Page 2 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

“Yeah. Okay.” He pushed his chair back, metal legs screeching over the brick.

“Wait.” She lunged halfway across the table and slapped her hand down onto it, nearly overturning the second half of his coffee. “Alex, wait, listen to me,” she hissed, urgently.

He waited, hovering half out of his chair, hands gripping tight to its arms.

Her eyes were huge, her jaw tense. Slowly, quietly, she said, “You need. To go. To thelocal police.” Her brows lifted for emphasis.

An image flashed into his mind as though thrown there: Sergeant Dale Dandridge, hitching his gun belt higher on his thick waist, face flushed from walking, his gaze shifty as they stood on the dock outside The Bait Shop.

“Shit,” he murmured.

“Yeah.” Duet nodded. “Good luck.”

~*~

Ava and Tenny arrived a solid fifteen minutes before Alex was scheduled to meet his FBI contact so they’d have a chance to scope out the patio, and the street, and take note of anything suspicious before the supposedly trustworthy feds (what a fucking oxymoron) arrived. Their waitress thought they were a couple, and Tenny rolled with it, putting on a Southern drawl, making cow eyes across the table at Ava and spinning some unnecessary tale about them being on a second honeymoon.

(It was actually hilarious, but Ava was too preoccupied to play along.)

She searched every face for a sign of malice; every reach for a coffee cup for some hidden signal being sent. And then the feds arrived, and her attention laser-focused on them.

The man was closer to fifty than forty, heavyset, unremarkable in a way thatscreamedlaw enforcement.

The woman could have been Jenny Snow-O’Donnell’s sister.

“Of course,” Ava muttered under her breath as she watched them settle into a table. “Just ofcourse.”

“What?” Tenny said around a mouthful of beignet.

“Her.” She tilted her head toward the table. “She looks like Colin’s wife.”

He glanced over, and then smirked.

“She’s probably gonna put all of us in cuffs, and all because Remy Lécuyer’s sons can’t say no to a leggy blonde.”

Tenny said, “Is this you admitting to dying your hair?”

She shot him the bird across the table and he laughed into his coffee.

“Hisstupidsons,” she amended, and he nodded alongof course, of course.

Then Alex showed up, and she felt the quietest, weakest pang of sympathy for him. He looked dead on his feet, boots braced wide apart, wavering side-to-side as he arrived at the feds’ table and greeted them. He was tired – they were all tired – but worse than that, he wasn’t used to doing what he’d done last night. He’d almost shot a cop, and while the rest of them wouldn’t have hesitated to if it had been absolutely necessary, Alex was doubtless going through an identity crisis. A reevaluation of his own moral code.

She felt sorry for him, even if she couldn’t sympathize directly.

(Not true, an unhelpful voice piped up in the back of her mind; it sounded like her own voice, like her real one, when she wasn’t moored against the black tide of desperation. She’d questioned herself in college. Had changed her hair, and her wardrobe, and slept with a tennis-playing prep. A regret to mull over later.)

They were sitting too far away to hear what Alex said to the agents, but she saw him put the phone down and knew he was showing them the photo of Remy. The woman’s brows knitted as she looked at it, and her expression was one of what Ava gauged to be professional concern when she glanced back up at Alex.

“They’re not going to help,” Tenny said, and made a happy sound when his second plate of beignets arrived. “Thank you kindly,” he told the waitress.

“I know,” Ava said, in response to his first comment, and then frowned across the table at him. “What the hell are you doing? How many of those are you gonna eat?”

“I’m carb loading.” He stuffed the last bite into his mouth, too big, one cheek bulged out like a baseball player with a huge wad of chaw. Dusted powdered sugar off his fingers and lifted his brows as if in challenge. “I believe energy is going to be the order of the day.” But it came out muffled and soggy and Ava wrinkled her nose and turned away.

Over at the other table, Alex was poised to get up, and the blonde was leaning across the table, arm stretched across it, beseeching. From this angle, the tableau presented as one of two lovers, the man leaving, the woman begging him to stay. In her current state, Ava found herself disgusted by its melodrama.

She sipped at her water and wished it was coffee instead.

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