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He had looked Nick right in the eyes and said he hadn’t seen Robbie Fontenot in years when he had in fact seen him in Bayou Breaux little more than a week past. Why lie about it?
Of course, lying seemed to be Dozer’s default mode when he was panicking. Confrontation overwhelmed him, and he automatically chose the quick lie over a truth that might trap him in something. Trap him in what, was the question.
Nick turned in at the Country Estates mobile home park. It was even more depressing in the light of day than it had been the night before with its faded, rusting old trailer houses and chicken-scratch yards of dirt and weeds and beater cars. He pulled in beside Dozer’s Silverado. At least he was keeping his day drinking at home instead of endangering the public on the roadways.
Nick found him around the back of the trailer, snoring in a hammock strung between two sickly elm trees, a pile of beer cans on the ground beneath him.
“Dozer!” Nick yelled, and kicked the pile of cans.
The racket startled Dozer awake. The big man woke flailing and sputtering, clawing at the air, rocking the hammock. He twisted sideways, trying to escape some imagined threat, and dumped himself on the ground with a thud.
“What the fuck?” he said, groaning. “Goddamn it, that hurt!”
Nick watched dispassionately as Dozer struggled up onto his hands and knees.
“Me, I once got called to a death scene,” he said, “where a man died in a hammock just like this one. He’d been dead a couple of days out in the heat. His head had swelled up like a watermelon, and his face turned black as pitch. Turned out he had passed out drunk and a rattlesnake had fallen out of the tree above him, landed on his face, and bit him, and he died right there.”
Dozer looked up at him like he was crazy as he struggled to get his big feet under him and stand. He was dressed in his usual bib overalls with no shirt, one of the shoulder straps undone and hanging down. He shifted the denim suit around his bulk, tugging at his crotch. “Why the hell you telling me that?”
“Rattlesnakes are pretty good climbers,” Nick said. “Most people don’t know that.”
“What are you doing here, Fourcade?”
“You should always be aware of what animals you might piss off, lest they bite you, Mr. Cormier. Myself, for instance,” he said. “Me, I don’t like being lied to, and I’m gonna have a bad reaction to that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dozer grumbled, sitting down on an old tree stump that had been sawed off at chair height.
“How drunk are you right now?”
“Not enough.”
“You had better be sober enough to listen to me or I’ll have a deputy here in five minutes to haul your ass to jail.”
“Why? I ain’t done nothing.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve managed to irritate the hell out of me today, and I’ve only just now laid eyes on you.”
“This is harassment,” Dozer said.
“You think so? Call a cop on that mysterious little cell phone you told me you didn’t own, you fucking liar.”
“You’re mad ’cause I have a phone?”
“I’m mad because you keep wasting my time, Dozer,” Nick said. “You think I want to keep coming out to this miserable shithole to talk around in circles with you?”
“Then don’t.”
“You told me you hadn’t seen Robbie Fontenot in years.”
“I haven’t.”
“And there you go again. I have a witness who puts you in the company of Robbie Fontenot Halloween night.”
“He’s a liar!”
“He’s got absolutely no reason to lie about that. You, on the other hand, make a habit of it. Why is that?”
“It’s none of your business who I talk to.”
