Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

"Help you up? I should call an ambulance! Or I suppose I could shoot you and put you out of your misery."

He winced as he tried to push himself up onto his hands and knees. "I'm fine."

Annie made a rude sound. "Oh, excuse me, I mistook you for someone who'd had the shit beat out of him."

"Mais yeah," he mumbled. "That'd be me. It ain't the first time, sugar."

"Why does that not surprise me?"

He straightened slowly, pain rippling through his body. "Come on, Broussard, quit gawking and help me. If we're partners, we're partners."

Annie moved around beside him and let him hook an arm around her shoulders. "I don't mind saying you're more than I bargained for, Nick."

He leaned heavily against her as she helped him into the house. They lurched past the front parlor like a pair of winos. Annie glanced at the blood that dyed the front of his T-shirt and muttered an expletive.

"Who did this?"

"Friend of a friend."

"I think you need somebody to redefine that term for you. Where are we going?"

"Bathroom."

She steered him down the hall and nearly fell into the tub as she lowered him to sit on the closed lid of the toilet.

"God, are you sure you're alive?" she said, squatting down in front of him.

"Looks worse than it is."

"I suppose you're gonna tell me I should see the other guy."

"They were ugly to start with."

"They? Plural?"

"Nothing's broke," Nick said, fighting off another groan as the muscles in his back seized up. "I'll be pissing blood tomorrow, that's all."

He leaned his forearms on his thighs and tried to concentrate on clearing away the dizziness. His head was banging like a ten-pound hammer on a cast-iron pot.

"Get me a whiskey," he grumbled.

"Don't boss me around, Fourcade," Annie said, digging through the small medicine cabinet. "I have it on good authority you should never piss off your medical personnel."

"Get me a whiskey, please, Nurse Ratched."

She peered over her shoulder with a look of amazement. "You must have a concussion. You just made a joke."

"It's in the kitchen," he ground out between his teeth, three of which felt loose. "Third cupboard on the right."

She went out and came back moments later with a tumbler of Jack Daniel's. She took the first shot herself.

"I want an explanation, Fourcade. And don't jerk me around. I've got a bottle of peroxide and I know how to use it."

She set the whiskey on the sink and started to help him out of his jacket.

"I can do it," he protested.

"Oh, God, don't be such a man. You can hardly move."

Nick gave in and let her remove his jacket and his shoulder rig with the Ruger.

He was disgusted with himself. He should have anticipated DiMonti's attack, should have known better than to go out the same way he'd come in. He should have been fighting off the knuckle hangover with greater success. He shouldn't have needed someone to take care of him, and he couldn't allow himself to get used to it. He wasn't the kind of man who could expect that kind of comfort. His was a solitary existence by necessity. He had pared away the need for companionship to better focus on building the broken pieces of himself into something whole.

But the job was far from finished, and he was tired and battered, and Annie Broussard's touch felt too welcome.

He started to pull the bloodstained T-shirt off himself, until the pain cracked across his back again, as if DiMonti were right there with that damned spade handle.

"I thank God daily that I don't have testicles," Annie grumbled. "They obviously impair common sense."

She began jerking the T-shirt up his back, but her hands stilled before she was halfway. Angry red welts lashed across the small of his back, blood pooling beneath them in bruises as dark as thunderheads.

"Jesus," she breathed. She had to have hurt him just putting her arm around him to help him into the house, and he hadn't made a sound. Damned stubborn man, she thought. He'd probably gotten exactly what he deserved.

"It's nothing," he snapped.

She didn't comment but moved more carefully as she peeled the T-shirt up. His skin was hot, the scent of him masculine with a feral undertone. Sweat and blood, she told herself. There was nothing sexual in it, nothing sexual in the act of undressing him.

Her knuckles grazed his collarbone. He was eye level with her breasts. The room suddenly seemed as small as a phone booth.

Fourcade leaned back as she stepped away, as if he may have felt it, too-the strange magnetic pull. He pulled the T-shirt off his arms and threw it on the tile floor. His chest was wide and hard-looking, covered with a mat of dark hair that trailed down the center of a six-pack of stomach muscles and disappeared into the waistband of his jeans.

Annie swallowed hard and moved to the sink.

"I'm waiting for that explanation," she said. She waited another few minutes while she filled the sink with warm water and soaked a washcloth.

"I went to see Marcotte. A friend of his took exception to my visit."

"Gosh, imagine that." She dabbed gingerly at the blood that had crusted along a cut on his cheekbone. "I'm sure you were your usual charming self-spouting paranoid delusions, accusing him of being the devil. What were you doing there in the first place? Did you find something in Donnie's phone records?"

"No, but I don't like Marcotte's smell hanging around this. I wanted to rattle his cage."

"And you got your bell rung, instead. Careless."

It was. He had said so himself countless times on the endless drive home. He was rusty, and beyond that, he didn't think straight when it came to Marcotte.

"So who were these 'friends'?"

"A couple of knee busters belonging to Vic DiMonti."

"Vic DiMonti. The wiseguy Vic DiMonti?"

"C'est vrai. You got it in one, angel. Didn't think a fine upstanding citizen like Marcotte would know anyone like that, did you? Well, you'll never see them on the society page together, that's for damn sure."

He took a sip of the whiskey while she rinsed the blood out of the washcloth. The liquor stung the inside of his mouth where his teeth had cut into the soft tissue. It hit his empty stomach with an acidic hiss that was followed closely by a warm, numbing glow. He took another drink.

"This should have stitches," Annie muttered, staring at the cut that sliced his left eyebrow.

She'd thought he was insane when he'd first brought up the subject of Marcotte. She'd thought Marcotte was just part of the baggage of his past that he dragged around behind him and wouldn't let anyone see inside of. But if Marcotte was Donnie's secret buyer, and if Marcotte consorted with mob types… maybe Fourcade wasn't so crazy after all.

"So what did Marcotte have to say?"

"Nothing. I didn't like the quality of his silence."

"But if Donnie wasn't in contact with him before the murder, then he's not a motive. What Donnie does with his half of the company now is his own business."

He took hold of her wrist and pulled her hand away from his split chin. "The devil comes knocking at your door, 'Toinette, don'tcha turn your back on him just 'cause he's late for the first dance."

Annie's breath caught at the leashed strength in his grip, at the dark fire in his eyes. This was what she had warned herself away from-his intensity, his obsessions.

"I'm in this to close the homicide," she said. "Marcotte is your demon, not mine. I don't even know what he did to win that exalted place in your heart."

She had just finished telling herself she didn't want to know, and yet she found herself holding her breath as she waited for the explanation.

"If we're partners…" she whispered.

The silence, the moment, took on a strange density, as clear and thick as water. The air of expectation: too heavy to breathe, charged with electricity. The weight of it was more than he wanted, the import beyond what he would have allowed himself to consider. He wondered if she felt it, if she could recognize it for what it was. Then he took a deep breath and stepped off that inner ledge.