Chapter 36

36

How had his life gone so wrong?

Dozer hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Halloween. Truth to tell, for longer than that. Way longer than that. The fatigue and the anxiety were weighing heavy on him. The alcohol that was supposed to numb the feelings only made him feel worse. People claimed they drank to forget. It never did that for him. It never had. That didn’t stop him trying, but what was it people said? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results was nothing but stupidity. Something like that.

He didn’t think he was a bad guy. People who didn’t know him were scared of him because of how he looked, because of his size and the fact that he was bald and ugly. Some people thought that somehow meant he didn’t have feelings, like he was an animal or Frankenstein’s monster or something. They treated him like he was less than human, like he couldn’t understand what they thought of him or didn’t realize how they used him. It made him sad. It made him angry. Anger made him dangerous, and when he was dangerous, people got scared of him, and that cycle went ’round and ’round.

He didn’t have many real friends. Mr. Bichon was kind to him, tried to offer him advice. Tommy Crawford treated him decent enough. And there was Marc.

They’d been friends since their first day of football practice in seventh grade. Marc had singled him out and struck up a friendship. Dozer couldn’t say he hadn’t wondered why or hadn’t suspected why—Marc was a quarterback, and Dozer was, by far, the biggest guy with the job of protecting him—but he had set all that aside in favor of feeling grateful to have a friend at all.

He wasn’t so dumb as to think Marc considered him an equal. He was aware of the role he played in Marc’s little dramas, but he had always reckoned Marc was as close to a real friend as he’d ever had or ever would, and Dozer was loyal as the day was long. Loyal to a fault. That, he could see now, was a problem.

All these years later, he was tired of being used. He was tired of being a drunk. He was tired of feeling like he was stuck in a loop of doing the same stupid shit, making the same stupid mistakes over and over.

Mr. Bichon always harped to him about the twelve steps and how you couldn’t get anywhere by skipping any of them. Admit your mistakes and make amends. He couldn’t even manage to get that right.

On Halloween night he had tried apologizing to Robbie Fontenot at long last, to do the right thing and to release himself from the weight of that guilt, and instead, Robbie Fontenot had ended up dead.

What a nightmare.

He started drinking more in a feeble effort to numb himself. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. That asshole Fourcade kept showing up, poking and prodding, trying to trip him up. Fourcade was smart and ruthless. Dozer was terrified to answer his questions because the detective could twist his words around and get him to say things he shouldn’t. His stomach was constantly in knots just thinking about it.

He’d had it. He wanted this over, one way or another.

He had waited almost all night, because he figured Fourcade had a deputy nearby, just watching for him to drive out of the trailer park so he could pull him over for driving drunk. But he wasn’t drunk now, not over the limit, anyway. And those night-shift deputies were about done and ready to head home.

Now was the time.

It was still dark. The morning was chilly with a light frost on the ground and a sheer veil of fog hanging in the air. He could see his breath as he went out to his truck. Lights were on in one of the other trailers nearby. The woman who lived there worked the breakfast shift at a truck stop on the highway to Lafayette. She would be leaving soon, too.

He pulled out the cell phone that he’d told everybody he’d lost and checked his traffic app where people always posted where they’d seen a po-po. Someone had mentioned a deputy on the road between Bayou Breaux and Luck, but that had been more than an hour ago, and no one had mentioned it since.

He needed to go. Marc was waiting. He was going to have to take his chances, because when Marc called, he had to jump to like a goddamn trained animal, he thought with disgust.

He started the truck and drove out of the trailer park.

—

How had his life gone so wrong? Marc wondered, as if he wasn’t at all responsible for anything that had happened, and the answer had nothing to do with him other than giving him back what he thought he deserved. As if he was and always had been an innocent bystander, even though he knew deep, deep inside that wasn’t the case.

And therein was the conundrum that was Marc Mercier—a brutally self-critical core wrapped in protective layers of narcissism and sociopathy as thick as cotton batting. A strange and useless being, desperate to save itself.

All he could think about now was how he was going to get his life back on track with no one the wiser about what a selfish, useless prick he was.

He would start that campaign today.

He knew he could only claim to be out of communication with the world for just so long before people decided he was an asshole, and he couldn’t have that. People were looking for him. People were worried about him. His mother would be about to lose her mind. And Melissa…Well, did she even give a shit? He doubted it. Did he care? Not like he should have.

They had met at Tulane. His first taste of freedom away from home. His first chance to be anyone he wanted to be, not Troy and Kiki Mercier’s favorite son, not the hero of Sacred Heart High School. It had been both exhilarating and terrifying to start from scratch where no one knew him, where he was just another student, just another rookie on the football team. All courtesy of a scholarship he shouldn’t have had, but he hadn’t thought about that at the time. He had only thought of himself. As usual.

All he had wanted at the time was out of Bayou Breaux, out of south Louisiana. It had been as if he could take a big, deep breath for the first time ever. He could reinvent himself, be whoever he wanted to be, aspire to whatever struck his fancy. For the first time in his life he had considered the possibilities of doing something new and different, going wherever he wanted to go. He didn’t have to be tied to this place. He didn’t have to be a junk dealer’s son. He could have a future away from his brother’s resentment and his mother’s cloying pride.

In Melissa, he had met a girl unlike any of the girls he had known growing up. She was from a prominent family, from a place as different from south Louisiana as could possibly be. She was smart and sassy and outspoken. She had believed in him, believed in his potential, without ever having known Saint Marc of Sacred Heart.

He had grabbed that opportunity with both hands and left behind the idea of his childhood self like a snake shedding its skin.

The trouble had been that in his new life, he had felt as much like an imposter as he had in his old one. It wasn’t really better; it was just different. The new Marc was just as much a phony as the old Marc, skating by on looks and charm. People were so happy to be fooled by a wide smile and a clever joke. They didn’t care to look deeper, where they would have seen nothing, because he was as shallow as a puddle after a spring rain.

God, he hated himself and the mess he’d made of his life.

What the hell did he do now?

He sat on the deck overlooking the water. The eastern horizon had just begun to turn pink beneath a band of midnight purple sky. Wispy layers of fog floated above the water like so many ghosts traveling aimlessly from souls unknown.

The camp belonged to some cousin of Dozer’s who lived up in Shreveport. The cabin was a single-wide house trailer raised up on pilings a good ten, twelve feet off the ground and wrapped around with a worn, weathered gray deck. The view off the front was beautiful—water like black glass studded with massive ancient bald cypress trees hung with ragged shawls of Spanish moss. He would have found it peaceful if the circumstances had been different.

He had come out there to get away, to think, to try to straighten out the mess in his head. He’d been a wreck inside since Halloween, a mass of nerves and fear and disgust. The tension between him and Melissa had become unbearable. The baby teething had ramped up the aggravation factor by ten. At work he’d had to contend with Luc’s relentless criticism and bullying. They had finally come to blows on Saturday. Then he’d gone home to Melissa’s bitching and yet another argument.

He couldn’t take it. He didn’t want to. He wanted out—of his marriage, of this mess, of his life—but at the same time, he was clinging to it all by his raw, ragged fingertips, terrified to lose any of it.

He had settled on taking a break for a day or two or ten. He brought his truck and boat out to Dozer’s cousin’s place and parked them, then took the Toyota and made his way back to town to be among people who thought he was great, who basked in his charm, who had no idea about the hollowness inside him. He could drink and dance and pretend for a few hours. But that hadn’t worked out either, the evening ending with Cody Parcelle busting him in the mouth for dancing with his wife. What a fucking mess. What a fucking failure he was.

He had actually contemplated suicide for a minute, which was laughable. How could Marc Mercier kill himself? Too many people loved him. How could he deprive the world like that? The truth was, he didn’t have the character to do it. He didn’t have the balls.

He thought he might choke on his self-loathing.

He took a pull on the bottle of whiskey he’d found in a cupboard and tried to wash it down.

If he wasn’t going to kill himself, then he needed to plan his next move. Dozer would be there soon. Things would happen. He would go back to Bayou Breaux, and he would find a way to do it as a hero because that was what was expected. Maybe he would say he’d been injured, that he’d lost his phone overboard…Maybe he would claim he had left a note with Melissa that he needed a little time to sort some things out, but that she must not have found it or accidentally threw it away, and that him “missing” was just a big misunderstanding. He’d only been gone a couple of days, holed up in a place with no TV, and in this scenario he had also lost his phone but hadn’t worried about it.

He believed fully in his ability to spin a lie and in the gullibility of people who would be eager to believe him. But then what?

Part of him wanted to stay in Louisiana because it was familiar, because people bought the myth that was Marc Mercier hook, line, and sinker, and that was a comfortable role for him to play. Part of him couldn’t stand the idea. The myth was a lie. He was a lie. He would be trapped in that lie forever if he stayed, trapped in this place with the memories and reminders of everything he’d ever done—not just the good, but the bad as well. But who was he if he wasn’t here, and if the life he’d built with Melissa went up in flames?

She’d seen through him now, seen through to the real Marc, the liar, the fraud. She was done. He was sure she would take the baby and leave, despite whatever was going on between her and Will Faulkner. Friends, lovers, it didn’t matter. Faulkner was just handy, someone to fill the space in her life her husband had already vacated.

Marc hadn’t been able to resist going around the house at night to see if she was alone. He had even called once. He couldn’t say why. To hear her voice? To scare her? To say something? Say what? How could he even begin? Faulkner had been there at the house that night, drinking wine and making Melissa laugh. He had gone at one point, but he came back fast enough after Marc’s creepy, silent call from a phone that wasn’t his, and he hadn’t left.

That Melissa didn’t even try to hide whatever that relationship was told Marc she was done with him. And he had to be done with her, because how could he stay with a woman who knew exactly what he was?

He took another pull on the whiskey, as if the answers he wanted were in that bottle. The pink band on the horizon had turned flame orange as daybreak neared, the color spilling down across the water like molten flame. The birds had begun to call. Dozer would be there soon. He had to get ready.

—

Nick picked up Dozer on the west side of Bayou Breaux, on the road everyone referred to as the Loop, skirting the new developments. He stayed well back, barely keeping the Silverado’s taillights in sight.

There was no traffic to hide in at this hour, especially not where Dozer seemed to be headed, but a thin fog helped give him cover. He couldn’t risk being seen, couldn’t risk spooking Dozer. He would get one shot at this. Everything had to fall just right.

He drove Annie’s old Jeep—the army-variety utility vehicle, small, black, devoid of any decoration. It in no way resembled a police vehicle. There were plenty just like it in the area. The kind of vehicle people used to head into the wild to off-road or to hunt. As soon as it was barely light, he cut his headlights.

The truck turned onto Cypress Island Road, winding through the stands of cypress trees. The road barely raised up above the water on both sides, and the fog gave a sensation of floating through the wilderness. They passed by Danny Perry’s BBPD radio car, still perched where it had landed on a stump, its front end squished like an accordion up against the trunk of a tree. The area was still cordoned off by yellow tape.

Nick had a good idea where Dozer was headed. A Wildlife and Fisheries agent had tipped him off to some unusual activity at one of the fish camps—a vehicle covered with a tarp, a dim single light flickering in the house at night. No one would have thought anything of it come the weekend, but in the middle of the week, it was just enough to pique the interest of a trained eye.

The call had come late, while he’d been sitting outside the Fontenot house waiting for Annie. He knew the general area where the camp was located. There was one road in. Once Dozer turned down it, he was trapped, along with whoever was staying at the camp. Marc, Nick reckoned.

The question was why. Why would Marc Mercier have taken himself out there without telling anyone where he was going? He had left his wife without a word, left his child. His mother was beside herself with worry. Why? Why did a man who loved to be adored disappear? Something had become too much. Pressure bred the need to run away. The trouble with his marriage? The conflict with his brother?

But it seemed that Halloween had been the trigger. Something had happened Halloween night. Something involving Robbie Fontenot. In the days that followed, tensions had built, Dozer had started drinking, Marc and his brother had fought and come to blows. Marc had left his wife and child and gone out Saturday night as if he were a single man and never came home.

He had run away from something, but if he had meant to escape, he should have run farther, Nick thought. Justice was about to come calling.