Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

"I'm Deputy Broussard! Annie Broussard."

"Broussard? Really?" The surprise wasn't quite genuine. He rolled her onto her back and shone his flashlight in her face, blinding her. "Well, what d'ya know? If it ain't our own little turncoat in the flesh."

"Fuck yourself, Pitre," Annie snapped. "And get the cuffs off while you're at it." She struggled to sit up. "What the hell took you so long? I called this in twenty minutes ago."

He shrugged, unconcerned, as he unlocked the handcuffs. "You know how it is. We gotta prioritize calls."

"And where did this rank? Somewhere below you paging through the latest Penthouse?"

"You really shouldn't insult your local patrol officer, Broussard," he said, rising, dusting off the knees of his uniform. "You never know when you might need him."

"Yeah, right."

Annie scooped up the Sig and pushed to her feet, biting back a groan.

She rolled her shoulders to try to dissipate the burning pain. "Great job, Pitre. How many home owners do you normally assault in the course of a shift?"

"I thought you was a burglar. You didn't obey my commands to get down. You oughta know better."

"Fine. It's my fault you whacked me. Now how about helping me look for the crook? Though I'm sure he's long gone after all your bellowing."

Pitre ignored the gibe, sniffing the air as they walked up around the corner to the south side of the building. "Jesus, what's that smell?" he said, shining the light ahead of them. "You been killing hogs or something?"

Annie pulled her own flashlight from the back waistband of her jeans. Dripping. She could still hear dripping. It hit her as she walked beneath the staircase-a drop, and then another-falling from the stairs that led up to her apartment. She held her hand out and shone the beam of the flashlight on her palm as another drop hit, and another. Blood.

"Oh my God," she breathed, bolting out from under the grisly shower.

"Christ Almighty," Pitre muttered, backing up.

The crushed shell beneath the staircase was red with it, as if someone had rolled an open can of paint down the steps. And hanging down between the treads like ghoulish tinsel were animal entrails.

Annie wiped her hand on her T-shirt and moved to the end of the staircase. Shining her light up to the landing, she illuminated a trail of bloody carnage, intestines strung like a garland down the steps.

"Oh my God," she said again.

A memory surfaced from a dark corner of her mind: Pam Bichon-stabbed and eviscerated. Then a possibility struck her like a bolt of lightning and the horror was magnified tenfold. Sos. Fanchon.

"Oh, God. Oh, no. No!" she screamed.

She wheeled away from Pitre and ran, feet slipping and skidding on the crushed shell, down the slope toward the dock. The beam of the flashlight waved erratically in front of her. Sos. Fanchon. Her family.

"Broussard!" Pitre shouted behind her.

Annie threw herself at the front door of the ranch house, pounding with the flashlight, twisting the doorknob with her bloody hand. The door swung open and she fell into Sos as a living room lamp went on.

"Oh God! Oh God!" she stammered, wrapping her arms around him in a frantic embrace. "Oh, thank God!"

"It's pig innards," Pitre announced, poking at an intestine with his baton. "Lotta pigs getting butchered this time of year."

Annie was still shaking. She paced back and forth at the base of her steps, fuming. Pitre had found the five-gallon plastic bucket the stuff had come in and set it off to the side, in view by the light now coming from the front window of the store. Annie wanted to kick it. She wanted to pick it up and beat Pitre with it because he was handy and he was a jerk. He was probably in on the joke. If it was a joke.

"I wanna hear it from the lab," she said.

"What? Why?"

"Because if a human body turns up two days from now missing its plumbing, someone's gonna want it back, Einstein."

Pitre made a disgruntled sound. If it was evidence, he would have to deal with it, scrape it back into the bucket, and haul it away in his car.

"It's pig innards," he insisted again.

Annie glared up into his face. "Are you so sure because you don't wanna deal with it or because you know?"

"I don't know nothin'," he grumbled.

"If Mullen is behind this, you tell him I'll kick his ass all the way to Lafayette!"

"I don't know nothing about it!" Pitre griped. "I answered your call. That's all I did!"

"Who's this Mullen, chère?" Sos demanded. "Why for he'd do somethin' like dis to you?"

Annie rubbed a hand across her forehead. How could she possibly explain? Sos had never been happy with her choice of profession in the first place. He'd love to hear how deputies were trying to run her out of the department. And if it wasn't Mullen, then who?

"A bad joke, Uncle Sos."

"A joke?" he huffed, incredulous. "Mais non. You didn' come laughin' to me, chérie. Ain' nothin' funny 'bout dis."

"No, there isn't," Annie agreed.

Fanchon looked up the stairs where half a dozen cats had come to feast on the entrails. "Dat's some mess, dat's for sure."

"Deputy Pitre and I will clean it up, Tante. It's evidence," Annie said. "You both go on back to bed. This is my mess. I'm sorry I woke you."

It took another five minutes of arguing to convince them to go home and leave the mess. Annie didn't want them touched by this act any more than they had been. As they finally walked away, a residual wave of the panic she had felt for them washed through her. The world had gone mad. That she could have thought someone could have butchered Sos and Fanchon was proof of it. Deep inside, she was just as afraid as everyone else in the parish that evil had leached up from hell to contaminate their world and devour them all.

She wished for more reasons than one that she could pin this undeniably on Mullen. But the more she thought on it, the less certain she felt. Keying her out on the radio was simple, anonymous. The snake in her Jeep had been easily managed, but this… Too much chance of being caught red-handed, literally. And the correlation to Pam Bichon was unnerving.

At Annie's insistence, Pitre hiked up onto the levee road with her and shone his light around. Animal eyes glowed red as the beam cut across woods and brush. If there had ever been a car parked along here, it was long gone now. There were no bloody footprints. Tires made no useable impression on the rock road.

It was nearly three A.M. by the time Annie trudged back up to her apartment via the in-store stairs. Her muscles ached. The pain between her shoulder blades where Pitre had struck her had a knifelike quality. At the same time, she was too wired to sleep.

She pulled another Abita from the fridge, washed down some Tylenol, and plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table, where her own notes on Pam Bichon's homicide were still spread out.

She picked up the chronology and glanced over the entries.

10/9 1:45 A.M.: Pam again reports a prowler. No suspect apprehended.

10/10: On leaving house for school bus, Josie Bichon discovers the mutilated remains of a raccoon on the front step.

Marcus Renard wanted to be her friend. He had wanted to be Pam Bichon's friend, too. Pam had rejected him. Annie had called him a killer to his face. Pam was dead. And Annie was lining herself up to take Pam's place in his life. Because she wanted to play detective, because she needed to find justice for a woman trapped in the shadowland of victims.

She had never imagined she might run the risk of ending up there herself.

"I was thinking maybe I could go into Records and Evidence," Annie said as she slid into the chair in front of Noblier's desk. She'd had all of three hours' sleep. She looked like hell already; lack of sleep wasn't going to alter the package noticeably.