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Annie said nothing and let his imagination run off.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered.
“Yeah, I hope you wore your chain mail drawers today,” Annie said. “I imagine Johnny Earl is gonna be looking for someone to sink his teeth into after Gus calls him.”
“Jesus Christ.” Rivette turned around in a little circle with his hands on his head as if trying to stop his brain from exploding. “You’re making me look bad!”
“Don’t be such a child,” Annie snapped back. “I’m not doing anything to you. B’Lynn Fontenot came to the SO looking for help. I’m helping her. The fact that you didn’t is ayouproblem, not ameproblem.”
“What was I supposed to do?” he asked. “The guy is an adult. He can go where he wants. There’s nothing to say anything happened to him at all!”
“Nothing except for his criminal record and his history of drug abuse.”
“I asked around. I looked,” he insisted.
“Asked who? Looked where?”
“Around!”
“Aroundis not a person or a place,” Annie pointed out. “You drove around to the local shithole bars looking for his car? Checked a couple of drug houses? What?”
“I don’t need to tell you!”
Annie rolled her eyes, exasperated. “What are you? Five years old? A person is missing, and this is how you behave?”
“I can’t pull a lead out of my ass!”
“I’m sure not,” Annie said. “There’s no room for one, what with your head shoved up there.”
“Robbie Fontenot done picked up and left!” he argued. “That’s what’s happened, and who can blame him? He’s a grown-ass man with his mama watching him like a hawk every minute of the day. I’d run off, too, with her breathing down my neck.”
“Then why don’t you, and we can all be happy?” Annie suggested. “You think this is a nothing case, then leave it alone. I may well come to the same conclusion, but I don’t mind holding Mrs. Fontenot’s hand along the way.”
“And what am I supposed to tell Chief Earl?”
“I can’t solve all your problems for you, Dewey,” Annie said. “Tell him you had no case. Tell him you’re still on it. I don’t care what you tell him. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and B’Lynn Fontenot is no longer your problem.”
She stepped back and gave him a little salute. “You have yourself a beautiful day!”
Rivette stood there, red-faced with his hands on his hips. She could feel his eyes boring into her back as she went to her vehicle. She tried to feel sorry for him for a second without much success. He had blown off a mother worried for her son, as if Robbie Fontenot didn’t deserve that concern, or as if B’Lynn should have been past caring. Whatever little effort Dewey Rivette had put into this was no more than half a tick past outright laziness. He deserved whatever ass chewing Johnny Earl might give him.
She was halfway back to her vehicle when the passenger door opened and B’Lynn popped up like a jack-in-the-box. Her laser stare blasted right past Annie.
“You’re a tool, Dewey Rivette!” she shouted.
“I guess you had something more to say after all,” Annie said as she rounded the hood of the car. “I appreciate that you didn’t rush over and punch him in the throat. Though I admit I would have enjoyed watching that.”
“His day may yet come,” B’Lynn muttered, settling back down in the passenger seat.
One way or another, Annie thought as she started the car and shifted into reverse. She watched Dewey Rivette in the rearview mirror as she drove away, standing in the sorry little yard like a lost soul, growing smaller and less significant by the second. She hoped he would stay that way.
6
The hugesign must havebeen thirty years old, weathered and worn, painted and repainted over the decades. It was mounted on cut-down power poles fifty yards before the driveway.mercier & sons salvage and swamp tourswith an airboat-load of bug-eyed cartoon tourists gaping at an alligator down in the right-hand corner, the gator’s jaws open wide, ready to snap on the first person to fall out of the careening boat.
The business was crammed onto ten acres of land on both sides of the old canal road on the butt end of the town of Luck. The marine salvage and tour business were located on the canal side, auto salvage on the other side. The property was a wasteland of decrepit boats and wrecked cars, rusted metal, and rotting wood contained inside the confines of high chain-link fencing crowned with a concertina wire overhang, like a prison yard for junk.
Nick pulled in at the gate with the red arrow pointing to the office and parked in front of the first of three large World War II–era Quonset hut buildings—half-round cylinders of time-worn, weather-beaten galvanized steel.
