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“I’m good!” the girl answered stupidly, as if she wasn’t sitting in an ER with her arm in a sling, looking like she’d been on the losing end of a brawl.
“What’d you do to yourself?” Annie asked, as if she had never been called to the Parcelles’ farm on suspicion of Cody Parcelle knocking his wife around.
Tulsie had refused to press charges that day, insisting her husband hadn’t touched her, that she’d had an accident handling a young stallion. The story had smelled like so much horse manure to the deputy who had responded to the 911 call. Annie had agreed with him, but without a complainant or a witness, they’d had to accept the girl’s story.
“Just a stupid accident!” Tulsie said now with another nervous laugh. “I was pulling down some hay. Cody, he bought a whole load of those big hundred-pound bales. I don’t know what he was thinking. They’re way too big for me to deal with! It’s like me trying to wrestle an alligator. I wrenched my shoulder pretty hard, but I’ll be fine!”
She spoke in exclamation points, as if the extra emphasis and forced smile would sell her story.
It could have been true, Annie conceded, but if she’d gotten hit in the face with a bale of hay, there would have been scratches, not just a black eye and a split lip. More likely was Cody Parcelle backhanding her across the face and yanking her around by one arm, but if Tulsie wasn’t ready to tell that story, there wasn’t anything Annie could do about it.
“Better ask Cody to get those bales down for you from now on,”Annie said. “A hundred pounds apiece? That’s almost as big as you are!”
“Oh, well, you know us farm girls,” Tulsie said, trying to smile again with her fat lip. “We just figure things out!”
She was trying so hard to sound lighthearted and carefree that she came across as frantic, verging on hysterical.
“Yeah, well, still,” Annie said. “Us short girls need to know our limitations, right?
“I didn’t see Cody out front,” she said. “He didn’t come with you?”
She glanced around as if Cody Parcelle might be lurking nearby, half hidden by a curtain. “You didn’t drive yourself here with that bad shoulder, did you?”
“No, I—”
“Because it’s really not okay for you to drive like that,” Annie said. “I’d be happy to give you a lift home—”
“No, no, not necessary!” the girl protested, smiling, laughing, sliding down off the gurney. “Our hired hand brought me. They’re waiting out in the parking lot.”
“Oh, well, good,” Annie said. “But, you know, if you ever need help, you just call me.”
She handed the girl a business card, and they both knew her offer had nothing to do with the attack of a hundred-pound hay bale.
Tulsie shoved the card into the pocket of her jeans, her eyes already on the exit. “Sure. Thanks, Annie. I need to get going. There’s chores to do before supper!”
“You take care,” Annie said.
“I will!”
The girl all but bolted down the work lane, nearly colliding with the PA coming back to tend to Annie’s eyebrow.
The nurse who had been helping Tulsie leaned toward Annie and murmured, “Funny how that girl can look everywhere but right in your eyes.”
“Yeah,” Annie agreed. But it wasn’t funny to either of them. It wasn’t funny at all.
11
August F.“Gus” Noblier hadruled as king of Partout Parish for two decades before his retirement. A reign of consecutive terms blemished by one election loss to the skullduggery of a political rival who had subsequently left the office in a cloud of scandal, only to be replaced by Gus for another dozen years after. It was a tenure unlikely to be repeated.
He was a figure as big as his reputation—rawboned and rough-edged, full of bluster and bombast and too much fried food. He stood behind his desk with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face. He had dressed for his day of meetings in Baton Rouge in full uniform, though he had jerked loose his necktie now at the tail end of the afternoon. He looked tired and irritated.
Between the shocking circumstances of the death of his successor, Kelvin Dutrow, and the fact that Dutrow had never promoted a chief deputy to the official position of second-in-command, the governor himself had asked Gus to come back and take control until the situation could be sorted and settled. Gus had done so grudgingly, out of a sense of duty, and he had made no bones about his intention to leave as soon as his replacement was in place.
As impossible as it had been for anyone to imagine him relinquishing his hold on power in the first place, retirement had suited Gus just fine. He had filled his days with his horses and his hobbies and helping his wife in the garden. He had claimed not to miss the spotlight or the endless headache of holding office, though Annie secretly wanted to believe otherwise.
Gus Noblier had been a constant in her professional life since she had come out of the police academy. He had hired her as a patrol deputy and promoted her to detective, serving as a mentor of sorts along the way. He had filled a similar role for Nick, hiring him after Nick’s career in New Orleans had crashed and burned like a derailed train. He had known Nick’s father and had taken on Armand Fourcade’s son at a time when no one else would have touched him.
He stood looking at Annie and Nick now like they were a pair of ill-behaved students who had been sent to the principal’s office.
