Page 203 of The Wild Charge

Tenny zipped his jacket and turned away. “Not this time.”

He made it two steps before a hand snatched him back by the hood. He allowed himself to be reeled around, not wanting to resist and risk undoing any of the physical progress Reese had made. He braced himself for a strike, mind flashing back to New York, that night he’d hit Devin, and then tried to hit Reese, when he’d approached Tenny’s violent mood with gentleness. He himself felt tired, drained; he didn’t want to fight, but he tensed up in anticipation of receiving a punch.

But Reese, as ever, surprised him. He still gripped Tenny’s hood, but his expression was no longer angry; it was cracked wide open, flooded with naked fear and doubt. It was worse than anger, worse than hate: the knowledge that he’dhurtthis person he loved so much.

Reese didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.

Tenny took a step back, and after a hesitation, Reese turned loose of him. “I’ll be back,” he said, and turned away, heart beating too fast.

Maybe this was it, he thought, as he ghosted down the stairs, through the open barn doors and into the dark of night. Maybe this was the last chance he’d have to push Reese away before he packed his things and left. A person could only wait for so long, after all. Could only tolerate him for short periods.

He'd devolved to silently berating himself by the time he was halfway down the run between the first and second paddocks, beam of his flashlight glinting off dew. The gate, right; he was supposed to be looking for the gate.

The run T’d into the gallop track that ran the perimeter of the property, sealed off with a gate that was latched with a simple double-ended snap, and not a padlock. He climbed over the fence, then, and entered the deeper shadows of the woods that bordered the pastureland. Something was startled, and when scuttling through the underbrush. He paused, and scanned the area with his light, but found only ferns and poison ivy.

Behind the bamboo, Walsh had said.We tried to disguise it.

He ducked under a low limb, and the light reflected yellow off the bamboo canes…and failed to delve down into the deep trench in front of them. A closer inspection revealed that earthen steps had been cut into the front and back wall of the trench; he went down until the edge rose above his head, and back up again; through the bamboo, and finally arrived at a metal gate secured with a heavy padlock. The top rail, he noted, when he thought of climbing it rather than bothering with the key, was wrapped in barbed wire. Jesus.

On the other side, gently rolling pastures gleamed silver in the moonlight, waist-high grass hissing and rippling in the breeze. An owl called, low and ghostly:who-cooks-for-you?

This, then, was the famed cattle property. The place where the club buried its sins. Tenny had never been before.

In the distance, light shone through the wide gaps in the boards of an old tumbledown barn. That was the direction he walked, grass tangling round his ankles, dew soaking through his jeans.

When he arrived, finally, he found a black club van backed up to the yawning mouth where barn doors had once stood. Inside, amidst the glow of a half-dozen battery-powered lanterns, three men waited for him: Fox, Mercy, and Michael.

Tenny halted, mind blanking, because he hadn’t the foggiest what any of this meant. “What sort of surprise?” he asked in a flat voice.

Mercy grinned. He went to the back of the van, opened the doors; reached in, and dragged out…a person. One he unceremoniously tossed to the dirt floor of the barn. A person who cursed, and groaned, and rolled over, hands bound, to reveal himself as Luis Cantrell.

“I had a thought the other day,” Mercy said, as he walked to the passenger door.

Tenny looked at Fox and received only a flat stare, and no help whatsoever.

“About that look on your face at the airport when we got home,” Mercy continued. A door slammed, and he reappeared carrying a large fishing tacklebox. “I’m sure a ‘professional,’” he rolled his eyes and made air quotes with his free hand, “would have a word for it. Probably a diagnosis and a fistful of pills to go along with it. But I’d know that look anywhere: you’ve got FOMO.”

Tenny stared at him. “FOMO?”

“Yeah, Fear Of–”

“I know what itmeans,” Tenny snapped. “But why the bloody hell are you saying it?”

Mercy smiled again, but this grin was different; it left something dark flashing in his eyes. For a moment, he didn’t look like a man at all, but something ancient and horrid that had crept in from the forest, wearing a man’s skin.

“I grew up in New Orleans,” Mercy said, and his voice shifted into something broad and colorful; gained a depth and a weight. A storytelling voice. “Outside of it, out in the bayou. Just Daddy, and Gram, and me. Homeschooled. Bit of a nerd, really. Daddy had a license from the state to hunt gators, and that was how we made our money. Daddy knew Bob, with the Dogs down there, and eventually I joined up so I could make us a little more money. So Daddy didn’t have to work so hard as he got older.

“My mama, though…she was a whore. Literally. We just wanted to be left alone, out in the swamp, to live our quiet life. But she…” He shook his head, still grinning, but all wrong, his jaw tight.

A prickling awareness moved up the back of Tenny’s neck. If this story didn’t end with Mercy killing his own mother, he could tell that he wished he had.

“I was out, doing club shit. And while I was gone, my mama sent her boyfriend out to our place. Him and his friends. When I got back…Daddy was dead. Gram was, too, but they’d…” His composure didn’t slip, but he couldn’t seem to make himself give voice to what they’d done to his grandmother.

“Oliver Landau,” Mercy went on. “That was his name. I cut him to ribbons before I used a twelve-gauge to paint our old kitchen cabinets with the inside of his head.”

Tenny could see it in crystalline detail. Knew exactly what a head looked like when it exploded that way.

“Fast-forward a little bit, and Ava’s twenty-two, and there’s these fuckers messing with her. Trying to come after the club through her. There’s still some of their blood down in the cracks in the concrete at the bike shop.”

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