Twenty-Five
It was Colin who offered the caution: “If he hears or sees you coming, he’ll shoot you first chance he gets, and you’re a big target, bro.”
And it was Devin who said: “So secure him first. Send someone he won’t see or hear coming.”
Tenny leaped at the chance, and then Gray offered. But Devin shook his head and said, “You’re not swamp creatures, boys.”
“Neither are you.”
“No, but I’ve got a few decades of sneaking experience on you.”
And it was settled.
~*~
Harlan wasn’t panicking. He could acknowledge that relying on Regina Carroll had been a huge mistake. Not a devastating one. Not the sort of mistake that idiot Fallon had made trying to hook up with a boy in a bar who turned out to be a goddamn Lean Dog, but, still. A mistake.
One he still, standing in the center of the rundown remnants of the old Lécuyer kitchen, couldn’t believe he of all people made.
You know why you made it , a voice whispered in the back of his head. You know damn well why .
He wasn’t lonely – except that he was , but he hated calling it that.
It was lonely work, having a singular purpose, a North Star, a driving cause to which you adhered daily, yearly, religiously. Lonely to do that, and for no one else to understand or to share your fervor.
Hames had allowed him to interview and hand-select his strike team, two years ago, and he’d made Fallon his 2inC because a little birdie had told him that Fallon had a predilection for underage boys, especially of the sort he had to pay for. He hadn’t expected Fallon to share his pursuit of Felix, but he’d hoped the man would understand dedication. Pursuit. The chase . He’d done things that would land him in prison a dozen times over, but he wasn’t even passionate about them.
Pathetic.
Perhaps, in hindsight, entrusting – no, using – him had been a mistake as well.
But Harlan wasn’t panicking. He wasn’t. He wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t .
“What if he doesn’t show?”
Harlan realized he’d become lost in thought. Too lost in thought.
“What?” he snapped.
Of the ex-cons and hired men he’d recruited, he’d brought Baker along with him on this particular errand because he was the quietest and canniest, the most capable. He wouldn’t waste a lot of time asking stupid questions – this latest one notwithstanding – and he didn’t appear to be out for any sort of personal glory, only to do as he was told and earn his money. A spare, ropy man covered in tattoos, with a military haircut and a no-nonsense face scarred from a knife fight, he wasn’t as big as Harlan, but alongside his comrades – whose names Harlan didn’t know or care to know – and Harlan, they turned the small room even tighter than Harlan remembered.
It was funny how memory worked that way: he’d been scrawnier, then, and frightened, more than a little in awe of the chance to enter Felix’s inner sanctum. The kitchen had been small, and shabby, yes, but it had been filled with the smell of frying fish, and the drone of standing fans, and Remy the elder’s broad, lake-bottom voice. There had been coupons pinned to the fridge with novelty magnets, and boxes of cereal out on the counter. Knitted potholders hanging on pegs by the oven door, and a row of potted herbs on the windowsill.
But that had been a long time ago, and now, the kitchen, the entire shotgun shack, belonged to the swamp. The linoleum floors had buckled, and peeled, as had the paint on the cabinet faces. A tree branch had fallen in a storm and shattered a window, its withered end still resting against the sill; the pots of herbs had spilled into the sink, where the crockery had shattered, and the dirt and plant life had long since turned to a sort of open-air terrarium. Harlan was pretty sure something was living there.
Not a stick of furniture remained, however, nor anything like old brown, dried bloodstains. A cabinet door was missing, and he wondered if that was where the buckshot had embedded itself, a damning scatter of holes full of forensic evidence.
It was easy, the easiest thing in the world, to imagine a table, here, and a chair, and Landau tied to it. Blood pooling down his arms, and splattering on the floor while Felix took his revenge, before Landau’s pleas for mercy had finally been answered.
Merci .
Harlan blinked, and Baker was watching him with skepticism. The look of a man who thinks another man has cracked.
“He’ll show,” he said, forcefully, but Baker didn’t look convinced. “Just make sure your men are in place.”
“They are,” Baker said, without checking the windows.
He’d brought three big bruisers, each armed with sidearms and shotguns, and stationed them in a triangulating pattern worthy of any agency commander.
It wasn’t that Boyle doubted him.
It was that he’d learned never to underestimate Felix or his allies.
Baker stared at him a moment longer, then lifted his radio and said, “Status?”
“ Still clear ,” came the crackling response.
The other two responded the same: clear .
Boyle paced toward the mouth of the hallway that led beyond the kitchen, toward what must be the bedrooms. He hadn’t been down here before, on his one and only trip to Camp Lécuyer.
It was narrow, seemingly too narrow for men of Lécuyer width to pass down without tilting their shoulders. Windowless, mantled with cobwebs, buckled linoleum littered with rat droppings and patched with mildew, Harlan hesitated, filled with a sharp, cold dread that raised goosebumps on his arms despite the cloying heat. Don’t go down there . Down to the doubtless small spaces where the family had laid their heads each night, dreaming of alligators, or gumbo, or their own front porch. Had Felix dreamed of killing, then? Of torture? Had he thirsted for it when he was still on the cusp of manhood, twisting and fretting beneath tangled sheets as he tried to understand the urge that welled up within him like a pricked boil?
Only the dusty glow of light through a rear door gave him the impetus to take the first step, and then the next. He passed a bathroom crusty and disgusting from abandonment, and three bedrooms, one to the left, two to the right, even smaller than he’d thought, wedged in tight by the narrow shotgun walls of the house.
Even on the thresholds, he could tell which one had belonged to which Lécuyer. Beneath layers of dust, the grandmother’s bed was draped tidily with a quilt made of multicolored crochet squares, faded from the sun through the window, the once-white drapes fuzzy with spider webs and spotted with fly droppings.
Remy’s and Felix’s might have been indistinguishable: plain comforters, nightstands, cheap bookshelves. But in one room, the bookshelf was empty. Felix. Somewhere between killing Landau and abandoning the house for good, Felix came back to collect his things.
As though caught in the navel by one of Felix’s shark-gauge fishing hooks, he was drawn into the room.
Felix hadn’t taken everything . The nightstand drawers were full of odds and ends: tubes of lip balm, bandages, lost buttons, and a stash of janky old toy cars and action figures leftover from boyhood. Amidst the dust bunny colony beneath the bed, he found a stash of dirty magazines – but not many. Mostly car, boat, and bike magazines. Positively tame by teenage boy standards. Saving himself for his fillette? Harlan pushed back to his feet with a sneer.
He blamed his headrush on standing suddenly…but it didn’t clear. His breath came quick, and with each inhale, he imagined he could smell the man himself beneath the heavy tang of dust and mildew and emptiness. The skin, and soap, and faint spice of cologne he’d smelled up close in person in a holding cell in Knoxville, right before a phone blew up in his face.
He was on his way to the closet when a shout issued from the kitchen.
Harlan swore, and headed that way at a run.
He saw the blood, first.
A fresh, bright skein of it like a blast radius across the old stains on the linoleum. Baker was down, side of his head blown out, unmoving.
It was one of his guys who’d shouted. Who knelt down, now, to take a needless pulse check.
The second guy walked to the window, the one that had been busted out by the tree limb. He raised his gun, leaned over the sink, peered out – and the back of his head blossomed like a red flower. His body jerked forward, and he fell into the sink, and then backward onto the floor.
Harlan lifted a hand to shield his face from the fine mist of blood, and the flying chunks of bone and flesh, and only then, as he fell back to the hallway and drew his gun, did he register the tinkling of glass. The shot had hit the back of the man’s head; it had come through the window on the opposite side of the kitchen.
“What the fuck?” he demanded. He tried to rally, and step back into the room, but his feet wouldn’t cooperate.
The third man wasn’t listening to him. “Fuck this,” he said, turned toward the front room, headed for the door, and then fell back as though thrown, body falling down with a meaty thump, no attempt made to twist away or break his fall. He’d been shot in the face.
And all three rounds, Harlan realized belatedly, had been shot through a suppressor, near-silent puffs of air displacement he had initially attributed to the thudding of his own heart.
His next realization was that a silhouette was stepping forward to fill the threshold before him, slender and dark against the light that spilled through the front door.
Harlan took aim.
And the unmistakeable cold, round kiss of a gun barrel touched the back of his neck.
“Be a good boy and put your weapon down, son,” a smoke-roughened, British-accented voice said from behind him. It was a pleasant voice; the tone held a smile.
One in front, one behind. Who knew how many more outside.
He swallowed with difficulty. “What happened to the men stationed outside?”
“Dead,” the British man holding the gun on his neck said. “Whatever you were paying them, it was too much.”
Harlan wracked his brain, trying to put a name to the voice. Kingston Walsh, the vice president, was British, but he’d spoken to him personally, and Walsh spoke in a cold, flat voice younger and cleaner than this one.
It didn’t matter, really. The Dogs had a British chapter. This could be any one of them.
“The gun,” the man prompted.
Harlan was a good shot, but not good enough to survive this little trap. He lowered the gun to his side, and when the barrel at his neck pressed harder, he dropped it to the floor.
“Good,” the man said, approvingly. “Now walk over there – mind the bodies, no sense desecrating the recently dead, eh? – and lean up against that cabinet. There you are, good boy.”
Harlan gripped the grimy counter edge until his knuckles cracked, leaned back against it, and watched the two men close in on him, converging so they stood between the sprawled bodies, three short paces away.
The one who’d spoken was of medium height, gray-haired, face lined with age and weathered with sun, but his eyes were a sharp, clear blue, and his build was wiry and athletic. His stance, most notably, was sure and professional: this was a man who knew how to move and move well when he needed to.
The six dead men were proof of that.
The second was much younger, thinner, taller, ash-blond and eerily dead-faced, eyes cold as mountain water.
Both were vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t name them.
“Right, then,” the Brit said, and gestured to the boy. “Bind his hands.”
“Nah, you don’t need to do that,” a third voice called from the front door.
Felix.
A jolt moved through Harlan, like that time he’d accidentally grabbed an electric fence. A cessation of all feeling, and then painful spikes of it down all his limbs. The sensation of having been struck in the back of the head, and a hard, hitching breath that didn’t provide enough oxygen.
“He’s not gonna jump me,” Felix continued, the floorboards creaking beneath his weight as he approached, and then he finally stepped into view. “He knows that wouldn’t end well for him.”
The man who moved to stand between the two gunmen wasn’t a version of Felix Harlan had ever come face to face with. Not kid-Felix in the clearing; not teenage-Felix standing to his new, full, towering height and intimidating his friends when they went too far; not friendly, newly-patched-Felix, in his uncreased cut, with his encouraging shoulder squeeze. He wasn’t even the grieving, shithead-Felix who’d lashed out at Harlan the night he abandoned the club, though that version, long-reviled, was Harlan’s driving force today.
Nor was it the adult-Felix he’d met, and questioned, and imprisoned in Knoxville just a few months ago. That version of Felix had given Harlan that same electric shock sensation, too, but in a different way. He’d been older, yes, somehow bigger, heavier, grown into himself in full adulthood, his physical presence truly terrifying…but tempered. By contentment. By a stable family life. He’d been the silverback, the alpha, the male lion of a pride, assured of his strength, and of his support, in no hurry to rise to any of Harlan’s bait. He’d been cocky in a way Harlan didn’t remember, and it had set Harlan’s teeth on edge.
How dare he? How dare some lowlife, murdering scum of the earth get to be happy ? Get to be so satisfied ?
And worst of all…the thing that made Harlan want to scream…was that he hadn’t remembered him. Wantabi = wannabe, a clear message. Remember me? Remember the little wannabe you treated like shit? Look at me now, bitch. How do you like me now ?
He’d walked into the interrogation room for the first time, nauseous with anticipation, skin prickling with giddy sweat. And then Felix had lifted his head, and looked at him, and looked right through him, and Harlan had realized with an ugly lurch that Felix didn’t remember him at all.
But the man standing before him now wasn’t that Felix, nor any of the others. This man had stripped off every name but one.
Mercy.
This, Harlan realized, arms bared in a tank top, thick and strong with muscle, inked with tattoos, his hair tied back tight at the nape of his neck, hems of his jeans wet with water, guns and knives hanging off his belt, was the creature that Oliver Landau and Dee Lécuyer had spawned one hot summer in New Orleans. A creature born of rage, and pain, and grief, and then honed, over the years, to an instrument of the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club capable of dealing rage, pain, and grief back out into the world at twice the measure.
He was an awesome creature to behold. In the moment, it didn’t matter how many pushups Harlan had done, what records he’d broken on the range or the obstacle course, how many arrests he’d made or suspects he’d killed in the line of duty. He felt reduced to a child again. Like Little Red Riding Hood stumbling out of the forest and straight into the jaws of the Big Bad Wolf.
You’re making a mistake , Fallon had said one night on the road, drinking vodka out of a gas station coffee cup and shaking his head with disgust. I know you think you’ve got things under control or whatever – the continued head shaking said he didn’t think that at all – but this man is going to end our fucking lives. Do you understand that? He’s going to carve us into little pieces and make Hannibal Lecter look like a fucking joke .
Maybe Fallon was right.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, Harlan grabbed it by the scruff and threw it aside. No. No, fuck that. He wasn’t some pussy, some coward. He wasn’t–
Felix – Mercy – stepped in close, huge boots neatly avoiding the blood splattered all over the floor. Up close, heat radiated off his body, and the smell of sweat, and algae. He tipped his head down to meet Harlan’s gaze, and Harlan, face hot and pulsing, had to tip his head back . Somehow in the intervening years, Felix had grown taller.
No, not Felix. Felix wasn’t in the room with them at all.
Mercy said, “I’ll give you credit, digging up a sister I didn’t even know I had. Points for creativity.” His voice was very low, and standing this close, Harlan swore he could feel the vibration of it through the air.
“There’s–” To his shame and horror, his voice was only a croak. He wet his lips and started again, but not before he saw Mercy’s pupils expand: the excitement of a hunter who’s weakened his prey. “There’s no shortage of people who hate you. It wasn’t hard to find someone who wanted to help.”
Mercy’s head tilted the slightest, predatory fraction. “Help with what? Snatching kids?” His head tilted the other way. “Makes sense you’d use a woman, I guess. Real men don’t hurt children.”
The suggestion infuriated him. To be thought of as such an unworthy opponent, that children were the only enemies with whom he could engage. He flexed his hands on the counter, felt his arms and shoulders bunching – and caught a flash of movement as the Englishman eased to the side and adjusted his aim, so he’d have a clear shot around Mercy’s side. But it was only a momentary glance, gaze drawn back to Mercy’s face, the awful, still, animal malice of it.
He bared his teeth. “I didn’t hurt him. I’m not going to.”
“No?” Mercy wasn’t seething. Far from it. He was calm . “Where is he now, then?” He turned his head side to side, a slow, theatrical sweep, and then his gaze snapped back to Harlan, frigid and inhuman, his pupils still blown. “That must mean he’s with your buddy Fallon, huh? He likes kids, doesn’t he? Especially little boys.”
“Fallon knows not to touch him.”
“You’d think he’d know not to touch any kids, but…” Mercy spread his hands, shoulders lifting. What’re ya gonna do?
“He knows I’ll kill him myself if he does anything stupid.”
“Kiddie-diddling stupid? Or stupid like what you’re doing right now?” He pointed to the space between them. “Because, I gotta tell you,” he continued, the words conversational, his tone that wrong, wrong, wrong voice of someone who’d shed every last trace of humanity, “this is monumentally stupid on your part.”
He didn’t step, but he inhaled, and his shoulders lifted, and all the tendons and thick muscles shifted in his arms, and he leaned forward with intent.
Harlan couldn’t get his throat to work this time, an aborted swallow that jacked his throat and turned his voice hoarse. He was vibrating, and he couldn’t decide if he was excited or petrified, or a combination of the two. “What would be stupid,” he said, “is not letting me walk out of here. Because if I don’t make the rendezvous point in an hour, my men have orders to kill the boy.”
Mercy nodded, gave a little shrug with his mouth. “Sounds about right.”
Harlan was starting to get the feeling that he might actually get to leave under his own power, and it intensified that jackrabbit-heartbeat, giddy feeling in his chest. “The same rule applies every time I go anywhere alone. Your wife tried to shoot me yesterday. What if she’d succeeded? You need to keep a tighter leash on your woman.”
A grin split Mercy’s face, and his eyes sparked, a twisted delight and amusement, like Harlan had said something hilarious, and was about to get decked for it. “Oh, mon cher. You really don’t understand my old lady, do you? She’s the one who holds the leash. And she doesn’t pull on it very often.”
Harlan’s mind flashed to the letters he’d found bundled and banded in the bottom of Ava Lécuyer’s dresser drawer. Fillette . That was what he called her, what he’d always called her. He thought of those rumpled, dusty skin mags under his childhood bed, and then thought of the letters, all those letters, bleeding a religious-like devotion.
Again, Harlan was struck by the piercing, squirmy notion that he’d made a huge mistake. That he should have killed the wife instead of taking the boy, the fastest way to cut the man off at the knees – no, at the heart. Because against all odds, by some strange miracle, the beast was capable of love.
But, no, this was good. This was right. He didn’t make mistakes of of that magnitude.
And there was still time to take care of Ava, an idea that gained appeal by the second. The bitch had tried to shoot him.
Mercy shifted again, just an expansion of his chest, really, but it reminded Harlan acutely that he needed to pay attention to the moment at hand. His breath caught, and it was an effort not to shrink back.
“Alright, Hank .” He leaned hard on the name – he remembered! – and sliced Harlan right down to that prospect he’d been, awed and trembling. “What was this little stunt? Get me out here? Kill me? It didn’t work. Now what’s your move?”
There was only one option, really. “To walk out of here, unharmed. Or, like I said, your kid’s good as dead.”
The feral smile slipped away, and it was as if it had never been there. Mercy nodded. “Then what? I kill more of your men at a secondary location and we do this dance again?”
Harlan’s thoughts raced. He conjured and dismissed a dozen scenarios between blinks, and finally cobbled together a compromise between his original intention, and what he was now faced with. “No. I’m tired of the games. I want a fair exchange.”
Mercy’s brows lifted.
“You for him.”
In the silence that followed, the droning of flies and cicadas, inside and outside the house, pressed in tight around them, filling the gaps between bodies and breath. The moment stretched out molasses-slow, sticky contrast to the fluttering of Harlan’s pulse in his throat, his ears, behind his eyes . He didn’t breathe, and thought, in the split-second between Mercy taking a breath and opening his mouth, that he might pass out. A split-second in which he recognized that he was about to die, and screamed internally at the injustice of it, of Mercy getting the last laugh, the last say.
But then Mercy kicked his head back, and smiled again, small and infuriating. The cat that got the cream – though in his case, the cat was a tiger, and the cream was the whole damn cow. “Alright,” he drawled, dragging the word out. “Me for Remy. Deal.”
The British man started laughing, low and delighted. “What’re you gonna do with him, lad? Put a bit in his teeth and a saddle on his back? I’d like to see that.”
“When and where?” Mercy asked.
“TBD.” Harlan’s pulse was flying, all his skin rippling and shivering. “There’s a phone in Baker’s pocket.” He nodded to the man, where he lay like dropped cordwood, brains smeared across the linoleum. He was already starting to draw flies. “Take that. I’ll call you.”
Mercy nodded, stepped back, and retrieved the phone from Baker’s pocket. Slipped it into his own. “Go on, then.” He motioned to the front door. “Off you go.”
He went, waiting for a bullet in the back the whole way. But he moved through the front room, and across the porch, and down the steps, and all the way across the weed-choked yard, cicadas sawing at his ears, and to his car.
His hands were shaking so badly it took three tries to start the engine, and when he glanced up through the windshield, he saw Felix standing on the porch, watching him go, smiling.