Page 59 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Hames winced. “I don’t know.”

An image flashed in Ghost’s mind, of Walsh in his own garage, face a mask of cold fury, hand vicious on the knife when he killed the man who’d tripped his driveway alarm. It had been a stunning moment, witnessing the fray of Walsh’s notorious calm. Seeing him lash out from a composure that had, somewhere along the way, fractured, and fractured badly.

Ghost stepped back, and let the knife hand fall to his side. He turned to Mike, and lifted his brows expectantly. “You know what I’m after.” He tilted his head toward Hames. “Get it for me.”

Mike gave him a bemused look, then shrugged, and took Ghost’s place in front of Hames – whose teeth had begun to chatter.

“I told you,” he said to Mike, braver than he’d been with Ghost, “I don’t know where he is.”

“Well, I figure he didn’t outright tell you, sure. So you can’t say where he isdefinitively. But we both know he went to New Orleans, and we both know that he took that boy with him.

“Now.” Mike squatted down with a wince, wobbled, and might have fallen over on his ass if he hadn’t gripped Hames’s knees for support. “I think we both know how you meant for this to go tonight, but, obviously, that’s not gonna happen now. You’re the one over a barrel now, Director, and I might be old and tired, and not as fit for duty as I used to be, but this young man here” – he gestured over his shoulder to Fox with one shaking hand – “isn’t dying of cancer, and he’s looking for that little boy, too. I don’t think I need to explain to you how this conversation plays out if you don’t cooperate, do I?” The last he said almost gently, and accompanied it with a pat to Hames’s knee.

Ghost was reminded of Mercy. Of his voice when he interrogated someone, that play of silken and down home friendly. His conversational, warm tone just before he plied someone’s teeth from their skulls.

Hames panted a moment, looking at Mike, at Ghost, at Fox. Then he pressed his lips tight together and shook his head.

Fox withdrew his own knife, stepped forward, and in one smooth movement, gripped Hames’s ear and brought the knife to bear just beneath the lobe. Blood blossomed, crimson-black beneath the shed’s dangling bare bulb, and Ghost didn’t think Fox was halfway through the flesh before Hames screamed.

“Wait, wait, wait!” he cried, high and shrill on the tail end of his initial shriek. “Please!”

“That’s alright.” Mike patted his knees again. “It doesn’t have to be painful.”

Fox twisted a glance over his shoulder, and at Ghost’s nod, took a step back, blue glove splashed with blood.

Hames wheezed and whined another moment. When he shook his head, droplets of blood scattered across the leg of his pants, his sleeve, the floor. Ghost made a mental note to mop it up with something before they left.

“It’s not me,” Hames said. He tilted his head as the blood began to trail down his jaw, his neck, like he was trying to press the damaged ear into his shoulder, but couldn’t reach. “It’s not – you don’t understand – this is bigger than me.” His gaze fixed on Ghost, finally, frantic,begging. “I was charged with getting rid of the Lean Dogs. Boyle’s just the trigger man, and he's…fuck, he’sinsane.” His face flooded with color, dark fury and contempt.

“Which is why you used him in the first place, right?” Ghost said.

“Same with Fallon,” Fox said, and Ghost noted that he was using a flat, generic American accent. Should he be disguising his own voice? What did it matter, at this point? Hames wasn’t walking out of this shed when they were done. “Fallon’s a pedo, and Boyle’s a hothead with blood on his hands. You chose them because you have leverage over them.”

Mike said, “Who has leverage over you?”

Hames sat up straight, leaned back as far as he could in his chair, and clamped his lips shut.

“You’re taped to a chair, and you’re still protecting them?”

Hames worked his jaw back and forth, jowls quivering with tension. “I have a family.”

“And you think I won’t exploit them?”

Hames studied him a moment. “No, I don’t think you will.”

“You want to ask your friend Sawyer about that?”

Hames blinked, startled, but recovered fast, face clamping down again. “If you killed her, then I know you’ll kill me. You’ve got me here now, so you don’t need my family for leverage.”

“Christ,” Ghost muttered. “That’s it, then? You don’t care if he carves you up, one piece at a time?”

“You’re a known entity,” Hames shot back. He sneered. “The do-good bikers.”

Ghost looked to Fox, who stepped forward, knife raised again, and neatly took the man’s right ear off. Fox’s expression never changed, which meant he wasn’t overly bothered by what he’d done – but unlike Mercy, he hadn’t gotten a thrill out of it.

Hames screamed. Ghost wondered, back of his neck crawling, if anyone was in earshot. There wasn’t a house or any sort of building within view, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were alone here.

He checked the windows, peering past the lacework of spiderwebs out at the darkness of night, full black now, moonless. Some ambient glow from the glitchy light pole out at the street flickered and gleamed on the parts of the old gas tanks not patched with rust. On the pipes, and the wheels of the on/off valves. It looked like the set of a zombie movie, a world abandoned by mankind; but it felt like they were being watched.

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