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“Ah, well, see, you’re wrong there, as usual,” Nick said. “It is literally my business when the person you lie about talking to went missing on that very night.”
“I don’t know nothing about it,” Dozer grumbled.
“Always so conveniently ignorant, aren’t you?” Nick said. “Where did you go that night after you left Monster Bash?”
“Nowhere. Home.”
“Really? Because I’m gonna go to every one of your neighbors here and ask them did they see you. And I’m gonna guess that even in this sorry place, at least one of them is gonna have a video doorbell, and we’ll see if you were home or not.”
Dozer frowned, his big face creasing like a bulldog’s as he considered his next story.
“I was drinking with Marc.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! I was drunk. Ask Marc.”
“Ask Marc, who is also missing? Are you trying to be a wiseass here,couillon? ’Cause you’re missing half that equation.”
“Maybe I saw Robbie and I just don’t remember,” Dozer said, backtracking.
“Really?” Nick said. “You run into a guy you haven’t seen in years, the guy whose life you ruined, and that just slipped your mind?”
“That was an accident!”
“Does it matter?” Nick asked, pressing on the old wound. “What happened happened. He could have been a superstar, but he became a drug addict because of you.”
“That’s not fair!”
“And you became an alcoholic,” Nick said. “That’s not fair, either, but here you are, a lying drunk sitting on a stump in the backyard of a shithole. You might want to reconsider some of your life choices, Dozer.”
“Why are you doing this?” Dozer asked, looking miserable.
“Because I want the truth, and all you’re giving me is one bad lie after the next.”
Nick took a step back to release some of the tension between them. Dozer was red-faced, breathing hard, clearly emotional. Nick had just poked a sharp stick into an old wound that had never healed, a wound that had spent ten years in a state of festering infection. It was cruel, but he couldn’t care about that. Dozer Cormier was at least sitting there in the flesh, which was more than he could say for Robbie Fontenot or Marc Mercier.
“You realize, Dozer, that we’re living in the digital age, the age of communication, and there are cameras literally everywhere now, watching our every move,” he said. “It may take some time, but I will go over every security video in town from that night, and I will find hard proof of you talking to Robbie Fontenot.”
“So what if I saw him?” he said irritably.
“Why lie about it?”
“Maybe I don’t like talking about him. Maybe I don’t like remembering all that.”
“Fair enough,” Nick said. “But if you’d told me that from the start, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. See how the truth works?”
Dozer said nothing.
“You can’t just bury it, Dozer, whatever it is,” Nick said quietly. “You been trying to do that for ten years, and look at you. Do you want this to be the rest of your life? A drunk, a failure, trying to hide from yourself?”
“What do you care?”
“I hate waste. You have a life. You have people who care about you. Donnie Bichon, Tommy Crawford—they gave you a chance, they want you to succeed. You’re just pissing it away because you can’t resolve something you did ten years ago. You need to get right with that.”
Dozer looked away and murmured, “I tried.”
“Try again.”
