Page 46 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Mercy thought he knew where this was heading.

“I thought…” He pressed his lips together, and his whole mouth twitched sideways in clear frustration.

The tension in Mercy’s jaw flared, and he smiled through it. A distant, pushed-back part of his mind loathed the way he could paste a smile over situations like this. The way he was able to be rational, and calm, and not be foaming at the mouth, tearing apart the city to find Remy. But it was a trait that had served him well – essentially, even – so he was loath to snuff it out.

“You thought there’d be a lot more shooting and kid-rescuing and a lot less playing around in the swamp, huh?”

Gray’s gaze dropped, and skated out toward the water again. “I’ve never worked a job like this before,” he said, quietly, but Mercy understood the wealth of things unsaid. The unconfessed doubt in his ability to work a missing child situation. His confusion over Mercy’s seeming calm in the face of it. All of them out in the swamp, nowhere near Boyle, or Remy.

Gray shrugged.

Mercy laid a hand on his shoulder, expecting tension to steal through the kid, but if anything, Gray sagged and then arched into the touch. Progress! It was nice to be glad of something small like this amidst the rapid unraveling of his life.

“If the past few months have taught me anything,” Mercy said, “it’s that Boyle isn’t bound by the law of the land, and that he is deeply, deeply fucked up about me, for reasons I still don’t understand. I’m not going to make the mistake of making the obvious move. Boyle thinks he’s clever, but I know he’s not as clever as me – and there’s no way he understands the swamp the way I do. I have to settle this with him on my terms. In my own backyard. You understand?”

Slowly, Gray nodded. “Yeah.” Then he went startlingly still a moment, head cocked.

That was when Mercy heard it: the drone of an approaching boat motor.

Mercy slipped his half-smoked cigarette into the Coke can, stood, and pulled his gun. To Gray, he said, “Go through the house, tell them to get ready, then go out back, and find the path–”

“That loops back along to the east,” Gray finished. “Watch your six?”

“Yeah. Wait for my signal.”

Gray nodded, and loped across the porch and inside. Mercy heard low murmurs, and then all sound inside ceased.

As the engine’s purr drew closer and closer, he had no doubts about the crew behind him, and their ability to back him up.

He had plenty of doubts about who might be in the boat drawing closer, closer, closer.

He heard when they rounded the last corner and the throttle opened up on the straightaway toward the cabin. Thiswas no tentative exploration: whoever was manning the wheel knew their destination, and wasn’t going to be shy about it.

Gun in-hand, Mercy walked across the yard and to the dock, and then down it, boots clomp-clomping over the boards. By the time he reached the end of it, he could see the boat’s spotlights panning out across the water, turning its surface murky green, alighting on duckweed and sleeping dragonflies that flitted unhappily into the air. Frogs plopped into the water.

He closed his eyes a moment, and listened. American-made engine. Evinrude, if he had to guess. The hiss of the water displacement betrayed a boat similar in size to the one Bob had loaned them: a wave-runner with an outsized motor that could make it fly in open water, with room for plenty of people and cargo.

Boyle?

Police?

He opened his eyes, and in the harsh glare of the spotlights, he saw a white prow, and the white froth of the boat’s wake.

He lifted his gun.

The engine slowed, from a roar to a held-back rumble. A sharp, two-blast whistle pierced the air, and a British-accented voice called out, “If my own father shoots me, I’ll haunt him the rest of his short, miserable life.”

Mercy was beaming before he realized it. He holstered his gun, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Hey, asshole! You get lost in the swamp?”

The boat drew closer – close enough for him to make out Tenny’s lean silhouette up near the prow, arm lifted in greeting. He wasn’t working the wheel – a much larger, more swamp-savy man had hold of it.

“Colin?” Mercy called, dumbfounded.

Tenny called back, “Call off the dogs, big man, and we’ll weigh anchor, or whatever the fuck you call it.”

Mercy laughed again – it was relief, more than joy, he knew; the crushing, overwhelming slap of knowing he had more backup – and turned toward the dark tangle of forest behind him. “Down, boys! It’s friends,” he called.

He had shit-talked Colin for so long, had even felt contemptuous of him for so many years, from their youth into that tenuous period of adulthood once he learned the truth of their parentage, that he forgot, sometimes, that he was a competent boatman. He steered the boat in to the dock in a wide, graceful sweep, reversing at the right moment so he didn’t hit the dock, and Reese stepped up to toss Mercy the rope so he could tie them off.

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