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“Cody’s an ass,” Annie said. He was almost certainly a dead ass, though in the moment Annie couldn’t begin to feel bad for him. He had beaten this girl senseless—more than once. And now his adoring little wife sat there, abused physically and emotionally, ready to end her own life over a man who had systematically destroyed her.
“Cody’s dead,” Tulsie murmured. “It’s my fault.”
“You have a right to defend yourself, Tulsie,” Annie said. “A good lawyer will argue self-defense, and I don’t know who in their right mind would blame you.”
“I made him mad. I shouldn’t have made him mad.”
She was as pale as milk, and her eyes had a glassy sheen. She was going into shock.
“This isn’t your fault,” Annie said. It didn’t matter if it was or it wasn’t. All that mattered now was getting the knife away from her and getting her out of this house. “Let me help you, Tulsie. Set that knife aside, and we’ll go get those cuts looked after.”
“Everything is so messed up, Annie. I’m gonna lose everything. Everything I worked for.”
“You’re not gonna lose your life,” Annie said, reaching out a hand for the knife. “Everything else can be fixed or replaced. It doesn’t matter.”
She tried to put the story together in her head. Tulsie had come home from Outlaw as ordered. Cody had come home and laid into her. She already knew this from what Tulsie had told them the night before. But that story had ended with Cody packing up and leaving for Houston the next day, when instead he had almost certainly died in this room that night.
“Let me have the knife, Tulsie.”
“No. No. No…”
Annie leaned an inch or two closer. Tulsie pulled the knife up as if she might use it. Annie leaned back, her mind racing. What if this girl just snapped? What if Tulsie came at her with the knife? Could she get out of the way quickly enough? Would she draw her weapon? Would she use it?
Suddenly, splitting up with Stokes looked like a stupid, reckless decision. She had expected to find Tulsie ill and helpless, but desperate people did desperate things. They found wells of violence and self-preservation deep within. They tapped into physical strength they never knew they had. She had experienced that firsthand and had the scars to prove it.
Focus, Annie. Focus. She needed her full attention on the moment and did her best to shove her anxiety to the side.
“Put the knife down, Tulsie,” she said. “Whatever happened, I’ll help you.”
Who else had helped her Saturday night? she wondered. Cody had to outweigh Tulsie by a good eighty pounds or more. And deadweight always seemed twice as heavy. Tulsie could never have moved him on her own. She had to have called someone to help her. Two trucks had gone out to that spot where the body had been dumped.
Stokes’s theory had Cody killing Marc for messing around with Tulsie. Maybe he had the right puzzle pieces in the wrong order. Maybe Marc had done the deed and carried the weight. Maybe Marc was the one who had headed for parts unknown. They would sort that out later. Now the only thing that mattered was getting this girl the help she needed.
“Put the knife down, Tulsie,” she said. “I’ll help you any way I can.”
The girl looked up at her, puzzled. “But what about Izzy?”
“What about Izzy?”
“She was only trying to help me,” she said. She had begun to shiver. “She told him before…If he hurt me again…”
“Izzy shot Cody?” Annie asked.
“And I’d damn well do it again.”
Annie looked up. Izzy Guidry stood on the deck in the open doorway, a handgun pointed straight at her.
30
There wereno slow nightsat the Goal Post sports bar, Louisianians being as sports obsessed as they were. Even in the middle of the week the bar was hopping. The building sat out on one corner of the parking lot shared by a newer strip mall that included a Rouses supermarket and an Ace Hardware, all of it built in the last ten years to service the trendier western neighborhoods of Bayou Breaux.
At a glance, it seemed like exactly the kind of place Marc Mercier would hang out—modern, popular with the upwardly mobile—and not the kind of place his brother, Luc, would frequent. But even a hard-ass like Luc Mercier had to succumb to the lure of college football on giant state-of-the-art TV screens.
Amissingposter showing Marc Mercier was taped to the front door glass withhelp us find marc!printed in big red block letters on a second piece of posterboard. The smell of hamburgers and onion rings filled the air as Nick walked into the bar. Basketball filled the TV screens.
The décor was industrial-meets-gymnasium with lots of exposed pipes and ducts in the high black ceiling. The two full-sizebars on either side of the space were faced in corrugated tin. The floor was an actual blond wood gymnasium floor complete with the painted lines of a basketball court. The bartenders and waitresses were dressed as referees in black-and-white-striped tops with whistles hanging on lanyards around their necks.
Nick singled out the most senior bartender—a thirtysomething Black woman with LSU purple and gold braids woven through her hair. Devonta Williams. He recognized her as one of the parent coaches from Justin’s T-ball league. She spotted him as he made his way toward the bar.
