Page 136 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

This, he imagined, was what it looked like when a cop got shot, only the white walls were full of cuts, rather than badges.

The whole Knoxville chapter was there, plus a good many NOLA guys. Every head turned his direction, and he could read none of their gazes. No one gasped. No one rushed toward him. No one reacted with an ounce of surprise.

He’d never felt smaller in his life.

The doors started to shut, and Aidan reached out a hand to stop them. As they stepped off, a man in a sheriff’s uniform stepped forward, overweight and friendly-faced.

He stuck out a hand. “Dale Dandridge. You must be the Ghost I keep hearing about.” He smiled.

Slowly, Ghost accepted the shake. “Are you the one I have to thank for keeping the cops away from my down boys?”

Dale retracted his hand so he could hitch up his gun belt. “Less keeping them away, more, we’re the officers here to investigate these shootings.” He winked.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Aidan pressed on, and again, Ghost followed – single-file, because the walls were lined either side with Dogs, and they couldn’t walk abreast. Gazes followed him, but still, no one spoke.

In truth, he would have preferred shouting. This silence made him feel like he was marching toward a firing squad.

The door to room 207 stood open, and voices spilled out of it, welcome contrast to the quiet in the hall.

The two beds stood against the lefthand wall, the privacy drape between them pushed all the way back. Tenny was in the far one, leg heavily-bandaged and elevated on a pillow, hair greasy and sticking up. He was pale, but the head of his bed was elevated, and he was talking animatedly with Devin, who stood between the beds, looking back and forth between them as the conversation flowed. Reese was passed out across three pushed-together plastic chairs on the bed’s far side, snugged up close, one hand clutched loosely in the blanket at Tenny’s hip.

Mercy was in the near bed, arms cartoonishly bulked up with white bandages from shoulder to elbow. His face was a mess of scratches, bruises scuffed over each cheekbone. Hair loose and even greasier than Tenny’s.

But he was smiling at whatever Devin was saying, and so was Ava, chair pulled up at his side, bent forward with her elbows resting on the bed.

Remy lay curled up across Mercy’s legs, sleeping like a sacked-out puppy.

Everyone out in the hallway might hate his guts forever, but he wouldn’t change a thing he’d done if it led to this moment here. To a family made whole again.

The tight ball of dread in his chest unraveled, and he took his first deep, relieved breath in more than a week.

“Oh.” It spiked again, briefly, a quick rewinding, at the sound of Maggie’s voice. He hadn’t spoken to her since he’d learned that she and Ava hadsnuck off their flightandgone running to New Orleans.He hadn’t noticed her when he first stepped in the room, where she’d stood against the wall across from the beds. He’d thought, days ago, that he was angry with her, but really, he’d just been terrified. He wondered, now, if she was angry with him, but when he turned to her, and saw her shove away from the wall, and rush toward him, he knew she wasn’t, and that she’d been terrified, too. “Baby. You’re here.”

He caught her halfway across the room, and hauled her into his chest, one arm around her waist, his other hand buried in the thick, currently-damp-and-greasy waves of her hair. She didn’t so much press as slam her face into his throat, and it startled a laugh out of him. “Yeah, I’m here. You give yourself a concussion?”

“No.” She sniffed, quiet and muffled against the collar of his shirt. “After thirty years of exposure to you, I’ve developed a thick skull. We match, now.”

He snorted, and pressed a kiss to her temple that lingered.

“Well, if it isn’t the boss man himself,” Devin proclaimed, “back from the grave.”

“I was never in the grave, asshole, but thanks for sounding cheerful about it.”

“Aw, boss.” Mercy’s voice was a little scratchy, the good ol’ post-sedation dry-throat that Ghost knew all too well, but his smile was his own, if tired. “You missed all the fun.”

“You look like you had too much fun.” He glanced over at Ava, and was met by a gaze that, while content, was as steady and eerily-composed as it had been the night he helped her burythe man she’d shot on her own doorstep. Back to Mercy, he said, “What the hell happened?”

Maggie pulled back from him. “Hold on.” And went to shut the door.

Mercy’s smile dimmed. “It’s a long story.”

“Where else have I got to be?”

He sighed, and nodded. And then, with Devin and Tenny filling in the parts he hadn’t witnessed firsthand, he told it.

At some point, someone came in, and a cup of shitty hospital coffee was pressed into his hand. Someone else, probably Maggie, pushed the edge of a chair against the back of his knees, and he sat. Sipped his coffee.

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