The Jeep was airborne for what seemed like an eternity. Then the world was a jarred blur in every window. The impact bounced her off the seat and bounced the snake off the floor. Its thick, muscular body hit her across her thighs and fell back down.
Annie was barely aware of killing the engine. Her only thought was escape. She threw her shoulder against the door, tumbled out of the Jeep, and slammed the door shut behind her. Her heart was thumping like a trip-hammer. Her breath came in ragged, irregular jerks. She hugged the front fender to steady herself.
"Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod."
Up on the road, several cars had pulled to the shoulder. One driver had climbed out of his pickup.
"Please stay with your vehicles, folks! Move it along! I'll handle this."
Annie raised her head and peered through the strands of hair that had fallen in her face. A deputy was coming toward her, his cruiser parked on the shoulder with the lights rolling.
"Miss?" he called. "Are you all right, Miss? Should I call an ambulance?"
Annie straightened up so he could see her uniform. She recognized him instantly, even if he couldn't manage the same with her. York the Dork. He walked as if he had a permanent wedgie. A Hitler mustache perched above his prim little mouth. It twitched now as realization dawned.
"Deputy Broussard?"
"There's a copperhead in my Jeep. Somebody put a copperhead in my Jeep."
While she probably wouldn't have died from a bite, the possibility was there. She certainly could have been killed in the accident, and she may not have been the only casualty. She wondered if her harasser had considered that when he'd been planting his little reptile friend, then wondered which answer would have upset her more.
"A copperhead!" the Dork chirped with a sniff. He peered into the Jeep. "I don't see anything."
"Why don't you climb in and crawl around on the floor? When it bites your ass we'll know it's real."
"It was probably just a belt or something."
"I know the difference between a snake and a belt."
"Sure you weren't just looking in the mirror, putting your lipstick on, and lost control of the vehicle? You might as well tell the truth. It wouldn't be the first time I heard that story," he said with a chortle. "You gals and your makeup…"
Annie grabbed him by the shirtsleeve and hauled him around to face her. "Am I wearing lipstick? Do you see any lipstick on this mouth, you patronizing jerk? There's a snake in that Jeep and if you 'little lady' me again, I'll wrap it around your throat and choke you with it!"
"Hey, Broussard! You're assaulting an officer!"
The shout came from the road. Mullen. He had parked on the shoulder-a piece-of-crap Chevy truck with a bass boat dragging behind. Encased in tight jeans, his legs were skinny as an egret's. He compensated with a puffed-up green satin baseball jacket.
"She claims there's a copperhead in there," York said, hooking a thumb at the Jeep.
"Yeah, like he doesn't already know that," Annie snapped.
Mullen made a face at her. "There you go again. Hysterical. Paranoid. Maybe you need to get your hormones adjusted, Broussard."
"Fuck you."
"Oooh, verbal abuse, assaulting an officer, reckless driving…" He swaggered around to the passenger side to look in the window. "Maybe she's drunk, York. You better put her through the paces."
"The hell you will." Annie rounded the hood. "Keying me out on the radio was bad enough, and I can take the crap at the station, but somebody other than me could have gotten killed with this stunt. If I can find one scrap of evidence linking you to this-"
"Don't threaten me, Broussard."
"It's not a threat, it's a promise."
He sniffed the air. "I think I smell whiskey. You better run her in, York. The stress must be getting to you, Broussard. Drinking in the morning on your way to work. That's a shame."
York looked apprehensive. "I didn't smell anything."
"Well, Christ," Mullen snapped. "She's seeing snakes and driving off the damn road. Tag the vehicle and take her in!"
Annie planted her hands on her hips. "I'm not going anywhere until you get that snake out of my Jeep."
"Resisting," Mullen added to her list of sins.
"I think we'd better go in to the station to sort this out, Annie," York said, straining to look apologetic.
He reached for her arm and she yanked it away. There was no out. York couldn't let her get back into her vehicle if there was a question of her sobriety, and she'd be damned if she was going to go through the drunk drill for them like a trick poodle.
"Uh-I think you better sit in the back," he said as she reached for the passenger-side door on his cruiser.
Annie bit her tongue. At least she had driven Fourcade to the station in her own vehicle, calling as little attention to the situation as possible. No one was going to offer her the same courtesy.
"I need my duffel bag," she said. "My weapon is in it. And I want that Jeep locked up."
She watched as he went back into the ditch and said something to Mullen. York went around to the driver's side and pulled the keys, while Mullen opened the passenger's door, hauled her duffel out, then bent back into the vehicle. When he emerged again, he had hold of the writhing snake just behind its head. It looked nearly four feet in length, big enough, though copperheads in this part of the country regularly grew bigger. Mullen said something to York and they both laughed, then Mullen swung the snake around in a big loop and let it fly into a field of sugarcane.
"Just a king snake!" he shouted up at Annie as he came toward the car with her bag. "Copperhead! You must be drunk, Broussard. You don't know one snake from the next."
"I wouldn't say that," Annie shot back. "I know what kind of snake you are, Mullen."
And she stewed on it all the way in to Bayou Breaux.
Hooker was in no mood for dealing with the aftermath of a practical joke, malicious or otherwise. He ranted and swore from the moment York escorted her into the building, directing his wrath at Annie.
"Every time I turn around, you're in the middle of a shit pile, Broussard. I've about had it up to my gonads with you."
"Yes, sir."
"You got some kind of brain disorder or something? Deputies are supposed to be out arresting crooks, not each other."
"No, sir."
"We never had this kind of trouble when it was just men around here. Throw a female into the mix and suddenly everybody's got some kind of hard-on."
Annie refrained from pointing out that she'd been on the job here two years and had never had any trouble to speak of until now. They stood inside Hooker's office, which a maintenance person had painted chartreuse while Hooker was gone having angioplasty in January. The perpetrator of that joke had yet to come forward. The door stood wide open, allowing anyone within earshot to listen to the diatribe. Annie held on to the hope that this would be the last of the humiliation. She could weather the storm. Hooker would eventually run out of insults or have a stroke, and then she could go out on patrol.
"I've had it, Broussard. I'm tellin' you right now." From somewhere down the hall came another raised voice. "What do you mean, you can't find it?" Annie recognized Smith Pritchett's nasal whine. Dispatch was down the hall. What would Pritchett want from them? What would Pritchett want badly enough to come in on a Saturday?
"Y'all are telling me you keep these 911 tapes for-frigging-ever, but you don't have the one tape from the night of Fourcade's arrest?"
A pulsing vein zigzagged across Pritchett's broad forehead like a lightning bolt. He stood in the hall outside the dispatch center in a lime green Izod shirt, khakis, and golf spikes, a nine iron in hand.
The woman on the other side of the counter crossed her arms. "Yessir, that's what I'm tellin' you. Are you callin' me a liar?"