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“Yeah,” Mercier said. “Gotta love that global warming.”
Global warming and gator baiting. Tour guides routinely fed the gators from their boats, so much so that some of the animals became programmed to swim toward the boats instead of away from them as they would have naturally done. The ready food source ensured that the tourists got their money’s worth. The animal rights activists tried every few years to get the practice banned, but to no avail. Practicality won the day in Cajun country. People needing to feed their families trumped the needs of alligators every time.
“Me, I’m thinking a brother knows some things about a brother that a mother might not know about a son, yeah?” Nick said. “I wanted to give you a chance to speak freely.”
“About Marc?” Mercier exhaled a stream of smoke. “What’s to say?”
“You get along with your brother?”
“We get along like brothers do. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”
“He give you that shiner?”
He laughed but glanced away. “That’d be the day. Fighting is the one thing I’m better at than him.”
“You don’t seem all that upset about him being missing,” Stokes said.
“Well, I just don’t think it’s anything, that’s all. He probably had a fight with his wife, and he’s gone to cool off somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“He’s up and gone before?”
“He’s spent more than one night on my couch.”
“What do they fight about?” Nick asked.
He heaved a sigh. “She don’t wanna be here. She didn’t marry no junk man, and she don’t wanna live in Asscrack, Louisiana.”
“But he does?”
“For now.” He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue with his thumb and flicked it away. “Daddy got brain cancer. Marc came home to help with the business.”
“How long ago was that?” Stokes asked.
“About a year ago. She’s had enough.”
“And your dad?” Nick asked.
“He passed back in March.”
“But your brother’s still here.”
“He’s still saving us,” he said, his mouth twisting in an ironic smile. “That’s Marc, always the hero.”
Brotherly resentment, the loss of a parent, a strained marriage—a combination of stressors that could be a recipe for depression, Nick thought. But it wasn’t depression that had shot the face off his morning victim and dumped him like a sack of trash on the side of the road. Still, he had to ask.
“Has he seemed depressed? Is there a chance he might have hurt himself?”
The brother laughed. “Marc? Hell no! Everybody loves Marc, but don’t nobody love Marc more than Marc does. You think he’d blow his pretty brains out? I don’t think so.”
Stokes shot Nick a look at the mention of a potential cause of death. Neither of them cared for a coincidence.
“You have any idea where else he might have gone?” Nick asked. “If he decided to drown his sorrows, where would he go?”
“Voodoo Lounge, Blue Bayou…Wherever two or more are gathered in his name.”
“Mouton’s?”
“No. That’s not his crowd.”
