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Like he was a stray dog that got hit by a car.
“What’d you do with the body?”
He sighed and looked away. “I stored it in a shed for a couple ofdays. I knew what needed to be done, but…I told Marc this was his fault and he should have to deal with it himself, but he wouldn’t. We fought about it. More than once. In the end, I had to take care of the dirty work, as usual. I told myself it’s just a carcass at that point, no different than a deer or a hog.”
His voice thickened as he said it, and the muscles in his face tensed like the memory caused him physical pain. But he fought through the moment and pressed on.
He gave a rough, humorless laugh. “And all that time Mama’s like ‘Oh, poor Marc, he’s under so much stress with work and his wife and the baby and all!’ And how I should be more kind to him! And I wanted to say, well, your precious fucking baby boy killed a man. But I didn’t. I just took care of it.”
“Your mother didn’t know what happened?”
Luc shook his head as he finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the tabletop, and dropped the butt in the paper cup. His rough, stained workingman’s hands were trembling a little as he lit up another, belying his calm demeanor.
“What’d you do with the body, Luc?” Nick asked again, knowing full well what the answer was going to be.
“I cut it up, ’cause I didn’t want no body floating up to the surface. Better for everyone that he just be gone. I took it out to a place I knew there’d be gators. And that’s what happened to poor Robbie Fontenot.”
Nick let the silence hang for a moment as Luc lived with the memory and smoked his cigarette.
“You don’t think he deserved better than that?” Nick asked.
A sad smile turned the corner of Luc Mercier’s mouth. “We all deserve better, but what happened happened. I was raised that a man takes care of his family first and always. And I may resent the hell out of my brother, but blood is blood. The thing that stings is knowing he would never, ever do the same for me. But I can only control what I do and who I am. And I’ll live with that.”
Despite what he’d done—or maybe because of it—Luc Mercierwas not the worst person in this story, Nick thought. He wasn’t sure there was a villain at all in the true sense of the word. People always wanted murder to be black-and-white, cut-and-dried, with a cartoon bad guy they could easily hate. But that wasn’t always the case.
Luc had made his choices to save his family. Marc had made his choices to save himself. Dozer had made a choice long ago out of loyalty and had made his choice on Halloween thinking the truth would set him free from his demons. And their respective choices of lies and truths along the way were the connective tissue that wove the story together.
Nick left Luc Mercier and went across the hall to another interview room, where his brother, Marc, had been sitting alone, left to stew and fret for two hours. According to Stokes, he’d spent that time crying and puking into a wastebasket, pacing and pounding his fists against the walls.
Nick walked into the room, silent and stone-faced, and stood staring at Marc for a long moment. Mercier halted his pacing along the back wall and stood motionless, looking like a prey animal awaiting its fate.
“I’ve been waiting for hours here,” he complained. “What’s going on?”
“You might want to work on making peace with small enclosed spaces, Mr. Mercier,” Nick said quietly. He took a seat at the table, turned his chair sideways, and crossed one ankle over a knee and sighed. “I watched you try to kill a man with an axe this morning, and I make an excellent witness at trial, if I do say so myself.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him!” Marc protested, pacing again. “I just—I just had to stop him going. I needed to talk sense into him.”
“An axe as a tool of persuasion,” Nick mused. “That’s…well,overkillis the word that comes to mind. And not that you’ve asked, but I’m told Mr. Cormier will survive his injuries. I’m going to speculate that his lifelong loyalty to you has perhaps run its course. You should also know that I’ve just come from across the hall, where I had a very illuminating conversation with your brother, Luc.”
“Luc killed Robbie, not me,” Marc said without a second’s hesitation. “I just defended myself. What happened was an accident. Robbie threw the first punch. I hit him back, and he fell and hit his head. That’s what happened. I didn’t mean for him to die! But Luc said he was gonna die anyway, and I’d go to prison. For what? For an accident!”
A different sort of person would have asked for an attorney and said nothing more. But Marc Mercier had the narcissist’s belief that his charm could talk him out of any situation, because it likely had more often than not all his life.
“Why did Mr. Fontenot punch you?” Nick asked.
“He had a wrong idea about something that happened a long time ago, and he blamed me, but it wasn’t my fault! I never told Dozer to cripple him! It wasn’t my fault he became a drug addict and threw his life away!”
“Why that night?” Nick asked.
Marc rolled his eyes. “Because Dozer was drunk and said something he should have kept to himself, and it set Robbie off, and shit happened. I wish it hadn’t.”
He put his hands on top of his head and turned around. His eyes kept cutting to the door, as if he was expecting someone to walk in and set him free.
“I moved back here to help my family,” he said. “I can’t believe this is happening to me!”
“That’s an interesting choice of words,” Nick said. “Because Dozer is the one that got hit with an axe, and Robbie Fontenot is the one dead and fed to alligators. This isn’t happeningtoyou, Mr. Mercier. This is happeningbecause ofyou. Because of the choicesyoumade. And when you go to prison, that will be because of whatyoudid. And when your wife divorces you and takes your child and leaves, that will be because of the man you chose to be.”
It became clear in that moment to Marc Mercier that he wasn’t going to win Nick over, and he wasn’t going to walk out of that room a free man.
