Twenty-One

It turned out that being a prospect wasn’t any more glamorous than being a potential prospect. He still had to wash all the bikes, and mop the floors, and scrub the toilets, and go on beer runs. Was still hazed mercilessly. For a solid week, he woke to find dead mice in his boots. He got sent on impossible, nonsense errands, and was told story after story that proved to be false, and left him the object of much laughter and ridicule.

But . Bob gave him a thousand bucks to put toward a new bike. It was shitty, missing parts, and couldn’t go more than twenty miles-an-hour to start with, but it was his, and he had access to club tools and parts to work on it in his spare time. That involved lots of asking questions, and more research, and staying up until the wee hours, flashlight clenched in his teeth, because he wasn’t given time during the day to tinker with it. He couldn’t sit in on church meetings, but was allowed to go on some runs with the guys. Innocent, around-town stuff, and he almost always wound up trailing far behind on his shitty bike. But people looked at him on the street, and he was flying the colors, and he was a part of them. When people watched him go by, he had the sense they were seeing a Lean Dog first, rather than a big-eared, awkwardly-built kid with a bad breakout along his jawline.

He was still too nervous to talk to girls whose company he hadn’t paid for, but a few of the Lean Bitches offered to blow him, and he accepted readily, even if they seemed bored with the whole thing. It took a little of his constant edge off, on the nights they knelt down between his spread thighs, but it didn’t soothe the hammering of his heart, or unclench the anxious knot in the pit of his stomach.

He called himself “Hank” around them, and since Bob wasn’t writing him checks, a last name hadn’t been necessary. He caught a head cold, and sneezed and coughed his way through three days in a row. He took to carrying tissues in his pockets, and Frenchie started calling him “Hankie,” which the others of course picked up.

In the weeks that passed before the night that would end his short tenure as a Lean Dog prospect, he spoke with Felix only three times.

The first, the Dogs were enjoying a late dinner courtesy of Diablo’s skills at the smoker, and a dozen pans of ribs and barbecue chicken. Harlan wasn’t allowed to sit down and eat until each Dog had been comfortably served, which of course meant that he wouldn’t eat for hours yet: by the time he got everyone situated, the first man he’d served wanted more beer, and the second had dropped his fork, and they were all casually intent on torturing him. It didn’t matter. Harlan crammed half a corn muffin in his mouth on his way to get a fresh pitcher of beer, and plastered a smile across his face. Prospecting only lasted a year, and by his reasoning, the easier he made all of their lives, the more likely they were to see the necessity of patching him in.

When he arrived at Felix’s table to refill glasses, someone else was calling for him across the room, and he was too harried to bother with his usual nervousness. He filled Felix’s glass, caught the pitcher’s drips with a cloth before they could hit the table, and stepped back.

“Thanks, man,” Felix said when he reached for his glass, and Harlan’s heart leaped .

He froze a moment, blinking, words washing over him like a hot bath at the end of a long day. Then he was off again, buzzing with renewed energy.

The second time was out in the parking lot a few weeks later. Harlan was on his way to the store, list clutched in one hand, and Felix was unloading cardboard boxes from one of the club pickups. “Hey,” he called, as Harlan passed, trying not to look too conspicuous as he darted glances Felix’s way. For one heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d been caught staring. But Felix waved him over and said, “Come gimme a hand with these.”

Harlan crammed the grocery list into his pocket and did so gladly.

The boxes were heavy , and their contents shifted with crammed-full, metallic noises, and the rustle of some sort of packing material. Harlan was wildly curious about their contents, but as a prospect, it wasn’t his place to ask questions, only to follow orders, so he toted and stacked alongside Felix until the truck bed was empty. Felix clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Thanks, man.” He didn’t make eye contact, but Harlan figured he was tired and winded from moving all the boxes. Not as tired and winded as he was, obviously, because look at those arms .

The third time proved to be the very next day. And proved to be more contact than Harlan had dared to hope for.

He was washing bikes, which seemed to be the only thing he did anymore; he washed bikes more frequently than he went to the bathroom. Frenchie leaned over the porch rail and peered down at him, squinting against the sun. “Alright, scrub,” he said. “Felix needs an extra set of hands picking up something at his old man’s place for Bob.”

Harlan blinked up at him, suds trickling up the back of his arm and dripping into the sleeve of his t-shirt to pool in his armpit. “He does?”

“What are you staring for? Get going.”

Harlan floundered, looking at the half-washed bike, the smear of soapsuds across its fender.

“Move,” Frenchie snapped, and he was grinning.

Harlan threw the sponge back in the bucket, hurriedly rinsed the bike down, and then scrambled for his cut, which he’d left draped over the porch rail.

Felix was behind the wheel of a club van, eyes shielded by sunglasses, and he greeted Harlan was a small smile and a “s’up,” as he scrambled into the passenger side.

“Hey.” He couldn’t help but notice that Felix waited to put the van in gear until he’d clicked his seatbelt into place, a small, considerate act that left Harlan marveling all over again that someone so large and intimidating to look at could have such a kind nature. It was a revelation that made him brave enough to speak out of turn as Felix piloted the van onto the road. “Frenchie said your dad had something Bob wanted?”

“Yeah. Some boat parts he picked up.”

Then it was silent save the hum of tires over pavement.

Shit.

Harlan watched the trees whip past out the window and racked his brain for something to say. This was so awkward! Why wasn’t he any good at conversation? Why couldn’t he just be one of those guys who could chew the fat about any- and everything, without worrying about getting the topic and tone just right?

Lost in such desperate thoughts, he didn’t hear it right away when Felix spoke, and then he whipped his head around so fast he had to look like an idiot. “I’m sorry, what?”

Felix’s lips were curved faintly upward with amusement as he watched the road through the windshield. “I said: what made you want to prospect?” When Harlan only blinked at him, dumbfounded to have been asked something personal, he continued, “You’re nobody’s kid or nephew, and I haven’t ever seen you hanging around the parties before. So what made you want to join?”

I used to sit and watch you for hours at a time. I wanted to step out of the bushes and introduce myself so many times, but I was always too much of a coward.

But he couldn’t say that . So he stuttered out, “I – I dunno. I just – I always wanted to, I guess.”

It was lame and vague, and Felix cut a glance across the console, silently asking for more information.

Which Harlan couldn’t provide, because he was tongue-tied and useless, heart hammering wildly in his throat to have Felix’s attention fixed on him like this. He thought he might pass out.

“Is it the bikes?” Felix asked, and glanced back out at the road. “Plenty of guys start hanging around ‘cause they like riding. Some of them stick around once they realize what the life’s like, but a lot of them bail. No shame in it,” he said. “The club’s definitely not for everyone. At least not the guys who think it’s nothing but parties and Sunday rides.

“But,” he went on, and it was like now that he’d started talking, he couldn’t stop, but without any of Harlan’s manic jitteriness. He had a broad and rolling cadence, his accent deep and rich and yet easy to understand. It brought to mind all the times Harlan had seen him sitting and talking with one of his club brothers, conversations that went on for long minutes, sometimes even an hour. He liked talking, Harlan realized, struck anew by how much more comfortable he was with the Dogs than he was with his friends. In the clearing, he rarely spoke, but beneath the persona he wore around Colin and Tucker, he had a lot to say. “It’s a natural fit for plenty of guys. Clubs like ours got started after the war, you know, vets who didn’t fit back into society…”

And so Harlan sat, listening intently, to an impromptu history lesson on the origins of one-percenter clubs. Some of it he already knew, thanks to afternoons spent researching in the library, but much of it he didn’t, because clubs were clannish, and secretive, and didn’t trust outsiders with sensitive information. What a thrill that was: to be considered an insider .

When they returned to the topic of Harlan’s – Hank’s – reasons for joining – Felix having shared that he’d prospected on his dad’s suggestion, as a way to make more money, but quickly found that he enjoyed being a part of the club – Harlan had decided on a reason that he didn’t think painted him in too poor a light.

“I guess, if I’m being honest,” he said, and was being mostly honest, “I haven’t…I haven’t ever fit in anywhere. Not at school, and not at home, and I…” Felix had said so much, and he felt the burning need to contribute – how could he have any sort of friendship with the man if he couldn’t have a conversation with him? “I got tired of being a loser,” he said, voice quiet, face burning.

Felix shot him a speculative look, and said, “Nah,” as he faced forward again. “Not fitting in doesn’t make somebody a loser. Losers are…” He frowned, and didn’t elaborate. Finally, he heaved a breath and said, “Well, not you, anyway. So don’t worry about it.”

Not you, anyway. Harlan stuffed the words deep, deep into his mind, and clung to them there, rubbed them like talismans.

They left the main roads behind, and then paved roads altogether, the van kicking up plumes of pale dust as they wended their way through thick groves of trees, jouncing over roots that snaked across the road, and finally passed through two posts and a leaning metal gate to arrive at a narrow tarpaper shotgun house shaded by live oaks trailing Spanish moss.

There was an old woman sitting on the porch, he saw, flat-shod feet working a rocking chair back and forth, back and forth, gnarled hands busy with knitting; sunlight glinted off the long, steel needles, as bright as the silver threaded through the waist-length braid draped over her shoulder.

Felix parked, and said, “Come on,” and Harlan followed, pulse accelerating, because this was no mere clearing full of dirty magazines and teenage boy arguments. This was Felix’s home . The place where he’d grown up; the place he went back to every time he brushed bark off his jeans and slipped off through the forest and out of sight, all those days that Harlan had watched him go with stomach aching and lungs tightening.

The old woman on the porch was deeply tan, wrinkled and leathery, eyes nothing more than beady black slits inside lids puffed with age and freckled from the sun. She glanced up at them as they approached, and for a moment, her gaze touched on Harlan, and was touched with a coldness so sharp it froze Harlan halfway up the porch steps. It lasted less than a second, her raptor-intense focus, an attention so violent and arresting he thought she might stand, and lunge forward suddenly to drive one of her knitting needles through his heart.

But then she tipped her head back and looked up at Felix, and all her wrinkles were warmth and fondness. She greeted him in French, and Felix responded in kind, before he half-turned back to Harlan and said, “This is Gram. She’s Dad’s mother.”

The woman looked back at Harlan, no longer murderous, but cool, guarded. She nodded, once, and turned her attention back to her knitting. As Felix led the way through the front door and into the house, Harlan saw her reach for the dented coffee can on the table at her elbow, and she spat a stream of dark tobacco juice into it.

It became quickly apparent that they didn’t have central AC in the house. A window unit chugged ineffectually in the small front living room, and when they passed into the kitchen, it was to the droning of two standing, oscillating fans that didn’t do much more than push hot air around, but which Harlan supposed kept the worst of the flies away from the stovetop, where a man who could only be Felix’s father stood dropping battered fish into a sizzling pan of oil.

Felix had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise of the fans. “Dad!”

The father – clad in a red plaid shirt and jeans, with a forehead that bore a dent from a hat band, three shades paler than the rest of his sunbaked face – turned toward his son, and smiled. It was Felix’s smile, though wider, and less self-conscious. A smile he turned just as readily and easily on Harlan, who nearly staggered beneath the force of it. No grown man had ever smiled at him that way before, not his father, or his stepfathers, or a teacher, or a coach. He had no idea what to make of it, and his insides went hectic in the face of it.

“You brought company,” the father said, and he had the same deep, velvet voice as Felix, if a little rougher from age and smoke.

“This is the new prospect, Hank.” Felix jerked a thumb his direction. “He’s gonna help me load the stuff.”

The dad nodded, and gestured with the spatula. “It’s on the back porch.”

The back porch proved to be deeper and cooler than the front, a ceiling fan whirling lazily over a trio of rocking chairs. It overlooked a short, sloping back lawn in need of mowing, and a private dock that extended out into the water, where a small boat with a massive engine was tied up at the end.

Harlan was so curious he momentarily forgot his nerves. “ That’s the boat you hunt gators in?” he asked, disbelieving. It didn’t look like it would hold two full-grown men, much less two men and a thrashing, half-dead alligator.

Felix, bent over inspecting a stack of cardboard boxes, straightened, turned to look, and snorted. “Yeah, that’s Bessie. We’ve been using her since I was just a little kid.”

“How?”

“Heh. Carefully. But Dad swears by small boats.” He glanced back at the house, then lowered his voice, a whisper so quiet Harlan had to lean in to hear him over the shriek of the cicadas. “Don’t say anything, but things have been good enough with the club that I’m planning on buying Dad a new boat. All the bells and whistles. With an actual wheel.” He grinned, delighted, and Harlan grinned back, though he had no idea how wheels came into play with regard to boats. He was a landlubber, through and through.

“Wow,” he said. “Is he gonna want that?”

“Oh, he’ll fuss about it, and pretend old’s better than new. But he’ll love it.”

The boxes, when they toted them around the side of the house to the van, proved as heavy and as full of metallic clinks and newspaper crackling as the boxes Harlan had helped with yesterday. The cardboard was taped tightly shut, and unmarked, so he had no way of knowing what they were transporting, but he didn’t think they were boat parts. Maybe once he patched in, he’d be privy to that sort of information.

Once the van was loaded, and they’d shed their cuts and sweat through their t-shirts, Felix’s father – his name was Remy, he said – came out and invited them in for a late lunch of fried fish, coleslaw, and hunks of fresh bread slathered with butter. They sat around the small, round table in the kitchen, Gram with her coffee can spittoon at her elbow, and her gimlet stare touching every now and then on Harlan’s face, bringing up goosebumps on his arms despite the sweltering heat.

~*~

That late lunch would prove a touchstone over the course of the next two weeks. He returned to it, withdrawing into it mentally when he was mopping, or sweeping, or washing, or stepping and fetching. The perfect, flaky batter on the catfish, hot enough in the center to leave a blister on his tongue, cooled by swallows of homemade sweet tea. The low, rich timbre of Felix and his father speaking over one another, hunting stories that left Harlan acutely nostalgic for a history he’d never been a part of. The glass sweat rings on the Formica table, and the gross sound of spitting, because Gram could somehow chew chaw and eat at the same time. Flies buzzed up above the drafts from the fans, and the linoleum popped and creaked whenever someone shifted in their chair. The way Remy put another helping of fish on his plate, though he’d been so nervous he’d barely choked down the first, and said he ought to “fatten up” so he could grow into himself, but not unkindly.

It was such a modest place, that kitchen, simple, and dated, and a little grimy around the edges, though the plates and pots and pans and drinking glasses had been spotless. There was an affection and care between father and son that Harlan had never shared with another person, and he admired as much as he hated them for the ease of its existence. He had the sense the old woman knew what he’d spent years doing, though she’d barely made it to the table from the porch, and certainly hadn’t made it all the way out to the clearing to know that he’d watched Felix with his friends. Didn’t know what his real name was, and that he’d given a false one to the club. Still, she seemed to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t belong here, and he found something oddly comforting in her automatic hatred and distrust, as though she sensed that he might become important to Felix, and could even steal him away from their three-person family.

Where that idea had come from – stealing him away – Harlan didn’t know, but it sent a thrill down his spine that turned his knees to jelly.

He hoped that after being invited into the Lécuyer home, breaking literal bread with them, and being invited back by Remy as they left with a lifted hand and a casual, “See ya next time,” that he and Felix might become something like friends.

But he was busy, and Felix was busy, and so he revisited his lunch – glowing like a religious icon in his memory – while he toiled away at the clubhouse.

Then the whispering started.

He was lugging the trash to the cans out back, and paused in the hallway when he saw that the back door was already propped open. It was raining, fat sheets bucketing down in a white noise curtain that drowned out most of what Frenchie and Decker were saying, where they stood blowing smoke through the open door, heads bent close, brows knit and mouths pressed to grim lines.

“…dead,” he heard Decker say, and Frenchie shook his head.

“Shit. That’s…just shit, man. Do we know who did it, yet?”

The wind shifted, and the rain got louder, and Harlan missed the rest of what they were saying.

The next day he heard a name. “Oliver Landau,” Bob said grimly to Cat, who was named not for the animal, but for the milky, cataract sheen of his eyes, through which he could apparently see just fine.

Was Oliver Landau the dead person Decker had mentioned yesterday? No, it didn’t seem, when Bob continued, “It had to be him. Everyone knows Dee could get him to do whatever she wanted.”

Dee. It could have been an initial, could have stood for anyone, but Harlan’s mind flashed immediately to Dee Lécuyer, and disquiet like an oil spill pooled in his belly.

There was a new tension in the clubhouse, Dogs talking in hushed voices and brief snatches. Felix wasn’t around at all, and when Harlan finally worked up the nerve to ask Frenchie, thoroughly rattled by the funereal pall that hung over the place, Frenchie took a sharp drag on his cigarette and said, “His dad died. And his grandmother.”

“They…what?” Harlan’s heart beat wildly. “But…but I just saw them a couple weeks ago! The old woman – the grandmother – she’s old, yeah, but Remy…” He trailed off when Frenchie sent him a direct look, and he knew then that they hadn’t died . They’d been killed .

Harlan went to the supply closet, shut himself inside, and, if asked, would have said that he was trying to find the Lysol, but, really, he pressed his hands over his face and fell back against the shelves, and spent a good ten minutes trying to get his breathing under control.

Dead? They were dead ? Someone killed them ? He’d sat at their table, and endured Gram’s penetrating stare, and eaten the fish Remy had fried with his big-knuckled, fishhook-scarred hands. Had witnessed firsthand how deeply and unselfconsciously Felix loved his family, small and poor though it was.

And now they were gone. But why?

He thought of those heavy, clinking boxes, and wondered if Remy had gotten mixed up in club business, and if it was some kind of vendetta.

But a vendetta carried out by whom?

A snatch of overheard conversation floated up to the surface of his churning thoughts, bobbed there like plastic litter thrown in a lake: Oliver Landau. The murderer?

He needed to know more.

He scrubbed his eyes with his shirttail, sniffed hard a few times, and ventured back out into the clubhouse, where he was met by several guarded, suspicious glances and one hastily cut-off conversation when Frenchie thumped Dino in the arm and then said, to Harlan, “Hey, where you been? We’re outta Corn Nuts.”

Corn Nuts. Right. Of course. Because he wasn’t going to be allowed to be a part of the club-wide mourning for Felix’s family. He had to go get Corn Nuts .

“Yeah. Sure.” He snatched the van keys off the pegboard by the door, a whining in his ears like the day he’d beaten a nutria to death with the stock of an ineffective pellet gun. His throat got tight, and his face got hot, and he thought it was probably for the best that he make a store run, because if he stayed here, he was likely to say or do something that would get his prospect cut stripped and his ass booted out onto the highway.

“Get toilet paper!” Ham called at his retreating back, and he slammed the door so hard on his way out he heard something crash to the floor inside. He hoped like hell it was that stupid fucking jackalope. Or maybe one of those grinning, arms-around-each-other’s-necks group photos. Brothers holding brothers. A brotherhood he wasn’t going to be allowed to join, was he? He had months and months left of his prospect year, and they wouldn’t even tell him about a member’s murdered family . Felix’s family, who he’d had lunch with . He…

He couldn’t see. He stopped beside the van, and scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve, for all the good it did. The tears had turned on like a tap, and were pouring down his face, breath unsteady thanks to the hot, hitching anger in his chest. He searched for grief, groped for it, but all he found was an incomprehensive, whipcord anger snapping and snaking and thrashing free like a fireman’s hose abandoned on the ground. He couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t banish it.

But he couldn’t stand here crying like a baby where anyone might see, so he climbed into the van, started it up, and blinked furiously at the tears as he pulled out of the lot.

Before he was conscious of it, he was past the turnoff for the store, and headed for Burgundy Street instead.

He hadn’t been back since he prospected, thanks to the halfhearted efforts of the club girls, but Dee had allowed him to return after that first time, and after getting booted. She wouldn’t see him herself, but she’d set him up with several of the other girls, three of them at once, even, and he had the sense that she was…well, trying to keep him around, in some way, for some reason. Maybe she was simply toying with him, letting him wonder a little, before she took him back into her bed. He could be patient, especially when she provided alternative company so willing to please.

He wasn’t looking for company today, though.

He left the van several blocks down the street and rang the bell three quick times in succession, because once he pressed it the first time, his finger just kept going.

“Jeez, hold your horses,” the girl who answered the door said, rolling her eyes. It was Katie. “Oh, hey there, Harlan. You here for lunch hour?” Her grin sharpened. “Two for one special today, on sale.”

“I need to talk to Dee.”

The smile dropped off her face. “Aw, come on. You know she won’t see you.”

“Not for sex.” His tears had dried on the drive over, but he was sweating copiously, now, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s important. I need to ask her something.”

Katie frowned, and stood in the half-open doorway, not letting him in yet. He knew that he could shove her back and march in uninvited – it was so tempting that he curled his hands into fists to keep from doing it – but he thought that would only end with him get manhandled by Dee’s meat-necked security thugs.

He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself. “I know she said she wouldn’t let me pay for her time anymore. I promise this isn’t about that. I…” He leaned in closer – she leaned back, he noted with a sour feeling in his stomach – and whispered, “It’s about her husband. Her ex, I guess. Felix’s father.”

Katie’s eyes flew wide. “Shit.”

“Yeah. I need to talk to her.”

“I…shit,” she repeated, and shook her head. “Okay, okay, come in.”

He did, and she pointed to the bench in the entryway. “Stay here, and I’ll go tell her you want to talk. Stay here,” she said again, and pointed to the bench for emphasis.

He sat. “Okay.”

Katie wasn’t gone a minute, not even long enough for Harlan to start second guessing his decision to come here, and then she waved for him to follow her.

In the back of the house, in her lavish private suite, Dee was dressed in a floral silk kimono and what was clearly last night’s makeup, smudged and uneven and caked into the lines of her face, betraying her true age. She paced barefoot back and forth across the rug, smoking a cigarette.

She whirled at the sound of Harlan’s entrance, and snapped, “Shut the door.”

He did, with a shrugging apology at Katie as he did so.

“What did you hear?” she demanded, the moment the latch was in place. Her voice was so loud and shrill he thought closing the door had been a waste of time. “ What did you hear ?” she repeated, when he didn’t respond quickly enough.

He’d started sweating again, and his eyes burned, and he thought he needed a Gatorade soon if he kept leaking fluids at this rate. “Nothing! I heard – well, I heard that Remy and his mother were dead. And something about some guy named Oliver Landau, but I don’t–”

She flew across the room, eyes bulging.

When Harlan tried to stagger back from her, he slammed into the door and could go no farther.

She gripped the front of his cut with one hand, and jabbed the burning cherry of her cig toward his face. “Oliver?” she shrieked. “You heard about Oliver? What did you–”

He’d shut his eyes when the cig got too close, but slitted them open when her screams cut off suddenly.

Her eyes had gotten somehow wider, wilder, fixed, feverish, and unblinking. They weren’t focused on his face, but on his chest – his cut, he realized, as she traced the top snap button with the thumb of the hand that gripped his collar. Slowly, still staring, lips parted, cig smoldering forgotten and in danger of burning her fingers, she flattened her hand, and trailed it down over his chest, skin rasping faintly on the smooth black leather.

“Prospect,” she murmured. “You’re a prospect.”

“Yeah. For a few weeks–”

Two things happened in fast succession.

One: the cigarette burned down to the filter and singed her.

Second: she released his cut and slapped him full across the face.

They both yelped.

Harlan clutched his burning cheek, and Dee let out a scream that was half-pain, half-anguish, and whirled away from him to stalk back across the width of the rug. She hit the edge of it, did an about face, and came marching back, kimono flaring behind her, hands raised and curled into claws, her expression murderous.

“He sent you here, didn’t he? That little shit! That little bastard! He knows where Oliver is, I know he does, I know he–”

When she reached him, she slashed at his face with her long red acrylics. Harlan had known she would, and he’d thought at first to grab her wrists and hold her off that way. But she was a tall woman, and worked up, half-crazed, and he didn’t want to get caught in a tug of war for control of a claw and slap fight. So when she was close enough, he grabbed her by the throat, and squeezed.

Dee made a startled choking sound, and when she exhaled, he squeezed tighter, and hissed, “Don’t touch me.”

Her eyes were still bugged, but now the spark of aggression quickly melted to the bright shine of fear.

He put his thumb over her pounding pulse and pressed until he felt it stutter. She croaked out a protesting sound, and pawed at his wrist; her nails raised angry red scratches, but he didn’t feel the pain of them.

For the first time all day – in days , plural, really – he felt good . Not slinking in the shadows trying to overhear what everyone was whispering about; not feeling left out, and confused, hoping for a glimpse of Felix; not hiding in the supply closet hyperventilating while he tried to process the fact that Remy Lécuyer and his mother were dead; wasn’t struggling to see the road through tears. When he’d walked into this bedroom, he’d stepped into a viper’s den, and found her with fangs flashing.

But with one thrust of his arm, and a tightening of his hand, he’d turned her into a wriggling, terrified worm. He was in control now. This was his show, and he’d be the one asking the questions.

For a moment, he entertained the idea of his hand spasming. Of the veins bulging in her temples, of her pulse skipping and juddering and finally stopping. The light – furious or frightened – leaving her eyes completely, until they were nothing but vacant blue marbles in a slack, sin-ravaged face. It might even be an improvement: up close like this, in her current state, face flushing dark with backed-up blood, she looked downright ugly. Whatever looks and charm she’d used to entice Remy to marry her once upon a time, she was wholly without them now.

But, no. He couldn’t keep squeezing, because she had information he wanted.

He leaned in until he could hear her throat attempting to work, could hear the high, nasal squeals that were the closest she could come to a scream at the moment. He said, “If I let go of you, will you sit down and answer my questions?”

A muscle was flickering at the corner of her mouth, a tic. Was she having a stroke?

“Will you?” he pressed.

She couldn’t speak, but her lips formed the word yes .

It still took him a moment to unlock his fingers; he did so love the feeling of her throat, the life thrumming inside it, in his grip. But he turned her loose – shoved her back, and she tripped on the hem of her kimono, and fell, coughing, to sit on the edge of her bed. She pressed both palms over her throat and hacked and wheezed and choked on the flood of oxygen that filled her lungs.

Harlan stood up straight, and smoothed his cut, and felt as though he grew; swore his head soared up toward the ceiling, and his shadow stretched far across the rug, and that if he were to reach for any of the items laid out on the dresser to his left, they’d look no bigger than doll brushes and mirrors in his grasp.

She was a wretched thing, fighting for every breath, hacking in choked, phlegmy bursts. Her kimono slid off one shoulder, and it was a sad, drooping movement, not alluring in the slightest.

He hated her in that moment, and he loved knowing that he was capable of making her small like this.

“What do you care about Oliver Landau? Who is he?” he asked.

Still coughing, she lifted her head and glared at him with eyes gone watery and red.

“Who is Oliver Landau and why do you care about him?” he asked. “I won’t ask again.” He had no idea where the note of authority in his voice had come from, only that it felt right and good, and powerful.

She gave one last honking cough, cleared her throat, hand still pressed to it, and gritted out, “He’s my boyfriend. Or – he was.” Her face, hectic spots of color on her cheeks from choking, eyes tear-filled, went ashen, suddenly. Her lips trembled. “I’m pretty sure Felix killed him.”

~*~

Now he wanted to speak with Felix more than ever. But the man wasn’t around, which was perhaps understandable, given he was in mourning. But wouldn’t that mean he needed the love and support of his club brothers now more than ever?

When his patience wore too thin, and that rush of importance he’d felt in Dee’s bedroom rushed to fill its place, he started asking questions.

“Did Oliver Landau kill Felix’s father?” he blurted out one day, loitering in the left-open doorway of Bob’s office. In secret, he thought it was funny that an outlaw had an office, with filing cabinets and everything, but he approved of it, too: even outlaws needed to be organized.

Bob lifted his head slowly, brows raised, as if he couldn’t believe what Harlan had just said. Harlan couldn’t quite believe it himself, but he didn’t feel his usual urge to look away, or duck his head, or, even worse, run out of the room. He braced his boots apart on the floor, met Bob’s gaze steadily, and said, “The guys have been talking for two weeks, and I’ve heard things. I know Remy Lécuyer and his mother are dead. That they were killed. Did Oliver Landau do it?”

Bob stared at him a long moment, unblinking, brows notched. It was an assessment. Harlan thought maybe Bob was truly looking at him for the first time, and wondered what he found there (hoped it was the man who’d nearly choked Dee unconscious, and not the prospect who fished a sponge from the hallway toilet).

Finally, after the moment had stretched so long that Harlan wet his lips in anticipation of asking something else, Bob said, “Yeah. He did.” His clenched jaw and flat gaze dared Harlan to be shocked, to protest, to threaten to run to the police.

It wounded him, that look, more than he wanted to admit. All the hard work he’d put in around here, all the “yes, sir,” “no, sir,” “yes, coming right up, sir” bullshit he’d been slinging, and Bob thought he was some sort of rat?

God, what would they do if he went to the police? If he told them about those heavy, clinking crates. If he told them what Dee had, that Oliver Landau had gone missing days ago, nowhere to be found, just like Felix?

No. He dashed the thought. He wouldn’t do that to Felix. When he saw Felix next, he was going to offer his deepest condolences.

“…kid?” Bob was speaking.

He blinked, and said, “Did Felix kill Landau?”

Bob’s gaze narrowed. “The less you know about that the better.”

Which meant yes .

Jesus.

So that was where Felix had been: finding, and then killing, and then disposing of Oliver Landau, just as Dee had said.

“Why?” he pressed. “Did Remy know something? Was he–”

Bob waved him to silence. “The only beef Landau had with Remy is beef that bitch Dee put into his head. The worst thing that man ever did after that woman left him was stay in town. He shoulda picked up his boy and fled the fucking state.” He shook his head, sadly, and returned his attention to the notebook before him, a clear dismissal.

The next day, he asked Frenchie, “When will Felix be back?”

Frenchie, sitting on the porch rail, one leg stretched out before him, the other dangling off into the open air, was smoking and tapped ash over the edge onto the gravel below. “Dunno. But trust me: you’re gonna want to steer clear when he does.”

He wouldn’t elaborate, so later that afternoon, he caught Diego and Mudbug out back by the storage shed, smoking, and he paused in his box-carrying trips to ask for clarification on Frenchie’s meaning.

The two of them shared sly grins. “Didn’t ya hear?” Mudbug said, wizened face screwed up with glee. “He’s not ‘Felix’ anymore. That boy finally got himself a road name, and it was Landau what gave it to him.”

Diego kicked him in the boot. “Shut up, you old fart.”

Mudbug made a face and waved him off. “Nah, nah, the kid needs to hear it. He needs to know not to fuck around with the man who makes you beg for mercy before the end.”

That was how he first learned that Felix Lécuyer was now known as “Mercy” to his club brothers.

Felix started coming back around, and though Harlan didn’t get the chance to speak with him right away, on that first night back, when the Dogs cheered, and drinks were hoisted aloft, and Felix was greeted with fanfare like a returning war hero, he could tell right away that he was Felix no longer. Not the Felix he’d first met, at least.

The man who wended his way through the clubhouse that night appeared taller, sparer, his arms ropier with muscle. All of that was just an illusion, though: he’d already been tall, and spare, and ropy with muscle. A hulking beast in the making, still caught up in boyhood’s lean spring. It was his face – the light in his eyes – that was changed, and turned his once-jovial, obvious kindness into the mask of a thoughtless animal, one wary, and withdrawn, ready to attack at a moment’s notice.

Harlan stood, transfixed, as Felix – Mercy – moved through the sea of well-wishers. They clapped him on the arms, and shoulders, and back as he passed them, offering condolences that sounded more like congratulations. Felix didn’t react to any of it. He found a table over against the wall, and sat with his back pressed to the wood paneling. A girl appeared before him, shimmying out of the crowd to set a beer before him with a dramatic bend at the waist that left her breasts all but tumbling out of her top and into his face. Felix didn’t react to that, either, and she withdrew looking disappointed.

Bob grabbed a fork off a table and rapped it against the side of a beer bottle until a hush fell and everyone turned to look at him. His gaze fell on Felix, who gazed back with an expression impossible to read, devoid of all warmth – of any kind of feeling at all.

“I just wanted to say,” Bob said, voice that magic blend of affection, and gravity that only Southern men seemed capable of pulling off, “we all know our own Felix has been going through a rough patch, and we know,” he said, seriously, “that things might be rough for a while. We’re all broken up with you about your family, son.”

There were murmurs of agreement and commiseration.

Felix inclined his head in slight acknowledgement.

“Remy was a good man,” Bob continued, “raised by a good woman.” He tipped his bottle, and poured a splash of beer straight onto the floor. Everyone else followed suit, and Harlan knew he ought to go fetch the mop, but he didn’t want to interrupt Bob’s moment. “They’ll be well missed.”

As far as funeral speeches went, the words were shit. But the emotion in the man’s voice was real, as was the sheen in his eyes. He said, “We want you to know, Felix, that so long as you’re flying the colors, you have a family here with us – all of us, every chapter, in this country and across the pond. We love you, and we’ve got your back, brother.

“Now, gents. I want you all to raise a glass for a man we already know and love, but who’s proved himself to be twice the man he already looks. Tonight” – he lifted his bottle high – “we lay to rest Felix Lécuyer, and we welcome our brother Mercy.”

A deafening cheer went up from every corner of the room.

Felix – Mercy – sipped his beer, and stared stone-faced at the table.