Page 99 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

His next realization was that a silhouette was stepping forward to fill the threshold before him, slender and dark against the light that spilled through the front door.

Harlan took aim.

And the unmistakeable cold, round kiss of a gun barrel touched the back of his neck.

“Be a good boy and put your weapon down, son,” a smoke-roughened, British-accented voice said from behind him. It was a pleasant voice; the tone held a smile.

One in front, one behind. Who knew how many more outside.

He swallowed with difficulty. “What happened to the men stationed outside?”

“Dead,” the British man holding the gun on his neck said. “Whatever you were paying them, it was too much.”

Harlan wracked his brain, trying to put a name to the voice. Kingston Walsh, the vice president, was British, but he’d spoken to him personally, and Walsh spoke in a cold, flat voice younger and cleaner than this one.

It didn’t matter, really. The Dogs had a British chapter. This could be any one of them.

“The gun,” the man prompted.

Harlan was a good shot, but not good enough to survive this little trap. He lowered the gun to his side, and when the barrel at his neck pressed harder, he dropped it to the floor.

“Good,” the man said, approvingly. “Now walk over there – mind the bodies, no sense desecrating the recently dead, eh? – and lean up against that cabinet. There you are, good boy.”

Harlan gripped the grimy counter edge until his knuckles cracked, leaned back against it, and watched the two men close in on him, converging so they stood between the sprawled bodies, three short paces away.

The one who’d spoken was of medium height, gray-haired, face lined with age and weathered with sun, but his eyes were a sharp, clear blue, and his build was wiry and athletic. His stance, most notably, was sure and professional: this was a man who knew how to move and move well when he needed to.

The six dead men were proof of that.

The second was much younger, thinner, taller, ash-blond and eerily dead-faced, eyes cold as mountain water.

Both were vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t name them.

“Right, then,” the Brit said, and gestured to the boy. “Bind his hands.”

“Nah, you don’t need to do that,” a third voice called from the front door.

Felix.

A jolt moved through Harlan, like that time he’d accidentally grabbed an electric fence. A cessation of all feeling, and then painful spikes of it down all his limbs. The sensation of having been struck in the back of the head, and a hard, hitching breath that didn’t provide enough oxygen.

“He’s not gonna jump me,” Felix continued, the floorboards creaking beneath his weight as he approached, and then he finally stepped into view. “He knows that wouldn’t end well for him.”

The man who moved to stand between the two gunmen wasn’t a version of Felix Harlan had ever come face to face with. Not kid-Felix in the clearing; not teenage-Felix standing to his new, full, towering height and intimidating his friends when they went too far; not friendly, newly-patched-Felix, in his uncreased cut, with his encouraging shoulder squeeze. He wasn’t even the grieving, shithead-Felix who’d lashed out at Harlan the night he abandoned the club, though that version, long-reviled, was Harlan’s driving force today.

Nor was it the adult-Felix he’d met, and questioned, and imprisoned in Knoxville just a few months ago. That version of Felix had given Harlan that same electric shock sensation, too, but in a different way. He’d been older, yes, somehow bigger, heavier, grown into himself in full adulthood, his physical presence truly terrifying…but tempered. By contentment. By a stable family life. He’d been the silverback, the alpha, the malelion of a pride, assured of his strength, and of his support, in no hurry to rise to any of Harlan’s bait. He’d been cocky in a way Harlan didn’t remember, and it had set Harlan’s teeth on edge.

How dare he? How dare some lowlife, murdering scum of the earth get to behappy? Get to be sosatisfied?

And worst of all…the thing that made Harlan want to scream…was that he hadn’t remembered him. Wantabi = wannabe, a clear message.Remember me? Remember the little wannabe you treated like shit? Look at me now, bitch. How do you like menow?

He’d walked into the interrogation room for the first time, nauseous with anticipation, skin prickling with giddy sweat. And then Felix had lifted his head, and looked at him, and looked right through him, and Harlan had realized with an ugly lurch that Felix didn’t remember him at all.

But the man standing before him now wasn’t that Felix, nor any of the others. This man had stripped off every name but one.

Mercy.

This, Harlan realized, arms bared in a tank top, thick and strong with muscle, inked with tattoos, his hair tied back tight at the nape of his neck, hems of his jeans wet with water, guns and knives hanging off his belt, was the creature that Oliver Landau and Dee Lécuyer had spawned one hot summer in New Orleans. A creature born of rage, and pain, and grief, and then honed, over the years, to an instrument of the Lean Dogs Motorcycle Club capable of dealing rage, pain, and grief back out into the world at twice the measure.

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