A Thin Dark Line by Tami Hoag Page A

area.
    Fourcade had Renard up against the side of a car, swinging at him with the rhythm of a boxer at a punching bag. A hard left turned Renard’s face toward Annie, and she gasped at the blood that obscured his features. He lunged toward her, arms outstretched, blood and spittle spraying from his mouth in a froth as a wild animal sound tore from his throat and his eyes rolled white. Fourcade caught him in the stomach and knocked him back into the Volvo.
    “Fourcade! Stop it!” Annie shouted, hurling herself against him, trying to knock him away from Renard. “Stop it! You’re killing him!
Arrète! C’est assez!
”
    He shrugged her off like a mosquito and cracked Renard’s jaw with a right.
    “Stop it!”
    Using the big flashlight like a baton, she swung it as hard as she could into his kidneys, once, twice. As she drew back for a third blow, Fourcade spun toward her, poised to strike.
    Annie scuttled backward. She turned the full beam of the flashlight in Fourcade’s face. “Hold it!” she ordered. “I’ve got a gun!”
    “Get away!” he roared. His expression was feral, his eyes glazed, wild. One corner of his mouth curled in a snarl.
    “It’s Broussard,” she said. “
Deputy
Broussard. Step back, Fourcade! I mean it!”
    He didn’t move, but the look on his face slipped toward uncertainty. He glanced around with the kind of hesitancy that suggested he had just come to and didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten there. Behind him, Renard dropped to his hands and knees on the blacktop, vomited, then collapsed.
    “Jesus,” Annie muttered. “Stay where you are.”
    Squatting beside Renard, she stuck her gun back in her waistband and felt for the carotid artery in his neck, her fingers coming away sticky with blood. His pulse was strong. He was alive but unconscious, and probably glad for it. His face looked like raw hamburger, his nose was an indistinct mass. She wiped the blood from her hand on his shoulder, pulled the Sig again, and stood, her knees shaking.
    “What the hell were you thinking?” she asked, turning toward Fourcade.
    Nick stared down at Renard lying in his own puke as if seeing him for the first time. Thinking? He couldn’t remember thinking. What he did remember didn’t make sense. Echoes of voices from another place . . . taunts . . . The red haze was slowly dissipating, leaving him with a sick feeling.
    “What were you gonna do?” Annie Broussard demanded. “Kill him and dump him in the swamp? Did you think nobody would notice? Did you think nobody would suspect? My God, you’re a
cop
! You’re supposed to uphold the law, not take it into your own hands!”
    She hissed a breath through her teeth. “Looks like I believed the wrong half of those rumors about you, after all, Fourcade.”
    “I—I came here to talk to him,” he muttered.
    “Yeah? Well, you’re a helluva conversationalist.”
    Renard groaned, shifted positions, and settled back into oblivion. Nick closed his eyes, turned away, and rubbed his gloved hands over his face. The smell of Renard’s blood in the leather gagged him.
    “C’est ein affaire à pus finir,”
he whispered.
It is a thing that has no end.
    “What are you talking about?” Broussard demanded.
    Shadows and darkness, and the kind of rage that could swallow a man whole. But she knew of none of these things, and he didn’t try to tell her.
    “Go call an ambulance,” he said with resignation.
    She looked to Renard and back, weighing the options.
    “It’s all right, ’Toinette. I promise not to kill him while you’re gone.”
    “Under the circumstances, you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe a word you say.” Annie glanced at Renard again. “He’s not going anywhere. You can come with me. And by the way,” she added, gesturing him toward the street with her gun, “you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. . . .”

5
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    “ Y ou can’t arrest Fourcade. He’s a detective, for Christ’s sake!” Gus