A Thin Dark Line

'That's all I want, pard,' he said, passing the cigarette through the wire. 'I want everybody to get what they deserve.'

Annie stayed in the locker room for twenty minutes fighting to compose herself. Twenty minutes of staring at that skinned muskrat.

There was no way of knowing where it had come from or who had hung it, not without questioning people, looking for witnesses, making a fuss. Mullen was a sound bet, but she knew a half dozen deputies who did some trapping for extra income. Still, skinning would have been Mullen's touch. Annie had always pegged him for the sort of kid who had pulled the wings off flies.

Turncoat bitch.

Holding her breath against the sweet-putrid scent of decaying rodent, she cut the thing down with her pocketknife and grimaced as it hit the floor with a soft thud. She tore up the note, then pilfered a cardboard box from the garbage in the office supply room and used it for a coffin. She had no intention of taking the thing to Noblier and making a bad situation worse. And there was no leaving it. After she rewrote her final report on the cemetery vandalism and filed it, she grabbed the box and her duffel bag and left. She could toss the corpse in the woods after she got home, and Mother Nature would give it a proper disposal.

The drive home usually calmed her after a bad day. Today it only made her feel more alienated. Daylight was nearly gone, casting the world in the strange gray twilight of bad dreams. The woods looked forbidding, uninviting; the cane fields were vast, unpopulated seas of green. Lamps burned in the windows of the houses she passed; inside families were together, eating supper, watching television.

Always in times like this, she became acutely aware of her lack of a traditional family. This was when the memories crept up from childhood: her mother sitting in a rocking chair looking out at the swamp, a wraithlike woman, surreal, pale, detached, never quite in the present. There had always been a distance between Marie Broussard and the world around her. Annie had been keenly aware of it and frightened by it, fearing that one day her mother would just slip away into another dimension and she would be left alone. Which was exactly what had happened.

She had had Uncle Sos and Tante Fanchon to look after her, and she couldn't have loved them more, but there was always, would always be, a place inside her where she felt like an orphan, disconnected, separate from the people around her… as her mother had been. The door to that place was wide open tonight.

'You're on the air with Owen Onofrio, KJUN, all talk all the time. Home of the giant jackpot giveaway. We're up over nine hundred dollars now. What lucky listener will pocket that check? It could happen any time, any day.

'On our agenda tonight: Murder suspect Marcus Renard was allegedly attacked and beaten last night by a Partout Parish sheriff's detective. What do you have to say about that, Kay on line one?'

'I say there ain't no justice, that's what I say. The world's gone crazy. They put that dead woman's daddy in jail, too, and everyone I know says he's a hero for trying to do what the courts wouldn't. Killers and rapists have more rights than decent people. It's crazy!'

Annie switched the radio off as she turned in at the Corners. There were three cars in the crushed shell lot. Uncle Sos's pickup, the night clerk's rusty Fiesta, and off to one side, a shiny maroon Grand Am that made her groan aloud. A.J.

She sat for a moment just staring at the place she had called home her whole life: a simple two-story wood- frame building with a corrugated tin roof. The wide front window acted as a billboard, with half a dozen various ads and messages for products and services. A red neon sign for Bud, a placard that read ICI ON PARLE FRANCAIS, another sign handwritten in Magic Marker HOT Boudin amp; Cracklins.

The first floor of the building housed the business Sos Doucet had run for forty years. Originally a general store that served area swampers and their families who had come in by boat once or twice a month, it had evolved with the times and economic necessity into a landing for swamp tours, a cafe, and a convenience store that did its biggest business on the weekends when fishermen and hunters- 'sports,' Uncle Sos called them- stocked up to head out into the Atchafalaya basin. The tourists loved the rustic charm of the scarred old cypress floor and ancient, creaking ceiling fans. The locals were happier with the commercial refrigerators that kept their beer cold and handy, and the two-for-one movie rentals on Monday night.

The second-floor apartment had been home to Sos and Fanchon during the first years of their marriage. Prosperity had allowed them to build a little ranch-style brick house a hundred yards away, and in 1968 they had rented the apartment to Marie Broussard, who had shown up on the porch one day, pregnant and forlorn, as mysterious as any of the stray cats that had come to make their home at the Corners.

' 'Bout time you got home, chere!' Uncle Sos called, leaning out the screen door.

Annie climbed out of the Jeep with her duffel bag strapped over one shoulder and the muskrat box in her other hand.

'What you got in the box? Supper?'

'Not exactly.'

Sos came out onto the porch, barefoot, in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his sinewy forearms. He wasn't a tall man, but even at sixtysomething his shoulders suggested power. His belly was as flat as an anvil, his skin perpetually tan, his face creased in places like fine old leather. People told him he resembled the actor Tommy Lee Jones, which always brought a sparkle to his eyes and the retort that, hell no, Tommy Lee Jones resembled him, the lucky son of a bitch.

'You got comp'ny, chere,' Sos said with a sly grin that nearly made his eyes disappear. 'Andre, he's here to see you.' He lowered his voice in conspiracy as she stepped up onto the porch. His face was aglow. 'Y'all had a little lovers' spat, no?'

'We're not lovers, Uncle Sos.'

'Bah!'

'Not that it's any of your business, by the way, for the hundredth time.'

He jerked his chin back and looked offended. 'How is that not my business?'

'I'm a grown-up,' she reminded him.

'Then you smart enough to marry dat boy, mais no?'

'Will you ever give up?'

'Mebbe,' he said, pulling open the screen door for her. 'Mebbe when you make me a grandpapa.'

A bouquet of red roses and baby's breath sat on the corner of the checkout counter, as out of place as a Ming vase. The night clerk, a crater-faced kid as skinny as a licorice whip, was running Speed on the VCR.

'Hey, Stevie,' Annie called.

'Hey, Annie,' he called back, never taking his eyes off the set. 'What's in the box?'

'Severed hand.'

'Cool.'

'Aren't you gonna say hello to Andre?' Sos said irritably. 'After he come all the way out here. After he sent you flowers and all.'

A.J. had the grace to look sheepish. He leaned back against a display counter of varnished alligator heads and other equally gruesome artifacts that titillated the tourists. He hadn't changed out of his suit, but had shed his tie and opened the collar of his shirt.

'I don't know,' Annie said. 'Should I have my lawyer present?'

'I was out of line,' he conceded.

'Try left field. On the warning track.'

'See, chere?' Sos smiled warmly, motioning her to close the distance. 'Andre, he knows when he's licked. He come to kiss and make up.'

Annie refused to be charmed. 'Yeah? Well, he can kiss my butt.'

Sos arched a brow at him. 'Hey, that's a start.'

'I'm tired,' Annie declared, turning back for the door. 'Good night.'

'Annie!' A.J. called. She could hear him coming behind her as she rounded the corner of the porch and started up the staircase to her apartment. 'You can't just keep running away from me. '

'I'm not running away. I'm trying to ignore you, which, I promise you, is preferable to the alternative. I'm not