Two

It had been too risky to go by the clubhouse, and so Bob had met them at the marina, down at the end of one of the more dilapidated docks, where nothing but small boats were tied up. The light at the end was on the fritz, and Bob had slumped against a pillar, only visible as the occasional flare of a cigarette cherry each time he took a drag, a lone red eye in the two-a.m. mist. As their boots clomped down the boards, made heavier by the bags of supplies they’d carried – guns, ammo, knives, Tasers, knuckledusters, and all manner of weapons brought from home and furnished from Devin’s mind-boggling personal cache, half of which was illegal, plus groceries and other sundries from a midnight Walmart run – the sounds echoed out across the water in a way that brought nostalgia roaring back.

Driving into the city had put a lump in Mercy’s gut, but this was different. Bittersweet, yes, and tainted, as all his memories were by the relentless knowledge of what happened to Daddy, to Gram. But no matter what tortures this city threw at him, he could never bring himself to hate the water. It had raised him alongside his father, the only mother he’d ever wanted or needed. There was water in Tennessee, sure, the Tennessee River, that fat black snake that curved around Dartmoor and slithered its slow way up to Neyland Stadium. But this was the swamp, and it smelled different, and it tasted different on his tongue when he opened his mouth to inhale, and it coursed through his bloodstream.

He didn’t realize he’d come to a halt until someone nudged him lightly in the back. He stood staring out across the flat, black stillness, the silhouettes of cypress tress like arthritic fingers along the far shore, clawing at the sky’s purple underbelly. Light was still hours off, the air at its coldest, the water steaming white vapor that looked like smoke.

“See something?” Devin asked behind him, unbothered. “I’ve always wanted to shoot one of those great lizard beasts.”

Mercy blinked, and started walking again. “Maybe you’ll get your chance.”

He hadn’t been sure how it would feel to see Bob again face-to-face. The last time had been almost nine years ago, when Bob came to rap on the half-open door of the dorm room that had been his home ever since his ill-fated return to New Orleans, heartbreak wafting off him like the smell of fresh blood. Bob was a tall man, broad-shouldered, self-assured in the way of the big-handed and strong-armed, always with obvious t-shirt tan lines, and a broad, white, slightly-crooked smile. He was easy , like Daddy had been, like Mercy had styled himself, after much exposure.

But Bob had looked unusually sober that night. It was so rare to see him frowning that Mercy had startled when he glanced up and across the room.

“You busy?”

Mercy gestured to the magazine laid out on the bed beside him and shook his head.

Bob stepped into the room and hooked his thumbs in his front pockets. “I just got off the phone with Knoxville.”

Mercy’s heart stopped. When it started again, it felt as though it had been clawed open, all its blood and meat spilling out to flood his stomach and turn him sick.

“It was Walsh,” Bob said, and the downward curve of his frown was apologetic. Like he was sorry to say it hadn’t been Ghost. That he wasn’t being sought for… family reasons. No one ever breathed a word of Mercy’s retreat from Knoxville, tail tucked, fur soaked, a whimper caught in his throat, but they all knew what happened. He’d caught all of his brothers staring at one point or another; caught the rustle of whispers in corners, like the turning pages of a book.

“He can’t make you, obviously,” Bob continued, though that was a lie: officers could negotiate terms, deny one another, bitch about it, but a non-officer Dog would go where he was told to go, no backtalk. “But he wants you to patch back in to Tennessee.”

Mercy’s claw-struck heart pulsed in erratic, dying lurches. “Why?”

“James is stepping down next week. Ghost wants to beef up Knoxville.”

“But did Ghost himself request me?”

Bob shrugged his wide shoulders. “Dunno, kid. But Walsh was firm about it.”

Despite those almost-nine intervening years, and a host of personal changes – he was a dad three times over, now, married, Ghost’s son-in-law and not merely an offense to be cast aside – Mercy felt a little of the old trepidation from that night way back when.

Baseless trepidation, of course. The cigarette flicked down into the water, a tiny red shooting star, and Bob straightened away from the pillar so the moonlight carved a sickle down the side of his face, layering shadows in the corner of his eye where he had a half-dozen more smile lines than Mercy remembered.

“As I live and breathe,” he said, and his voice was the same, and Mercy wondered how he’d ever made room for trepidation within the maelstrom that was worrying over Remy, “if it ain’t ol Merci himself.”

“Nobody calls me that anymore.”

“Well, I’m gonna. You can’t go forgetting where you came from.”

Mercy closed the final gap, and Bob still smelled like Lucky Strikes and spearmint gum. He still gave the best damn hugs. When he squeezed back, Bob chuckled and said, “Shit. Did your arms get bigger?”

He pushed Mercy back so he could examine him, hands on the crooks of his elbows. In Mercy’s memory, they’d been of a height, but the reality was that Bob was a good two inches shorter. He had to tip his head back a fraction so the bright gleam of their eyes could meet in the darkness.

His smile remained, but it softened. “I’m real sorry to hear about your boy.”

“Yeah.”

As if sensing that was the only response Mercy could manage to choke out, he clapped him on the shoulder and said, “I got you a boat.”

It was a small runabout with a massive Mercury engine on the back; though larger than the narrow bateau Mercy would have preferred, it would carry all four of them, their gear, and get them moving fast when the need inevitably arose. Bob showed where he’d already stashed high-powered spotlights, a first aid kit, a CB radio, and a pair of emergency shotguns in the bow, and Mercy stepped down into it, the water shifting pleasantly beneath him, so he could reach up and accept the bags the others handed down.

The mist thickened while they loaded, and by the time they were all onboard, water slap-slapping against the sides, it had become the sort of murky dark that only the most seasoned of boatmen would have dared navigate.

Toly clutched wildly at the siderail, face ghostly white in the blue, ambient nighttime light, and his eyes were uncharacteristically big.

“Don’t like boats, son?” Devin guessed.

“I’ve – I’ve never been on a boat.” He made a sickly gulping sound that didn’t bode well. “Shouldn’t we wait for daylight?”

“It’ll be alright,” Mercy said. “I know where we’re going, and I’ve got good night vision.”

Toly looked stricken.

Devin patted him on the shoulder. “All you have to do is sit there and enjoy the ride.”

“Guh,” Toly said, elegantly.

Bob hunkered down to crouch at the edge of the dock and tossed the end of the rope over. “Felix, if you need anything,” he started, and Mercy nodded.

“Yeah, I know. I’ll radio you. Thanks, Bob,” he said, and meant it fiercely. “I don’t know…” He didn’t know a lot of things, right now, mostly how to find the words to express his gratitude to everyone who’d already helped them, and would doubtless help them more before this thing was through.

Bob nodded. “Yeah. Go find your man. Happy hunting.”

Mercy offered a salute and moved behind the wheel to put the key in the ignition. It started like a dream, purring and snorting and ready. He sat, and Gray slid soundlessly onto the seat beside him.

“Ready?” Mercy asked him.

A wink of silver proved that Gray had a rifle laid across his lap. “Yes.”

There was a moment, powering across the open water toward the mouth of the channel, when the meager light from the dock was left behind, when the darkness ahead swallowed them whole. The moment between worlds, when, for even the bravest of navigators, the belly curled in on itself and the mind whispered turn back, you can’t do this . But he could do this, had done it more times than he could count, and after another dozen yards, his vision adjusted, and the darkness took shape. Welcomed him. And it was like he’d never left the swamp at all.

The landscape had changed, of course it had. The moss shaggier in some places, and thinner in others. New half- submerged logs across the waterway, and places where the banks had eroded or caved in completely. Trees felled in storms, and patches of white, fractured stumps where the forest had been timbered.

But not once did he get turned around, or lose his way. He slowed to go around obstacles, but not to gather his wits.

Above the roar of the motor, he could hear Toly retching at intervals, and Devin murmuring soothing nonsense.

“Apparently, bratva hitmen get seasick,” Mercy said to Gray who, miraculously, cracked a grin, a faint upward curve in the glow of the dash lights.

~*~

Alex had told them, based on his NOLA FBI contact, that the old cabin had been ripped to shreds in Boyle’s search for forensic evidence. Mercy knew it would be gone. And still, somehow, seeing that it was hit him like a gut punch.

The sun still lurked below the horizon, but the sky had lightened to a hazy, fallout yellow-pink by the time Mercy rounded the last bend, killed the gas, and glided into the cove where he’d once weighted and dropped fifteen corpses. The dock had been slipshod in his time, and by all rights should have long since collapsed, but new, pressure-treated wood gleamed like bone in the lightening fog of morning.

Up the hill, the cabin hadn’t merely been torn down; the entire clearing had been scalped .

He remembered honeysuckle growing in heaps; great Maleficent tangles of blackberries, thorns long as roofing nails, and twice as sharp. Thick ropes of poison ivy crawling up the tree trunks, trailing drifts of moss that flapped in the rare breeze. It had been a wild place, the cabin cool in the shade of the pines, its interior buffed and oiled and clean by contrast. Mercy remembered the smell of it: fresh drywall that he’d installed himself, and the one leaky bottle of lamp oil that left a stain on the rug.

Nothing remained save a pile of splintered timbers and a heap of garbage – white porcelain flash of the old sink, like a broken tooth jutting from tufts of pink insulation – inside a circle that had been mown, weed-whacked, and even, in places, burned. He saw black scorch marks and withered, twisted vegetation.

“Fuck,” he murmured, as he swung the boat sideways up to the new dock, and wasn’t sure why the devastation put a lump in his throat. This had never been a home; he’d never lived here. He’d entombed his kills in this water, murky-brown beneath the bow of the boat. And through the cracked windows, he’d listened to the call of birds, and the deep groaning of the gators. He used to swear he could pick Big Son’s voice out from the others, its reverberations drawn up from the blackest depths of hell.

Big Son, Big Son, come and get it, you big son of a bitch!

Mercy killed the engine. In the ringing wake of its silence, Toly hawked, and spat, and struggled to catch his breath.

Devin let out a low whistle. “They didn’t leave so much as a shingle, did they? Christ.”

Without prompt, Gray shouldered his rifle and leaped out onto the dock, lithe as a deer; he turned to catch the rope when Mercy tossed it, and then Mercy hauled himself up and out as lithe as a…water buffalo, maybe. His bum knee was endurable most of the time, but it was throbbing after so many hours first in a car, then in a boat. He grimaced, and powered through, and wondered if he shouldn’t a) lose a few pounds, and b) start taking those glucosamine supplements Ava had bought and put pointedly in the medicine cabinet.

Christ, Ava .

No, no, no, he couldn’t think of her. Not now.

“Do you want to stay in the boat?” Devin asked, and Mercy turned to see that Toly looked bad. About to pass out bad. His too long hair was plastered to his face with sweat, lips bloodless, eyes bloodshot from puking over the side the whole way. He didn’t look able to stand, much less clamber up onto the dock.

“No,” he rasped, emphatically, and was able to get to his feet with Devin’s arm supporting him around the waist.

Mercy stepped in to catch his hand when it reached up – trembling – and hauled him up onto the dock.

Devin was still laughing to himself when he climbed up, unaided. “Son, what’s going to happen when Raven wants to take a Riviera cruise?”

“She can take her next husband,” Toly panted, and Mercy was glad of the chance to smile, even if it was at poor Toly’s expense.

“Here.” Gray produced a hip flask from inside his jacket and offered it over.

It looked like it took more than a little effort when Toly scowled. He still gripped Mercy’s forearm, fingers digging in so hard he dented the flesh. “What’s in it?”

“Brandy. It’ll help.”

Toly’s lip peeled off his teeth in a silent, doubtful snarl, but he took the flask.

Gray unslung his rifle, and led the way up the dock and then the hill.

The path was strewn with debris: fluffy bits of insultation, splinters, peeled corners of linoleum – Mercy recognized, with a jolt, the pattern from the peel-and-stick tiles that had been behind the sink – and fresher garbage. Candy wrappers, a forlorn square of cling wrap, tangled around a few stalks of grass that had escaped the weed whacker.

By the time they reached the top of the rise, Toly turned loose of Mercy’s arm with a muttered, “I’m alright.”

Mercy spared him a glance, and saw that the brandy, which he swigged more of while Mercy watched, had put two warm, pink spots of color on his cheeks, and his eyes were brighter.

Satisfied for the moment that he wouldn’t fall over or hurl, Mercy turned back to the clearing.

Devin and Gray circled it, moving toward one another in concentric loops, toeing at debris, traveling in complementary paths as though they’d trained together at some point.

Mercy walked straight forward, right up to where the edge of the porch had once started. The posts hadn’t merely been sawed off at ground level, but dug up, concrete and all, leaving leg-breaker craters behind. A shallow well had provided water to the cabin, and the pipes remained, lying along the tilled-up earth once covered by joists and floorboards. They’d left the foundation stones. Otherwise, it was as though the structure had never existed.

He stepped to the very center, where the weeds hadn’t started to grow yet, where he’d once laid a rug down on old warped floorboards, and thought it felt homey. As the day lightened around them, the peepers and crickets gave way to the racket of birds, and the first trilling whines of cicadas.

Devin joined him. “You weren’t expecting him to be here, were you?”

“No.” And he hadn’t been. “Had to start somewhere, though.”

“Right,” Devin agreed. “Now what? Go back into town? Keep searching out here?”

He said it casually, but Mercy wasn’t fooled. He turned to regard the man and found Devin watching him with sharp blue eyes full of withheld suggestions. For someone whose children professed to hate him, he had the sort of intelligent, paternal air Mercy would have expected from someone who’d brought his kids up properly, in a hands-on, daily way.

Wise. That was the word for Devin Green. All ten of his children would have scoffed aloud at the notion…but Mercy thought they would agree with him, deep down.

Mercy couldn’t manage a real smile – the kind that split his face, that allowed some jubilant, inner child part of him to break out into the waking world and set people at ease – but he could lift his lips a little, and that eased a modicum of the tension lodged in his gut. Devin mirrored the expression, and that helped a little, too. “Well, we could do that. Go into town, visit the old haunts. Turn over stones and kick anthills. All that shit. But this is definitely a needle in a haystack situation. Boyle wants me to hunt him – he’s desperate for it. So desperate, in fact, that if I make him come to me instead, he’ll have no choice but to come.”

Devin’s smile broadened. “A trap?”

“A trap. A nasty one.”

“I’d be disappointed in you if it wasn’t.”