Page 252 of Fearless

“We want this for you,” Remy always said. “Go do more than I ever did. See the world the way I never could.”

Becoming an outlaw biker wasn’t exactly the same as going to college or joining the Marines, but in Remy’s narrow world, it was a big step. One for which Mercy was grateful.

Off a badly paved road, Mercy turned the bike down the dirt drive, between the knotted branches of two squat oaks, and that was when it hit him. The sense that something was wrong.

Remy’s truck was parked in its usual spot, but there was evidence that other cars had been there, the grass flattened down where it normally stood tall.

He killed the engine and swung off his bike. The drone of cicadas flooded his ears, that hypnotic, ceaseless chattering. He stood very still in the driveway and strained, listening. There were no other sounds besides the insects. No whirring or humming or thumping or dull murmur of voices from the house. The air vibrated around him, that electric charge of utter silence, absolute quiet.

He pulled his shopping bag from its place bungeed onto the bitch seat and headed for the back door. He paused, something dark catching his attention down in the pale, powdery dirt of the driveway. It was tobacco juice, a big glob of it, spat there on the ground between boot prints.

Gram chewed some, used to, but had stopped on doctor’s orders. And Remy had never picked up the habit. He got his tobacco fix with cigarettes.

Mercy picked up the pace, making it to the door in three long strides. The knob turned against his hand and he pushed inside. “Dad? Gram?”

The smell almost knocked him down. Blood. The copper tang of wet, steaming-hot blood. The stench of gore.

The grocery sack fell out of his hand, tomatoes bouncing across the linoleum. The door eased shut with a groan.

Everywhere, the signs of struggle. Open cabinets, dishes shattered on the floor. Open drawers, pawed-through flatware jutting up like quills. Overturned chairs. Stippling on the table: stray buckshot. Powder burns. Acrid scent of a fired weapon, just under the blood. Footprints in the blood itself, tracking toward the living room.

He found Remy face-down alongside the sofa, his blood soaking into the carpet, his long, powerful frame lifeless, his usual rich coloring almost as white as the scars that crossed his arms and knuckles.

“Daddy,” Mercy breathed, going to his knees beside his father. His fingers found Remy’s throat. No pulse. He turned him over, and saw the gunshots in his chest and abdomen that had nearly cut him in half. How he’d made it this far from the kitchen, no one could know. Sheer strength and force of will.

He was dead.

Mercy cradled his father’s head in his hands, eyes moving over the dark marks where bruises had settled into his face, evidencing the fight he’d put up.

Then he remembered. “Gram!” He laid Remy gently back to the carpet and shot to his feet, tearing through the rest of the small house, calling to Nanette over and over.

He found her in the front yard, down by the water, her tiny frame crumpled like a dried-up flower. Her streaming white hair was full of blood, her skull soft and pulpy. She’d been bludgeoned to death. Her dress was ripped. There was blood on it, and on her legs. She’d been raped. His eighty-five-year-old grandmother had been raped before she was murdered.

The Cherokee girl Louis Lécuyer from Quebec had brought to New Orleans with a dream and a promise, and the son they’d made together, both dead.

It was a long moment before Mercy realized that the awful screaming that echoed through the swamp was his own, and that his throat was bleeding with the effort. He closed his mouth, and the silence reigned supreme again.

Save for the cicadas.

The plunk of fish.

Birds flapping through the canopy.

The sun beat down, unforgiving and insistent. Its blanketing heat was making the smell worse.

Not decomp, no. Too freshly dead for that. Just blood, fear, sweat, recent death. The stink of a body stopping, like it had run up against a wall and ceased to exist.

“Go to a place in your head,” Remy had told him once, when he was eleven, the first time they’d taken a gator home to dress and cook and tan themselves. All of the gators went to the depot, where the tags earned them cash. But this one had been small, and wily, hard to catch. “We’ll keep this one,” Daddy had said. He’d squeezed Mercy’s shoulder. “Don’t think about how bloody and messy it is. Just concentrate on what you need to do.”

So now, on his knees in the tall grass beside the water, staring at his brutalized grandmother, his throat raw from screaming, Mercy concentrated on what he needed to do. He had to take care of his family. That’s what a good son would do.

He gathered Nanette up – she weighed no more than a child – and took her in the house, laid her on the sofa. Then he went to the shed where Remy kept his hunting and fishing gear. He found a shovel and a pickaxe, and toting them over his shoulder, he walked up the slight rise into the trees until he found the spot he wanted, the little clearing between the oak roots, where the ground was soft and covered in a turf of pale green grass. There was honeysuckle, tangled among the briars, and spiked yucca fronds. There was a view between the tree trunks down to the water, with its paving of duckweed and purple blooming hyacinth.

A good spot. A pretty one.

It took him hours to dig the graves, side by side, deep enough that the foxes couldn’t dig them up. It was black dark by then, the moon shivering on the water the only light. His eyes had adjusted. Like the hellhound he wore on his cut, he could see well at night.

He carried Nanette up first, and laid her gently down in the bottom, covering her one shovelful at a time, until they were six feet separated, and the flat of the shovel tamped down the fresh earth on top.

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