Chapter 18

18

Dozer Cormier was as advertised: a massive individual. Nick spotted him as soon as he got out of his vehicle at the construction site. Even from a distance, he dwarfed his co-workers by almost comic proportions. The sun had come out and shone off his bald dome as if it was made of titanium. Nick watched as he plucked a stack of two-by-fours off a flatbed truck and carried it to the house under construction like he was carrying a handful of yardsticks.

“Tommy Crawford?” Nick said, approaching the crew boss who stood at the cab of the flatbed, writing on a clipboard.

“Who wants to know?” The man looked up from under the wide brim of a straw hat, his eyes permanently narrowed against the harsh glare of the Louisiana sun.

Nick held his badge up. “Fourcade. Sheriff’s office.”

“Hell, there’s never a cop around when you need one, and when you don’t, here they come calling,” Crawford said. He set his clipboard aside and reached out to shake Nick’s hand. “Donnie called ahead to say you’d be stopping. You want to talk to Dozer, he said.”

“Yeah. It shouldn’t take long.”

“Has he done something?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Is he the type?”

“Not in the main,” Crawford said. “He’s a good kid. He gets to drinking, though, he’s been known to make some bad choices.”

“I’m hoping he might be able to shed some light on where Marc Mercier is at,” Nick said. “I understand they’re buddies.”

“Oh, yeah,” Crawford said. “Mutt and Jeff. I saw on the news Marc’s gone missing.”

“You know him?”

“Marc? Sure. Everybody knows Marc. You think he’s had an accident or something?”

“We don’t know.”

“They said on the news he’d gone out hunting. I hope he didn’t fall out of his boat or something,” Crawford said. “I had an uncle went teal hunting up on Catahoula Lake years ago, back when you could still hunt up there. Bent over the side of the boat to pull up his trolling motor, the string popped, and he lost his balance and went headfirst into the water with waders on. Those waders filled up and that was that. Another hunter saw him go in from maybe thirty yards away, but by the time he got over there, it was too late. It happens.”

“It does,” Nick said. “No sign of his boat yet, though. Hoping Dozer might have some ideas as to where he might have gone.”

Crawford nodded and shouted across the yard, “Dozer! Dozer Cormier! Get your ass over here!”

“He’s a good worker?” Nick asked as he watched the big man turn and start lumbering toward them.

“He’s not a self-starter, if you know what I mean, but as long as I stay on him, he’ll work harder than a rented mule.”

“His drinking doesn’t get in the way?”

He shook his head, rubbing at the beard stubble on his chin. “Almost never. He missed a couple days after Halloween. Too much partying at Monster Bash. He’s been a little shaky since, but he’ll be all right. I haven’t said anything about that to Donnie. I want to give the kid a chance to sort himself out and get back on the beam, you know. He can be a damn couillon for sure, but he’ll be all right.”

“Whatchu need, boss?” Dozer asked.

He had to be six foot five or more, Nick thought, and well over three hundred pounds. A giant of a man with a close-cropped beard and mustache. He wore bib overalls that had to have taken an entire bolt of fabric to make. His hands were the size of catcher’s mitts.

“This here’s Detective Fourcade from the sheriff’s office,” Tommy Crawford said.

Dozer’s face dropped. “I ain’t done nothing!”

“Not saying you have, Mr. Cormier,” Nick said. “You might have heard your friend Marc Mercier is missing. I’m hoping you might help me with some information.”

“I ain’t done nothing to Marc!”

He had a look in his small dark eyes like a horse on the verge of panic. No doubt that would be exactly what it felt like if he bolted—like getting run over by a horse.

“No one is accusing you of anything, Mr. Cormier,” Nick said calmly. “I just want to have a chat. You want us to find Marc, yeah? Bring him home safe to his family?”

“Well…yeah…”

“Let’s step over here in the shade. Might as well make this a little break from your day, right?”

“I guess,” he said hesitantly.

They moved away from the worksite, and Dozer took a seat on a pile of building materials that had been stacked there for the purpose. Nick stayed on his feet, noting that seated, Dozer Cormier was almost at eye level with him.

“When did you last see Marc?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dozer said. “A couple nights ago, I guess. I don’t remember exactly.”

“You don’t remember?” Nick asked with just a hint of incredulity. “He’s your best friend. You spend a lot of time together the way I hear it, but you don’t remember when you last saw him?”

“I don’t know. It might have been Friday or it might have been Saturday. We had a few beers.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Where?”

“Where did you have the beers? I imagine people saw you there. Someone will remember.”

Dozer didn’t seem to like that idea, that other people would have seen them together at a specific place and time. Nick could count the man’s pulse ticking in his carotid artery on the side of his neck. He was pale beneath the flush high on his cheekbones, and a fine sheen of sweat was rising on his forehead.

“We went a couple places,” he said. “I don’t really remember.”

“You seem awfully nervous, Mr. Cormier,” Nick said quietly. “Why is that?”

“Me, I don’t like talking to cops,” Cormier admitted. “Y’all are always trying to trick people into saying things they shouldn’t.”

“I’m not trying to trick you, Mr. Cormier. I’m just gathering information. If you haven’t done anything wrong, then I shouldn’t be able to trick you into saying any wrong thing, right?”

Cormier looked at him like a deer in headlights.

“That’s not a trick question,” Nick said.

Dozer held still.

He was hardly the first person to react with nerves to being questioned. Nick knew not to read too much into it. People were wary of cops in general. He had learned to use it to his advantage.

“Let’s do this,” he proposed. “Why don’t you just tell me about the last time you saw Marc, what y’all did, what kind of mood he was in.”

“I told you, we went out for some beers.”

“Was that Saturday night?” Nick asked. “He’d had a fight with his wife…”

“Yeah, maybe. They fight a lot. She don’t like us going out.”

“Does Marc get pissed off about that—her dogging him for going out with his buddies?”

“Yeah, for sure. She’s always ragging on him. She’s not from here, you know. She don’t know how things are.”

“So was he in a bad mood that night?”

“For a while.”

“Did he ever talk about leaving his wife, getting divorced, anything like that?”

Dozer shrugged, his massive shoulders rolling. “Don’t they all? Married guys. They’re all the time bitching about their wives. I don’t know why they get married in the first place.”

“You’re single, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Did Marc ever say anything about just packing it in, taking off, starting a new life?”

“Who doesn’t?” Dozer asked.

“You didn’t take it serious?”

“No. Everybody talks like that sometimes. Don’t nobody ever do it.”

“Did Marc say anything about what he was doing the next day?”

“He was going hunting with Luc.”

“Did he ask you to go along with him?”

“No. Me, I don’t like Luc. He’s an asshole. I ain’t gonna waste a day off with that guy.”

“Why did you show up at the Corners, then, Sunday morning?”

Dozer startled like he’d gotten shocked. “What?”

“You were at the Corners Sunday morning,” Nick said, “about seven, seven fifteen.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m a detective,” Nick said.

“Why were you watching me?” Dozer demanded. “I ain’t done nothing!” he said, pushing to his feet. “This is some kind of Big Brother bullshit!”

“If you haven’t done anything, then why you don’t want to answer my questions, Mr. Cormier?” Nick asked, letting his impatience begin to show. “This is getting tedious for me. Now, I can ask you to accompany me back to the law enforcement center, and we can have a much longer conversation about this, or you can find the spirit of cooperation right now. Do you want to have to explain to Donnie Bichon why you lost half a day’s work being a goddamn couillon for no reason?”

Cormier shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his gigantic hands jammed at his waist as he looked left and right, as if scoping out an escape route.

“Marc was supposed to meet his brother at the Corners Sunday morning to go out to their hunting property,” Nick said, trying to pull him back on topic.

“Then he probably did,” Dozer said. “That’s got nothing to do with me.”

“He didn’t,” Nick said. “Neither of them showed up.”

“Then maybe you ought to be talking to Luc, not me.”

“You know they had a fight on Saturday. Marc gave him a black eye. Do you know what that was about?”

Dozer shook his head.

“Marc had a fight with his brother bad enough to come to blows, but he didn’t say anything about that?”

“Nope. Ain’t the first time that’s happened.”

“But he still planned to go hunting with him the next day.”

“Yeah. So? They’re brothers. That’s what they do. That’s how they are.”

“What were you doing at the Corners?” Nick asked again.

“It’s a free country,” Dozer said. “I can go hunting, too. Me and half of south Louisiana. You asking all of them?”

“What were you hunting?”

“Deer.”

“Did you get one?”

“No.”

“What did you stop at the Corners for?”

“They got them good breakfast biscuits,” Dozer confessed. “I got me a sack of them and went out in the woods. You can ask Sharelle Dupuis. She give me a hard time for buying so many.”

“Those are good biscuits,” Nick conceded, easing off on the pressure again. Dozer let go a sigh. “Have you heard from Marc since then?”

“No.”

“Have you tried to call him?”

“No.”

“Your best friend’s missing and you haven’t tried to call him?”

“I ain’t got a cell phone right now,” Dozer said. “I lost mine Halloween night. I can’t afford a new one until payday.”

“Sounds like you had quite a night that night.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s that mean?”

“You and Marc did Monster Bash,” Nick said. “You must have partied some after. Your crew boss says you missed a couple days’ work. That’s a big hangover.”

“It ain’t against the law to get drunk.”

“That all depends on what kind of trouble you get into while you’re over the limit, yeah?”

Dozer looked past him. “Can I go back to work now?”

Nick said nothing for a moment, just to fuck with him. He pulled out a business card and tucked it into the chest pocket of the big man’s overalls.

“You hear from Marc, you call me,” he said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cormier.”

Dozer started to move.

“One more thing,” Nick said.

Cormier turned back around, scowling.

“Did you happen to see Robbie Fontenot on Halloween?”

“Robbie?” he said, as if he’d never heard the name.

“Robbie Fontenot. You went to school with him.”

“No,” Dozer said. “I ain’t seen him in years.”

And he turned and walked away.

Nick watched him go, trying to sort out the man’s reactions and pick the truth from the lies.

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the text from Caleb McVay.

No go on the dental. Too much damage.

“Damn.”