“I’ll put it on my list,” Ava said. She touched Mercy’s hand and felt it twitch, an automatic defensive reflex that was so unlike him. “You ready?” she asked gently.
“Yeah.” He moved too quick, like he was coming out of a bad dream. He snatched her hand, said, “Thanks, Barbara. Call Bob if you need me for anything; he’ll know how to get in contact.”
She nodded.
Ava was towed out the front door like they were fleeing from a fire. Mercy slammed the door behind them and it rattled on its hinges.
They were fifteen feet down the sidewalk when she dug her heels in and offered resistance, nearly face-planting on the cobbles for her effort. “Merc!”
He halted and swung around to face her. His eyes were wild, detached, his chest heaving. He stood holding her wrist for a long, breathless moment before he seemed to come back to himself, like he realized again where they were and what he was doing.
He let go of her as if she’d burned him. Or, more accurately, as if he was afraid he’d hurt her. His hand came up to hover beside her face; his brows knitted together. “You’re okay?” His voice was desperate.
“I’m fine.” She laid a hand over his thundering heart as if to quiet it. “You’re not.”
He shook his head and picked up her hand again, the one on his chest. He turned and pulled her arm through his, so she was tucked in close beside him, and picked up a reasonable walking pace.
“Mercy–”
“Not right now.” It sounded like a plea.
They walked back down St. Ann the way they’d come, but this time, Ava didn’t see any of the wrought iron or the gingerbread. She noticed Mercy: every deep breath, every flex of his fingers against hers, every crinkling of his brow.
He finally halted when they reached Jackson Square. He looped his arms over the iron fence and stared at the Cathedral. Pedestrians walked along behind them, chatting under the bright sky. While just one foot away from them, Mercy was all rain and clouds.
“I’m sorry,” Ava told him. “I would never have let you go there if I’d known…”
His eyes came to her and his mouth quirked, a fast non-smile. “What did she tell you after I left?”
“Nothing. I was the one telling her a few things.”
His smile became almost real. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His gaze moved over her. “You mean, looking at her didn’t turn you to stone?”
She rested her chin on his elbow, where it was hooked over the fence, smiling at him. “Nope. Someone might need to check on her, though. My inner gorgon may have come out.”
“You get that from your mother, you know.”
“And proud of it.”
He reached to tousle her hair, eyes softening, a silent thank you.
Over his shoulder, a hundred feet down the sidewalk or so, Ava spotted the pale man in the black hoodie again.
She stiffened and he sensed it immediately, standing up straight against the fence. “What?”
“That man again. Behind you. No – don’t turn too fast. He’ll see you.”
He did a slow twist that looked casual, like he was scoping out the street behind them. Still, the man spooked and took off, disappearing into the crowd of St. Louis admirers.
“Did you get a look at him?” Ava asked.
He nodded as he turned back to her, expression grim. “Yeah. I don’t know him, but obviously somebody does.” He glanced down at her with an apology in his eyes. “I know I promised you some real sightseeing…”
“Not worth it,” she said. “After all, this isn’t a vacation. I didn’t expect it to feel like one.”
“Gates are locked,” RJ said as he and Rottie came into the common room. “You should see the fucking media circus out there by the street.”
Ghost didn’t want to.
“Mina and the boys are at Hound and Nell’s place,” Rottie said. “I talked to him. I’ve got his proxy vote to go ahead with whatever you wanna do.”
“Ditto for Troy,” Dublin informed them from the bar. “He’s not fighting his old ass through all that mess” – gesture to the door – “just to vote ‘yea.’ ”
Ghost nodded and did a head count. All present save Jace, and by now, he knew where that little fucker was. It would give him pleasure to be the one to put that rat in the ground himself.
“You four” – the prospects, Carter and Greg – “eyes outside.”
They trooped out to their posts and the patched members headed for the chapel.
Maggie stood at the end of the bar, her charade of composure impressive, all save for the eyes, which her huge and slick and not fooling him for a second. Ghost caught her around the waist before he went to join the others.
“It’s alright,” he said, kissing her forehead.
“No, it’s not,” she sighed. “But I’ll take the lie.”
He was the last one in the chapel, and he closed the doors, sealing in the straining silence of the room. Most of the guys were smoking or searching for lighters. The tension was stacked all the way up to the ceiling.
When Ghost took his seat, Ratchet said, “I checked with the EMS team that responded. Five shot, three in critical condition, one dead on the scene.”
“Fuck,” Ghost said. He glanced at Michael. “I’m assuming this is retaliation.”
His impassive face was marked only by the tension necessary to take a drag on his smoke and then exhale. “I found four Carps playing poker in a shithole apartment last night. I took care of all of them. No witnesses.”
“Yeah, but they’re missing,” Aidan said, “and someone will have noticed that.”
“Did notice,” Tango corrected. “Or we wouldn’t be having this sit-down.”
“Bodies?” Ghost asked Michael.
“Plastic-wrapped and ready for the pasture. There’s no forensics for anyone to find.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” Briscoe said, “but what about the forensics all over our damn street?”
Ghost waved a hand for silence before an argument could get started. “I want us to go in tonight.”
Mild eyebrow lifts of surprise, all around.
“No more sitting around and waiting for the shit to hit the fan. I’m done. I am beyond fucking done. I want every Carpathian in the ground by morning. We’ve got a rat to deal with.” More surprise. Ghost gestured to Collier. “Feds are in town, the PD’s enlisting our guys. Let’s cross something off the list tonight.”
Forty-Five
Ava kept checking over her shoulder during their ride out of the city into the untamed bayou territory. Several cars followed them for a while, but all eventually turned off. They were totally alone by the time they reached Lew’s. Even the sneakiest of stalkers couldn’t keep up with the Dyna unless he was riding one of his own.
At the store, Mercy asked Lew if he had “a little something” he could borrow. Lew produced a twelve-gauge shotgun from behind the counter and a box of buckshot. Mercy saluted him with the box of shells and urged her toward the door. He wanted to get on the water, get lost out in the tangled estuaries and lose any chance of being followed.
The swamp in the middle of the afternoon shimmered with insects. The heat pressed low, like a fist coming down on top of the black water, pinching them tight until Ava couldn’t tell where her skin ended and the film of sweat on top of it began. There was no breeze. The moss hung in lifeless tatters from the cypress. Gators sunning themselves on the banks didn’t even lift their heads at the sound of the bateau motor.
She was fascinated by the hulking scaly shapes laid out on the stubbly grass. They were prehistoric and monstrous. And worlds larger than she’d ever imagined.
Mercy passed the hidden entrance to Saints Hollow, cruising forward at an even speed. When she turned to question him, hair whipping across her face, he didn’t seem to notice her, staring at the unfurling expanse of water ahead of them, expression withdrawn.
They startled three white egrets and two sunning turtles as t
hey passed. They weaved around submerged logs that Ava was unable to see until they were beside them, and she shivered to think that someone who didn’t know what to look for – like her – could get a boat hung up, or even sunk, so easily. And then she’d be gator bait.
Finally, Mercy slowed and moved in close to the bank. By the time he’d killed the motor, Ava had spotted it: the house.
It was the tar paper house Mercy had grown up in, perched right on the edge of the water, a rickety dock jutting out from the bank, its boards loose and warped.
It broke her heart to see the place now, so different than it had been in the Lécuyer family photos. Its windows black and empty, half the glass shattered. A storm had put a tree limb through the roof, and the exposed plywood beneath the shingles was rotted and sagging. The tar paper had peeled, was speckled liberally with mildew and mold. The wild grasses had grown up to scale the walls. The porch was on the verge of collapse. Abandoned, unloved, forgotten. Past all hope of repair.
“The local kids say it’s haunted,” Mercy said behind her. “They’re right.”
She wanted to cry, looking at what had once been his home, and that was before she turned to look at him, and the naked pain in his eyes. The house wasn’t the only thing that was haunted. The boy that it had raised was full of ghosts too.
Ava wanted to reach for him, touch him, comfort him. But she felt the chasm of ignorance opening up between them. She didn’t know his ghosts; and she needed to know them if she ever hoped to exorcise them.
“Sometimes, the best thing you can do is wait,” Maggie had advised her once. “Everyone can talk. But waiting’s an art.”
So she waited.
Birds called in the tree tops. Dragonflies swooped low along the water. The midges and mosquitos teemed. Something plunked below the surface.
Mercy said, “Do you want to know about Oliver Landau?”
“Very much.”
“It’s not a nice story.”
“Most aren’t. I can handle it.”
He nodded. He took a deep breath, and in a haunted patch of swamp, while the sweat rolled down their bodies, he told her the tale of his life’s turning point. The journey that had led him to her.
**
Fourteen Years Ago
Mercy was nineteen when he met Bob Boudreaux. He and Daddy were at Lew’s, loading up on whole chickens and nylon rope, when the loud cursing of a man in a bateau drew Remy’s attention.
“Ha!” Remy whooped when he saw who it was. “Bob, don’t you know how to keep from flooding your engine? I guess you’ve only got the magic touch with bikes, huh?”
The man – standing at the stern of his small fiberglass boat – laughed and grimaced at the same time, shaking his head. “This fuckin’ thing,” he complained. “I belong on two wheels, not on the water.”
“Maybe we can help,” Remy offered. “My boy here can work wonders on motors.”
Bob was a tall, narrow man, deeply tan, obviously Cajun, his hair a shade of gold that glimmered in the sun. He wore black jeans and had a wallet chain. His Harley-Davidson t-shirt was stretched tight over the thick muscles in his arms. He regarded Mercy with open speculation. “Yeah?”
“You bet.” Remy slapped Mercy’s shoulder. “Run down there, Felix, and see what you can do with it.”
Mercy got the shiny Mercury outboard running again. Bob thanked him, shook his hand, and told him to come by “the clubhouse” if he was looking for work.
“We could always use a good mechanic around,” he said, before he waved goodbye to them and took off into the swamp.
Three days later, Remy told Felix to get his ass in the truck and they rode into town, to a corrugated steel, chain link-surrounded building on Iberville Street that looked more like a warehouse than any kind of house. The array of motorcycles had been dazzling. Bob Boudreaux had come out to meet them, shake their hands, show off the bikes to them.
Bob, Mercy was told, was the vice president of the Louisiana chapter of the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club, and they were looking for some new hangarounds, with the hope they could then prospect some of them. Their ranks needed beefing up.
Homeschooled, largely sheltered from the more sinister elements of city living, Mercy was, after all, the son of a professional madam, and he’d understood what the Lean Dogs were. Real, one-percent outlaw bikers, the kind he’d learned about through National Geographic documentaries. Organized, law-breaking, impenetrable clubs like this one thrilled him. Frightened him, too, if he was honest.
At dinner that night, Remy encouraged him to try and join the club. “This,” he said, opening his arms to the shadowy kitchen around them, “is the best I can ever offer you. I think you could have a real chance for something better with them. And I want you to have better, Felix.”
That had been two years ago. Now he was a full-fledged, patched member of the Dogs, and he’d earned enough repairing bikes to buy one of his own, and he wore a leather cut full of patches over his usual t-shirts, and drivers and pedestrians alike gave him nervous, sidelong glances when he rode through the Quarter.
He didn’t wrestle gators anymore, or leave breakfast warming in the oven for Gram, or hear his Daddy singing in the dawn mist each morning.
He’d lost his virginity to a big-breasted club groupie named Janet who’d pulled him into a back room and urged his hands against her and worked his cock like she was riding a show pony. He hated those groupies, really, because they reminded him so much of Dee. But he couldn’t go without, and for a little while, it was nice to pretend that the girls who begged to have him inside them actually gave a damn, and weren’t just doing all this for a cheap thrill.
It was a Wednesday when Remy came by to see him at the clubhouse. Mercy was tinkering with his bike and waiting for his father to work around to whatever it was he really wanted to talk about, because the shape of the cloud overhead most certainly wasn’t it.
When the silent question became too heavy, Remy reached to scratch a splattered bug off the Dyna’s headlamp and said, “I had to borrow some money.”
Mercy’s hands stilled on the spokes of the front wheel. “From who?”
Remy looked embarrassed, not willing to meet Mercy’s gaze. “Your mother.”
“Shit.” Mercy felt the unhappy souring of his stomach that any mention of the woman inspired in him. “How much?”
“Not that much.” He winced. “Five grand.”
“Shit,” Mercy repeated. He stood, so he could read Remy’s face better. “Dad, why didn’t you come to me?”
“I knew you didn’t have–”
“I’ve got more money than you think, and nothing to spend it on but bike parts and liquor. Hell, if you wanted a loan, you coulda got one from the club.”
“I didn’t want to owe them and cause any trouble for you.”
“ ‘Course not. Now you just owe Dee, and that’s trouble for you. How’s that any better?”
“Well, what’s done is done. I borrowed the money and now I owe it. No sense crying over what I can’t change.”
Mercy sighed. Typical Daddy, trying to act prosaic, as if that made it any more palatable. “Lemme guess. She’s ready to collect, and you don’t have the money.”
“Not yet, but I will,” Remy said. “I just gotta check my lines tomorrow. I should have caught enough…”
But Mercy was shaking his head. “Nah. You know that’s not gonna work.”
Remy glanced across the parking lot, looking, for the first time in Mercy’s memory, like he was getting older. The flecks of silver in his black hair, the deep sun lines on his face. He was the dark and shadowed version of the Louis Lécuyer Mercy only knew from photographs.
“What did you need the money for?” he asked quietly.
Remy took a deep breath and looked sort of caved-in when he let it back out. “Your grandmother needed to have some tests run at the doctor.”
Mercy could have kicked himself. All this time he’d spent with his new brothers, the long runs, grow
ing into his new big boots as a Lean Dog, and the family who’d raised him with such love had been languishing in the swamp, money so tight that Daddy had borrowed from The Bitch in order to pay for Gram’s medical tests.
What a failure at being a son and grandson, after they’d reared and educated him. Had the bikes and the big tits really been worth the trade?
“Daddy, I tell ya what.” He touched his father on the shoulder. “Don’t even worry about it. I’ll take some of what I got, borrow a little from Bob or Champ” – the reigning president – “and I’ll go pay Dee. I’ll take care of it.”
Remy’s face was pained. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Sure you can. That’s what kids are for, right? To return the favor.” He smiled. “Let me help. I’ll go see Dee today. And after, I’ll come out and have dinner with you and Gram. Hell, I’ll cook dinner.”
Remy’s half-smile was heavy with emotion. “Do I ever tell you how proud I am of you, Felix?”
“All the time.”
An hour later, pockets fat with cash, he left the clubhouse and went to his mother’s place on St. Ann. Originally purchased for her by a john, its payments had been paid over the years by boyfriends and clients alike. She liked to call herself a “woman of independent means,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but there was no convincing her of that. “When you have to keep sucking dick to pay your mortgage, you’re dependent on everyone but yourself,” Mercy had told her during their last meeting. That had been his birthday, if he remembered correctly.
He parked his bike on the curb and took the two steps across the sidewalk and up the stoop to ring the bell.
Barbara answered the door, in one of her usual cotton dresses and her slender flat shoes. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Felix.”
“You never see me more often than that,” he returned, stooping to kiss her cheek as he entered. “Is Dee here?”
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