Page 114 of The Wild Charge

“They’re just fucking with us,” Walsh said. “Even if he we backed off, and stopped digging, they can’t afford to leave us alone, now. At the very least, they’ll fuck with our business.”

Mercy nodded. “These assholes give the impression they like to play with their food. They’ll try to dry up our revenue streams slowly.”

“Crippling us would be more fun than killing us,” Walsh agreed.

Fox said, “We’ve been too obvious.” Brows went up. “We styled ourselves their enemies from the first. We’re doing things the way the Dogs always do them: forcefully.” Now that he was saying it, the truth of the words pricked like needles. He’d patched in, he’d followed Ghost’s lead: a good little soldier offering insight, but letting himself be deployed where he was told to go. They were a united front, they were a family – but this wasn’t a scenario in which they could go in guns-blazing like a band of old west vigilantes.

Not yet, anyway.

He sighed, and leaned forward, elbows braced on the bar top. “I’m not saying what we’ve done so far iswrong. We’ve learned a lot about what – and who – we’re dealing with. I was ready to agree, at first, that this was a very big snake to try and cut the head off, and that we were better off working our way up from the bottom, but I’m not sure that’s right anymore.”

Walsh snorted. “Typical. You’ve got the perfect idea after we’re already neck-deep in the shit.”

“No, not perfect. This isn’t my area of expertise. I go where I’m told to go, and kill who I’m told to kill, and that’s it, the end. I don’t have to worry about collateral damage. You,” he pointed at Walsh, “have always been the one with the balance sheets, making sure everything comes out right. The perfect idea, if it exists, is part balancing act, part baby steps, part persuasion, part precision cuts.” He snipped his first two fingers together in demonstration. “It needs a deft touch on all fronts.”

Walsh sent him a weary look. “Lovely sales pitch. But where are you going with this?”

“When Luis showed up in Knoxville, he tried to recruit Ian over to his cause – poorly, granted, but you can’t tell me that wunderkind came up with the idea all on his own. He buggered it all up, yeah, but that was supposed to be an olive branch, I’m guessing. And where is Ian now?”

Mercy braced his hands wide on the bar and let out a small, humorless chuckle. “You want Ian to start cozying up to Waverly and his bunch?”

Fox nodded. “I think we should go up there, too.” He gestured between himself, Reese, and Tenny. “Keep an eye on the girls. Get away from” – Marshall fucking Hunter – “this mess down here. If we’ve been made locally, then we’ve lost our advantage.”

Mercy nodded. “Makes sense.”

Even Walsh looked to be in grudging agreement. “We’ll see what Ghost says.”

“Go call him,” Fox urged. “I want to be on the road by dawn.”

~*~

“Tenny,” Mercy called, when they were more or less safe back at the clubhouse. “Hang back a sec, would ya?”

He looked around first, as if to ensure Mercy hadn’t called the wrong name.

Reese hesitated, a few steps behind him. Finally, Tenny gave him a nod, and Reese followed the others inside.

Mercy climbed up on top of his favorite picnic table and patted the space beside him in invitation.

Tenny followed a few beats later, wary as a cat; he kept a good foot of space between them.

Mercy withheld a grin and shook out a smoke instead. He tilted the pack in offering, and Tenny’s shoulders dropped a fraction as he accepted one, and then the lighter.

They smoked in silence a few moments, the air full of late summer night sounds: crickets, tree frogs, the occasional deep-bellied croak of a bullfrog down on the water.

Ava had always said he was a natural storyteller, that he could ease his way nice and gentle into a topic with a swamp anecdote, or a bit of his daddy’s wisdom. He didn’t think of it as a skill, per se, but simply the product of his upbringing. If the South moved slow, New Orleans moved slower, and no one grew up hunting gators and shooting snakes out of the water without learning that the world was an immovable, inexorable boulder rolling along; the only way to survive was to adapt. You got violent when you needed to, and stepped aside when that was the best option.Patience, Daddy had always said.This life is all about waiting for the right moment.

He’d spoken to Tenny before, sure, but always as a part of a group. They’d never had a tête-à-tête. This felt like the right moment; like the stakes were higher for the boy than they’d ever been, and that instead of tactics and maps and barked orders he needed a little conversational visit to the bayou.

“Was there something you wanted to say?” Tenny asked, before Mercy could do any sort of storytelling or easing-in. “Or are you afraid to sit out here alone?”

Mercy snorted. “Do I look scared to you?”

Tenny’s jacket and cut rustled as he shrugged. His next exhale was a forceful jet of gray smoke: a little stress tell. “Isn’t everyone afraid of something? That sounds like the sort of trite bollocks everyone keeps telling me around here.”

“Trite doesn’t mean untrue. For what it’s worth, I was gonna tell you a badass story about an alligator.”

“Awhat?”

---