Page 249 of Fearless

“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?”

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