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“Oh!” Nick said, feigning amazement. “Now you’re telling me you’re trying to protect her, then you turn around and yell in her face and scare the hell out of her and make her cry? That don’t fly, Mr. Mercier. Better oil up those wheels in your brain and come up with a better story than that.”
Head down, hands on his hips, Luc Mercier took a step back, and then another. He turned toward the water, the muscles working in the back of his jaw like he was chewing on a tough piece of meat.
“Is that your pride you’re chewing on?” Nick asked. “Choke it down,baw, because you’re gonna apologize to that girl in front of me. Now, you and I are gonna have us a conversation, and you had better hope I find your answers satisfactory. Do you understand me?”
Mercier scowled and looked away. “This is how you treat people, Fourcade? My brother’s missing. My family are the victims here, and this is what you do?”
Nick laughed out loud. “Now you’re gonna play the Poor Me card? Spare me. You’re starting to bore me, Mr. Mercier. You should at least make an effort to be more original in your phony outrage.You were wrong, and you know you were wrong. I guess we should at least take that as a positive sign that you’re not a sociopath.”
Mercier sucked in a deep breath and sighed, still too stubborn to surrender, but not clever enough for a snappy comeback.
“Why you don’t want your sister talking to me?” Nick asked. “What’s she gonna say you don’t want me to hear? Has she seen something? Heard something?”
“She got the mind of an eight-year-old child,” Luc said. “She don’t always understand what she sees or hears.”
“Like what? Like you and Marc having a fight Saturday? Like Marc punching you in the face?” Nick suggested. “I don’t care that he did, if he did. I hope he enjoyed it, ’cause I sure as hell would. I’m only interested in the why and what you did about it after.”
“Nothing,” Luc said. “I did nothing.”
“So are you telling me now the two of you came to blows?” Nick asked. “That’s how you got that shiner. But it don’t mean nothing. And I’m supposed to swallow that? Seriously?”
“We’re brothers. We don’t always get along,” Mercier said. “I don’t know what planet you’re from, Fourcade, but around here, that’s normal.”
Nick didn’t argue. Bayou country was a place of strong opinions and hot tempers, to be sure. Though violence among family members was hardly the norm, that didn’t mean it wasn’t the norm for the Mercier boys.
“What did you fight about?”
Luc made an exasperated gesture with his hands and sighed again. “We disagree about things.”
“What things?”
“Everything. Every fucking thing. How’s that?”
“Not good enough, that’s how that is,” Nick said. “You disagree over Tony Chachere’s or Slap Ya Mama seasoning, you don’t punch your brother in the face for it. What did you fight about?”
Luc thought about it for a minute, still looking out over thewater. Finally, he said, “I been running this business more or less since Daddy got sick. Long before Mr. Local Hero deigned to come back here. I didn’t need his help then, and I don’t need his help now. He can take his snotty wife and go back north. Don’t nobody need him here.”
He pulled his cap off and scratched his head. “That don’t mean I want him dead or anything. Just gone.”
“Well, he is gone, isn’t he?” Nick said.
Mercier said nothing to that.
“Marc never made it to the Corners Sunday morning,” Nick announced, then waited for a reaction.
“What do you mean?” Luc asked, doing a good job of looking confused. “That’s where we were meeting.”
“I mean, he was never there. And neither were you.”
“The hell. How do you know?”
“I know because Sos Doucet is my de facto father-in-law, and I made sure there are surveillance cameras all over that property. Your brother was never there Sunday morning, and you never came looking for him. Why would you lie to me about that?”
Luc muttered a curse, looked away, and sighed. “Because I wasn’t gonna stand there in front of my mother yesterday and say that I never went, that I blew Marc off. I don’t need her chewing my ass any more than she already does. Saying I was late was bad enough.”
As lies went, that one was for a good reason at least, Nick thought, but a good lie was still a lie.
“Marc’s wife says he left home Saturday night around six thirty, quarter to seven,” Nick said. “Where’d he go?”
