Page 45 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

“Shit,” he muttered, and she looked up, and followed his sightline to spot four guys turned around on their bar stool, thickset rather than muscular, but big nonetheless. One of them was grinning at her, and winked when she made eye contact.

Ava stared right back, and pushed the hem of her jacket back to flash the gun she wore on her hip. The man’s smile fell away, and slowly he and his friends turned back around.

“Try not to attract a lot of attention,” Colin muttered down at her from the side of his mouth.

Back at the hotel, she’d put on a simple, high-necked t-shirt, jeans, boots, and her battered old denim jacket. Had crammed an Atlanta Braves baseball cap down on her head.

“You’re the one turning heads,” she shot back. “Duck down or something.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that won’t look stupid. Head through there.” He steered her through an open doorway into an adjoining room full of occupied poker tables.

The bar was larger than it looked on the outside, a hodge podge of outbuildings pieced together into one rambling structure, each room flaunting different floor and ceiling heights; there were hallways to nowhere and strange jogs in the floorplan. The Winchester Mansion of Louisiana swamp-side dive bars.

Finally, they reached what looked like a sunroom, windows on three sides, a view of the docks and the black water beyond. There were a dozen plastic patio tables here, and only two were occupied. By Lean Dogs.

Bob Boudreaux was a face she’d only ever seen in photos that were more than twenty-years-old, but she would have recognized him straight off, despite the intervening years and the graying hair, based on the way the Dogs were seated. Bob sat at the corner-most table, facing the doorway through which she and Colin entered, the front of his cut weathered from long decades of wear, and resplendent with patches. The man beside him was a good ten years younger, slight, but with a serious face, and his own impressive bevvy of patches. His VP, she thought. The others, ranged across the rest of the tables, drinking beer from tall glasses, were his killers. His honor guard. They glanced over their shoulders and flicked disinterested glances up from their hands of cards; she knew they were cataloguing everything about her, and were surprised by her presence at Colin’s side, though Bob was the only one to show it outwardly.

His brows lifted, pressing a tall stack of sun wrinkles up his forehead. “Colin,” he said as they approached the table, “not to stick my nose in your business, son, but I thought your old lady was a blonde.”

“She is.” Ava pulled off her cap and smoothed the crown of her ponytail. “I’m Mercy’s old lady.”

The VP – stone-faced in a very Walsh-like way – went blank and blinking with surprise. “Shit.”

“Shit,” Bob echoed.

“Bob, meet Ava Lécuyer,” Colin said in the voice of a man who was very, very tired of his life lately.

“Wow,” Bob said, and then folded his arms and grinned. “The famousfillette, in the flesh.”

Ava couldn’t decide how she felt about that, so she said, simply, “Hi, Bob. You got a boat we can borrow?”

~*~

By the time night fell, Mercy was pleasantly sore and sunburned from a day spent baiting hooks. He worked with his hands every day, but it turned out fixing bikes worked an entirely different set of muscles than hiding shark-gauge hooks in whole chicken carcasses and rigging them up in low branches that overhung the water. Old, repetitive motions once upon a time, and now his fingers and palms and forearms throbbed with a pleasant sort of pain, reminding him how long it had been since he went hunting. Each time he brought his cigarette to his lips, his t-shirt shifted over his shoulders, hot, and tight, and stinging where the sun had burned him around the straps of the tank top he’d been wearing earlier.

The lights were on inside, gold rectangles falling on the tangled grass around his boots. The windows were open, and Devin’s voice floated through the screens, low and pleasant, the accent soothing on some deep, subconscious level as he made heating up pork and beans for dinner sound like something from the Food Network, despite Toly’s protests that he didn’t “need a goddamn lesson, Jesus.”

A porch board creaked directly behind him, and Mercy scooted over and patted the section of top step beside him. Gray folded down neatly beside him in response to the silent invitation.

Mercy dragged down the last bit of his smoke, dropped the butt into the half-empty can of Diet Coke he’d found in the back of the cupboard inside, and lit a fresh one. He didn’t offer Gray the pack; he’d turned him down the last three times he’d tried.

“What’d you think about today?” he asked. Gray had been his right hand man in the boat today, while Devin and Tolystayed back at the cabin. Mercy had given him a hands-on lesson in line baiting, one not asked for, but dutifully attended with Gray’s Hunter-brand of stillness and intensity. Mercy liked his company, just as he’d always liked Reese’s for the same reason: deft, ready hands to help him, and a thoughtful listener who took what he said seriously. He’d even managed to coax a smile out of the kid, for which he was stupidly proud.

Gray was silent a moment, and a glance proved he was gazing out across the narrow lawn, past the two thick, interwoven cypresses, to the water beyond, an impenetrable ink spill beneath the limb-laced indigo of the sky. Mercy found it peaceful, but wondered what Gray, an urban assassin, born and raised, thought of it.

Finally, Gray said, “Hunter used to have this pair of boots. His good boots. He wore them when he met with a new client. They were alligator.” He glanced over, blue eyes the color of dirty snow in the glow of the light that spilled from the cabin. “I don’t guess I ever thought about where they came from. I didn’t know they wererealalligator.”

Mercy smiled – the sort of big smile born of delight, a relief that eased the tension he’d been carrying in his jaw for days. “That’s right: there’s no place to get gator boots ‘cept from genuine gator hide.” He put a Southern showman’s spin on the words, accent getting slow and taffy-thick, and earned another of those rare, quiet smiles.

“Truth told, I think the market for hide is a lot less marketable than it used to be, and people farm gators for meat, now. But there’s enough people here who still like a good belt and a basket of fried tail. There’s too many of them, though. It’s like when deer start to take over a place?” When Gray merely blinked at him, he said, “Anyway. The hunting helps balance the ecosystem. Circle of life.

“Technically,” he continued, “what we did today was poaching, since I don’t have a valid license and I didn’t tag the lines.”

“Is that why we went so far out?”

“Yeah.” There were more than a few points where he’d had to cut the engine and pole them beneath low-hanging branches, finding out-of-the-way lagoons with no signs of civilization close by, but recent slide marks on the bank advertising big bulls coming and going out of the water.

Gray nodded. Then, with obvious reluctance – which Mercy took as progress, because he wasn’t blurting something out guilelessly, but weighing whether or not he wanted to say it, thinking of social cues – he said, “Today…”

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