Page 5 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Bob nodded. “Yeah. Go find your man. Happy hunting.”

Mercy offered a salute and moved behind the wheel to put the key in the ignition. It started like a dream, purring and snorting and ready. He sat, and Gray slid soundlessly onto the seat beside him.

“Ready?” Mercy asked him.

A wink of silver proved that Gray had a rifle laid across his lap. “Yes.”

There was a moment, powering across the open water toward the mouth of the channel, when the meager light from the dock was left behind, when the darkness ahead swallowed them whole. The moment between worlds, when, for even the bravest of navigators, the belly curled in on itself and the mind whisperedturn back, you can’t do this. But he could do this, had done it more times than he could count, and after another dozen yards, his vision adjusted, and the darkness took shape. Welcomed him. And it was like he’d never left the swamp at all.

The landscape had changed, of course it had. The moss shaggier in some places, and thinner in others. New half-submerged logs across the waterway, and places where the banks had eroded or caved in completely. Trees felled in storms, and patches of white, fractured stumps where the forest had been timbered.

But not once did he get turned around, or lose his way. He slowed to go around obstacles, but not to gather his wits.

Above the roar of the motor, he could hear Toly retching at intervals, and Devin murmuring soothing nonsense.

“Apparently, bratva hitmen get seasick,” Mercy said to Gray who, miraculously, cracked a grin, a faint upward curve in the glow of the dash lights.

~*~

Alex had told them, based on his NOLA FBI contact, that the old cabin had been ripped to shreds in Boyle’s search for forensic evidence. Mercy knew it would be gone. And still, somehow, seeing that it was hit him like a gut punch.

The sun still lurked below the horizon, but the sky had lightened to a hazy, fallout yellow-pink by the time Mercy rounded the last bend, killed the gas, and glided into the cove where he’d once weighted and dropped fifteen corpses. The dock had been slipshod in his time, and by all rights should have long since collapsed, but new, pressure-treated wood gleamed like bone in the lightening fog of morning.

Up the hill, the cabin hadn’t merely been torn down; the entire clearing had beenscalped.

He remembered honeysuckle growing in heaps; great Maleficent tangles of blackberries, thorns long as roofing nails, and twice as sharp. Thick ropes of poison ivy crawling up the tree trunks, trailing drifts of moss that flapped in the rare breeze. It had been a wild place, the cabin cool in the shade of the pines, its interior buffed and oiled and clean by contrast. Mercy remembered the smell of it: fresh drywall that he’d installedhimself, and the one leaky bottle of lamp oil that left a stain on the rug.

Nothing remained save a pile of splintered timbers and a heap of garbage – white porcelain flash of the old sink, like a broken tooth jutting from tufts of pink insulation – inside a circle that had been mown, weed-whacked, and even, in places, burned. He saw black scorch marks and withered, twisted vegetation.

“Fuck,” he murmured, as he swung the boat sideways up to the new dock, and wasn’t sure why the devastation put a lump in his throat. This had never been a home; he’d never lived here. He’d entombed his kills in this water, murky-brown beneath the bow of the boat. And through the cracked windows, he’d listened to the call of birds, and the deep groaning of the gators. He used to swear he could pick Big Son’s voice out from the others, its reverberations drawn up from the blackest depths of hell.

Big Son, Big Son, come and get it, you big son of a bitch!

Mercy killed the engine. In the ringing wake of its silence, Toly hawked, and spat, and struggled to catch his breath.

Devin let out a low whistle. “They didn’t leave so much as a shingle, did they? Christ.”

Without prompt, Gray shouldered his rifle and leaped out onto the dock, lithe as a deer; he turned to catch the rope when Mercy tossed it, and then Mercy hauled himself up and out as lithe as a…water buffalo, maybe. His bum knee was endurable most of the time, but it was throbbing after so many hours first in a car, then in a boat. He grimaced, and powered through, and wondered if he shouldn’t a) lose a few pounds, and b) start taking those glucosamine supplements Ava had bought and put pointedly in the medicine cabinet.

Christ,Ava.

No, no, no, he couldn’t think of her. Not now.

“Do you want to stay in the boat?” Devin asked, and Mercy turned to see that Toly looked bad. About to pass out bad. His too long hair was plastered to his face with sweat, lips bloodless, eyes bloodshot from puking over the side the whole way. He didn’t look able to stand, much less clamber up onto the dock.

“No,” he rasped, emphatically, and was able to get to his feet with Devin’s arm supporting him around the waist.

Mercy stepped in to catch his hand when it reached up – trembling – and hauled him up onto the dock.

Devin was still laughing to himself when he climbed up, unaided. “Son, what’s going to happen when Raven wants to take a Riviera cruise?”

“She can take her next husband,” Toly panted, and Mercy was glad of the chance to smile, even if it was at poor Toly’s expense.

“Here.” Gray produced a hip flask from inside his jacket and offered it over.

It looked like it took more than a little effort when Toly scowled. He still gripped Mercy’s forearm, fingers digging in so hard he dented the flesh. “What’s in it?”

“Brandy. It’ll help.”

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