Page 216 of Fearless

When he was gone, Aidan said, “Collier?”

Ghost shook his head. “Nothing yet. Mags went by and saw Jackie, said she was definitely covering for him, but couldn’t get a word out of her.”

“Protecting her man,” Aidan said. “She’s got a right to do that.”

“She does,” Ghost sighed. “But it pisses me off.” His gaze came to Aidan’s face. “Wherever he is, whatever the truth is, you know what has to happen to Greg, don’t you?”

Aidan swallowed, a lump getting caught in his throat. “Yeah…I do.”

Forty-One

New Orleans. Rising up out of the steaming swamps of Louisiana. Riding into the city was like bursting inside a flowered wedding cake, all structure, confection, decoration and sugar. It was an overheated, proud city, that didn’t shrink from its history and culture like so many paved-over suburban Southern cities. Tropical blossoms, flaking loud paint, iron railings and all that water-smell, it folded over her like hot dough as they crossed its limits. Stop, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to stand in the street and turn circles, absorbing it through her eyes and her pores.

Ava was exhausted and so sore, but they didn’t go straight to the clubhouse as she’d expected. After five minutes, she realized what Mercy was doing: he was giving her a silent tour, slowing the bike to a crawl when they passed something he knew would set her imagination roaring.

He took her through the French Quarter, with its three-tiered facades crawling with ornate iron curlicues, the upper galleries bursting with Boston ferns. The brick walks and the old iron lampposts. The street-level cafes and the striped awnings. The jazz and the Dixieland bands, playing on the corners for the tourists.

Through the Garden District, with its precise European gardens, spreading oaks, iron fences and the glorious, gorgeous houses, holding court behind gates.

It was a blur, all of it, as the bike rolled down narrow streets, stopped to wait for the horse-drawn carriages toting tourists down Bourbon Street.

Ava felt the heat work its way into her exhausted joints. The magical myriad houses marched past her in pastel flashes interspersed with green breaks, flowers bobbing in the breeze. Her soreness faded, the exhaustion shoving down beneath the wonder.

How could Mercy hate this place?

Eventually, they moved away from the glamor, hitting a two-lane that led out of the tumbled-down outskirts of the city, and out through a stretch of scrub forest. The grass was blue and shiny with the water that hid between the blades. The oaks here were untended and bowed toward the ground, their gnarled branches heavy with Spanish moss.

With nothing to look at, she pulled back inside herself, the hurts coming back to the surface. She closed her eyes and knotted her fingers in the front of Mercy’s shirt, her arms quivering from the prolonged effort of holding onto him. When this trip was over, she didn’t want to see the bitch seat of a motorcycle again, not ever.

She didn’t know how much time had passed before they turned off the main road, and then turned again, and the trees closed overhead, laced fingers that bathed them in shadow. She could smell the water stronger here: a ripe, dark smell, water full of plant and animal life. The pavement fell away, and they drove on a powdery white dirt; she could taste it against her lips as a cloud of it rolled up over them. And then the road simply ended, right at the doorstep of a ramshackle tar paper building with a high, peaked roof and a scattering of old pickups out front.

Mercy parked, and she gritted her teeth as she climbed off the bike like a crippled, arthritic woman. “Oh, God.” She bent at the waist and stretched her back, staring at the pale dirt under her dusty boots.

Mercy’s hand landed between her shoulder blades. “Poorfillette. Not used to this much riding, huh?” He sounded like he was trying not to laugh.

“Ass,” she accused. “I feel like I got run over by something.”

“You just need to get drunk,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, baby doll. We wanna hit the water while there’s still plenty of light.”

“Water?” She straightened and was pulled along by his hand.

“Yeah,” he said over his shoulder as he towed her. “Unless you wanna ask Lew if you can borrow his hammock.”

“Where are we?”

He slapped a wooden sign as they passed it.Lew’s Tackle and Grocery.

“Oh nice,” she muttered. “Ice creamandworms.”

But she wasn’t disgusted. Under all the aches and pains, she was fascinated, and charmed.

The store was a long, narrow building, half of which perched over the water on thick pylons. It had a three-sided, roofless porch, old rusted shovels, garden tools, boat anchors, and other oxidized metal bits hanging on the walls. An ancient Coke machine sat beside a hip-high cooler with a hand-labeledFresh Baitsign taped to the front.

The land sloped down toward the water, the little dock that jutted out across its dark surface. Ava spotted a sequence of outbuildings, under the dense shade cast by the trees, and between two of them, the hammock Mercy had mentioned. She also spotted the gas pumps.

Mercy paused when he reached the door of the place and turned back to give her the most excited, boyish smile. It did dangerous, melty things to her insides. “I just gotta warn you. You’re about to step into the Land That Time Forgot. This ain’t no place for princesses like you.”

“Call me a princess again,” she said, “and the only place for you will be the bottom of that lake out there.”

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