Page 37 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Fox pulled out a digital audio recorder, clicked it on, and set it on the table, just out of her reach. Folded his arms. “Tell us about Abacus. About how you like to buy and sell young women.”

She stared at him a moment, and then her lashes flickered, and her eyes welled, and her lip trembled. She broke, and Ghost tipped a mental hat to Fox’s judgement call on approaching her first.

Somehow, over the years, up to his eyeballs in enough crises and mundane worries alike to drink and smoke and stress himself into the hospital, he’d managed to amass the sort of talent and loyalty in a crew that could more than likely topple a small country, if they set their minds to it. The FBI had all their tech and their government money, but Ghost had the smartest, savviest killers in the country under his roof.

How many of those killers, he wondered, his own son included, would trust him once they learned that he’d lied to them?

Eleven

Two blocks from Sun House, Ava and Tenny slowed, and even held hands, so they looked like a couple out for a stroll, rather than fugitives. Tenny was convinced the security thugs wouldn’t pursue them in broad daylight, and Ava agreed. They were walking beneath the cool shade of a no-doubt hundred-year-old live oak dressed in moss like Christmas tinsel, when Tenny’s phone chirped in his pocket.

“Hi, love,” he answered, and Ava looked down at their joined hands, and sighed.

“Convincing,” she muttered, and he swung her arm back and forth in a petulant, punishing way that made her snort, and him squint one eye and stick his tongue out at her.

Then he stilled all over. He kept walking, but his stride turned purposeful, and the rest of his body iced over like a pond in winter, expression flat, eyes darting across the street and then straight ahead. “Yeah. Yeah. We’ll meet you there.” When he slipped his phone away, he tugged her hand and they started jogging again.

“What?”

“They found Regina.”

“Shit, where?”

“Holding a gun on Alex’s mother.”

~*~

After the screaming phone call, the blonde fumbled a pack of cigarettes from her purse one-handed, and was trembling so badly she barely got one lit. Throughout this ritual, her gun hand drooped, and wavered, and Tina debated throwing herself to the floor and crawling for safety. The problem, though, was thateven an unsteady gun hand was still holding agun, and it would take longer to run than it would to shore up a grip and fire.

So Tina sat, feeling stupid and helpless, anxious sweat trickling down her back, but she didn’t dare reach to scratch the itch it left behind for fear it might set the woman off. She was…not doing well.

“You sit there, bitch,” she said, mostly to herself, cigarette bobbing off her lip as she paced back and forth in front of the sink. “You just sit there, and your son’s gonna come, and Harlan’s gonna come, and it’ll be because ofme.” She slapped her free hand against her chest, above the neckline of her dress, and when she lifted it, skin peeled from skin with a sticky sound; she was sweating, too. “My mama tried her whole fucking life to get those boys, but it’ll beme. I’ll be the one to get them.” Her smile was a feral rictus, bleached teeth shadowed deeply at the edges from nicotine.

With a jolt, Tina realized who “Harlan” was. She envisioned Alex sitting across from her at this very table, his face, so handsome and broad and strong-featured, so like his father’s, pinched between the brows and the corners of his eyes with worry. Remy had been a thoughtful man, easily troubled, prone to brooding over his thoughts stoically, and Alex was the same way. But he’d told her about the agent digging up the bodies in the swamp, the one giving him grief, the one hellbent on going after Felix: Harlan Boyle.

What was an FBI agent doing messing around with a woman like this? Approving of her actions or not, he knew she was running around town with a gun in her purse. He was…

Cold dread filled her stomach, and she was glad she hadn’t eaten, because there was nothing to come back up.

She didn’t know if Boyle had figured out that Felix and Alex were related: most likely, if he saw a photo of Felix and compared the two of them even a little. All three of Remy’s boyscould have been triplets, had they been the same ages. Boyle had some sort of obsession with Felix, that much Alex had made clear a few months ago. If that obsession now included Alex – and what else could she surmise about a trembling woman holding a gun on her and demanding she get Alex here now? – it meant that Boyle was an equal opportunity Lécuyer hater…or that Alex had interfered on Felix’s behalf, and put himself in Boyle’s crosshairs.

The blonde peered out the window over the sink, and then turned back to Tina. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here yet?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea where he was to start with.”

The blonde bared her teeth. “Did you tip him off? Did yousay something?”

“You were standing right there. You heard the call.”

“Shut up.”

Alex had told her a story, once, about a hostage situation he’d witnessed as a trainee. The recruits hadn’t been allowed to get involved, merely watched what happened on the monitors in the van the feds were using as a communications center. It had been a bank robbery, and the robber had turned out to be only eighteen, and terrified, and Alex had marveled at the way the negotiator talked him down; chipping carefully at his edges until the kid broke down in tears, and laid down his weapon, and walked out of the bank with his hands up.

He'd shared a bit of wisdom the negotiator had shared with the recruits that day, after it was all over: people didn’t do crazy, illegal things for shits and giggles. There was always a reason, and it was always personal. Something in their life had gone wrong, and by God, they were going to get theirs, in some fashion, usually at the expense of innocents.Soft targets, Alex had called them. People the perps thought they could use or manipulate.

Tina supposed she was the soft target, in this scenario.

But she thought, if she could play it delicately, that she might could play negotiator, too.

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