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Nick had already lost interest in the conversation. “Show me your boat.”
Arceneaux led the way. “You don’t wanna see that body first?”
“He’s not going anywhere, is he?”
Even as he said it, a trio of stray dogs emerged from a thicket of trees, noses scenting the air.
“Goddamn it,” Stokes muttered, moving off, pulling his sidearm. “I’ll stay with the body. Git, you mangy mutts!” he shouted at the dogs. “Go on, git!”
He pointed his weapon off to the side and discharged a round, sending the dogs scurrying back toward the trees.
Nick followed Arceneaux and Rodrigue, glad for the boots he kept in his vehicle as they pushed through the weeds and the tall grass that had faded from green to blond with the approach of winter. There was no bank to speak of, just softer and softer ground that gave way to water.
They broke through the vegetation where Alphonse Arceneaux’s snub-nosed bateau floated, a shallow, flat-bottomed aluminum boat as weathered as its owner’s face. A pile of dead nutria lay in the noseof the boat—ugly, orange-toothed swamp rats bigger than cats. They were the scourge of the wetlands, non-native invaders devoted to tearing up the root systems of the marsh grasses, creating erosion in the delicate ecosystem that seemed threatened at every turn these days.
A rifle lay propped near the morning’s harvest.
“You hunting with a .22?” Nick asked.
“When I need it. Me, I’d rather use ol’ Black Betty and save the ammunition,” Arceneaux said, reenacting clubbing something. “I run a hundred fifty traps, me. Not going ’round filling the swamp with shot when there’s no need.”
“You got a shotgun on board?”
Arceneaux laughed and tipped his cap back on his head. “What kind of damncouillonhunts nutria with a shotgun?! That’s a good one! Talk about!”
Rodrigue laughed along as Arceneaux pantomimed shooting and exploding a nutria to kingdom come.
“How’d you come to find the body?” Nick asked.
As expected, the corpse wasn’t visible from this spot, nor was the road. Nothing but a waving sea of grass and the occasional glimpse of Stokes’s dark head a dozen yards away.
“I had me a bad oyster last night,” Arceneaux confessed, “and I got me a touch of thefwathis morning. Got out the boat to relieve myself and that’s how I come to find a dead dude. How ’bout that?”
Rodrigue shook his head. “We got us a case of the diarrhea to thank for the discovery of a murder victim! I been doing this a long time, and that’s a first for me!”
“Did you recognize this dead man?” Nick asked.
“Mais non,” Arceneaux said, shaking his head. “That dude, his ownmamanain’t gonna recognize him. You’ll see. It’s bad.Pauvre bête,” he murmured. “May God rest his soul.”
He crossed himself, picked up the small crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck, and pressed a kiss to it with chapped lips.
“Closed-casket bad,” Rodrigue said. “Somebody was mad mad at that guy. Maybe a drug thing or some kind of feud. Something personal.”
“You don’t know him, either?” Nick asked the deputy as they made their way back through the grass toward the body. “He ain’t your fourth cousin twice removed?”
“I wouldn’t know him if he was my own brother,” Rodrigue said. “We gotta hope he’s still got his wallet in his pants. Only God gonna know him now.”
Ran into the wrong end of a shotgun, Stokes had said. There was no pretty version of that.
“Did you touch the body?”
“No, sir.”
“Did Stokes?”
Rodrigue laughed. “He’s just here for show, ain’t he?”
“I heard that!” Stokes shouted. “You know I leave the bodies for you, Nicky. You get so testy otherwise.”
