Page 128 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

“Whaddya say we go find Daddy?”

He nodded again.

Ava stood, and moved his hand to her belt. “Hold on to me, baby.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She lifted her rifle, and its scope, back to her face, and searched the forest in all its shades of phosphorescent green. No sign of Boyle, but she would find him, and she would kill him.

“Let’s go.”

They went, and as they did so, she thought she heard the far-off, mournful notes of dogs howling.

~*~

Maggie was manning the radio in the boat. Colin was driving. They’d dispatched the men left alive in the boat whose driver had been decapitated, taken down the cable that had done it, then headed downstream to pick up Toly.

Now, they neared the mouth of the canal that fed into the massive rookery lake – at least according to Colin – and they could hear gunshots.

“Shit,” Colin muttered. “Who’s doing that?”

Maggie started to answer, and the radio crackled in her hand. A voice came through, wholly unexpected, and she nearly dropped the radio in surprise.“Colin? Devin? Toly? Any of you guys there?”

“Holy shit!” Maggie swore, and then pressed the transmit button. “Tango?! Is that you?”

“Hi, Mags. Yes, ma’am, it’s me – well, it’s us.”

He was interrupted by a volley of gunshots in stereo: ahead of them, in the near distance, and much closer on Tango’s end.

“Is that you guys shooting?” she asked, heart still leaping afterus. How many of them constitutedus? Was Ghost with them? Aidan?

“Yeah,”he responded.“We’ve got Fallon pinned down in a boat.”

Though her thoughts raced, she had no idea what to make of their presence here, now. “How…” she started, and was cut off by another volley of shots.

Colin slowed the boat, and leaned over to shout into the radio: “How the fuck are youhere?”

When Tango came back on, he said,“Long story – shit, yeah.” That sounded meant for someone in the boat with him.“Where’s Boyle?”

“He got away on foot.”

“Ah. Okay. Good thing we brought the dogs.”

~*~

Harlan swatted a branch out of the way, only to be slapped in the face by another. “Fuck! Fucking – fuckall of this!” he hissed under his breath.

He had his gun, but he didn’t have a light, and save for the moments when the canopy of interlaced tree limbs thinned, hecouldn’t see well enough to know which way he was going, much less see well enough to shoot someone.

He couldn’t believehehadn’tbeen shot.

That bitch Ava Lécuyer. That stupidcunt. If he ever got a clear shot at her…Or, better yet, got his hands on her–

His heel skidded on a slick patch, and then kept skidding. His boot splashed down into a puddle, or a bog, or a whateverthefuck that plunged him up to his knee in muck and brackish water. He cursed, and pinwheeled his arms, but couldn’t rebalance, and went down face-first onto the swamp floor for the second time tonight.

For one flashfire moment, he thought about staying down. Just…drowning. Getting it all over with. Failure tasted like mud, and it burned in his large muscle groups like lactic acid, and it cramped his gut like food poisoning. That’s what he’d done: he’d failed.

It was too huge and nauseating a concept to wrap his head all the way around at the moment. To think that he’d spent so many years, more than half of his life, chasing this one goal…no. He hadn’t failed yet.

---