Page 112 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

She sighed, and climbed out of the Jeep. Her boots landed in squishy mud that squelched unappealingly underfoot. “Are you sure this is gonna hold?” she asked, and clicked on her flashlight to find a hillock of moss that proved to be a better place to stand. She climbed up onto it and looked down at the water’s edge, where Colin was stripping out of his shirt.

He traded it for the hook from Devin, and, barefoot, dark mud squishing up between his toes in the glare of the headlights, he stepped down into the canal. “Yeah. If the boat’s going fast enough, it won’t matter. But we’ll chock the tires to be safe.”

She nodded, and stepped back into the mud to go around to the back and fetch them.

~*~

Toly capped the generator, and then stashed the empty diesel can in the back of the Rover. It had taken more than an hour to drive to this remote location, mostly because the road was nothing more than two ruts in the underbrush, and he’d had to climb out twice to hack through a screen of poison ivy; it was the first time he’d ever used a machete for its true, intended purpose. Vines, he’d learned, were more difficult to slash than flesh.

He'd made it, finally, though, the old, tumbledown stone chimney gleaming the color of bone in the headlights, and he’d gassed up all four generators: two on the near side of the canal, two on the far. Those he’d reached with the aid of an inflatable raft and paddles, the journey too short to trigger his motion sickness, but his belly squirming each time he looked down at the taut lines that plunged from the tree tops to the unbroken surface of the water. That was four monsters down there for certain, and maybe more swimming around free. Could they see him above them, despite the darkness of the night sky? Would they come up and take a chomp out of his raft?

“They’re not hippos,” he muttered to himself, scrambled out of the raft, and went to gas the far side generators.

He cranked them, and crossed back over. He’d asked Mercy before if the fuel would hold, and he’d nodded, as self-assured and calm as he’d been about every aspect of his plan – which to Toly sounded like something out of an Indiana Jonesmovie, impossible and improbable. “Nah, it’ll hold. It doesn’t take much to keep ‘em running. But when you cut the hydraulics on, and they start fighting all that weight, it’ll burn fast.”

City boy that he was, he found comfort in the steady diesel chug of the generators. Devin had rigged up all the wiring, cords wound up the trees and through the canopy branches that spanned the canal; he’d tested the winches, all four of them, mounted to piled-up railroad ties leftover from the house-that-never-was off to his left. He’d assured Toly they would work, and Toly had no choice now but to trust him, and to wait.

~*~

Where are we going?It was the thing Remy wanted so terribly to ask. But he knew no one would tell him, and he wasn’t sure he could be heard over the roar of the motors anyway. He’d slipped down against the bench, hair flattened and wind-scraped by the force of their speed. It wascold, going this fast, and he tugged the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, only for the wind to blow it back again.

Maybe Tenny was a mind reader, because he sat up straight and shouted, “Where are we meeting them?”

Boyle hesitated to answer so long that Remy thought he hadn’t heard; but, finally, he turned, and frowned at Tenny. “There’s a private dock up ahead.”

Fallon, bent over his phone, the screen highlighting the greasy sheen of sweat on his face, lifted his head and shouted, “That means they have road access! And they’ve had hours to put people into place!”

“I’ve already got men in place!” Boyle shouted back, and smiled, fleetingly, before that hard, concentrated look of frightened-dog tension overtook his face again.

So long as Boyle was afraid, Remy thought that he could be brave.

~*~

From her perch in the crotch of a massive, unusually squat cypress at the water’s edge, Ava heard the swish and crackle of approaching footsteps. A large body moving through the underbrush, much larger than a nutria, or a fox, or even most men.

She lowered her night vision binoculars and glanced down at the base of the tree just as Colin stepped out from behind a screen of yucca spikes and mounted the knees of the tree roots so he stood just below her.

“You doing okay?” he called up to her, nothing more than a silhouette and a wedge of moonglow face in the darkness.

“Yeah.” Except for the way adrenaline was making herteethvibrate. “Everyone in place?”

“Yeah. We’re good to go. Just waiting on word from your man.”

She nodded, though he doubtless couldn’t see her up amidst the branches.

He was quiet a beat, then: “Ava?”

She bit back a sigh. She wasn’t angry with Colin, wasn’t even annoyed, but the tension cycling through her, the readiness, the need for action, precluded patience, especially given whatever Colin was about to say wasn’t anything she’d take to heart. “Are you going to ask me to stay in this tree and not go running off to do something dangerous?”

He was quiet another beat. “Probably a waste of breath, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Right, well.” He gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug.I tried. “I don’t wanna have to tell Felix I let you get killed.”

“Don’t worry: you didn’t let me do anything. If I get killed, it’ll be my fault, and he’ll know it.”

He chuckled. “Don’t bet on that.”

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