Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
Alex didn’t know or care where Reese had gotten a Molotov cocktail, was only grateful that he’d had it, lit it, thrown it, and the resultant explosion of the empty boat’s fuel tanks had broken up what was fast devolving into a real shitty-ass party.
The shooting stopped.
The other two boats from Boyle’s party kicked into high gear and went racing away.
Alex finally dared to sit fully upright behind the wheel of their boat so he could actually see where they were going. He cut the wheel toward shore, intent on joining up with Duet and Dandridge so they could regroup and figure out where to go next.
A hand landed on top of his, and wrenched the wheel the other way.
Eyes still blurry and shimmering with the afterimage of the boat fire, Alex blinked up at Reese’s startingly stern expression.
“Ten’s still in the water,” he said, and his voice – only ever flat, or, at best, mildly pleasant, in Alex’s experience – cracked with emotion. With panic, Alex saw, when he got a good look at his eyes.
“Shit, yeah, alright.” He spun the wheel, gave the boat as much gas as he dared, and wished like hell he’d bothered to learn how to work one of these things properly.
Someone on the shore hailed them with a flashlight. Alex threw up a wave, prayed it was someone friendly, and kept going, chugging them along at Reese’s direction.
“Stop,” Reese commanded after a few minutes, and he went back and to the side of the boat.
Alex laid off the gas, but of course the boat didn’t stop . Boats were never still on top of the water.
He got it as still as it would go, though, and twisted around in his seat in time to see Gray join Reese at the side. Both of them leaned so far over he thought they might topple head-first into the water, but then they pulled back – and pulled Tenny with them. He had an arm across each of their shoulders, and rather than his usual lithe movements, one of his legs dragged awkwardly up over the edge of the boat, and he hissed a curse as they laid him down on the vinyl bench at the stern.
Though his jeans were dark and waterlogged, Alex could clearly see the darker splash of blood.
He jolted up out of his seat. “Shit! Where are you hit?”
Tenny’s face resembled that of a wax doll, bloodless and clammy, his lips tinged blue despite the warmth of the water.
“Thigh,” he gritted out through bared teeth. “It didn’t hit the femoral, it’s fine,” he tacked on.
“Shut up,” Reese said, and his voice cracked again, but in the other direction this time, soft and vulnerable. He knelt down in the bottom of the boat, produced a knife seemingly from nowhere, and cut Tenny’s jeans open with a few deft wrist flicks.
There was a lot of blood.
Alex said, “Shit,” before he could catch himself, and then thought, no, screw that . Gray was standing there observing passionlessly, and Reese’s hands were as deft and steady as a paramedic’s; Tenny had his jaw tensed, but looked down at his own wounded leg without any undue concern.
Reese mopped the leg with the sleeve of his own hoodie, then reached up and Gray placed the first aid kit in his palm without further prompt.
Alex turned and lunged for wheel. “Hold on. We’ll get to–” Well, not the dock, because if the damn thing wasn’t on fire yet, it likely soon would be, the way the boat was blazing. “We’ll get to shore.”
“ No ,” Tenny snapped, and he glanced back over his shoulder, incredulous.
The tendons in Tenny’s throat stuck out stark and tensed as Reese dumped half a bottle of alcohol on the bullet wound and then started swaddling it up tight. But despite his pallor and the amount of blood slicked over the bench and the floor of the boat, his gaze was stern when it met Alex’s. “We need to find Remy, and Mercy’s still out here, somewhere.”
“You’re bleeding out!”
“I’m not.” He glanced toward Reese. “I’m not, right?”
“No. But it was close.”
“See? Close isn’t dead,” Tenny said. He pointed with one bloodied hand, dictatorial as ever. “Head over toward that shoreline. I told Remy to swim for it.”
“Fine.” Alex turned back around, heart hammering. “But if you die, don’t blame me.”
Not that he would admit it, but Alex was impressed as hell. He’d never worked a case in which someone was shot, but every tale he’d heard firsthand had resulted in ambulances and lots of shouts of “agent down!” Tenny’s stoicism was incredible, but Alex really was going to blame himself if the idiot died.
He pushed the throttle, and sent the boat toward the far shoreline. Mercy had stashed a bag there earlier, “just in case,” and Alex knew there were more first aid supplies in it; hopefully, they could use them on Tenny, and they wouldn’t find Remy injured or…
No. He swallowed hard, and wouldn’t let himself think it.
Gray came up to stand beside him, high-powered flashlight aimed out at the water ahead of them.
“Is he really gonna be okay?” Alex leaned in to ask.
“He won’t die of blood loss,” Gray said, without emotion, “but infection’s likely, given he was in the water.”
Speaking of the water…it was flat, dull, and tea-colored in the flashlight’s beam. Alex could see nothing but clumps of duckweed bobbing along the surface. He slowed, images of Remy hiding below flashing through his mind, holding his breath, watching their shadow pass overhead.
“Remy!” he shouted, and didn’t know if he could be heard over the drone of the engines. “Remy!”
They slowed further, as they neared the shallows, and Alex swung wide, afraid of getting too close and being grounded.
“Look,” Gray said, light fixed on a point beyond the thin, dark sandy stripe of the beach, studded with knobby cypress knees and threaded with water grasses.
Alex powered the throttle all the way down, and it took him a moment to spot what Gray had: footprints. A pair of small sneakers. Boy-sized. Walking up out of the water and to the underbrush.
Gray leaped lightly out of the boat – “Hey, be careful” – and waded up out of the water, onto shore, and skirted around the footprints, following them from the side past the first screen of trees.
Alex strained his ears, waiting for a shout. Here he is. I found him .
Instead, Gray appeared a minute later, shaking his head. “There’s other prints,” he called. “A man.” Before Alex could ask, he added, “Not large enough to be Mercy.”
“Shit.”
A shuffling sound drew his attention to the side, and he saw that Tenny was on his feet, supported by Reese, arm across his shoulders.
“Jesus Christ, sit back down .”
Tenny ignored him. To Gray, he called, “Go look for Mercy’s pack.”
Gray nodded, turned, and melted back into the woods.
“I didn’t see Boyle again after he went overboard,” Tenny said, grimly. “It could be him. It has to be him.”
“What about Fallon?”
“He dove onto a boat before I went in after Remy. He’s probably halfway across the swamp by now.”
“Headed for our traps?” Alex asked, hopeful.
“Maybe.” Tenny turned to regard him, speculative. “They’d head that way quicker if they were being pursued.”
“We wait for Gray,” Alex decided, casting a longing look toward the opposite shore, which was now flooded with police light. A raft was launching out into the lake, headed toward the flaming boat, whose blaze was slowly dying down as it burned through the fuel onboard and ran out of steam. He wanted to go over there, check in, get Tenny into an ambulance and recon with Duet about next steps.
But he’d committed to this. To these people. To his brothers, and his brother’s club brothers. He couldn’t go play lawman now.
“If he can’t find Remy and Mercy, then we’ll give chase to Boyle’s people.”
Tenny’s brows lifted in mild surprise, pleased, and he nodded. “Yeah.”
“But you’re gonna sit your ass down and try not to die.”
Tenny rolled his eyes.
“Deal?”
“Whatever,” Tenny huffed, but Reese eased him down into one of the seats up near the bow, and he went without further fuss.
Gray returned a few minutes later, shaking his head, and Alex’s stomach sank. He waded back out into the water, and Reese helped him aboard when he reached the ladder.
“The footsteps go off through the swamp, and go down into a smaller canal, no sign of continuation on the other side. Mercy’s pack is gone. He’s following them.”
“Damn it,” Alex muttered.
“Let’s go,” Tenny said. “If it’s just Boyle, and just Mercy, Mercy’s got this. Nobody knows those godforsaken swamp woods better than him.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, by rote, and then it really hit him: if it was Boyle who had Remy, without any sort of backup, without supplies, in the dark, in the swamp, he didn’t stand a chance. Alex almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
“Godspeed, brother,” he muttered, and slammed the throttle down.
~*~
Ava had been sitting still so long that her ass and legs had gone from achy, to numb, and now she could no longer feel them at all. When it came time to climb out of her perch in the tree, she was going to have to move her feet with her hands and dangle for a few minutes before the blood rushed back to her toes. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore, save the span of canal and forest she continually scanned through her night vision binoculars.
So far, she’d seen two nutria, a host of bats swooping through the tree tops in search of mosquitos, and an owl that had plucked something small and shrieking from the ground before it settled into a branch across from her to eat. The night was alive with sounds, not least of all the many plops and splashes in the water that could have been fish or frogs; she never got a good look, even with the night vision. But none of the movements had been loud enough to warrant a predator: neither man nor gator.
She waited for so long that when she finally heard the whine of an approaching motor, she almost dropped her binoculars.
She fumbled the long-range walkie-talkie out of her hip pocket and pressed the transmit switch. “Incoming. Maybe a half-mile out. Too far to tell how many, but it sounds like more than one.”
The radio crackled, and Maggie’s staticky voice came through. “Copy that.” She sounded very military-professional. But her voice dipped into a more motherly register when she added, “You doing okay, baby?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll let you know when our guys get in range. Over and out.”
“Over and out,” Maggie echoed.
If their guys got in range, Ava added to herself. Their cells didn’t work this far out, and though the walkie-talkies had been a good substitute, they only had a two-mile range, which meant once Mercy’s crew headed to meet Boyle, they hadn’t been able to contact them.
Carefully, she gripped her boots by the ankles and shifted her feet off the branch so they dangled into open air. She tried to roll her ankles, and couldn’t, unsurprisingly. She straightened her legs out the best she could and started massaging the feeling back into her calves.
The motors – definitely plural – drew closer, and closer, and closer.
Pins and needles filled her lower body, but she could move her legs again, so she took up a better position on her perch, stowed the binoculars, and unslung the rifle from her back.
The scope offered an even better night vision view of the canal below, but it was narrow, and she could only peer through it with one eye. Still, she pressed the stock to her shoulder, wedged her upper back against the trunk of the tree, body braced and arms relaxed, ready.
The whine of the boats became a roar, just a few dozen yards away, now, and moving at unsafe speeds, by the sound of it.
For a moment, she considered the practicality of what she was doing. Her job was to serve as lookout; to radio to the cable team and let them know what was headed their way. The rifle was for if worst came to worst and she needed to protect herself. She wasn’t supposed to snipe anyone.
Her radio crackled to life with an incoming connection. Reese’s voice came through, patchy at first, but then stronger, like they’d gotten nearer. “Two boats headed your way. We’re third. Repeat: we’re in the third boat behind them.”
Ava one-handed the rifle long enough to say, “Copy,” then put her face back to the scope, and slipped her finger inside the trigger guard.
A boat, ghostly white in the darkness, blasted into view, kicking up a frothy white wake. Through the scope, Ava saw the boat’s prow, its windshield, and the men crowded behind it, standing clumped together.
She put one in crosshairs – skinny arms, lank hair – and pulled the trigger.
The rifle kicked so hard she might have gone tumbling out of the tree if she hadn’t braced herself. The sound of the shot came three heartbeats later, and she lowered the rifle in time to watch the man she’d hit tumble boneless down to the floor of the boat, falling against his friends.
Shouts rose up, more alarmed than angry, and then the boat was past, the second one hot at its heels.
She grabbed her radio. “Boats are passing me now,” she said into it.
“We heard a shot,” Maggie came back, right away.
“That was me. I got one of them. The first two boats are hostiles, Reese said the third one’s them.”
“Mercy? Remy?” There was a muffled noise and, away from the radio, she heard Maggie call, “Now, now, pull it now, they’re coming.”
When she could, Ava pressed her switch. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”
But when the third boat finally came into view, slower than the first two, Alex’s big hand lifted in a don’t fire gesture, Ava counted only four heads, and none of them belonged to her son or husband.
~*~
“Here they come,” Maggie said into her radio. “Stand by.”
She sat behind the wheel of the Jeep, watching through the windshield, motor running but lights off, her foot pressed firmly on the brake. Devin had assured her that the cable was strong, and that if the boat was moving fast enough, the Jeep and the tree trunk on the far side of the canal would be plenty strong enough to keep things tight.
Still, she wasn’t taking chances.
She flashed the lights once to let the boys know they had incoming, though they could doubtless hear the engines approaching; Maggie could, even over the low idling of the Jeep. Then it was dark again, and Maggie braced her hands on the wheel, like that would actually do something.
Too late to second-guess things now: a flash of white in the corner of her eye. The boat.
Maggie could see the winch cord because she knew to look for it, a faint flicker of silver against the black of the canal. But the man piloting the boat didn’t see it, and certainly wasn’t expecting it.
It caught the windshield first, and snapped it off as if it was nothing more than part of a child’s toy boat. It broke into multiple pieces, some of which flew high, some of which tumbled back into the boat and struck the men aboard it. There were shouts of alarm – that turned to screams, because the boat’s pilot was standing behind the wheel, and the cable caught him across the throat, and cut through him neatly and cleanly.
Maggie saw his head topple, and his body flopped forward against the wheel, spinning it hard to the right. The others were seated, and avoided decapitation, but the boat surged, and bucked, and careened to the side, and struck the far bank with an awful crunch of collapsing metal and fiberglass.
Then the second boat roared up. The men aboard it had watched their comrade lose his head, and so they ducked. The cable took the windshield, but nothing else, and the boat sped past and away into the night, out of view.
~*~
Toly was adept at waiting. He’d waited plenty in his bratva days: spying, stalking, holding himself back, silent and unseen, until the moment came to strike. Usually, he waited in dark doorways, on cold rooftops; frigid corners in the deep of winter. Urban landscapes. The wilderness unsettled him, but after a half-hour or so, the routine of waiting soothed his country-jangled nerves and allowed him to settle in the driver’s seat of the Rover, scanning routinely and calmly through his night vision binoculars for anything out of place.
When his radio crackled to life, he was expecting it, hovering in that perfect pre-op calm in which all his movements felt precise and efficient, and in which his heartrate slowed to accommodate for the rapid-fire spinning of his thoughts.
Maggie’s voice came through the line: “Toly, there’s a hostile boat headed your way. The guys are in the boat behind.”
“Copy that.”
More crackling, and then her voice turned strained, as, holding the radio, he climbed out of the Rover and moved to the array of switches, finger poised and ready. “Toly, we can’t find Ava.”
For the first time, his perfect calm splintered. The night insects sounded suddenly loud – or, no, wait, that wasn’t a giant mosquito. It was a boat approaching.
He pressed the radio switch. “I thought she was up a tree.” A thought occurred. “I heard a rifle shot.”
“That was her,” Maggie confirmed. “But when I went to get her, she was gone. Her footprints went off into the swamp and then disappeared.”
What a lovely, unnecessary complication.
He shook his head, and said, “The boat’s coming. I’ll check in after. Keep me posted.”
“Copy, over and out,” she said, all business again, and Toly tucked the walkie-talkie into his pocket. Losing Ava was a whole new problem, but she’d struck out on her own, it sounded like, and Toly couldn’t abandon his post to search for her.
The approaching whine intensified to a deep growl, and Toly held his breath, listening intently. Now, he thought.
“Christ, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he muttered, and threw the switches.
The winches lurched, and engaged, and started to wind up. Limbs and pulleys creaked overhead as the cables started fighting with their payloads.
Toly tipped his head back and searched the canopy, waiting for the sharp snap of a broken branch, for the whipping strike of a snapped cord.
He unslung his rifle and walked around behind the Rover, peering around its windows in the hopes the car would shield him when something inevitably broke.
But the winches kept turning, and the pulleys kept squeaking, and the lines rose and rose up out of the water, dripping, vibrating as the gators fought.
Winches and diesel generators were stronger than a man’s arms, though, and, just as the boat blasted into view, the gators did what Mercy had predicted they would do: they stopped trying to stay under and fight the lines, and burst upward with strong swipes of their tails.
Whoever was manning the boat must have seen the water froth at the surface as the gators jumped. He backed off the throttle, and the boat dipped low at the prow as it slowed suddenly.
One gator struck the side of the boat with the end of its snout like a torpedo. It didn’t do any damage, but the driver whirled around with a confused exclamation. “What the hell–”
“Gators!” someone else shouted. “Holy shit, it’s gators!”
The winches kept turning, and hauled the other three gators, thrashing and hissing, up into the boat.
A branch finally did snap, and the line went slack, and the gator attached to it – a solid five-footer – fell down amongst the men in the boat, who started screaming bloody murder.
“Fuck me,” Toly breathed. “It worked.” He hustled forward, keeping low, rifle held in one hand, and cut the switches.
The winches stopped.
The gator who’d struck the side made a low, deep growling nose and thrashed its head side-to-side, fighting the line.
The others were in the boat, and one started rolling; another sent a man overboard with a swipe of its tail.
A gunshot cracked out, and Toly ducked, but none of the men in the boat had seen him.
“You shot the boat!” a man shouted, and he heard the engine rev back to life.
A moment later, it was gone, foamy white wake lapping at the shore.
Two of the gators had tumbled back into the water, dancing at the ends of their lines. Toly reversed the winches and let the cords play out again; the gators used the slack to dive once more, still hooked, but now even angrier.
One, though, was still onboard the boat, and he shook his head in wonderment.
Mercy’s words from earlier returned to him: “I don’t expect anyone to get seriously hurt, but these are thugs and killers and not swamp men. This here” – he’d gestured to the winch and cord setup – “is gonna scare the everloving shit out of them. And a scared man is a man who makes mistakes.”
“Diabolical,” Toly had assured, and Mercy had grinned, teeth flashing in the gloom of evening as he tested the give of the lines.
“I should hope so.”
~*~
Pain was just weakness leaving the body. Wasn’t that what the Marine Corps said? Mercy had heard it somewhere, and it came to him now, though it didn’t really matter: he didn’t know if there was weakness leaving his body, only a lot of blood, and the pain was secondary. There were bandages and alcohol in his pack. He cleaned up best he could, wrapped his arm, slapped gauze and tape over his shoulder, shrugged into the pack, and set off through the swamp, boots squishing pleasantly on the soft ground. The pain was a steady drumbeat, throbbing in time with his pulse, but nothing was dislocated or broken, and he could move. There’d been Gatorade and a few granola bars in his pack, one of the latter he crammed down against a wave of nausea, and the former he carried in one hand, sipping regularly as he walked.
He'd come so close to killing Boyle on the boat – but he would have his chance again. He was more confident now than he’d been in days, because now, Boyle was on foot, and, inept as he was in the wild, he was leaving a trail for Mercy to follow.
Better yet: though he didn’t know it, Boyle was cutting a path cross-country straight for the rookery, and, as Mercy had hoped all along, it was there that Boyle would be trapped.
I’m coming, baby , he thought in Remy’s direction, and lengthened his stride, the pain pulsing sharp and electrifying through him.
~*~
Ava didn’t know the swamp the way that Mercy did, and she wasn’t going to delude herself into believing that a mother’s love and intuition could overcome the gaps in her knowledge and experience.
But what she did know was that Mercy had set his trap for Boyle west of here, at a lake island where the birds congregated after dark: the rookery. And she knew that this canal would lead her there eventually. So, with her rifle, and her radio, and a backpack of ammo and essentials, she struck off on her own.
She’d listened to the radio long enough to know that Boyle, Remy, and Mercy were missing, and knew that Mercy would be hunting Boyle.
She intended to join them, stepping carefully in the dark, brushing aside curtains of moss, boots squish-squishing in the mud.
Hold on, baby , she thought, to both her boys, and lengthened her stride.
~*~
They heard a gunshot. Singular. One loud, booming crack that echoed through the forest, and which sounded too close to have come from the wild scene at the dock.
Boyle froze, hand closing punishingly on Remy’s shoulder, and he swore under his breath.
Remy wanted to twist away from him, but he knew that if he did, Boyle would snatch the back of his shirt, and maybe strike him in the head to daze him; maybe even throw him over his shoulder like he did that first day in the school, and as bad as this was, Remy didn’t want to be carried. Walking on his own was better than being completely captive.
“That was too close,” Boyle muttered, and shoved him without letting go, righting him roughly when he tripped on a hidden tree root. “Fuck them. Fuck your fucking family,” he fumed, and Remy figured that didn’t warrant an answer.
They’d been walking for some time. When they started out, Remy had been able to see the three-quarter moon overhead, but it had dipped out of sight now. He’d been shivering when he first came out of the water, but now his sodden clothes dragged at him like weights, and sweat slicked his skin beneath them. He didn’t dare try to take his sweatshirt off, though. Boyle probably wouldn’t allow it, for one, and two, they were slapped and scraped from all sides by low branches. Boyle’s arms, he noted when he reached to impatiently swat at a screen of Spanish moss, were criss-crossed with red welts and scratches.
They walked and walked. Boyle stopped frequently to shush him though he wasn’t talking, and held stock-still for long moments before shoving him forward again.
Finally, Remy said, “Why do you keep stopping?”
Boyle swatted him on the back of the head – but not hard. His voice was distracted when he hissed, “Shh, listen.”
Remy listened a moment. He heard night insects, several layers of them overlapping, and he heard a faint gurgling of water. Something rustled low in the brush ahead, and his stomach tensed with nerves. Daddy hadn’t ever mentioned wolves or lions in the swamp, but gators did walk on land sometimes…
“Listening for what?”
“Shut up.” Boyle shoved him forward, fingers digging into his shoulder, and Remy almost face-planted in the mud.
He knew what Boyle was listening for, though: Daddy.
If Daddy was alive – please, please, please let him be alive! – then Remy had no doubts that he was following them. And that, like Strider in The Lord of the Rings , he would be able to track them, as keen-eyed as an eagle in the swamps where he’d grown up. Even so, Remy put a little more weight into each step, trying to leave clear footprints in the soft ground.
He’d become aware, some distance ago, that his eyes had adjusted to the dark much better than Boyle’s. Boyle tripped over obstacles that Remy stepped over, cursing and flailing, and dragging harder and harder at Remy, because he refused to let go of him. Each trip seemed an opportunity for escape – but a too-narrow opportunity. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to put any distance between them, and at this rate, the way Boyle was panting, and cursing, and talking to himself – “I’m gonna gut that fucker. When I catch him, oh shit, I’m gonna…” – Remy was afraid he might decide Remy didn’t need his legs to remain a good hostage, and shoot him in the knees.
They walked a little farther, and Remy could see that the ground dropped away, suddenly and steeply, ahead of them. Boyle didn’t see it, because he kept blundering forward at the same pace.
Was this his chance? Finally?
Maybe. It was worth the risk.
Remy put his foot out into open air, and caught a glimpse of a deep, water-filled ravine. The other side sloped up gently, wooded with low-growing vegetation, and beyond a screen of trees, he saw the glimmer of moonlight on water. A lot of water.
First, though, the drop.
Remy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, clenched his teeth tight together, and let himself go.
“Oh, fuck!” Boyle yelped.
Remy flew through the open air, and he wrapped his arms tight around himself once Boyle released him, ducked his head, and was ready for impact when he landed hard on his shoulder, and started rolling downhill.
Boyle started yelling, and then kept yelling. Curses and threats to murder Remy and Mercy interspersed with yelps of pain and shouts of alarm.
Remy landed, finally, and gave himself a two-count to open his arms and be sure he’d reached the bottom. He had, just shy of the narrow strip of water that lined the lowermost point of the ravine. Boyle was still shouting – “motherfuck fucking shit fucking” – so Remy scrambled to his feet and cast a look around.
The water was a slowly trickling creek, and on the other side, the gentle slope he’d spied from above, a thinning of narrow tree trunks, and beyond that, a large and glass-smooth body of water, gleaming black in the moonlight.
Remy took off running. He was so tired, and his clothes were so heavy, his shoes full of water and threatening to slip off his feet, but he found a burst of reserve energy, and jumped the creek, and scrambled desperately up the hill toward the water.
Behind him, a splash. The sound of a body floundering in muck. Then Boyle shouted, “Stop! Stop, you little shit!”
Remy reached the first tree, and a chunk of its trunk exploded outward. He felt wood chips strike his face, and he closed his eyes and ducked his head on instinct. The report of the gun registered a beat later.
Boyle had shot at him.
“Stop!”
Remy crouched low, but kept moving, braced for a hit.
BOOM .
That was not the crack of Boyle’s handgun. It was a much bigger gun, and as the thunderclap of its firing echoed away into the trees, a feminine voice shouted, “ Get away from my son!”
“Shit,” he heard Boyle say, and then the gun fired again. BOOM .
Remy whirled toward the sound of it, and his eyes burned and blurred with a sudden film of tears. “Mama!”
~*~
There was an alligator in the boat.
There was an alligator in the boat .
Fallon had reached levels of stress, shock, and incredulity that made him question every single decision he’d ever made in his miserable life, which very well might end tonight, one way or another. Probably badly. Definitely painfully.
He wanted nothing more than to curl up into a little ball, close his eyes, go to sleep, and wake in his own loveless bed in Virginia to find that this had all been one long, awful dream. If that happened, he might even roll over and kiss his wife good morning, joyous with his mundane routine.
But when he closed his eyes, someone staggered backward into him, and someone else cursed, and someone else screamed, and he opened his eyes to find that the nightmare was all too real.
Everyone had scrambled to the edges of the boat to get clear of the gator. The thing was trailing a length of steel cable from its mouth, and a tree limb as big around as Fallon’s thigh lay at the bottom of the boat beside it; it had fallen from above, and struck one of the men – Lloyd had called him Rawlins – in the head. He’d collapsed in a boneless heap, and lay there still.
Lloyd was driving the boat, and he gunned the engine, so that the forest flew past them in a blur, which seemed like a real shitty idea after an unseen wire had decapitated the pilot of the first boat. They hadn’t stopped after it crashed to see if anyone aboard needed help or wanted to board their boat.
“Fuck this,” Lloyd had said, and pressed the throttle flat, and they’d raced away into the night.
Only for flying alligators to leap at them, one of which was now hissing and swinging its tail and turning in tight, agitated circles, lunging at them all.
“Somone dump that sonovabitch overboard!” Lloyd shouted over his shoulder.
Someone reached for its tail, and then staggered back into Fallon when the gator whirled and snapped. “Fuck that,” the guy said, and tried to keep backing up.
Fallon elbowed him in the ribs, then tripped, and nearly toppled backward. He had a flash vision of backflipping straight into the outboard props, then regained his balance with a tight grip on someone else’s arm.
The gator twisted away from them – and chomped down on Rawlins’s head.
Fallon turned away.
Someone shouted, “Oh, God!”
“Shit!”
Fallon swallowed hard, not sure if he could keep his gorge down. He could hear an awful, meaty sound, and the gator’s weight thumping on the boat’s floor, and he guessed Rawlins was either terribly concussed, or dead, because having his skull punctured – oh, God, the sound of it! – didn’t rouse him.
Fallon saw the water rushing past below, the white-capped, wavering lines of the boat wake, and considered diving in.
But thought of more gators made him shudder, and kept him rooted to the spot.
“Get it out!” Lloyd roared.
There was a flurry of scuffling, grunting, swearing, and then an almighty splash.
He turned his head in time to see the gator as they flew past…and Rawlins. The gator hadn’t released him, and the men had shoved him overboard, too.
Fallon shuddered again, and turned around so he could see what awaited them.
To his surprise and relief, the narrow canal opened up into a huge expanse of star-studded sky, and a vast lake, black beneath black, so they might have been floating if not for the moon-silvered silhouette of a small island out in the middle.
Lloyd backed off the throttle, and the boat slowed to an easy glide across the open water.
Fallon’s attention was fixed on the island, and the floating white specters that glowed amidst the mossy branches.
Ghosts , was his first, foolish thought. New Orleans was supposed to be haunted, wasn’t it? And here the ghosts were: not mere raps on hotel doors, or cold patches in a cemetery. These were good old-fashioned sheet-draped Hollywood spirits, floating and wavering, flapping …
Birds. They were birds. Hundreds and hundreds of white egrets roosting for the night.
How many times could his heart leap and stall and slow tonight? It was doing more work than a gymnast on a balance beam.
“Shit,” someone said, and Fallon gave himself a mental shake. He’d learned that cursing meant someone might be about to die, in this situation.
“What?” someone else asked.
“Look at all these damn gators.”
Gators?
Dear God.
Fallon looked out at the water, and his guts shriveled.
The moon was bright enough to reveal the humped backs of countless gators. They scattered before the boat, but there were so many of them, enough to run along their backs if they’d have tolerated that.
It looked like a feeding frenzy, gator tails slapping the water; more eyes than he could count reflecting the flashlight beams.
He hadn’t wanted to die the whole time, but, suddenly, he really didn’t want to die in this way.
“Look!” one of the men shouted. “A light.”
Fallon lifted his head, ears stuffy thanks to the high-frequency racing of his pulse, and saw that, yes, there was a light, high-powered, a white glow like an eye across the lake. A boat.
The phrase any port in a storm filled him with one last flicker of hope. They were definitely in a storm, and he’d take any port.
The light drew closer, until the sound of its motor reached them, their own light glinting off the backs of the gators that slithered and tussled each other out of the way.
With backup, and enough bullets, maybe they could start firing on the gators. Would injury send them fleeing? Or would blood in the water only put them into a sharklike frenzy? Fallon didn’t know, but he thought it was worth trying, as far as strategies went.
Lloyd swung the boat sideways, and lifted a big hand in greeting as the second boat drew closer. “Hey! Cody!” He waved, hand white-limned in the fierce glow of the other boat’s spotlight. “We–”
With all five fingers distinctly outlined, it was easy to see when the middle one exploded with a spurt of black blood, and then was gone.
Lloyd bellowed with pain and snatched his hand down into his chest. With his good hand, he attempted to gun the throttle, but then his head kicked back, and he fell back across his seat.
Whoever was in the other boat, they weren’t friends.
~*~
Through her night vision scope, Ava saw Boyle slip between blackberry-webbed tree trunks, and disappear from sight. Getting away! Again!
But…
“Mama!”
She swung the rifle over her shoulder on its strap, dropped to one knee, and opened her arms.
Remy hit her like a little cannonball, without slowing, warm, and sweaty, and crying out loud in a way he hadn’t done since infancy, big, gulping hiccups and sobs. He was rank from the swamp, from a lack of baths, and when Ava wrapped him up tight, and cupped the back of his head, she felt the scratch of twigs tangled in his hair.
Ava had spent so long suppressing her grief, her sense of doom, her throat-gripping panic, that it wasn’t until now, his small body wrapped safe and shaking in his arms, that she actually believed she would ever get to hold him again. She’d known that she would do anything, would die trying, but hope had been only the most ephemeral thread woven through her determination.
And here he was, alive and whole, even as he clung to her and whimpered “mama” into her neck, which he wetted with his tears. He was here. Against all reason, against the odds, she had him.
Ava turned her face into the side of his head and breathed deep the scent of unwashed scalp, and green water, and rocked him side to side as his crying slowly quieted. She’d thought when this moment came – if this moment came – that she would cry along with him. Instead, though she felt warm tears slip down her cheeks, she was filled with an overwhelming relief; a crushing exhaustion at war with the lightness in her lungs. She could have laid down here on the marshy ground and slept, her baby clutched to her chest.
But they weren’t done.
When he’d gone quiet, she eased Remy back, and wiped his face with her hands, smearing the dirt smudges across his cheeks. “You okay, baby?”
He sniffed hard, and though his lip trembled, he nodded. Brave boy.
“Whaddya say we go find Daddy?”
He nodded again.
Ava stood, and moved his hand to her belt. “Hold on to me, baby.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She lifted her rifle, and its scope, back to her face, and searched the forest in all its shades of phosphorescent green. No sign of Boyle, but she would find him, and she would kill him.
“Let’s go.”
They went, and as they did so, she thought she heard the far-off, mournful notes of dogs howling.
~*~
Maggie was manning the radio in the boat. Colin was driving. They’d dispatched the men left alive in the boat whose driver had been decapitated, taken down the cable that had done it, then headed downstream to pick up Toly.
Now, they neared the mouth of the canal that fed into the massive rookery lake – at least according to Colin – and they could hear gunshots.
“Shit,” Colin muttered. “Who’s doing that?”
Maggie started to answer, and the radio crackled in her hand. A voice came through, wholly unexpected, and she nearly dropped the radio in surprise. “Colin? Devin? Toly? Any of you guys there?”
“Holy shit!” Maggie swore, and then pressed the transmit button. “Tango?! Is that you?”
“Hi, Mags. Yes, ma’am, it’s me – well, it’s us.”
He was interrupted by a volley of gunshots in stereo: ahead of them, in the near distance, and much closer on Tango’s end.
“Is that you guys shooting?” she asked, heart still leaping after us . How many of them constituted us ? Was Ghost with them? Aidan?
“Yeah,” he responded. “We’ve got Fallon pinned down in a boat.”
Though her thoughts raced, she had no idea what to make of their presence here, now. “How…” she started, and was cut off by another volley of shots.
Colin slowed the boat, and leaned over to shout into the radio: “How the fuck are you here ?”
When Tango came back on, he said, “Long story – shit, yeah .” That sounded meant for someone in the boat with him. “Where’s Boyle?”
“He got away on foot.”
“Ah. Okay. Good thing we brought the dogs.”
~*~
Harlan swatted a branch out of the way, only to be slapped in the face by another. “Fuck! Fucking – fuck all of this !” he hissed under his breath.
He had his gun, but he didn’t have a light, and save for the moments when the canopy of interlaced tree limbs thinned, he couldn’t see well enough to know which way he was going, much less see well enough to shoot someone.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been shot .
That bitch Ava Lécuyer. That stupid cunt . If he ever got a clear shot at her…Or, better yet, got his hands on her–
His heel skidded on a slick patch, and then kept skidding. His boot splashed down into a puddle, or a bog, or a whateverthefuck that plunged him up to his knee in muck and brackish water. He cursed, and pinwheeled his arms, but couldn’t rebalance, and went down face-first onto the swamp floor for the second time tonight.
For one flashfire moment, he thought about staying down. Just…drowning. Getting it all over with. Failure tasted like mud, and it burned in his large muscle groups like lactic acid, and it cramped his gut like food poisoning. That’s what he’d done: he’d failed.
It was too huge and nauseating a concept to wrap his head all the way around at the moment. To think that he’d spent so many years, more than half of his life, chasing this one goal…no. He hadn’t failed yet.
He braced his hands in the mud, pushed himself up, and struggled out of the sinkhole.
After, he lay panting on firmer ground, overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion so intense he thought that if he closed his eyes, he would fall asleep right here, on a bed of moss and old, dead leaves.
But something rustled off to his left, so he got back on his feet, and pressed onward.
~*~
Bob Boudreaux was piloting the boat.
The rest of them were manning the guns.
It was Aidan who spotted Fallon in the enemy boat as they swung around broadside. “There, right there!”
Tango saw him. In the flash of the boat’s spotlight, his face a big-eyed, petrified white disc, Tango saw him not as the grinning, cruel-handed man he could only remember in fits, and snatches, and a sense of unbeatable dread, but as a sad and pathetic wretch. One living a lie, married to a woman he didn’t love, soulless enough to pay to rape boys held captive in a brothel. Just a loser caught between a barrage of gunfire and a lake full of hungry gators.
How had Tango ever been afraid of him? Ever shivered, and wanted to hide, and shrunk down into his own collar beneath his sly questioning?
A single gunshot cracked from the other boat, and a narrow splash proved it had gone wide and struck the water, harmless.
Bob gave the wheel one last spin and brought them alongside.
RJ swung the spotlight around.
“Now!” Albie shouted over the roar of the engine. He and Aidan were armed with Albie’s beloved Skorpions, and strafed the side of the boat, hitting fiberglass and flesh alike.
Tango had a Skorpion of his own, but he dropped it, and let it dangle on its strap in favor of pulling his usual sidearm: the .45 that had terrified him as a teenager, and become as comforting as a well-hugged teddy bear in the years since.
He was far from the best shot in the club, but tonight, with the spotlight beaming on his target like the helpful flare of heaven, he took aim, and fired, and had the pleasure of watching Fallon’s head kick back, red entry point blooming blood on his forehead, before the boats screamed apart.
When he twisted around to look back, he saw a pale body in the water, and then saw it get pulled under.
~*~
Walsh hadn’t come to America expecting to become important amongst the Yank Dogs, but he’d recognized the startled, impressed looks on James and Ghost’s faces when he had Knoxville’s finances sorted and in the black within a month of his arrival. Six months after that, Knoxville began investing in new businesses. Ghost had told him, a year in, over late-night drinks in the office after James had gone home, and Ghost had stayed, already president in all the ways that counted, that he had dreams – big ones. And he thought Walsh was the missing puzzle piece he’d needed all along to make them come true for his club.
He was then tasked with consulting with the other chapters, and showing them how to haul themselves up out of the typical MC poverty. No more money lost on hookers and blow and extravagant parties; smart investments, proper laundering, receipt management.
Walsh got them turned around – but, of course, none of the other chapters would become as successful as Knoxville. No one had ever expected the boss man not to be on top of the pile anyway.
But the other chapters did well for themselves these days, and it was why Bob had been able to equip them so well on such short notice.
He would have much preferred his Harley on a stretch of open road, but needs must. Walsh squeezed the brakes, cranked the handlebars, and ducked a low hanging branch as his Honda dirt bike bucked and jerked its way over the uneven ground. When he was clear, he stood up on the footpegs again to let his arms and legs distribute the shock better.
Mounted on a dirt bike of his own, Michael rode ahead of him, and, as promised, Crassus the Dane kept pace easily with their subdued swamp speed. Michael had his uncle’s current stud dog on a short leash attached to his belt, and Walsh kept waited for disaster – a branch, or a stump, or thick tangle of brambles to catch the tether – but so far so good. And despite the rev and surge of their motors, the hounds ahead could still be clearly heard.
They’d caught their scent, and they were running it to ground.
Walsh just prayed they wouldn’t be too late.
~*~
Harlan felt like he’d been walking for hours. No matter which way he turned, he couldn’t seem to get away from the glittering black expanse of the lake, nor its roaring boat motors, or its cracking gunshots. Eventually, though, the shooting ceased, and the boat activity quieted to low, idling murmurs.
He tripped on a root, nearly fell again, and made the decision to move closer to the water. There, at least, the trees thinned, and the moonlight shone on the white sand of the shoreline, and he could keep his feet. He glanced out across the lake, and saw the distant, dark shape of the island, and the even more distant pinpricks of boat spotlights. Well-away and with no chance of spotting him at this distance.
He let out a ragged sigh of relief.
That was when he heard the first howl.
It rooted him to the spot, and lifted all the fine hairs on the back of his neck. A lonesome, echoing awwwwoooooo , like a wolf in a movie. A second howl followed, and then two at once. They were–
Baying. Hounds baying.
He glanced back out across the water, at the distant lights, and could hear the bawling of the dogs get closer, and closer, and closer.
He needed to run, and run now. Climb a tree – or, well, shit, no. Then they’d have him treed and helpless. He could shoot them, then, and make a break for it. Maybe even take to the water. Whatever the plan of action, he needed to move .
Instead, his shivering, worn-out body refused to cooperate, and all the sweat that slicked his skin turned to ice as an image filled his mind, not of earthly dogs, but of hellhounds: bristling, red-eyed, razor-toothed. He’d let pride get the best of him, had pushed too hard, and now the devil wanted his due.
“No, stupid,” he muttered to himself. “It’s a K-9 unit. It’s Bloodhounds.”
A twig snapped behind him. “No,” Mercy Lécuyer’s voice floated out from the gloom behind him. “Those are Smokey Mountain Blueticks, fresh from Tennessee.”
~*~
Truthfully, Mercy had thought the dogs were police trackers at first, too. But Bloodhounds had droopier jowls, and so the quality of the sound was deeper, more bellow, less howl. Plus, by this point, he knew well the particular sound of a Bluetick. Or two, in this case.
By the time he walked up on Boyle where he stood at the water’s edge, the dogs were close enough for him to be certain, motors that didn’t belong to boats were echoing through the trees, and Mercy was grinning hugely, all his pain and exhaustion pushed down by sheer joy: his brothers had come. All of them.
And now, here, finally, was his quarry, run to ground at last.
Boyle turned around, clumsily, and then they stood ten feet apart, guns pointed at one another.
The motors drew closer: ATVs of some sort at a guess.
Mercy said, “I’ll give you this, Boyle. You’re a determined son of a bitch.”
Boyle gritted his teeth, a wet gleam in the moonlight, and lifted his gun higher. “You–”
The wraith that lunged out of the shadows was the size of a pony, coal black, narrow waisted, and leanly muscled. “I got to meet Mr. Chace’s catch dog,” Remy had said after his trip to Uncle Wyn’s farm, frowning a little over the unfamiliar phrase. “He was really huge. His name’s Crassus.”
He was indeed really huge, and in two bounding strides cleared the underbrush and clamped his massive jaws on Boyle’s gun arm with a snarl dragged straight up from the depths of hell.
Boyle screamed, dropped his gun, and was borne to the ground by the massive Great Dane, who firmed up his grip, put one giant paw on Boyle’s chest to pin him, and held fast.
“Attaboy,” Mercy praised, but didn’t dare approach further.
He didn’t have to wait long. Boyle’s continuous hoarse screams were quickly drowned out by the growl of engines, and two dirt bikes burst from the trees and then rolled to a halt on the sand of the beach. Kickstands went down, motors were killed, and the riders dismounted.
Mercy had expected Michael. “Mikey!” But Walsh was a surprise. “And King baby, too? Fuck me, what a surprise.”
There was enough moonlight to catch Walsh’s wry look.
Michael stepped forward, leash in hand, and said, “Down, Crass. To me, to me,” in a low and calm voice.
The dog whined, but released Boyle and went to Michael to accept his leashing, and a generous scratch between the ears.
Exhaustion hit Mercy anew, a sledgehammer in the back, right between his shoulder blades.
Speaking of…
He let his pack slide off his arms and to the ground, and from it, withdrew the twelve-pound, short-hafted sledge that was one of its many contents.
Boyle must have tried to scramble away, because Mercy heard Walsh said, “Stay on the fucking ground, you wanker . Do you not know when you’ve been bested?”
“No,” Mercy said, strolling up to join them. The hammer felt like it weighed fifty pounds, pulling at the gunshot wounds in his arm. He felt a clot give, and fresh, hot blood trickled down the crook of his elbow. “That’s always been his problem, ever since he was a kid: he never knew when to quit.”
Walsh stood with a boot pressed to Boyle’s throat, and Boyle’s face was darkening rapidly beneath the pressure on his windpipe.
“And,” Mercy continued, moving to stand between Boyle’s spread legs, shouldering the hammer, “he’s been obsessed with me for most of his life. I guess it’s flattering.” He smiled again, black spots pressing at the edges of his vision. “What do you say, Hank: you want the full Mercy experience?”
Boyle’s eyes bugged.
Mercy brought the hammer down, one clean, well-practiced arc, and shattered Boyle’s kneecap to shrapnel.
He didn’t even scream; he simply passed out.
Walsh lifted his foot with a disgusted sound, then spat on him.
Crassus panted happily.
The chug of a motor reached them, the flicker of a light. A boat approached. And when it was close enough, it was Devin’s voice that called cheerily over the radio intercom: “You boys need a lift?”
~*~
Mercy looked like hell. Toly spared him a glance from the boat he was in with Gray, willed his gorge to stay the hell down, and then did a double-take when he saw all the blood that slicked the big man’s arms. He wavered on his feet, and Colin and Alex both moved to support him as he stepped from Devin’s boat into the one where Ava and Maggie sat bracketing Remy.
“Daddy!” Remy shouted, and lunged for him, and even if he was waxen and half-dead on his feet, Mercy grinned at his son, and pulled him into a big bear hug.
Ava got up and went to them, and was enfolded into the embrace.
Toly glanced away to give them privacy, and swallowed hard when the boat rocked slightly.
“Do you need a Dramamine?” Gray asked.
“Niet.” Toly adjusted his grip on the dead man’s feet; Gray held him by the shoulders. “I don’t want to pass out and fall in.” Because in was boiling with gators, happily disposing of the bodies they kept heaving overboard. “Let’s finish. One, two–”
They both lifted, and the dead man went up, and over, and splash, and a gator grabbed his arm and towed him into the frenzy.
~*~
Ava could hear conversation behind her, and registered it as she would dialogue in a movie left running in the background.
Devin: “Sure you don’t want more of us to come along? The big man doesn’t look like he’s got more than an hour of consciousness left in him.”
Colin: “Yeah, we’re sure. Reese bandaged his arms. That should hold. But, hey, Dev: thanks, man. Seriously. For everything.”
Devin: “Ah, o’ course. Like this was a party I didn’t want to be a part of? I get it: this last thing needs to be family. Take care of him, though, yeah? And get them all back to the rendezvous point?”
Colin: “Yeah, of course we will.”
Sound of a hearty handshake that turned into a man-hug.
Reese: “You’re going to the hospital. Now .”
Tenny: “And do you see a bloody hospital out here? We’re all going back together, and I’m not going anywhere after that until we’ve got Mercy back again.”
Others spoke, voices overlapping and indistinct. But all Ava could focus on was Remy, in an uncharacteristic panic, face screwed up and eyes fever-bright after she and Mercy told him to stay with Grammie and Uncle Aidan because they had one last thing to take care of before they went back into town.
“No, no, no, no, no!” he cried, hands twisting in the sleeves of her jacket. “No, you can’t – no – Daddy’s hurt – Mama, no .”
Her heart ached . “Shh, baby, it’s okay–”
“Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”
Oh, God. No, no, she really couldn’t. But they couldn’t take him …could they?
“Hey.” Mercy crowded in next to her, not flinching when his injured arm pressed against hers. “Hey.” He reached to lay a hand on the side of Remy’s face, and his vast palm swallowed it up. “Bud, it’s okay. We’ll be okay. I’m not hurt that bad.” Ava could hear the smile in his voice – and the pain. The exhaustion.
“Take me with you,” Remy begged, lip trembling, eyes filling.
She shared a glance with Mercy, and he gave the faintest shrug with his eyebrows. His face was too pale. They were running out of time. But he was leaving the decision to her; he, she could tell, had no problem with Remy witnessing what they planned to do.
Ava didn’t really either, when it came down to it.
She glanced at her mom, and at Aidan, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder across from her. They regarded her with near-matching looks of up to you , Aidan’s disturbed, Maggie’s resolute. Up to you .
Ava smoothed Remy’s too-long hair, and thumbed a tear off his cheek. “Okay. Shh. Okay, you can come.”
~*~
Harlan woke slowly and swimmily to a white, throbbing pain that seized his stomach in a vise grip. He needed to be sick, but couldn’t move, thoughts fuzzy, eyelids heavy, and so he swallowed, and went through his breathing exercises, and took stock.
The pain – at first an overwhelming, strangling shroud that seemed to pulse through his whole body – shrank and localized to his left knee. It was a sharp, deep, visceral hurt, throbbing in time to his too-quick heartbeat. He remembered being flat on his back, and Mercy above him; the wink of metal in the moonlight, and a crushing weight.
His arm throbbed, too, where a monster had sunk its teeth through fabric and skin. Even the bone felt tender, and he thought it might be cracked.
But he was alive. His wounds weren’t fatal.
Buoyed by that knowledge, he swam up through his cottony half-consciousness and heard voices.
“…starting to come around.”
“He didn’t move, though.”
“Nah, his eyelids fluttered.”
He forced his eyelids still, and tried to keep his breathing slow.
Booted footfalls made their slow, heavy way toward him, across a wooden surface – but one that echoed strangely. It wasn’t a floor, not a normal one, it sounded like–
Shit, it was a dock. He was on a dock.
A boot thumped into his bad knee, and there was no more feigning sleep; the pain was electric, and he screamed, and opened his eyes, and in the blue glow of a battery lantern, he beheld a beast standing over him.
A towering figure, lit from below, the shadows painting a demon’s mask around a wide, white knife slice of a smile. Its eyes burned, two black coals set in that devil face.
Harlan knew, suddenly, that he was about to die. Not in a panicked, prayerful, please-don’t-let-me-die way. But certainty swept through him, cold and final. He was going to die, and no amount of struggling or pleading could stop it.
It was oddly peaceful.
He was ready for his hunt to be over, and this would end it for good, even if it wasn’t in the way he wanted. Sometimes an end, any end, was a blessing.
But then the beast crouched down, and the light slid up its face like a wave, and the beast was Mercy, and his grin was one of deep satisfaction.
Peace fled, and in its place, his veins flooded with terrified adrenaline.
“Bonjour, Hank.” Mercy’s voice was a low and throaty purr that immediately brought to mind the dog who’d maimed his arm. “How’re you feeling?”
The pain in his knee spiked, a white pulse that shot all the way up to his hip, and wrapped around his pelvis. His vision fuzzed, and he realized Mercy was digging a thumb into what remained of his kneecap.
He clenched his teeth against a scream, but it leaked out anyway. He closed his eyes, and his head thumped back against the dock, and he wanted to die right now, to stop the–
The pressure let up, and the pain receded back to its ugly red throbbing.
He gasped.
Above him, Mercy tsked. “I expected more, honestly.”
“Felix,” a woman’s voice chided, somewhere out of sight. Oh, God, the bitch was here, too.
Mercy chuckled – but it sounded strange. “Yeah. Alright. Up we get.”
Huge hands hooked him under each arm, and Harlan was too weak to struggle or to help. No matter: Mercy lifted him as though he were a baby, and stood him up on his feet. Harlan cried out when his own weight compressed his smashed knee to smaller fragments. Mercy supported him, and he managed to straighten his good leg and hold himself up.
This isn’t real. This isn’t happening . The self-soothing words of a man whimpering like a beaten puppy.
But when he opened his eyes, it was, in fact real. He stood at the end of the dock his very own team had fortified and restored, the one that led up to a clearing where the same team had picked a cabin apart, board by brick. The place where, fifteen years ago, the man who held him had dumped fifteen bodies into a deserted stretch of swamp, and let the gators tear into the evidence of his murders.
“God,” he murmured.
“He’s not here right now,” Mercy said, “only men.” Then, without dropping him, he stepped around behind Harlan, grip moving the whole time, steadying him, trapping him. And Harlan saw their audience, standing just a few paces up the dock, right where it butted up against dry land.
Ava he had expected, thanks to her voice. And the brothers – Bonfils and O’Donnell, standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind her – weren’t a surprise.
The boy was.
Remy Lécuyer, dirty, and pale, long hair tangled around his eerie, doll-blank face, stood in front of his mother, her hands on his shoulders. He stared at Harlan, unblinking, and Harlan, belly shriveling with shame, looked away. He couldn’t…he just…
Voice raspy with pain, he said, “Your kid’s already just as fucked up as you.”
“Yeah,” Mercy said easily. “He’s already had to learn that no matter how much he minds his own business, some weird fucker’s gonna want a piece of him.” Before Harlan could respond, he said, “Col?”
“Yeah,” O’Donnell said, and sidled past Ava. He was holding three large rocks.
Shit, Harlan thought. If they were going to kill him – and of course they were – he’d prefer to be shot.
But O’Donnell didn’t pummel him with them. Instead, he stepped over to the edge of the dock, cocked his arm back, and hurled the first rock into the water. Harlan heard its deep plop as it hit the surface.
O’Donnell drew a deep breath and bellowed, “Big Son!” He chucked the next rock. Plop . “Big Son! Come and get it, you big son of a bitch!”
The third rock. Plop .
Silence.
O’Donnell propped his hands on his hips, and looked up over Harlan to meet Mercy’s gaze. “It’s been a long time, Merc. He might not come.”
“He’ll come,” Mercy said, sounding sure.
Who? Harlan wondered. Who’ll come? Dread welled up in his stomach, as powerful as the pain, because, really, he knew. Not the specifics, not who, or what, or how, but he wished, suddenly, that O’Donnell had bashed him in the face with a rock.
Mercy said, “How many hours – how many days, weeks, years did you spend watching me? Wanting to be my friend. Wanting to be me. But you didn’t ever learn anything, did you? You admired a swamp man, but it never even occurred to you to go out and learn the swamp for yourself.”
Harlan’s pulse galloped; sweat slicked his body beneath his clothes. He felt…reduced. Second by second, his confidence, his training, his sureness in his mission, drained out through the soles of his feet. He felt clumsy and drunk, his tongue thick in his dry mouth. He started shaking. “I – I don’t – I didn’t–”
Then he heard the movement in the water. Subtle. Sinuous.
“Heh,” Mercy breathed, hot against the back of his neck, his ear. “There he is.”
“Who?” Harlan rasped, unable to help himself. He thought he was having a heart attack. His vision swam; turning his head seemed to take forever.
“Jeeeesus,” O’Donnell breathed, and took a step back from the edge. “He’s real.”
“Pfft. Of course he’s real,” Mercy said. “You think I was making him up?”
O’Donnell sent him a raised brow look. “You tell stories like a Southern grandma, so, yeah.”
The water disturbance, a gentle swish-swish along the surface, moved closer.
Harlan blinked his vision clear, and at first he saw nothing but the dark rectangle of the canal, as dark and fathomless as space. But then he clocked the movement. The edges of that movement.
His bladder turned loose with a sudden hot rush.
Mercy said, “Fillette.”
Harlan heard movement, footsteps. Ava murmured, “Stay here with Uncle Colin, okay? Stay right here.”
The shape in the water came closer, and closer, the size of a Buick.
“Hey.”
When Harlan didn’t turn his head, slender fingers gripped his jaw, and yanked his head around.
Ava Lécuyer stood before him, thoroughly bedraggled, mud-smeared, jaw set, and her eyes were not the eyes of a human woman.
She said, “I want to make something very clear to you. I want it to be the last thing you ever hear.” Her head cocked, and nothing about that movement was human either. “There has never been, nor will there ever be, anyone on this earth more obsessed with Felix Lécuyer than me. You spent, what, twenty years chasing him? He’s mine. Always has been, always will be. You learned that tonight.”
She lifted her right hand, and the lamplight winked off the deceptively small, sharp, hooked blade of a linoleum knife.
Yes , he thought, cut my throat .
But then her hand darted, struck downward, and lingered, and dragged, and awful, bright, bloody pain opened up across his belly.
He looked down, and saw the flesh part, saw the blood well, black in the blue lantern glow.
“Go to hell,” Ava said. “And stay there.”
Mercy’s hands gripped tight on his shoulders, and shoved him.
The world spun, black sky, black water.
And then the water took him, like the cold, soft arms of a corpse bride.
~*~
“Oh my God – look at the – fuck, that’s a dinosaur,” Alex breathed, safely back on land.
Relief washed over Mercy as elation, and with it came the ugly dizziness of blood loss. He turned, and carefully lowered himself to sit on the edge of the dock, boots dangling over the edge.
He lifted his arm – lead-heavy, no longer painful, only dragging, which wasn’t a good sign, he knew – so that Ava could sit down beside him, and tuck herself beneath it.
She was shivering as though cold, despite the hot, sweaty feel of her cheek when she pressed it down on his shoulder.
“Good job, Mama.” He tried to pat her waist, but his hand didn’t want to cooperate.
In the water, Big Son had begun his death roll.
“You, too.” She turned her head and pressed her lips to his shoulder before resettling, her warm, familiar weight better than any drug against his side.
Mercy’s head felt cotton-stuffed, dry, and floaty, like he’d taken morphine. But it was pleasant. Dreamy. “He really is beautiful, isn’t he?”
“He is, baby,” Ava agreed. “Like you.”
“Guys,” Colin said, gently. “We need to go. We need to get Mercy to the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Mercy agreed.
Small footsteps moved down the dock, and a small hand landed on his other shoulder, Remy’s grip strong and sure. “Daddy?”
“In a minute. Just a minute.”
Ava took his half-numb hand in hers, and dragged it into her lap, laced their fingers together, right up close to their new baby. The second one who’d come to the swamp in the womb.
It felt like the closing of a circle. Felt final. Right.
“Come on, baby,” Ava urged. “We gotta go.”
Big Son turned, startlingly graceful in the water, a submarine that moved like a ballerina.
He took three large chomps, adjusting his dinner in his grip, and then, slowly, moved away from them, propelled by the unhurried sweeps of his monstrous tail, bearing away the last any of them would ever see of Harlan Boyle.