Page 185 of American Hellhound
“Collier and me would drag our toys up here – soldiers and tanks and shit. Make forts out of pallets and rat traps. Got my finger once.” He help up his left pinky for demonstration, and for the first time she saw the faint scar there.
“Ouch.”
“I cried like a girl, and then Mama swatted us both for being up here. She was always afraid we’d fall out the window,” he said with a chuckle.
Maggie swung her feet in slow circles. “She had a point, there.”
“She always did.”
She didn’t know what to say. She was thrilled to see him open up and share bits of his childhood with her, but she was afraid if she pushed, probed at the wrong scars, he’d clam up and that would be it.
He spoke before she could come up with anything. “I shoulda sold it a long time ago,” he whispered, like a confession, gaze fixed on the house. “Right when Dad died, when the lawyer came ‘round, I shoulda put it on the market. Hell, the guy who owns the place next door wanted it. I coulda made three-hundred grand, easy.”
“Why didn’t you?” Maggie asked, gently.
He shrugged. “Couldn’t. Just…yeah. Couldn’t do it. Ain’t that stupid?”
“No.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “It’s not.”
“I keep telling myself it’ll come in handy one day.”
To her, the fallow fields seemed alive with possibility. She could envision the house whitewashed, with a new roof and a reworked porch, a new board fence along the driveway, white-faced cows lowing at dusk. Flowers in clay pots and the jangle of windchimes. It could be made new. It could be a home again.
But that wasn’t for her to say.
Instead, she said, “Ghost, what are we gonna do?”
He sighed. “For starters? Not get killed. After that…we’ll see, I guess.”
His arm tightened around her, and she knew that whatever they did, they’d do it together. That was the only way out of this mess.
Twenty-Nine
Now
Mercy prided himself on being a light sleeper. Unless he was blackout drunk – and he certainly wasn’t tonight, tossing and turning on a shitty dorm mattress, missing his bed at home, wishing Ava was tucked warm and sweet against his side – any little sound woke him. The floorboards popping in the cold, the wind in the eaves, a spatter of rain on the window: all of it brought him to wakefulness on a normal night.
So when he rolled over just before dawn, the dorm the underwater blue of six a.m., he wasn’t expecting to find someone standing next to his bed.
“Shit.” He jackknifed upright, hand finding the Colt beneath his pillow on the way up.
The dark figure took a step back and held up two pale hands, palms like spindly white flowers in the gloom. “It’s me,” Reese said.
“Jesus.” Mercy wasn’t sure if he ought to lower the gun. He did, though, but slowly. “What the fuck?”
“There’s bikes coming.” The kid had a rusty voice. Straightforward, no emotion, and out of use. “I heard them.”
Mercy blinked a few times, his vision clearing. The digital clock on the nightstand said it was six-twenty. “Did you go look?”
“No. I came to tell you.”
Mercy sighed and flipped the covers back. “Next time, knock,” he said as he got up, bad leg grabbing. “Okay? Don’t just stand there all…Redrum, alright?”
Reese didn’t comment, just fell into step behind him as he walked out into the dark hall.
They always kept a few lamps on, the warm light glowing off the clean floorboards of the common room. Mercy had a surreal moment, as he crossed to the door, feeling like he was back in his bachelor days, like Ava and the kids were a wonderful dream he’d finally woken from; he shuddered.
And then he heard the bikes.
