A Thin Dark Line

by Tami Hoag

  Victor waited for the voices to go away. Then he waited some more. He counted to the Magic Number three times by sixteenths before he left his room. He had come down to Marcus's Own Space, drawn by the need to see the face, even though it upset him. Sometimes he was like that.

  Sometimes he couldn't stop from hitting his fist against the wall, even though he knew it hurt him.

  The disorder of the room upset him. He couldn't abide broken things. It hurt him in his brain to see broken glass or splintered wood. He felt he could see every torn molecule, and feel the pain of them. And yet he stayed in the room because of the face.

  He closed his eyes and saw the face, opened them and saw the face again—the same, the same, the same, but different. Mask, no mask. The feeling it gave him was very red. He closed his eyes again and counted by fractions to the Magic Number.

  Annie. She was The Other but not The Other. Pam, but not Pam. Elaine, but not Elaine. Mask, no mask. It was like before, and that was very red.

  Victor rocked himself and whimpered inside his being, not outside. The intensity was building. His senses were too acute. Every part of him was hard with tension, even his penis. He worried that panic would strike and freeze him, trapping the red intensity inside where it would go on and on, and no one would be able to make it stop.

  He lifted his hands and touched his favorite mask and rocked himself, tears running down his cheeks as he stared at his brother's pencil drawing of Annie Broussard, and the jagged, bloody tear that ran down the center of it.

  41

  Kim Young was a regular at the Voodoo Lounge. She worked three to eleven as an assistant manager at the Quik Pik on La Rue Dumas in Bayou Breaux and figured she deserved a beer or two after eight hours of clearing gas pumps, selling lottery tickets, and running teenagers off before they could shoplift the place into bankruptcy. Besides that, Icky Kebodeaux, the kid she supervised, was weird, smelled like a locker-room laundry basket, and had acne so bad she thought his whole face would explode one of these days and just ooze away. After eight hours of Icky's company, a beer was the least she deserved.

  And so she always stopped off for a nightcap at the lounge on her way home when Mike was out on the TriStar rig in the Gulf. They lived on the outskirts of Luck in a neat little brick house with a big yard. They had been married less than a year, and so far Kim found married life to be good news/bad news. Mike was a catch, but she was left alone for weeks at a time when he was on the rig. He was gone now and not due back for another week.

  He was going to miss Carnival in Bayou Breaux, and Kim was feeling bitchy about that. At twenty-three she still liked to party, and she had decided she would damn well party without Mike if he wasn't willing to take the vacation days. He was always willing to take vacation days during hunting season, when he wanted to have some fun.

  Screw him. She wasn't going to look good in tight jeans forever. She had already made arrangements to go to Carnival with Jeanne-Marie and Candace. Girls' night out. There were always plenty of guys to hook up with for fun at the street dance—if the town fathers allowed the street dance to go on this year.

  Everyone was spooked about this rapist. One of the victims had died today. She'd heard it on the radio.

  Kim would never have admitted it, but she hadn't been sleeping too well herself this last week. She had thought about moving in with her sister until Mike got home, but Becky had a month-old baby with colic and Kim wanted no part of that. Anyway, it wasn't as if she was helpless.

  "What I want to know is if Baptists can't go to Disney World on account of the gays, can they go to Busch Gardens?" the caller on the radio asked. "How do they know there ain't gays working at Busch Gardens or Six Flags? My brother-in-law's cousin works at Six Flags, and he's so light in the loafers he floats. It's all just silly, if you ask me. What kind of good Christian people go around trying to figure out if perfect strangers are AC or DC?"

  "Ah, there's a can of worms. Any Baptists out there care to comment? This is KJUN, all talk all the time. Home of the giant jackpot giveaway. We'll be right back after these messages."

  Kim wouldn't have minded winning that jackpot. She and Mike had been talking about putting away money toward a new boat. God knew she called into this stupid show often enough. She had called just tonight from the Quik Pik to give her opinion on canceling the street dance. Stupid, that's what that idea was. Nobody was going to get raped at the street dance. The worst that ever happened was fistfights.

  She swung her old Caprice in under the carport beside the house as Zachary Richard sang a zydeco jingle for a casino downriver.

  The house was safe and sound, just the way she'd left it. A basket of laundry sat on the kitchen table, ready for folding. She scooped it up, carried it with her to the bedroom, and did the job while she watched a rerun of Cheers on the tiny color set she'd bought to have on her dresser.

  She went to bed at about one-thirty and lay awake for a long while, straining to listen for sounds in the house. The wind had picked up outside, and she grew frustrated trying to tell the difference between the rustle of tree branches and the scrape of footsteps outside the window. By one-fifty she had drifted off, a scowl on her face, her right hand jammed under Mike's pillow.

  At 2:19 she woke with a start. He was here. She could feel his presence, dark and menacing. Her pulse raced out of control. She lay perfectly still, waiting.

  She had left the night-light on in the bathroom down the hall, and a faint shaft of illumination spilled out the partly opened door into the hallway.

  She saw him coming. The black figure of doom. No features, no face, as silent as death.

  Death.

  Why me? Kim wondered as he slipped into the bedroom. Why did he pick me? What did I do to deserve this?

  She would know later, she thought, as he came toward the bed. She would find out after she killed him.

  In one smooth motion, and without hesitation, Kim Young sat up, swung the gun out from under her husband's pillow, and pulled the trigger.

  42

  The dream was washed in filtered shades of red. Soft red light as grainy as dust. Deep red shadows as liquid as blood. She stood in front of what she thought was a mirror, but the face staring back was not her own. Lindsay Faulkner looked through the glass at her, her expression accusatory, scornful. Annie reached out a hand to touch the mirror. The apparition came through the glass and passed over her, passed through her.

  She twisted around and tried to run, but her body was bound in place by raw red muscle growing up from the floor and reaching out of the walls. Across the room, the apparition suddenly fell backward onto the floor, screaming. Then the floor heaved upward and became a wall, and the apparition became Pam Bichon, blood running like wine from her gaping wounds, her dark eyes burning blankly into Annie's.

  With a shout, Annie clawed her way out of the dream, out of sleep. The sheet was twisted around her body like a sarong. She struggled free of it and sat up on the couch with her knees drawn up and her head in her hands. Her hair was wild and damp with sweat. Her T-shirt was soaked through. The air conditioner kicked on and blew its cold breath over her, raising gooseflesh. The disturbing quality of the dream clung to her like body odor. Shadows and blood. Shadowland:

  "I'm doing the best I can, Pam," she whispered. "I'm doing the best I can."

  Too edgy to lie back down, she went into her bedroom and changed T-shirts. Fourcade had cleaned up the mess for her, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to sleep in the bed. Maybe after the images had some time to fade from her mind. Maybe after this was all over and she had a chance to put a fresh coat of paint on the wall and buy some new pillows ... Or maybe this was just one of the more obvious ways in which her life would never be the same.

  She went to the kitchen for a drink, then pulled a Snickers bar from the freezer instead. Nibbling at the frozen chocolate, she wandered around her living room, using only the lights from the stereo system and the scanner to keep her from running into anything. Ni
ck was outside somewhere. Stakeout duty. She didn't want to alarm him by turning on lights at two-thirty in the morning, even though it would have been nice to have some company. She was getting to like his company a little too much, she feared.

  She sank down on the sofa and rubbed the taxidermized alligator's snout affectionately with her bare foot.

  "Maybe I need to get a live pet, huh, Alphonse?" she muttered. The gator gave her his usual toothy grin.

  Across the room the scanner scratched out a call.

  "All units in the vicinity: We've got a possible 245 and a 261 at 759 Duff Road in Luck. Shots fired. Code 3."

  A possible assault and rape. All deputies were to come fast with lights and sirens.

  "The caller says she shot him," the dispatcher said. "We've got an ambulance on the way."

  Luck was just down the road and across the bayou. And, if Annie's hunch was right, Chaz Stokes may just have been lying in a pool of blood at 759 Duff Road.

  Two units made the scene ahead of her. The cars sat at flamboyant angles in the front yard of the little brick house, beacons rolling. One officer sat on the concrete front steps, either watching out for the ambulance or being sick. The latter, Annie guessed as she crossed the lawn.

  He grabbed hold of the wrought iron railing to steady himself as he rose to his feet. The front-porch light gleamed off his red hair like the sun on a new copper penny and Annie thanked heaven for small favors. This cop was a Doucet. Blood was thicker than the Brotherhood. Blood was thicker than anything in South Louisiana.

  "Hey, Annie, that you?"

  "Hey, Tee-Rouge, where y'at?"

  "Tossing my cookies. What you doing here, chère?"

  "Caught it on the scanner. I thought the victim might appreciate having another woman here," she lied.

  Tee-Rouge gave a snort and waved a hand in dismissal. "That's some victim. Somebody oughta lift that li'l gal's nightie and see what kind of hairy balls she's hiding under there. She shot this son of a bitch point-blank in the face with a cut-down shotgun."

  "Youch. Who is he?" Annie asked, trying for casual, feeling anything but. In her mind's eye she pictured Stokes creeping toward the woman's bed, the woman raising the shotgun, Stokes's face exploding.

  Tee-Rouge shrugged. "Chère, his mama wouldn't know him if he sat up and called her name. He's got no ID, but he was wearing the mask. There's feathers all over the damn scene. This is our scumbag of the season right here."

  "You call the detectives?"

  "Yeah, but Stokes, he's who-knows-where. In bed with some chick, probably—no offense."

  Annie's heartbeat quickened. "He's not answering his page?"

  "Not so far. Quinlan's on his way, but he lives clear up in Devereaux. It'll take him some time to get down here."

  "Who's inside?" she asked, starting for the door.

  "Pitre."

  Groaning to herself, Annie went on into the house as a third cruiser came screaming down the road. Every patrol in the parish was being abandoned in favor of the excitement of a "hot crime scene. Everybody wanted in on wrapping the Mardi Gras case.

  The living room was empty. There was no immediate sign of the victim. The bedroom looked to be a straight shot down the hall to the left. Pitre stood just inside the doorway, at the feet of the fallen assailant. Annie took a deep breath and marched down the hall.

  "I'm not gonna want pizza any time soon," Pitre muttered, then looked up at the source of the footfalls. "Broussard, what the hell are you doing here? You're not on tonight. Hell, you're barely on the force at all."

  Annie ignored him, turning to look at the dead man. He wasn't her first. He wasn't even her first by shotgun. But he was the first hit at close range, and the sight was by no means pretty.

  The rapist lay on the floor, arms outflung. He was dressed in black, covering every inch of his body, including his hands. He could have been black, white, Indian—there was no telling. There was virtually nothing left of his face. The flesh-and-bone mask that set one human being apart from the next had been obliterated. The raw meat, shattered bone, and exposed brain matter could have belonged to anyone. The hair was saturated with blood, its color indistinguishable. A fragment of the black feather mask was stuck to a jagged piece of cranium. The stench of violent death was thick in the air.

  "Oh my Lord," Annie breathed, her knees wilting a bit. The Snickers bar threatened a return trip, and she had to steel herself against spewing it all over the crime scene.

  Scraps and chunks of the assailant's face had been sprayed up onto the ceiling and on the pale yellow wall. The sawed-off shotgun lay abandoned on the bed.

  "If you can't take it, leave, Broussard. Nobody asked you here," Pitre said, moving around the bed to check out the shotgun. "Stokes won't be amused to see you."

  "Yeah? Well, maybe the joke's on him," Annie muttered, trying to think ahead. Should she pull Quinlan aside when he arrived and tell him about the possibility? Or should she just step back and let the thing unravel on its own? No one would thank her for having suspected Stokes.

  "Hey," Pitre said with the delighted surprise of a child finding the hidden prize in Cracker Jack. "We know the guy had one blue eye."

  "How's that?"

  A nasty grin lit his face as he leaned over the bed and stared at his find. " 'Cause here it is. Would you look at that! That sucker musta popped clean out of his head when she shot him! It's just sitting here like a little egg!"

  Stokes's turquoise blue orbs came clearly into focus in Annie's mind as she stepped around the body. But before she could get a look at Pitre's prize, a familiar voice sounded behind her.

  "Man Without a Face. Anybody see that movie? This guy's uglier. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'."

  Annie swung around, stunned. Stokes stood looking down at the body, chewing on a stick of boudin sausage, a Ragin' Cajuns ball cap backward on his head. He glanced over at her and made a face.

  "Man, Broussard, you are like the goddamn clap—unwanted, unwelcome, and impossible to get rid of."

  "I'm sure you're the voice of experience," Annie managed. She hadn't quite realized just how set she had been on Stokes's guilt until that moment. A mix of emotions swept over her as she watched him step around the body—disappointment, relief, guilt.

  "Who asked you to the dance, anyway?" Stokes asked. "We don't need any secretaries here, don't need any crime dogs."

  "I thought the victim might appreciate having another woman here."

  "Yeah, he probably would have if he wasn't dead."

  "I meant the woman."

  "Then go find her and get the hell outta my crime scene." He looked right at her and said straight-faced, "Can't have you messing up any evidence."

  As Annie went into the hall, Stokes leaned over the bed and looked at the shotgun. "Man, that's what I call birth control. You know what I mean?"

  Pitre laughed.

  The victim, Kim Young, was in her neat little yellow kitchen, leaning back against the counter, trembling as if she had just walked out of a freezer. The pale blue baby-doll nightgown she wore barely cleared the tops of her thighs and was liberally flecked with blood and tissue. The mess had sprayed across her face and into her dishwater blond curls.

  "I'm Deputy Broussard," Annie said gently. "Would you like to sit down? Are you feeling all right?"

  She looked up, glassy-eyed. "I—I shot that man."

  "Yes, you did."

  From where she stood, Annie could see the open patio door in the dining room, where the assailant had gained entry. A neat half-moon of glass had been cut out beside the handle.

  "Did you get a look at him before you pulled the trigger?"

  She shook her head, dislodging a bone fragment from her hair. It fell to the tile floor next to her bare foot. "It was too dark. Something woke me up and—and—I was so scared. And then he was right there by the bed and I—I—"

  Tears choked her. Her face reddened. "What if it had been Mike? It could have been Mike! I just shot—"

  Igno
ring the blood and gore, Annie put an arm around Kim Young's shoulders as the realization dawned in the woman's mind—that she might have killed a loved one by mistake. Then, instead of being a hero, as she would certainly be touted when the press caught up with the story, she would have been portrayed as stupid and hysterical, a misguided vigilante forced to pay a terrible price. The difference was the outcome, not the action. Just another one of life's little object lessons.

  The assailant's name was Willard Roache, known affectionately by his old pals in the penal system as "Cock" Roache. He had a long, ugly history of sexual assault charges and two convictions. He'd done his last jolt in Angola and had been released in June 1996. His last address listed with the state correctional system was in Shreveport, where he had dumped his parole officer and his identity.

  Calling himself William Dunham, he had moved to Bayou Breaux in late December and secured a job as a technician at KJUN Radio, using a fake resume no one had bothered to check. Working the evening shift with Owen Onofrio, Roache had answered the phones and recorded the names and addresses of callers for the giant jackpot giveaway. It was from this list he had chosen his victims.

  Evidence obtained at Roache's home included photocopies of the lists with his personal notes scrawled in the margin. Next to Lindsay Faulkner's name he had written the words "Sexy bitch." Also found in his home was a box containing half a dozen black feather Mardi Gras masks that had come from a novelties wholesaler in New Orleans.

  The information came in piece by piece throughout the day, starting with the discovery of Roadie's car parked a short distance from Kim Young's home. At the sheriff's instruction, Roache's corpse was fingerprinted at the scene and the prints sent through the state automated fingerprint system with a rush order—the rush being a press conference set for four o'clock in the afternoon. Noblier wanted the case tied up with a ribbon before the start of Carnival for maximum PR benefit.