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“I just wanted someone to love me,” Tulsie said.
“I know,” Izzy whispered, fighting tears. She reached out and tenderly brushed Tulsie’s hair back from her face.
“Please don’t leave me, Izzy.”
“I won’t leave you,” Izzy whispered. She set the handgun down on the floor and wrapped her arms around Tulsie’s shoulders. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She glanced back at Annie over her shoulder. “Call the ambulance. And tell them to hurry.”
32
The videoquality was good,clear. One of the benefits of Goal Post being a relatively new establishment with a well-off group of local owners who enjoyed spending money to have the best of everything.
He found the camera that was focused on the area where Marc and Dozer had settled and watched the show. Devonta Williams had used the termholding court, and an apt term it was. Marc moved among his audience like an actor on a stage, with a big smile and big gestures, clearly basking in the glow of their adoration.
Dozer sat watching as Marc worked the room, looking like he would have rather been anywhere else on earth. This wasn’t the kind of place for Dozer or the crowd he would have run with, Nick thought. He sat among the cute, stylish people like an ogre at high tea, too big, too rough, too ugly for them, looking miserable and angry as he drank his beer. He was an accessory for Marc, a prop, part of Marc’s carefully cultivated image. Bayou Bodyguard, Devonta had called him.
Hell of a way to treat a friend.
Nick kept waiting for Tulsie Parcelle to arrive on the scene,thinking they might have hooked up at this bar before going on to Outlaw. She had been out that night with a group of girls, celebrating someone’s divorce—a group that could have easily been mistaken for a bachelorette party, he supposed. But she never appeared. The blonde with the mermaid hair was no one Nick recognized, just another pretty girl with a big smile and a tight top, putting on a show for Marc. She was just one of half a dozen pretty young things swarming around in Marc’s orbit that night.
Nick shook his head as he watched Marc work his charms. He thought of Melissa Mercier sitting at home that night with a teething baby, feeling abandoned on the eve of her birthday while her husband tried to hang on to his youth, putting on a show for a bunch of shallow people who were still impressed by the fact that he had been pretty good at throwing a football when he was in high school.
Who raised a man like that? He thought of Kiki Mercier and her adoration for her favorite child. Had she ever told him no? Had she ever taught him how to treat a lady? How to value other people? She had taught him that the sun rose and set on him, and that he could do no wrong.
Marc had no doubt found out—out in the real world, away from his past—that he might be able to get by on his looks and his charm to a certain extent, but that people who didn’t have that frame of reference of Marc the Star Quarterback would have a different view of him, expect more from him, be less impressed by who he had once been. And what did that do to a man when he realized he had no substance, that he was just a fraud trying to skate through life on the thinnest ice of superficiality?
People were always saying what a great guy Marc was because again and again he stepped in when necessary to save the day. But now Nick wondered at his motives. Was he really a hero, or was he just addicted to the adoration of the people who saw him that way?
At one point in the video, Luc Mercier entered the picture. Luc, who had never once mentioned going to Goal Post or that Marc had.He walked up to Marc’s booth with a beer in hand and a scowl on his face. Angry words were exchanged. And there was the reason he had lied, Nick thought. He hadn’t wanted to put himself in a bar having an argument with his brother, who had disappeared shortly after.
Dozer got up and left. Luc walked away. Marc downed his beer, then revved up the million-watt smile again and reimmersed himself in his pack of acolytes.
What had that conversation been about? Serious, contentious. The brothers had exchanged blows earlier in the day, then exchanged words that night. Nick had a hard time believing that was nothing but a disagreement over business practices—unless those practices were far outside the norm.
He kept wanting to go to the copper theft theory because that was simple and plausible. Junk dealers buying and selling stolen goods. But he had yet to find any evidence or hear anything about the Mercier brothers linking them to illegal activity.
What else would they have been so at odds about? Was it just the oil-and-water combination of a favored son and the family workhorse? Twenty-some years of jealousy and resentment coming to a head? Luc wanted his life back and his baby brother gone, but as Nick watched Marc bask in the glow of adoration, it seemed he had no intention of leaving.
Nick watched the video from that particular camera until Marc said his goodbyes, hugged half a dozen people, and headed down the hallway toward the back exit. He switched then to the exterior camera view from the back entrance and fast-forwarded to the correlating time stamp.
Marc came out the back door, heading to the area where bar employees parked. Nick scanned the first row of vehicles, looking for but not finding Marc’s Ford Raptor truck. He could only see the first of two rows of parking, but he knew from driving around the building that this area backed up to a retaining wall where the garbage dumpsters were parked. If Marc had parked to one side of thelot, he would be able to exit without Nick seeing him. If he had parked closer to the other end of the lot, he would have to drive out right in front of the camera.
He waited impatiently for the Raptor to come around, but it never did. The only car to drive around the end of the parking area and past the security camera was a blue Toyota Corolla with some years on it.
Robbie Fontenot’s car.
What. The. Hell?
Nick backed the video up and watched again. The car had no front license plate. Louisiana did not require such. But he froze the video as the car passed, trying to get a look at the rear plate. He jotted what he could see of the number on a Post-it from a pad on the desk, took a picture of the Post-it with his phone, and tossed the note in the trash.
He sat back and swiveled the desk chair. What the actual hell?
He ran the video back and watched it again. It was impossible to see into the car, impossible to see the driver or if there was a passenger. He couldn’t see Marc Mercier in the vehicle, but if he wasn’t, then where the hell had he gone? And if he was, what did that mean? Why would he be driving around in Robbie Fontenot’s vehicle?
His phone pinged the arrival of a text from Annie.
Your DB is Cody Parcelle. Suspect in custody. Details later.
