Free A Thin Dark Line by Tami Hoag

pretending to jot herself a note.
    “Damn straight, girl.”
    Jolie pushed open the door to Renard’s room and held it. The room was set up as a double, but only one bed was occupied. Renard lay with the head of the bed tipped up slightly, the fluorescent light glaring down into his eyes, which were nearly swollen shut. His face looked like a mutant pomegranate. Just two hours after his beating and already the swelling and bruising made him unrecognizable. One eyebrow was stitched together. Another line of stitches ran up his chin and over his lower lip like a millipede. Cotton had been crammed up his nostrils, and what was left of his nose was swathed in bandaging and adhesive tape.
    “Not a plug to be pulled,” the nurse said regretfully. She cut a glance at Annie. “You couldn’t have just hung back until Whoever put this asshole in a coma?”
    “Timing has never been my strong suit,” Annie muttered with bitter irony.
    “Too bad.”
    Annie watched her glide away, heading back for the nurses’ station.
    “Mr. Renard, I’m Deputy Broussard,” she said, uncapping her pen as she moved toward the bed. “If it’s at all possible, I’d like to get a statement from you as to what happened this evening.”
    Marcus studied her through the slits left open in the swelling around his eyes. His angel of mercy. Beside the elevated hospital bed, she looked small. The denim jacket she wore swallowed her up. She was pretty in a tomboy-next-door kind of way, with a blackening bruise high on one cheek and her brown hair hanging in disarray. Her eyes were the color of café noir, slightly exotic in shape, their expression dead serious as she waited for him to speak.
    “You were there,” he whispered, setting off a stabbing pain in his face. What little lidocaine the doctor had bothered to use was wearing off. The packing in his nose forced him to breathe through his mouth, and only added to the feeling that his head was twice its normal size. His sinuses were draining down the back of his throat, half choking him.
    “I need to know what happened before I got there,” she said. “What precipitated the fight?”
    “Attack.”
    “You’re saying Detective Fourcade simply attacked you? No words were exchanged?”
    “I came out . . . of the building,” he said haltingly. Tape bound his cracked ribs so tightly he wasn’t able to take in more than a teaspoon of air at a time. “He was there. Angry . . . about the ruling. Said it wasn’t over. Hit me. Again . . . and again.”
    “You didn’t say anything to him?”
    “He wants me dead.”
    She glanced up at him from her notebook. “He’s hardly the only one, Mr. Renard.”
    “Not you,” Marcus said. “You . . . saved me.”
    “I was doing my job.”
    “And Fourcade?”
    “I don’t speak for Detective Fourcade.”
    “He tried . . . to kill me.”
    “Did he state that he meant to kill you?”
    “Look at me.”
    “It’s not my place to draw conclusions, Mr. Renard.”
    “But you did,” he insisted. “I heard you say, ‘You’re killing him.’ You saved me. Thank you.”
    “I don’t want your thanks,” Annie said bluntly.
    “I didn’t . . . kill Pam. I loved her . . . like a friend.”
    “Friends don’t stalk other friends.”
    Marcus lifted a finger to admonish her. “Conclusion . . .”
    “That’s not my case. I’m free to review the facts and come to any conclusion I like. Did you provoke Detective Fourcade in any way?”
    “No. He was irrational . . . and drunk.”
    He tried to moisten his lips, his tongue butting into the jagged edges of several chipped teeth and a blank space where a tooth had been. He shifted his gaze to a plastic water pitcher on his right.
    “Could you please . . . pour me a drink . . . Annie?”
    “Deputy Broussard,” Annie said, too sharply. His use of her name unnerved her. She wanted to deny his request, but he already had enough to file suit against the department. There was no sense exacerbating the situation