Chapter 44

44

Nick stood on the dock at Merciers’ swamp tours, watching the airboat glide in, the seats full of tourists delighted with their glimpse of this wild country he loved with all his heart.

Luc Mercier sat up on his perch, guiding the boat in, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, but his full attention was on the sheriff’s office personnel waiting for him—Nick and a pair of uniformed deputies stationed a few yards behind him. He took his time getting down, making sure the boat was tied off properly, before walking up.

“I don’t reckon this is a social call, is it?”

“ Mais non ,” Nick said quietly. He saw no need to make a show in front of the tourists, no need to embarrass the man or upset his loved ones. “I need you to come with me, Mr. Mercier. Your brother is already under arrest and in custody.”

Luc’s mouth twisted in a parody of a smile, and he looked off over the water. “And he threw me under the bus, did he? That’s Marc. Our paper tiger.”

“Me, I’m hoping you’re not gonna make a scene in front of your sister,” Nick said. “She doesn’t need to see that.”

“No,” Luc agreed. “You’ll give me a minute with her?”

Nick nodded. He watched Mercier go to his sister over by the ticket building and kiss her cheek and tell her he was going away for a bit and not to worry. Noelle Mercier smiled brightly and waved at Nick, her friend.

Nick had the deputies wait until they were on the far side of the vehicles to handcuff her brother and load him into the SUV.

It gave him no pleasure to take Luc Mercier away from his family and his business. Every part of this story was a tragedy that would go on and on because the Merciers’ favored son had made a terrible decision when he was just a boy, desperate to be a hero. The wake from that choice was still rippling through lives a decade on.

“What are you doing?” Kiki shouted as she came running across the road, red-faced and wild-eyed. “Where are you taking my boy?”

Nick intercepted her with both hands before she could fling herself at the vehicle. She twisted out of his grasp and stepped back, fuming.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“He’s under arrest, Mrs. Mercier,” Nick said quietly. “Please don’t make a scene. For the sake of your daughter.”

Kiki’s attention was on Luc now as he stared at her, stone-faced, from inside the vehicle. “What have you done?! What have you done to Marc?!”

She flung herself at the car, slamming her hands on the window and shouting at her eldest son. “If you hurt Marc, I’ll kill you!”

Nick pulled her away and held on to her as the SUV drove off.

—

Despite the no smoking sign posted on the wall, Luc lit up a cigarette and took a long drag on it, as if this might be his last for a while. He exhaled and shrugged. “What are you gonna do? Arrest me?”

“You don’t want a lawyer present?” Nick asked, unbothered by the man flaunting a rule. That was the least of his sins.

“For what? To charge me money to tell me to shut my mouth? No, thanks.”

“Your choice. Tell me about Halloween.”

He tapped the ash off his smoke into a paper cup with a puddle of cold coffee in the bottom. “Marc called me in a panic. Eleven thirty or so. Said there’d been an accident and could I come. I wasn’t far away, just down the street a ways at T-Neg’s bar drinking. So I go, and there’s Marc and Dozer, dressed up in costumes like a couple’a goddamn couillons , drunk. Dozer was crying. Marc was crying that his life was gonna be over…”

“Where was this at?”

“In the alley behind Canray’s Garage. And there was Robbie Fontenot, on the ground in a bad way.”

“He was alive?”

“Barely. There’d been a fight. Robbie hit Marc; Marc hit him back. Robbie fell and hit his head on a busted-up old concrete parking block. He wasn’t gonna make it,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “The side of his head was caved in. He was barely breathing, having a seizure, foaming at the mouth. It was godawful.”

“Why you didn’t call an ambulance?” Nick asked.

“For what? So he could be a vegetable? So he could get to Our Lady and die there instead of in that alley? So my brother could go to prison? No. No. I couldn’t let that happen. What would be the point?” he asked. “It was a stupid accident. It didn’t need to get any more tragic than it was.”

“What did you do?”

“I cleaned up the mess because Marc wouldn’t. He couldn’t suck it up and be a man and do what needed to be done. I put that poor bastard out of his misery, and I rolled him up in a tarp and put him in the back of my truck.”

Like he was a stray dog that got hit by a car.

“What’d you do with the body?”

He sighed and looked away. “I stored it in a shed for a couple of days. I knew what needed to be done, but…I told Marc this was his fault and he should have to deal with it himself, but he wouldn’t. We fought about it. More than once. In the end, I had to take care of the dirty work, as usual. I told myself it’s just a carcass at that point, no different than a deer or a hog.”

His voice thickened as he said it, and the muscles in his face tensed like the memory caused him physical pain. But he fought through the moment and pressed on.

He gave a rough, humorless laugh. “And all that time Mama’s like ‘Oh, poor Marc, he’s under so much stress with work and his wife and the baby and all!’ And how I should be more kind to him! And I wanted to say, well, your precious fucking baby boy killed a man. But I didn’t. I just took care of it.”

“Your mother didn’t know what happened?”

Luc shook his head as he finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the tabletop, and dropped the butt in the paper cup. His rough, stained workingman’s hands were trembling a little as he lit up another, belying his calm demeanor.

“What’d you do with the body, Luc?” Nick asked again, knowing full well what the answer was going to be.

“I cut it up, ’cause I didn’t want no body floating up to the surface. Better for everyone that he just be gone. I took it out to a place I knew there’d be gators. And that’s what happened to poor Robbie Fontenot.”

Nick let the silence hang for a moment as Luc lived with the memory and smoked his cigarette.

“You don’t think he deserved better than that?” Nick asked.

A sad smile turned the corner of Luc Mercier’s mouth. “We all deserve better, but what happened happened. I was raised that a man takes care of his family first and always. And I may resent the hell out of my brother, but blood is blood. The thing that stings is knowing he would never, ever do the same for me. But I can only control what I do and who I am. And I’ll live with that.”

Despite what he’d done—or maybe because of it—Luc Mercier was not the worst person in this story, Nick thought. He wasn’t sure there was a villain at all in the true sense of the word. People always wanted murder to be black-and-white, cut-and-dried, with a cartoon bad guy they could easily hate. But that wasn’t always the case.

Luc had made his choices to save his family. Marc had made his choices to save himself. Dozer had made a choice long ago out of loyalty and had made his choice on Halloween thinking the truth would set him free from his demons. And their respective choices of lies and truths along the way were the connective tissue that wove the story together.

Nick left Luc Mercier and went across the hall to another interview room, where his brother, Marc, had been sitting alone, left to stew and fret for two hours. According to Stokes, he’d spent that time crying and puking into a wastebasket, pacing and pounding his fists against the walls.

Nick walked into the room, silent and stone-faced, and stood staring at Marc for a long moment. Mercier halted his pacing along the back wall and stood motionless, looking like a prey animal awaiting its fate.

“I’ve been waiting for hours here,” he complained. “What’s going on?”

“You might want to work on making peace with small enclosed spaces, Mr. Mercier,” Nick said quietly. He took a seat at the table, turned his chair sideways, and crossed one ankle over a knee and sighed. “I watched you try to kill a man with an axe this morning, and I make an excellent witness at trial, if I do say so myself.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him!” Marc protested, pacing again. “I just—I just had to stop him going. I needed to talk sense into him.”

“An axe as a tool of persuasion,” Nick mused. “That’s…well, overkill is the word that comes to mind. And not that you’ve asked, but I’m told Mr. Cormier will survive his injuries. I’m going to speculate that his lifelong loyalty to you has perhaps run its course. You should also know that I’ve just come from across the hall, where I had a very illuminating conversation with your brother, Luc.”

“Luc killed Robbie, not me,” Marc said without a second’s hesitation. “I just defended myself. What happened was an accident. Robbie threw the first punch. I hit him back, and he fell and hit his head. That’s what happened. I didn’t mean for him to die! But Luc said he was gonna die anyway, and I’d go to prison. For what? For an accident!”

A different sort of person would have asked for an attorney and said nothing more. But Marc Mercier had the narcissist’s belief that his charm could talk him out of any situation, because it likely had more often than not all his life.

“Why did Mr. Fontenot punch you?” Nick asked.

“He had a wrong idea about something that happened a long time ago, and he blamed me, but it wasn’t my fault! I never told Dozer to cripple him! It wasn’t my fault he became a drug addict and threw his life away!”

“Why that night?” Nick asked.

Marc rolled his eyes. “Because Dozer was drunk and said something he should have kept to himself, and it set Robbie off, and shit happened. I wish it hadn’t.”

He put his hands on top of his head and turned around. His eyes kept cutting to the door, as if he was expecting someone to walk in and set him free.

“I moved back here to help my family,” he said. “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”

“That’s an interesting choice of words,” Nick said. “Because Dozer is the one that got hit with an axe, and Robbie Fontenot is the one dead and fed to alligators. This isn’t happening to you, Mr. Mercier. This is happening because of you. Because of the choices you made. And when you go to prison, that will be because of what you did. And when your wife divorces you and takes your child and leaves, that will be because of the man you chose to be.”

It became clear in that moment to Marc Mercier that he wasn’t going to win Nick over, and he wasn’t going to walk out of that room a free man.

“I think I should have an attorney now,” he said.

“That’s your prerogative,” Nick said, pushing to his feet. “Unless you know one off the top of your head, I suggest you use your one phone call to reach out to your wife…and hope she answers.”

“What’s gonna happen to me?” Marc asked, his expression full of fear and a kind of disbelief that anything bad could happen to him at all.

Nick paused at the door and looked at him. “Justice, Mr. Mercier. Justice.”