Chapter 28

28

Dozer Cormier had never shown up for work that day. His crew boss had shrugged it off as Dozer being Dozer. Just more of the rough patch he’d been going through lately. The rough patch he’d been going through since Halloween, the night Robbie Fontenot had gone missing. Robbie Fontenot, whom Dozer had flatly denied seeing.

He had looked Nick right in the eyes and said he hadn’t seen Robbie Fontenot in years when he had in fact seen him in Bayou Breaux little more than a week past. Why lie about it?

Of course, lying seemed to be Dozer’s default mode when he was panicking. Confrontation overwhelmed him, and he automatically chose the quick lie over a truth that might trap him in something. Trap him in what, was the question.

Nick turned in at the Country Estates mobile home park. It was even more depressing in the light of day than it had been the night before with its faded, rusting old trailer houses and chicken-scratch yards of dirt and weeds and beater cars. He pulled in beside Dozer’s Silverado. At least he was keeping his day drinking at home instead of endangering the public on the roadways.

Nick found him around the back of the trailer, snoring in a hammock strung between two sickly elm trees, a pile of beer cans on the ground beneath him.

“Dozer!” Nick yelled, and kicked the pile of cans.

The racket startled Dozer awake. The big man woke flailing and sputtering, clawing at the air, rocking the hammock. He twisted sideways, trying to escape some imagined threat, and dumped himself on the ground with a thud.

“What the fuck?” he said, groaning. “Goddamn it, that hurt!”

Nick watched dispassionately as Dozer struggled up onto his hands and knees.

“Me, I once got called to a death scene,” he said, “where a man died in a hammock just like this one. He’d been dead a couple of days out in the heat. His head had swelled up like a watermelon, and his face turned black as pitch. Turned out he had passed out drunk and a rattlesnake had fallen out of the tree above him, landed on his face, and bit him, and he died right there.”

Dozer looked up at him like he was crazy as he struggled to get his big feet under him and stand. He was dressed in his usual bib overalls with no shirt, one of the shoulder straps undone and hanging down. He shifted the denim suit around his bulk, tugging at his crotch. “Why the hell you telling me that?”

“Rattlesnakes are pretty good climbers,” Nick said. “Most people don’t know that.”

“What are you doing here, Fourcade?”

“You should always be aware of what animals you might piss off, lest they bite you, Mr. Cormier. Myself, for instance,” he said. “Me, I don’t like being lied to, and I’m gonna have a bad reaction to that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dozer grumbled, sitting down on an old tree stump that had been sawed off at chair height.

“How drunk are you right now?”

“Not enough.”

“You had better be sober enough to listen to me or I’ll have a deputy here in five minutes to haul your ass to jail.”

“Why? I ain’t done nothing.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve managed to irritate the hell out of me today, and I’ve only just now laid eyes on you.”

“This is harassment,” Dozer said.

“You think so? Call a cop on that mysterious little cell phone you told me you didn’t own, you fucking liar.”

“You’re mad ’cause I have a phone?”

“I’m mad because you keep wasting my time, Dozer,” Nick said. “You think I want to keep coming out to this miserable shithole to talk around in circles with you?”

“Then don’t.”

“You told me you hadn’t seen Robbie Fontenot in years.”

“I haven’t.”

“And there you go again. I have a witness who puts you in the company of Robbie Fontenot Halloween night.”

“He’s a liar!”

“He’s got absolutely no reason to lie about that. You, on the other hand, make a habit of it. Why is that?”

“It’s none of your business who I talk to.”

“Ah, well, see, you’re wrong there, as usual,” Nick said. “It is literally my business when the person you lie about talking to went missing on that very night.”

“I don’t know nothing about it,” Dozer grumbled.

“Always so conveniently ignorant, aren’t you?” Nick said. “Where did you go that night after you left Monster Bash?”

“Nowhere. Home.”

“Really? Because I’m gonna go to every one of your neighbors here and ask them did they see you. And I’m gonna guess that even in this sorry place, at least one of them is gonna have a video doorbell, and we’ll see if you were home or not.”

Dozer frowned, his big face creasing like a bulldog’s as he considered his next story.

“I was drinking with Marc.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know! I was drunk. Ask Marc.”

“Ask Marc, who is also missing? Are you trying to be a wiseass here, couillon ? ’Cause you’re missing half that equation.”

“Maybe I saw Robbie and I just don’t remember,” Dozer said, backtracking.

“Really?” Nick said. “You run into a guy you haven’t seen in years, the guy whose life you ruined, and that just slipped your mind?”

“That was an accident!”

“Does it matter?” Nick asked, pressing on the old wound. “What happened happened. He could have been a superstar, but he became a drug addict because of you.”

“That’s not fair!”

“And you became an alcoholic,” Nick said. “That’s not fair, either, but here you are, a lying drunk sitting on a stump in the backyard of a shithole. You might want to reconsider some of your life choices, Dozer.”

“Why are you doing this?” Dozer asked, looking miserable.

“Because I want the truth, and all you’re giving me is one bad lie after the next.”

Nick took a step back to release some of the tension between them. Dozer was red-faced, breathing hard, clearly emotional. Nick had just poked a sharp stick into an old wound that had never healed, a wound that had spent ten years in a state of festering infection. It was cruel, but he couldn’t care about that. Dozer Cormier was at least sitting there in the flesh, which was more than he could say for Robbie Fontenot or Marc Mercier.

“You realize, Dozer, that we’re living in the digital age, the age of communication, and there are cameras literally everywhere now, watching our every move,” he said. “It may take some time, but I will go over every security video in town from that night, and I will find hard proof of you talking to Robbie Fontenot.”

“So what if I saw him?” he said irritably.

“Why lie about it?”

“Maybe I don’t like talking about him. Maybe I don’t like remembering all that.”

“Fair enough,” Nick said. “But if you’d told me that from the start, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. See how the truth works?”

Dozer said nothing.

“You can’t just bury it, Dozer, whatever it is,” Nick said quietly. “You been trying to do that for ten years, and look at you. Do you want this to be the rest of your life? A drunk, a failure, trying to hide from yourself?”

“What do you care?”

“I hate waste. You have a life. You have people who care about you. Donnie Bichon, Tommy Crawford—they gave you a chance, they want you to succeed. You’re just pissing it away because you can’t resolve something you did ten years ago. You need to get right with that.”

Dozer looked away and murmured, “I tried.”

“Try again.”

“I need to go,” he said, groaning a little as he stood. He hitched up his overalls and fastened the loose strap.

“You think I’m gonna let you get behind the wheel of that truck?” Nick asked. “There’s a dozen empty beer cans laying here. You get in that truck, I’ll have to arrest you.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he grumbled. “Can you just go ?”

“We’re not done,” Nick said. “When you went out with Marc Saturday night, where’d you go? And don’t tell me you don’t remember. You’re too young to have Alzheimer’s.”

The big man huffed a sigh and lumbered around in a circle, cupping his bald head in both massive hands. “Goal Post.”

“What was Marc driving?”

“What?”

“What vehicle was he driving that night?”

“His truck. What else?”

“Where’d he leave his boat?” Nick asked. “He left home driving his truck, pulling his boat. He was supposed to meet Luc Sunday morning at the Corners with it. He wasn’t pulling that boat with him to every bar parking lot in town that night, was he?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t riding with him. Who cares, anyway? What difference does it make?”

“Where’d you go after you left Goal Post?”

“I left at halftime and came home.”

“Why you didn’t stay until the game was over?”

“I was sick of listening to Marc complain about his wife, complain about his brother, complain about his life,” Dozer said. “His life looks pretty damn good to me.”

“And did Marc stay?”

“He was still there when I left, flirting with some blond girl.”

“Tulsie Parcelle?” Nick asked, wondering if maybe there wasn’t more to that story than an innocent dance at Outlaw. Maybe Stokes’s latest theory of an affair wasn’t so far-fetched.

Dozer shrugged. “I don’t know her, and I didn’t care.”

“Does Marc like to play around?”

“He’s a guy.”

“Me, I’m a guy,” Nick said. “I don’t cheat on my wife. Does he?”

“ Mais , I don’t know. I mind my own business, me.”

“You’re not blind.”

Dozer heaved a big beer-tainted sigh. “Girls like Marc. Marc likes girls. Whatever else goes on is not my business.”

“Well, not your business might have got him killed,” Nick said. “Unless you know something I don’t…”

“Me, I don’t wanna know nothing,” Dozer said wearily. “That’s why I drink.”

“Did you see Luc that night?”

“Yeah. He was there. Another good reason to leave. Are we done now?” he asked irritably. “I’ve got another six-pack to start.”

“Yeah, we’re done,” Nick said. “For now. Stay off the roads, Dozer. You want to drink yourself to death because you can’t escape your own head, I can’t stop you, but I don’t want you killing someone else. The last thing you need is the death of an innocent person on your conscience.”

“Yeah,” Dozer said, looking away toward his house. “That’s the last thing I need.”