Chapter 6

6

The huge sign must have been thirty years old, weathered and worn, painted and repainted over the decades. It was mounted on cut-down power poles fifty yards before the driveway. mercier & sons salvage and swamp tours with an airboat-load of bug-eyed cartoon tourists gaping at an alligator down in the right-hand corner, the gator’s jaws open wide, ready to snap on the first person to fall out of the careening boat.

The business was crammed onto ten acres of land on both sides of the old canal road on the butt end of the town of Luck. The marine salvage and tour business were located on the canal side, auto salvage on the other side. The property was a wasteland of decrepit boats and wrecked cars, rusted metal, and rotting wood contained inside the confines of high chain-link fencing crowned with a concertina wire overhang, like a prison yard for junk.

Nick pulled in at the gate with the red arrow pointing to the office and parked in front of the first of three large World War II–era Quonset hut buildings—half-round cylinders of time-worn, weather-beaten galvanized steel.

“Man, I hate these places,” Stokes griped, unwrapping a stick of gum as he got out of his car. He looked around and made a face.

“Look at that mess,” he said, nodding toward the corral of trashed cars gutted of their engines, stripped of their tires, hoods up or missing, doors hanging open. “There could be anything out there. Rats and snakes. For sure there’s snakes. And trunks full of drugs and dead bodies for all we know.”

Nick cut him a sideways look. “You’re up to date on your tetanus shot, yeah?”

“I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“Because you have no choice.”

“Well, it sure ain’t your sunny disposition.”

The door and two long horizontal windows of the building marked office were fitted with iron bars for security and plastered with redneck bumper stickers and product logos for Pennzoil and Snap-on tools, support for the NRA, Browning rifles, and Ducks Unlimited. A hand-lettered sign proclaimed: We REservE the RIGHT to RefusE ServicE to ANyBody!!

“Like it’s a freaking five-star restaurant,” Stokes quipped. “I didn’t know junk dealers could be so choosy.”

A bell rang as they opened the door and went inside, though whether it could be heard over the blaring country music was debatable. The smells of oil, grease, and sweeping compound made a thick perfume that assaulted the senses. Long rows of tall industrial metal shelving were crammed with all manner of engine and car parts, household plumbing fixtures, pipes of all descriptions, light fixtures, and electrical wiring.

At the front of the space, a long cypress-wood counter that looked like it might have come out of an old-time drugstore marked off the office section of the building. Several chrome-legged stools with ripped vinyl seats invited customers to sit and shoot the breeze. Behind the counter, more shelving was piled with precarious mountains of paperwork and thick catalogs. A doorway led into what looked to Nick like a small private office—more shelves stuffed with who knew what.

A woman’s harsh voice called out from inside the little room: “Turn down that goddamn music! Merde! I can’t hear me think! Do you hear me, Luc Mercier?!

“ Mais ?a c’est fou! ’Course he don’t hear me ’cause of that goddamn radio,” she muttered, coming out of the office. “Damn couillon .”

She was a tall, rawboned woman, thin and sinewy with wide hips and a lean, unadorned face. Her hair was steel gray and scalp short. She stopped in her tracks and stared with narrowed eyes at Nick and Stokes. Men with badges hanging around their necks were not her regular customers.

“Lieutenant Fourcade, Sheriff’s Office,” Nick said. “This is Detective Stokes.”

The woman said nothing as the color drained from her face. She stood frozen, as if she were afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

“You say something, Mama?” a man’s voice called. Luc Mercier emerged from the murky darkness of the shelf rows, thirtyish, six feet of stocky muscle, with a day’s growth of dark beard, and a shiner on his right eye.

“Can I help you fellas?” he asked, wiping his meaty hands on a greasy rag.

“Turn off that goddamn radio!” his mother shouted, snapping out of her state of suspended animation.

He turned on his heel and headed back down the first aisle to kill the music.

The woman turned back to Nick. “Is it Marc?” she asked. “Was it a car wreck?”

“Ma’am?”

“My son Marc. Marc Mercier. Is he dead?” she asked, and crossed herself over the front of her bib overalls.

The picture of the faceless body flashed through Nick’s mind, the body he’d sent to the morgue at Our Lady of Mercy with a John Doe toe tag. The mystery could be solved right there and then, which was way more than he had hoped for—and not at all what this woman wanted to hear. That was how quickly lives could be turned on their heads, upended and tumbled all over the place, like dice from a cup. Just like that.

“We ain’t heard from him since Saturday,” the woman went on. She turned toward her present son as he came back. “I told you! I told you something terrible happened! And would you listen to me? Hell no!”

He threw his hands up. “Well, what the hell was I supposed to do about it? Drive up and down every goddamned road in the parish looking for him?”

“You don’t ever listen to me!”

“Oh, I hear you! Jesus Christ! My ears are ringing all damn day with it!”

Nick held a hand up like a referee and barked, “ Arrête! C’est assez! We need to begin here again, yeah? There’s been no car crash I know of. Let’s start there.”

“Jesus,” Luc Mercier muttered half under his breath. “Going off half cocked for no damn reason, as usual.”

“Shut your mouth!” his mother snapped.

“What happened, then?” she asked, turning back to Nick. “What are you doing here?”

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Nick asked, opening his notebook and clicking his pen.

“Kiki Mercier.”

“And how old is your son Marc?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“What’s he look like?”

She hooked a thumb in the direction of her other son. “Like this one, but taller.”

“How tall?”

“Six foot two,” Luc said, his straight, thick brows drawing together in suspicion. “Why would you ask that?”

Tall enough, Nick thought. He would have brown eyes, like his mother and his brother and the corpse.

“What kind of vehicle does he drive?” Stokes asked.

“He’s got a brand-new flat black Ford Raptor truck,” Luc answered.

“Sweet ride! You know the tag number?”

“No.”

“What kind of tires on it?”

“BFGoodrich all-terrains,” he said, looking from one of them to the other with growing suspicion. “What the hell kind of questions are these?”

“If he’s missing, we need to be looking for him, right?” Stokes said. “Have you reported him missing?”

“No. We figured he’d turn up. He ain’t been gone that long,” Luc said irritably.

“Marc don’t ever miss work,” Kiki said. “We didn’t hear from him yesterday—and they were supposed to go duck hunting.”

Luc rolled his eyes, impatient with the whole conversation. “I was late getting there. He left without me just to be an asshole. I guarantee it.”

“ Mais yeah, Marc being gone is all about you,” Kiki said sarcastically.

“Duck season ain’t started yet,” Nick said.

“We was just going out to get the blind cleaned up and ready, and work the dogs some, that’s all,” Luc said. “Shoot some geese, maybe, or snipe. I was supposed to meet him at the Corners at five thirty in the goddamn a.m.”

“And?”

He made a face. “I was late, because fuck that shit. I had a hangover.”

“You ain’t never been on time in your whole goddamn life,” his mother remarked, “including when you was born.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t no surprise, then, was it?” Luc shot back. To Nick he said, “He’d done gone by the time I got there.”

“Did you call him?”

“So he could chew my ass? No, thank you. I turned around and went home.”

“And he didn’t call you, ask where you’re at, when you’re getting there?”

“No. Because he was pissed, and better to sit out there in the boat by his own damn self and pout so he could bitch about it later.”

“What kind of boat?”

“Seventeen-foot War Eagle Blackhawk with a modified V-hull.”

“Where do y’all hunt?”

“We got some property on the marshes, on the western edge of the parish. I drove out there later—”

“I made him go,” Kiki said. “Marc could’a been out there drowned, for all he knew.”

“Well, he wasn’t, was he?” Luc shot back. “He wasn’t there at all.”

“I tried to call him to come over for supper last night,” Kiki said. “My calls, they went straight to voicemail. I tried to call that useless wife of his, but she wouldn’t answer the damn phone!”

“Could they have gone somewhere together?” Nick asked.

Luc made a scoffing sound, as if the suggestion was absurd.

“Me, I called her work this morning,” Kiki said. “They told me she was in a meeting.”

“What’s the wife’s name, and where do they live?” Nick asked.

“Prissy Missy,” Kiki muttered.

“Melissa,” Luc answered. “Twenty-eight Quail Trace, Bayou Breaux.”

“Her Royal Highness,” Kiki grumbled, building up another head of steam. “Luck ain’t good enough for her.”

“Bayou Breaux ain’t good enough for her, neither,” Luc said. “Maybe Marc had enough of her bullshit and left. Who could blame him?”

“He wouldn’t just up and go and leave his baby!” Kiki insisted. “Maybe she killed him!”

Luc rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Well, where’s he at, then?” she demanded. “I told you something was wrong! A mother knows. I feel it in my bones! And here’s the sheriffs, right here now! So who’s ridiculous?”

Luc Mercier looked past her to Stokes and Nick. “Wait a minute. If you ain’t here about Marc, and you don’t know nothing about Marc or where he’s at, then what are y’all doing here in the first place?”

Nick opened his phone and pulled up a photo of the business card he had pulled from the dead man’s pocket. “We came across this card in the course of an investigation and were hoping you might be able to shed some light as to who might have had it or to what that written amount might refer.”

“What kind of an investigation?” Kiki asked.

“Routine,” Stokes said. “We’re just clearing up the little details.”

Luc Mercier stepped closer and squinted at the photo. “Probably an estimate.”

Kiki peered at the photo, frowning. “That’s Marc’s handwriting. He makes his eights like that, like two little circles.”

“Like a kindergartener,” Luc grumbled.

“Does that amount mean anything to you?” Nick asked.

“Why didn’t the person who had it tell you?”

“There was no one there to ask,” Nick said calmly. “It’s just a thing we found. Could mean nothing at all, but if you know anything about it, that could be helpful pointing us in a direction.”

Luc shrugged. “Could be anything. We deal with all different kinds of people—contractors, commercial fishermen, car dealers…Could be for anything.”

“If y’all did a deal for that amount in the last few days, you’d have a receipt for that, yeah?”

“Should have,” Kiki said. “Me, I’m behind on my paperwork, though. We’ve been busy, and shorthanded. I was gone down Jeanerette Friday and Saturday to a visitation and a funeral. My cousin Gerry Gaudet, she died of cancer.”

“Sorry for your loss,” Nick said automatically. “So, who was working in here Friday and Saturday?”

“Just Marc in here,” Luc said. “I was running swamp tours all day, both days.”

“Evie Orgeron,” Kiki said. “She minds the tickets and whatnot for the swamp tours over on the dock. She don’t come in here, though. And Noelle was here.”

“Helping Evie,” Luc clarified.

“Who’s Noelle?”

“My daughter,” Kiki said.

“She’s got Down’s syndrome,” Luc explained. “She likes to help on the dock, cleaning the boat up and whatnot. Marc was the only one working the desk Saturday.”

“If there’s a receipt in this amount, you’ll have the name of the customer, right?” Stokes asked.

Luc Mercier shrugged. “If they bought something from us and paid with a credit card or a check, yeah. If we bought something from them, there should be a record.”

Should be. Nick suspected there were probably few records of any cash transactions, people being people, not wanting to give the government a cut of their hard-earned business. And then there was always the possibility the customer had been a thief. Stolen catalytic converters brought a pretty penny, and copper was always a hot commodity. Thieves targeted construction sites and ransacked vacant houses and fish camps, stripping out all the copper they could get their hands on. It was hard to trace and easy to sell—particularly to a dealer not fussy about sources or paperwork.

“If you could check and let us know, we’d appreciate it,” he said.

“What kind of an investigation did you say this is?” Kiki asked.

“I’m not free to say at the moment.”

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, pressing a hand to her flat chest. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Marc’s dead.”

“We don’t know anything of the kind, ma’am,” Nick assured her, not wanting to reveal too much too soon and cause what could very well turn out to be unnecessary anguish. There was also the matter of needing to speak with Marc Mercier’s wife, who was his legal next of kin. She would be the one asked to identify his body if it came to that, or to provide something for a DNA sample.

The wife, the woman whose mother-in-law thought her capable of murder.

“Do you have any reason to think he could become a victim of foul play?” Stokes asked. “Does he have shady friends or dangerous habits? Drugs? Gambling? Anything like that?”

“Everybody loves Marc,” Luc said with just enough of an edge to make Nick wonder where he’d gotten that shiner. The remark was also curiously not an answer to the question.

“Is he a party kind of guy?” Stokes asked. “Did he maybe go out Saturday night? He could be sleeping off a good time at a friend’s house.”

“He likes to pass a good time, like everybody,” the brother said. “But his wife was still pissed off about Halloween.”

“Why was that?”

“He wanted to go to Monster Bash with some friends. She had an opinion about it. He went anyway. Been in the doghouse since.”

“Marriage problems often come with girlfriends and boyfriends attached,” Stokes said. The voice of experience. “Is he seeing anybody outside the marriage?”

Luc Mercier made a little shrug and glanced ever so slightly away. “Not that I know of. Not that I’d blame him.”

“You don’t like his wife,” Nick stated.

Again with the shrug. “She don’t like us.”

“We’re not good enough for her,” Kiki said. “She thought she could take Marc away from us. She thought wrong. His daddy got sick and we needed him, he come back to us, sure enough. If it wasn’t for the baby, I’d tell her to pack up and go back to her people.”

“Where’s she from?” Stokes asked.

“Philadelphia,” she said, as if the name left a bitter taste in her mouth.

A woman not only taking her son away from her, but a Yankee to boot.

“How’d they meet?”

“In college. Marc, he went to Tulane on a scholarship,” Kiki said proudly.

Luc turned his head just enough that she couldn’t see him roll his eyes.

“Have you had problems with any customers lately?” Nick asked. “Not to suggest anything improper, but times are hard. People try to make a buck any way they can, sometimes with things that don’t necessarily belong to them, yeah?”

“We don’t trade in stolen goods,” Luc said flatly.

“Have you refused anybody that’s brought stuff in recently? Somebody who might nurse a grudge?”

“No.”

His answer was too quick and too definitive. South Louisiana was a place overflowing with hot heads and quick tempers. Grudges could be held for decades, for generations, even. Tempers could flare up with the slightest provocation, the barest hint of an insult. And the Merciers had seen fit to post a sign in their front window telling the world that they could refuse to do business with anybody. With two exclamation points, no less.

Nick looked up and glanced around, spying one camera over the desk, pointed toward the door. “Is that hooked up?”

“No.”

“Marc wants us to put in a new system,” Kiki said. “He says it’s not even hard these days—”

“We got dogs on the property at night,” Luc interrupted. “Don’t nobody mess with them. That was good enough for Daddy.”

“What you talking about?” Kiki snapped. “He put that camera up back in the nineties—”

“Damn thing was busted more often than not,” Luc said. “That ain’t worked in years. We keep it for show, and that’s enough.”

“You just don’t want new ’cause it’s Marc’s idea,” Kiki grumbled, pulling her iPhone out of a pocket on her overalls. She tapped the screen and began scrolling. “You don’t never grow up.

“Here! Here,” she said, turning the phone around so Nick could see the photo she had stopped on. “This is Marc and his truck. You can see the tag.”

The photo showed Marc Mercier, tall, athletic, good-looking, posing next to his new big-boy toy with a wide grin splitting his face. Everybody loves Marc …He had that look about him, like life was easy and doors opened before him like magic. All he had to do was smile that smile.

“Can you text me that picture, s’il vous pla?t ?” Nick asked. He handed a business card to the mother. She immediately typed his cell number into her phone and sent the photo.

“He’s a good boy, him, my Marc,” she said. “You gonna find him for me, yeah?”

“We’ll do our best, ma’am,” Nick assured her, then turned to Luc. “Step outside with us for a moment, Mr. Mercier.”

“I got a tour group coming in ten minutes,” Luc Mercier said, squinting hard as they went out into the bright light.

He walked a few yards away from the front door of the building, stopping at the nose of a black Dodge Ram 2500 pickup. Spotless, Nick noted, freshly washed and hand-dried.

“Nice truck,” Stokes remarked, looking down the length of the pickup, his gaze dropping to the tires. “That black is a commitment.”

“Less trouble than a woman,” Mercier returned. He shook a cigarette out of a pack from the pocket of his denim shirt and hung it on his lip as he leaned back against the front quarter panel of the truck.

Out of eavesdropping range, Nick thought, glancing back to see Kiki Mercier peering out the window at them, eyes narrowed as if that might sharpen her hearing.

“Getting late in the season for swamp tours, no?” Nick asked.

Luc shrugged as he lit up. “We run as long as the weather holds and the tourists want to go out and see an alligator.”

“When I was a boy, it’d be cold by now,” Nick remarked, settling his sunglasses down on the bridge of his nose. “The gators would be digging in for the winter about this time.”

“Yeah,” Mercier said. “Gotta love that global warming.”

Global warming and gator baiting. Tour guides routinely fed the gators from their boats, so much so that some of the animals became programmed to swim toward the boats instead of away from them as they would have naturally done. The ready food source ensured that the tourists got their money’s worth. The animal rights activists tried every few years to get the practice banned, but to no avail. Practicality won the day in Cajun country. People needing to feed their families trumped the needs of alligators every time.

“Me, I’m thinking a brother knows some things about a brother that a mother might not know about a son, yeah?” Nick said. “I wanted to give you a chance to speak freely.”

“About Marc?” Mercier exhaled a stream of smoke. “What’s to say?”

“You get along with your brother?”

“We get along like brothers do. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

“He give you that shiner?”

He laughed but glanced away. “That’d be the day. Fighting is the one thing I’m better at than him.”

“You don’t seem all that upset about him being missing,” Stokes said.

“Well, I just don’t think it’s anything, that’s all. He probably had a fight with his wife, and he’s gone to cool off somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“He’s up and gone before?”

“He’s spent more than one night on my couch.”

“What do they fight about?” Nick asked.

He heaved a sigh. “She don’t wanna be here. She didn’t marry no junk man, and she don’t wanna live in Asscrack, Louisiana.”

“But he does?”

“For now.” He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue with his thumb and flicked it away. “Daddy got brain cancer. Marc came home to help with the business.”

“How long ago was that?” Stokes asked.

“About a year ago. She’s had enough.”

“And your dad?” Nick asked.

“He passed back in March.”

“But your brother’s still here.”

“He’s still saving us,” he said, his mouth twisting in an ironic smile. “That’s Marc, always the hero.”

Brotherly resentment, the loss of a parent, a strained marriage—a combination of stressors that could be a recipe for depression, Nick thought. But it wasn’t depression that had shot the face off his morning victim and dumped him like a sack of trash on the side of the road. Still, he had to ask.

“Has he seemed depressed? Is there a chance he might have hurt himself?”

The brother laughed. “Marc? Hell no! Everybody loves Marc, but don’t nobody love Marc more than Marc does. You think he’d blow his pretty brains out? I don’t think so.”

Stokes shot Nick a look at the mention of a potential cause of death. Neither of them cared for a coincidence.

“You have any idea where else he might have gone?” Nick asked. “If he decided to drown his sorrows, where would he go?”

“Voodoo Lounge, Blue Bayou…Wherever two or more are gathered in his name.”

“Mouton’s?”

“No. That’s not his crowd.”

“Is he a hard drinker?”

Mercier shrugged. “Compared to what? He likes to toss back a few, like anybody.”

“And you’re sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

“None that I know of,” Mercier answered, putting his attention to neatly rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing an elaborate and colorful sleeve of tattoo ink.

“Your brother got ink like that?” Stokes asked.

“No. Marc, he wouldn’t mess with perfection.”

“What about the wife?” Nick asked. “She got a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. Mama thinks she’s got something going on with her boss.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t give two shits, but I don’t think Will Faulkner bats from that side of the plate, to be honest.”

“Where does she work?” Stokes asked.

“She manages vacation rental properties for Bayou Realty.”

“Y’all have a fishing camp Marc might have gone to?” Nick asked.

“Yeah, down the bayou on Lake Aucoin. He could be there if Missy didn’t Airbnb it up full of out-of-town sports this weekend,” Luc said, his attention going now to the road as a van pulled into the property on the bayou side. His tour group. “There’s never enough money to suit the princess.”

“You didn’t go down there and check?” Nick asked.

He heaved a sigh. “Me, I only got so much patience for Marc’s bullshit temper tantrums. I got a business to run, and I can’t just drop everything and go looking to see where my little brother’s sulking this time.

“I gotta go,” he said, pushing away from the truck.

Nick handed him a business card. “If you hear from him, give me a call. We’ll put out an alert on his vehicle.”

“You do that,” he said as he dropped the last of his smoke on the crushed shell and ground it out with the toe of his boot. Done with the conversation, he got in the truck and fired up the diesel engine to drive thirty yards across the road.

“How about that?” Stokes said as they watched him go. “Start the day with a Who Is It, now we got us a What the Hell, and it’s only lunchtime. What do you think the odds are our dead guy and our missing guy are one and the same? Could we get that lucky?”

“You know I don’t believe in luck, me,” Nick said, glancing back to see Kiki Mercier duck inside from the window. “Human nature, though…that’s something else again.”

He let the thought trail off. In his experience, crime almost always turned out to be depressingly, stupidly simple. Criminal masterminds were the stuff of movies and TV. People did what they did for simple reasons—money, lust, jealousy, fear. Pick a thread and follow it to the end. Luck was seldom necessary.