outrun him, but she had four good all-terrain tires and a machine that was nimble for its size. If she could make the levee road, she would shake him.
She hit the brakes and went into a skid, downshifting. As the car shot past her, she bent the skid into a 180- degree turn and hit the gas. In the rearview, she could see the brake lights on the car glowing like red eyes in the night. By the time he got turned around, she would be halfway to the levee-if her luck held, if the trail out to Clarence Gauthier's camp wasn't under a foot of water.
Her headlights hit the sign. Nailed to the stump of a swamp oak that had been struck by lightning twenty years ago, the sign was a jagged piece of cypress plank, hand-lettered in blaze orange: keep out-trespasser will be ate.
Behind her the car was lurching around. Annie swung the Jeep onto the dirt path and hit the brakes. Ahead of her, water lay across the trail in a glossy black sheet dimpled by rain. Too late, she thought she might have been wiser to sprint the miles back to Renard's house to take refuge with one killer in order to escape another. But the car was barreling toward her now, taking advantage of her hesitation.
If she couldn't make it across to higher ground, she was his, whoever the hell he was, for whatever the hell he wanted. She'd have to go for the Sig in the duffel bag on the passenger's seat, and hold the son of a bitch off until help came along.
She gunned the engine as she let out the clutch. The Jeep hit the water, engine roaring, wheels churning. Churning and catching. Churning and sinking.
'Come on, come on, come on!' Annie chanted.
The back end of the Jeep twisted to the right as the back tire slid toward the edge of the submerged trail. The engine was screaming. Annie was screaming. In the mirror she caught a glimpse of the car pulling up on the road behind her.
Then the front tires caught hold of firmer ground, and the Jeep scrambled to safety.
'Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. Oh, shit,' Annie muttered as she sped down the twisting trail, branches slapping at the windshield.
Someone ran out of the shack where Clarence Gauthier kept his fighting dogs. Annie took a right before she got to the camp, and flinched at the sound of a shotgun going off in warning. Another half mile on the trail that was rapidly disintegrating to bog and she was finally able to climb up onto the levee road.
Clear of the woods, the rain closed around her like a liquid curtain. Only the lightning allowed her nightmare glimpses of the world beyond the beam of her headlights. Black, dead, not a living thing in sight.
She felt ill. She was shaking.
Somebody had just tried to. kill her.
The Corners' store was closed. The light in Sos and Fanchon's living room glowed amber through the gloom across the parking lot. Annie pulled the Jeep in close to the staircase on the south side of the building and ran up to her landing. Her hands were trembling as she worked the lock. She struggled to mentally talk her nerves into calming down. She was a cop, after all. That someone tried to kill her probably shouldn't have bothered her so much. Maybe next time she would shrug it off entirely. Par for the course. Just another day on the job. The hell it was. Once inside the entry, she shed her sneakers, dropped her gear bag, and went straight to the kitchen. She pulled a chair across the floor. A dusty bottle of Jack Daniel's sat in the cupboard over the refrigerator.
She thought of Mullen as she pulled the whiskey down and set it on the counter. He would have liked this moment on videotape-evidence of her sudden alcoholism. Son of a bitch. If she found out he'd been behind the wheel of that car tonight… what? The consequences would go far beyond having him charged with a crime.
Life should have been so much simpler, Annie thought as she unscrewed the cap from the Jack and poured a double shot. She took a long sip, grimacing as the stuff slid down.
'You gonna offer me some of that?'
Heart in her throat, Annie bolted around. The glass hit the floor and shattered.
'I locked that door when I left,' she said.
Fourcade shrugged. 'And I told you before: It's not much of a lock.'
'Where's your truck?'
'Out of sight.'
Nick grabbed a dish towel and bent down to clean up the mess. 'You're a mite on the edge tonight, 'Toinette.'
He looked up at her standing beside the jaunty gator on her refrigerator. Her face was pale as death, her eyes shining like glass beads, her hair hanging in damp strings. He could feel the tension in her like the vibrations of a tuning fork.
'I suppose I am,' she said. 'Someone just tried to kill me.'
'What?' He jerked upright and looked her over as if he expected to see blood.
'Someone tried to run me off the bayou road into the swamp. And he damn near succeeded.'
Annie looked around her kitchen, at the old cupboards and the vintage fifties table, at the canisters on the counter and the ivy plant she had started from a sprig in Serena Doucet's bridal bouquet five years ago. She looked at the cat clock, watched its eyes and tail move with the passing seconds. Everything looked somehow different, as if she hadn't seen any of it in a very long time and now found none of it quite matched the images in her memory.
The whiskey boiled in her empty stomach like acid. She could still feel its path down the back of her throat.
'Somebody tried to kill me,' she murmured again, amazed. Dizziness swept through her like a wave. With as much cool and dignity as she could muster, she looked at Nick and said, 'Excuse me. I have to go throw up now.'
31
'This is not one of my finer moments.'
Annie sat on her knees in front of the toilet, propped up on one side by the old claw-foot bathtub. She felt like a withering husk, too drained for anything deeper than cursory embarrassment. 'So much for my image as a lush.'
'Did you get a look at the driver?' Fourcade asked, leaning a shoulder against the door frame.
'Just a glimpse. I think he was wearing a ski mask. It was dark. It was raining. Everything happened so fast. God,' she complained in disgust. 'I sound like every vic I've ever rolled my eyes at.'
'Tags?'
She shook her head. 'I was too busy trying to keep my ass out of the swamp.
'I don't know,' she murmured. 'I thought Renard staged the shooting just to get me over there, but maybe not. Maybe whoever took that shot hung around, watched the cops, watched me come and go.'
'Why go after you? Why not wait 'til you're gone and take another crack at Renard?'
The answer might have made her throw up again if she hadn't already emptied her system. If the assailant was after Renard, it made no sense to go after her.
'You're probably right about the shooting,' he said. 'Renard, he wanted an excuse to call you. That story he gave you is lame as a three-legged dog.'
Annie pulled herself up to sit on the edge of the tub. 'If that's true, then Cadillac Man was there for one reason-me. He had to have followed me over there.'
She looked up at Fourcade as he came into the room, half hoping he would tell her no just to ease her worry. He didn't, wouldn't, wasn't that kind of man. The facts were the facts, he would see no purpose in padding the truth to soften the blows.
With a dubious look he pulled the towel away from the ceramic grasping hand that stuck out from the wall and soaked one end of it with cold tap water.
'You manage to piss people off, 'Toinette,' he said, taking a seat on the closed toilet.
'I don't mean to.'
