AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And we’ll also have the data recorder from the police car,” Grant said. “Provided it wasn’t damaged in the crash. That’ll give us the speed, throttle position, brake usage. We’ll put this together. It’ll take a few days. I expect it’ll take the better part of this day just to extricate the vehicle.”
Never mind extricating the vehicle, Annie thought. She didn’t even want to imagine the process it must have required to extricate Danny Perry from the car to get him to the ambulance, the time they would have lost just navigating the terrain while his life hung in the balance.
She had spoken to Sergeant Rodrigue on her way to the site, knowing he always had the scoop. He told her Perry had misspoken the name of the road, reporting to dispatch he was pursuing a possible stolen vehicle on Cypress Canal Road rather than Cypress Island Road, delaying support vehicles from finding him by precious minutes. Likely unconscious from the impact, he hadn’t answered his radio calls as dispatch had tried to contact him for his correct location.
First responders had requested AirMed, knowing Perry would stand his best chance at the level-one trauma center in Baton Rouge, but there was no good place for them to land in this wildlife management area, and it was determined the most expedient choice was to send him by ambulance to Lafayette General, a level-two trauma hospital, and if they could stabilize him there, then chopper him to Our Lady of the Lake.
“This is a nightmare,” Dewey declared, more to himself than to anyone. He looked at Annie. “This is on Fontenot.”
“Oh, it’s his fault Danny Perry tried to run him off the road?” Annie asked, incredulous.
“You don’t know that’s what happened!” Dewey barked. “Why didn’t he just pull over?”
“Why didn’t he?” Annie asked. “Out here in the middle of fucking nowhere in the dead of night? Why didn’t Danny just follow him?”
“Why would Danny run him off the road?”
“To kill him is the first thought that comes to mind,” Annie said.
“That’s insane! You’re accusing a police officer of attempted murder? What the hell is wrong with you, Broussard?” he demanded, then caught himself. “Oh, I forgot. You’ve made a career out of that.”
“Oh, fuck off, Dewey,” Annie snapped, irritated he would dredge up the ancient history of the time she had arrested Nick for assaulting a suspect. “I wasn’t wrong then, and I won’t look the other way for a bad cop now. I’m not the problem here. I’m not the one who tried to run someone into the swamp!”
Dewey’s little eyes bugged out of his head. “Keep your voice down!” he ordered in a harsh whisper. “There are TV cameras rolling on this.”
“The two of you can take this fight elsewhere,” Sergeant Grant said in a stern voice. “I’ve got work to do here.”
“Apologies, Sergeant,” Annie said. “Thank you for the information.”
She started for her vehicle. Dewey rushed up alongside her.
“Where are you going?”
“To do my job,” Annie snapped back at him. “You might think about trying that instead of following me around like a lost puppy. Or are you stalking me, Dewey? Is that what this is? I’m sniffing around something you don’t want me to find?”
“I don’t like you accusing our officer of shit he didn’t do. Danny’s a good cop.”
“It’s not looking that way,” Annie said, yanking open her car door.
“Where are you going?” he asked again.
She got behind the wheel and looked up at him.
“Lafayette,” she said, and slammed the door, mutteringfuckerunder her breath. She’d had more than enough of Dewey Rivette this week. Of course, now he was going to think she was going to Lafayette in the hopes of getting some kind of dying declaration out of Danny Perry. Good, she thought. She hoped the idea gave him diarrhea.
She turned her car around, glaring at him the whole time, and wound her way back through the growing mess of law enforcement vehicles, media vans, reporters, and gawkers. She needed to focus on the possible good news of the day: that Robbie Fontenot might be alive and well.
Danny had been sitting on the Mercier house when he spotted the Toyota prowling the neighborhood. That truth brought back the conversation she’d had with Nick the night before—his exploration of the seemingly wild possibility that Robbie might have been hired to kill Marc. She wanted to reject that idea out of hand, but she couldn’t. What did she really know about Robbie Fontenot’s state of mind? How could she know what he was capable of doing? She had two views of him: his criminal record and his mother’s opinion. Neither of those things was the whole truth.
He was a man with no job and few prospects and by his mother’s own admission could have been nursing a grudge against Marc Mercier for a decade. But would he kill a man for money?
That seemed like a big leap, but she couldn’t stop seeing that pile of cash—$2,450. People had done the same job for a lot less. And that might have just been the down payment.
Where had he been headed, coming down that winding, dangerous road? she wondered as she turned onto the highway to Lafayette. That road through the wildlife management area went on for another mile or more beyond the crash site before coming to a T intersection that would have let him go anywhere. Or had he chosen that road thinking there was a chance that exactly whathadhappenedwouldhappen?
How could he have orchestrated that? This wasn’t someFast and Furiousmovie. Robbie Fontenot wasn’t a trained stunt driverdriving some mega-muscle car. He was a regular guy driving an old Toyota, being pursued by a souped-up cop car.
Annie really didn’t want to think that Danny Perry was some movie villain rogue cop, either, but as Sergeant Grant had said, the evidence was the evidence. Or had Danny thought he could just scare Robbie into pulling over by bumping his car, then pulling back?
