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Mercier & Sons Salvage
673 Canal Road
Luck, Louisiana
Handwritten in the upper-left-hand corner was an amount: $2,875.
“Got a name?” Stokes asked, peering down over Nick’s shoulder.
“No, but $2,875 could be a motive, if there was cash that went with this card.”
Nick had certainly known people to be murdered for a lot less. A man walking around with a big wad of cash, flashing it in the wrong bar…
Mouton’s roadhouse wasn’t far down the bayou from here. The kind of place where brass knuckles were a common fashion accessory and every man—and most of the women—carried a gun or a knife. People looking for trouble looked at Mouton’s. Poachers, thieves, drug dealers—all made themselves at home there.
“Could be he picked up a hooker, got wasted by her pimp,” Stokes speculated.
“Could be.”
“I’m telling you, my friend, this’ll end with a woman.”
Nick arched a dark brow. “You know the only difference between you and this guy?” he asked, nodding to the faceless corpse.
“Fashion sense?” Stokes quipped.
“Timing.”
3
Timing. Lifewas all abouttiming, Annie Broussard reflected as she waited for the traffic light to turn green. Time: a complex and delicate dance of nanoseconds orchestrated by an unseen force beyond the ordinary person’s control or understanding.
A schedule, a plan, a timeline—all were just illusions people were allowed to believe in to let them feel like they were in control of their lives. A million tiny things happened every day to direct the dance. Move a split second faster here, hesitate briefly there, and the outcome could change dramatically. That annoying delay could save you from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, avoiding catastrophe. Life was all about timing.
The driver behind her beeped his horn. The light had turned green.
She drove down the main drag of Bayou Breaux, with its eclectic mix of brick and clapboard buildings. Several dated as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, before the first Acadian refugees—the people who would eventually come to be known as Cajuns—had arrived as exiles from Canada. Some businesses boasted second-story galleries reminiscent of New Orleans’ French Quarter, with ornatewrought iron railings and window boxes trailing ivy and the last geraniums of the season. Some had been restored over the years; others looked like they hadn’t seen a coat of paint since God was a child. All of it passed by Annie unnoticed. Her mind was elsewhere.
This would be her first day on the job in weeks. It seemed like forever since the night she’d been attacked. It seemed so long ago that memory might have been a dream—no, a nightmare, as surreal as any horror movie.
Don’t go there without me.She could still see the text in her mind’s eye. But it had been getting late, the tail end of a terrible day. Tired, wanting to make that one last stop and be done, she had run out of patience.
R U coming or what?
She had sent the message, then sent it again, trying to annoy Nick into answering, but no answer had come. Impatient, she had typed:
Going on…Need this day to be over…Come when you can…
What if she had waited just a little while longer?
If just one person involved in that series of events had made a different choice that night, someone who had died might have lived, but someone who had lived might have died. She might have died. It could have been her family grieving, her son without a mother. The possibilities tumbled in an endless cycle in her battered brain these days—what if this, what if that?—driving her crazy to the point that she questioned every decision she had to make no matter how trivial, trapped in a state of anxiety over potentially making the wrong choice.
Her doctor assured her this was not abnormal. She had suffered a serious concussion. Her brain was sorting itself out, healing,rewiring itself, rebalancing its chemistry. Add to that the post-traumatic stress that came in the aftermath of what had happened, the shock of the things she had seen. She needed to be patient with herself, and patience was all about time. Too much time.
She had already tried once to go back to work too soon and had ended up on an additional two weeks of doctor-ordered rest—no activity, no working out, no driving a car, no heavy lifting. Not able to read a book or to follow the plot of a TV show for the pounding in her head, she had nothing to do but lie around and think. What if this? What if that?
The pain and the anxiety chased each other around and around in her head like two squirrels racing up a tree. She tried to distract herself with positive thoughts—the fact that what had happened had given her and Nick a reboot at a time when their marriage had been struggling a bit. Nothing like a near-death experience to refocus on the things that were truly important in life. She smiled a little now, thinking about the night before, the two of them slow-dancing on the lawn, making love and falling asleep together. So comforting, so peaceful…until her brain had awakened her shortly after to spin and fret and keep her up…
Sick to death of herself, she felt an almost giddy sense of excitement as the law enforcement center came into view. She needed to get out of her own head and get back to work. She needed the distraction of other people’s problems. She needed to make herself useful to humankind. Even if she spent the day doing nothing but counting paper clips, it would be better than being alone with her endless thoughts.
