Fourteen

The Bait Shop was the sort of bar Ava wanted to write into a book. In peace times, she would have enjoyed traipsing through the sawdust and peanut shells on the floor, Mercy’s heavy arm around her waist as opposed to Colin’s arm around her shoulders.

“Shit,” he muttered, and she looked up, and followed his sightline to spot four guys turned around on their bar stool, thickset rather than muscular, but big nonetheless. One of them was grinning at her, and winked when she made eye contact.

Ava stared right back, and pushed the hem of her jacket back to flash the gun she wore on her hip. The man’s smile fell away, and slowly he and his friends turned back around.

“Try not to attract a lot of attention,” Colin muttered down at her from the side of his mouth.

Back at the hotel, she’d put on a simple, high-necked t-shirt, jeans, boots, and her battered old denim jacket. Had crammed an Atlanta Braves baseball cap down on her head.

“You’re the one turning heads,” she shot back. “Duck down or something.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that won’t look stupid. Head through there.” He steered her through an open doorway into an adjoining room full of occupied poker tables.

The bar was larger than it looked on the outside, a hodge podge of outbuildings pieced together into one rambling structure, each room flaunting different floor and ceiling heights; there were hallways to nowhere and strange jogs in the floorplan. The Winchester Mansion of Louisiana swamp-side dive bars.

Finally, they reached what looked like a sunroom, windows on three sides, a view of the docks and the black water beyond. There were a dozen plastic patio tables here, and only two were occupied. By Lean Dogs.

Bob Boudreaux was a face she’d only ever seen in photos that were more than twenty-years-old, but she would have recognized him straight off, despite the intervening years and the graying hair, based on the way the Dogs were seated. Bob sat at the corner-most table, facing the doorway through which she and Colin entered, the front of his cut weathered from long decades of wear, and resplendent with patches. The man beside him was a good ten years younger, slight, but with a serious face, and his own impressive bevvy of patches. His VP, she thought. The others, ranged across the rest of the tables, drinking beer from tall glasses, were his killers. His honor guard. They glanced over their shoulders and flicked disinterested glances up from their hands of cards; she knew they were cataloguing everything about her, and were surprised by her presence at Colin’s side, though Bob was the only one to show it outwardly.

His brows lifted, pressing a tall stack of sun wrinkles up his forehead. “Colin,” he said as they approached the table, “not to stick my nose in your business, son, but I thought your old lady was a blonde.”

“She is.” Ava pulled off her cap and smoothed the crown of her ponytail. “I’m Mercy’s old lady.”

The VP – stone-faced in a very Walsh-like way – went blank and blinking with surprise. “Shit.”

“Shit,” Bob echoed.

“Bob, meet Ava Lécuyer,” Colin said in the voice of a man who was very, very tired of his life lately.

“Wow,” Bob said, and then folded his arms and grinned. “The famous fillette , in the flesh.”

Ava couldn’t decide how she felt about that, so she said, simply, “Hi, Bob. You got a boat we can borrow?”

~*~

By the time night fell, Mercy was pleasantly sore and sunburned from a day spent baiting hooks. He worked with his hands every day, but it turned out fixing bikes worked an entirely different set of muscles than hiding shark-gauge hooks in whole chicken carcasses and rigging them up in low branches that overhung the water. Old, repetitive motions once upon a time, and now his fingers and palms and forearms throbbed with a pleasant sort of pain, reminding him how long it had been since he went hunting. Each time he brought his cigarette to his lips, his t-shirt shifted over his shoulders, hot, and tight, and stinging where the sun had burned him around the straps of the tank top he’d been wearing earlier.

The lights were on inside, gold rectangles falling on the tangled grass around his boots. The windows were open, and Devin’s voice floated through the screens, low and pleasant, the accent soothing on some deep, subconscious level as he made heating up pork and beans for dinner sound like something from the Food Network, despite Toly’s protests that he didn’t “need a goddamn lesson, Jesus.”

A porch board creaked directly behind him, and Mercy scooted over and patted the section of top step beside him. Gray folded down neatly beside him in response to the silent invitation.

Mercy dragged down the last bit of his smoke, dropped the butt into the half-empty can of Diet Coke he’d found in the back of the cupboard inside, and lit a fresh one. He didn’t offer Gray the pack; he’d turned him down the last three times he’d tried.

“What’d you think about today?” he asked. Gray had been his right hand man in the boat today, while Devin and Toly stayed back at the cabin. Mercy had given him a hands-on lesson in line baiting, one not asked for, but dutifully attended with Gray’s Hunter-brand of stillness and intensity. Mercy liked his company, just as he’d always liked Reese’s for the same reason: deft, ready hands to help him, and a thoughtful listener who took what he said seriously. He’d even managed to coax a smile out of the kid, for which he was stupidly proud.

Gray was silent a moment, and a glance proved he was gazing out across the narrow lawn, past the two thick, interwoven cypresses, to the water beyond, an impenetrable ink spill beneath the limb-laced indigo of the sky. Mercy found it peaceful, but wondered what Gray, an urban assassin, born and raised, thought of it.

Finally, Gray said, “Hunter used to have this pair of boots. His good boots. He wore them when he met with a new client. They were alligator.” He glanced over, blue eyes the color of dirty snow in the glow of the light that spilled from the cabin. “I don’t guess I ever thought about where they came from. I didn’t know they were real alligator.”

Mercy smiled – the sort of big smile born of delight, a relief that eased the tension he’d been carrying in his jaw for days. “That’s right: there’s no place to get gator boots ‘cept from genuine gator hide.” He put a Southern showman’s spin on the words, accent getting slow and taffy-thick, and earned another of those rare, quiet smiles.

“Truth told, I think the market for hide is a lot less marketable than it used to be, and people farm gators for meat, now. But there’s enough people here who still like a good belt and a basket of fried tail. There’s too many of them, though. It’s like when deer start to take over a place?” When Gray merely blinked at him, he said, “Anyway. The hunting helps balance the ecosystem. Circle of life.

“Technically,” he continued, “what we did today was poaching, since I don’t have a valid license and I didn’t tag the lines.”

“Is that why we went so far out?”

“Yeah.” There were more than a few points where he’d had to cut the engine and pole them beneath low-hanging branches, finding out-of-the-way lagoons with no signs of civilization close by, but recent slide marks on the bank advertising big bulls coming and going out of the water.

Gray nodded. Then, with obvious reluctance – which Mercy took as progress, because he wasn’t blurting something out guilelessly, but weighing whether or not he wanted to say it, thinking of social cues – he said, “Today…”

Mercy thought he knew where this was heading.

“I thought…” He pressed his lips together, and his whole mouth twitched sideways in clear frustration.

The tension in Mercy’s jaw flared, and he smiled through it. A distant, pushed-back part of his mind loathed the way he could paste a smile over situations like this. The way he was able to be rational, and calm, and not be foaming at the mouth, tearing apart the city to find Remy. But it was a trait that had served him well – essentially, even – so he was loath to snuff it out.

“You thought there’d be a lot more shooting and kid-rescuing and a lot less playing around in the swamp, huh?”

Gray’s gaze dropped, and skated out toward the water again. “I’ve never worked a job like this before,” he said, quietly, but Mercy understood the wealth of things unsaid. The unconfessed doubt in his ability to work a missing child situation. His confusion over Mercy’s seeming calm in the face of it. All of them out in the swamp, nowhere near Boyle, or Remy.

Gray shrugged.

Mercy laid a hand on his shoulder, expecting tension to steal through the kid, but if anything, Gray sagged and then arched into the touch. Progress! It was nice to be glad of something small like this amidst the rapid unraveling of his life.

“If the past few months have taught me anything,” Mercy said, “it’s that Boyle isn’t bound by the law of the land, and that he is deeply, deeply fucked up about me, for reasons I still don’t understand. I’m not going to make the mistake of making the obvious move. Boyle thinks he’s clever, but I know he’s not as clever as me – and there’s no way he understands the swamp the way I do. I have to settle this with him on my terms. In my own backyard. You understand?”

Slowly, Gray nodded. “Yeah.” Then he went startlingly still a moment, head cocked.

That was when Mercy heard it: the drone of an approaching boat motor.

Mercy slipped his half-smoked cigarette into the Coke can, stood, and pulled his gun. To Gray, he said, “Go through the house, tell them to get ready, then go out back, and find the path–”

“That loops back along to the east,” Gray finished. “Watch your six?”

“Yeah. Wait for my signal.”

Gray nodded, and loped across the porch and inside. Mercy heard low murmurs, and then all sound inside ceased.

As the engine’s purr drew closer and closer, he had no doubts about the crew behind him, and their ability to back him up.

He had plenty of doubts about who might be in the boat drawing closer, closer, closer.

He heard when they rounded the last corner and the throttle opened up on the straightaway toward the cabin. This was no tentative exploration: whoever was manning the wheel knew their destination, and wasn’t going to be shy about it.

Gun in-hand, Mercy walked across the yard and to the dock, and then down it, boots clomp-clomping over the boards. By the time he reached the end of it, he could see the boat’s spotlights panning out across the water, turning its surface murky green, alighting on duckweed and sleeping dragonflies that flitted unhappily into the air. Frogs plopped into the water.

He closed his eyes a moment, and listened. American-made engine. Evinrude, if he had to guess. The hiss of the water displacement betrayed a boat similar in size to the one Bob had loaned them: a wave-runner with an outsized motor that could make it fly in open water, with room for plenty of people and cargo.

Boyle?

Police?

He opened his eyes, and in the harsh glare of the spotlights, he saw a white prow, and the white froth of the boat’s wake.

He lifted his gun.

The engine slowed, from a roar to a held-back rumble. A sharp, two-blast whistle pierced the air, and a British-accented voice called out, “If my own father shoots me, I’ll haunt him the rest of his short, miserable life.”

Mercy was beaming before he realized it. He holstered his gun, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Hey, asshole! You get lost in the swamp?”

The boat drew closer – close enough for him to make out Tenny’s lean silhouette up near the prow, arm lifted in greeting. He wasn’t working the wheel – a much larger, more swamp-savy man had hold of it.

“Colin?” Mercy called, dumbfounded.

Tenny called back, “Call off the dogs, big man, and we’ll weigh anchor, or whatever the fuck you call it.”

Mercy laughed again – it was relief, more than joy, he knew; the crushing, overwhelming slap of knowing he had more backup – and turned toward the dark tangle of forest behind him. “Down, boys! It’s friends,” he called.

He had shit-talked Colin for so long, had even felt contemptuous of him for so many years, from their youth into that tenuous period of adulthood once he learned the truth of their parentage, that he forgot, sometimes, that he was a competent boatman. He steered the boat in to the dock in a wide, graceful sweep, reversing at the right moment so he didn’t hit the dock, and Reese stepped up to toss Mercy the rope so he could tie them off.

He caught it, loving insult for Colin already forming on his tongue…

But it wasn’t Colin standing on the boat in front of him.

I’m dreaming , he thought, because that was the only explanation. That’s it. You haven’t slept, and right now, you’re flat-out on a sleeping bag inside, and this is a dream . Because it was too wonderful, and too terrible to contemplate: Ava here, when he wanted her most; and Ava here, where it wasn’t safe.

But never in a dream was the slap of water on a boat hull, nor the tangy scent of the water itself so vivid. In dreams, she didn’t wobble, and brace a hand on the boat rail. In dreams, she beamed at him, and reached for him, eyes all melted-candy soft, pink lip pulled between her teeth because she wanted him so badly. In dreams, she didn’t kick up her chin and shoot him a challenging glare, her face pale and waxy, hair glued to her neck in sweaty straggles. She was as radiant to him as ever…but this looked too real to be a dream.

Still, he blinked. Several times.

“Jesus,” Colin muttered, and heavy boots clomped up onto the dock. The rope was pulled from his hand.

Oh.

He hadn’t breathed in…a while.

Mercy drew in a deep, slow breath, and sparks flared at the edges of his vision. He could still see, though. Could see Colin bending to tie off the boat. See that the boat was full of people, actually.

But the only one he could focus on was Ava. Who straightened, and brushed her hair off her neck with a blown-out breath, lips a tired O. Then she scrounged up a smile, and said, “Hi, baby.”

Her voice, the fatigue that made it shake, was what finally convinced him he wasn’t caught in a strange hallucination, and launched him into action. Shock moved through him painfully, a lightning bolt that seized his heart and numbed his toes. “Fillette,” he breathed, “oh…” And then he lurched forward, leaned over the slapping black stripe of water between dock and boat, and grabbed her right around the waist with both arms.

Ava made a fast, wheezy sound like he’d crushed all the air out of her lungs, but wrapped her arms around his shoulders and leaned into him as he swung her up and out of the boat and set her boots on the planks of the dock. He cupped the back of her head, where her bun was falling down in the humidity, dropped his face against the side of her throat, and breathed for a minute.

She smelled like sweat, fresh layered over old, and the swamp, in the faint way it clung to everyone who entered it. But mostly she smelled of home : their dryer sheets, and their soap, the coconut shampoo she’d been using since she was a teenager. Like her skin, and their bed. Like every good thing he’d left behind when he came down here.

At first, the rush of his pulse in his ears drowned out all other sounds save the soft, close rustle of their clothes rubbing together. But as that faded, he became aware that Ava was rubbing a circle against the back of his shoulder with the heel of her hand, and that she was murmuring to him. “…alright, baby, it’s alright. I know.”

He was shaking. Shuddering. Hard, wracking shudders like he was struck with a high fever, and couldn’t seem to stop. He squeezed her tighter, and she shushed him like he was one of their babies, and for a little while, that was all that mattered.

~*~

The truth was, Mercy wasn’t surprised. If anything, Ava’s calm agreement to be shuttled off to London had been the surprise. There was no way his angry mama lioness had suddenly, for once in her knife-wielding, gun-toting, man-killing life, decided to stand down and let the men handle the tough business. In his hurry to leave, he’d chalked it up to the eerie detachment she’d developed when Remy was taken, but the real Ava – his Ava – was clearly still in there, behind the stone-cold veneer she’d wrapped herself in like a cloak, and despite the absolute insanity of her appearance here tonight, he was glad to see it.

“Don’t be mad at Ava,” Maggie said, once they were all crammed into a cabin that wasn’t built to fit – Jesus – ten people. “It wasn’t her idea.”

From her place wedged between Mercy’s hip and the arm of the couch, her legs slung over his lap, Ava turned to regard her mom and snorted, once, shoulders lifting.

Mercy grinned and massaged at the back of her neck, pleased when she leaned into the touch. “Mags,” he said, “I’m more than a little insulted on my wife’s behalf that you expect me to buy that line.”

Maggie shrugged and sipped at her beer. “Worth a shot.”

“You’re not angry, then?” Tenny asked, sounding curious – fascinated, almost – rather than apprehensive. He was sitting on the counter by the hot plate, boot heels drumming absently on the cabinet face below. “I told this one” – he hooked a thumb Reese’s direction, where he stood beside him, hands braced back along the counter edge – “you’d be ready to make crab bait of us.” His gaze, Mercy noted with approval, said that he’d accepted that possibility early on, and acted regardless.

Mercy smiled – he kept smiling. His face hurt from it. He hadn’t realized he was flirting dangerously close to a panic attack until he had Ava in his arms on the dock. On him, panic didn’t manifest in too-quick breaths, and sweaty palms, and a racing heart. When he panicked, his heart raced because he was swinging a sledgehammer, most likely through someone’s teeth.

He’d felt calm, upbeat, even, as he showed his three-man crew around the swamp, enlisting their capable hands in the laying of traps and the procurement of crawfish for dinner (Toly had taken one look into the bucket, walked wordlessly across the cabin, opened a can of SPAM, and started eating it with a fork straight out of the tin. Devin had shrugged and said, “Won’t be the worst thing I’ve ever sucked.”). He’d felt grounded, and sure of himself – sure that his plan to lure and then catch Boyle would work.

But then he saw Ava standing in that boat, and realized he was about a half-day from walking down Bourbon Street with a shotgun, blasting holes in storefronts and demanding Boyle show himself, like a gunslinger in a Spaghetti Western.

But now Ava was here in his lap, her jaw set at that angle that meant trouble for anyone who wasn’t him. Now he could screw his head back on straight. He was no different from the kids, really: if Mama was there, then everything would turn out alright. The monsters under the bed were only dusty socks, and the only tears to fall would be ones they drew out of other people.

To Tenny, he said, “Have you ever been able to tell your better half what to do?”

Tenny smirked, which was answer enough.

Silent up ‘til now, standing in the corner with his arms folded, Alex cleared his throat pointedly. Mercy looked at him – really looked – for the first time, and noted his pinched expression.

After Ava, no one else’s presence in the boat had been a surprise. Colin and Tenny he’d known about across the water, straight off, and where there was Tenny, there was Reese. Sight of Maggie had lifted his brows, but only for a moment. Who else would one mama trust more than her own mama?

Alex he hadn’t expected, though.

He’d clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re here.”

To which he’d scowled. “Of course I’m here.” Insulted.

But even after an hour of playing catch-up and drinking beer, he looked no less constipated.

“What?” Mercy asked.

Alex looked at Ava, pointedly, and said, “I think it’s past time to address what happened today.” His brows lifted in clear expectation of her agreement.

She held his gaze a long, unblinking moment, then sighed, shoulders sinking back deeper into the arm of the couch. “Yeah. I guess we–”

She stilled.

Which made Mercy still.

The way her face froze, but her eyes widened, and not a muscle in her body moved, made him sit up straighter, arms poised to curve around her and draw her into the shelter of his body.

“Baby–” he started.

Then she was a sudden flurry of movement, scrambling up and off his lap, slamming her beer bottle onto the table. It was still full, he noted absently, as beer sprayed up and over its lip. When she was on her feet, she bolted for the door.

Mercy went after her.

“Mercy,” Maggie called behind him, and he almost didn’t stop. Almost kept going. But the sudden, sharp crack of her voice brought him up short at the still-open door, and he glanced back over his shoulder. Her expression was a complicated mix of emotions he couldn’t decipher. “Maybe give her a minute.”

Mercy heard the words, and then he understood them. Then he said, “Uh, what ?” Because since when in the history of Mercy and Ava – more firmly a single unit, MercyandAva, than ever now – had either one needed to give the other “a minute” when it came to serious topics?

He scanned the other faces in the room, and found his crew curious, and the newly-arrived crew glancing amongst themselves with a kind of shiftiness he didn’t like at all.

Maggie said, “I don’t know if–”

And Mercy turned, and walked through the door. He loved Maggie, and respected the hell out of her, but she could no longer stand between him and Ava the way she had when Ava was still a teenager.

He expected to find Ava on the porch, and when he didn’t, fear wrapped its cold fingers around his throat.

She was too smart to go wandering off into the dark; to get turned around in the dense swamp woods, or fall in the gator-infested water. But they were being hunted, and Boyle had proven, time and time again, that he had resources beyond their ken, and willingness to do whatever necessary.

“Fillette?” he called. “Ava?”

“Here,” she called, thankfully only a few paces off the porch, just beyond the reach of the hanging oil lantern. Then she made another noise, one that piqued his concern until he registered what it was: retching. She was throwing up. Then he was concerned for another reason. “Hold on.”

Yeah right.

He pulled the lantern down off its nail and descended the porch steps, light sweeping forward in a revolving lozenge that struck first Ava’s jeans, then the forward curve of her back. She stood with feet planted wide apart in the grass, bent forward, hands braced on her knees, catching her breath in deep, audible gasps.

When he reached her, he laid a hand between her shoulders and felt her fine tremors. She dashed her forearm across her mouth, straightened, and when she turned to him, her face was sickly pale despite the flickering yellow warmth of the lantern light.

Fear tightened its fingers on him. “Shit, what are–”

“I’m pregnant,” she said, in a breathless, exhausted voice. And before he could react to that, before joy could bloom and fill him, and suffuse every part of him with that familiar wonder that had accompanied the announcement that she was pregnant with all three of their babies – their first three babies, it turned out – she added, “But that’s not why we came all the way out here.” Looking about to fall over herself, she swept her hair back off her forehead, and said, “Baby, you might wanna sit down for this.”