taken care of."

"Judas," Sticks Mullen muttered, letting himself in without knocking. "Looks like somebody already took care of her."