Page 51 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Walsh nodded, and then eased the lid of the laptop shut until it clicked quietly. Each of his breaths was slow and audible, his eyes, beneath half-lowered lids, feverish. Not with illness, Aidan realized, as his gaze lifted and moved down both sides of the table, but with anxiety.

His own gut tightened in response.

Walsh said, “Fox wants to make one more stop, but he was pleased with the intel he got from Sawyer before she hanged herself off the second-story balcony.”

“Jesus,” Briscoe muttered.

Walsh shrugged. “It’s the job. She was Abacus.” He let that sit a moment, giving someone – anyone – a chance to argue. No one did, not even Hound, though Aidan snuck a glance down the table at him. The old timer was fiddling with an unlit cigarette, frowning at it, but not visibly disturbed by the news of Sawyer’s “suicide.”

“Obviously,” Walsh continued, “he’s not going to send along anything on the phone or electronically. And what he did tell me was in code, but he’s confident.”

“When is he ever not confident?” Albie asked. “Is he being careful? He better be being careful.”

“He is.” Walsh reached as though to adjust the needle in his arm, thought better of it, and flattened his free hand against the table. He swept them all with another almost-fractious gaze that was jarringly at odds with the too-tired slump of his body in the chair. He gathered a deep, hitching breath, and Aidan had the sense he was about to tell them something that none of them wanted to hear.

Maybe it was dread of more bad news, or maybe it was the sharp tug of pity he felt for Walsh in that moment; either way, he interrupted before Walsh could even get started.

“Actually,” he said, too loudly, whipping heads his direction, and then cleared his throat and started again, fingers rapping nervously on the table. His role in church had always been to vote and offer wisecracks; he never offered up agenda items on his own. “Actually, I have something I want to propose. Something to vote on.” He caught Tango’s gaze, and Carter’s, and Roman’s.

The first two nodded. Roman inclined his head in what Aidan read as an encouraging angle, but one laced with caution.Don’t expect this to go your way, his look said, because Roman himself didn’t even like the plan.

“It starts,” he turned back to Walsh, “with you writing a check. A pretty damn big one.” He started to make an apologetic face, but caught himself; VPs didn’t apologize. They made thoughtful decisions, and then defended them at church.

Walsh lifted a single brow with a third of his usual judgement. “Oh really.”

When they left the Parker place yesterday around noon, Aidan had gone straight downtown to the proper city office and pulled the plat for their property. He unfolded it from his pocket and spread it out in front of Walsh.

Across from Aidan, Michael sat forward to peer down at it as well.

Aidan said, projecting his voice so that everyone could hear, “During the festival, Dad had us man that stupid- that sign up table,” he corrected, and caught the corner of RJ’s smirk before he glanced away, and let his gaze swim in the safe waters between Tango and Carter. “Only one person put their name and number down on the sheet, and he even tried to prospect right there in person – and a few weeks later, when he cameby the shop. Lewis Parker. Eighteen. Just a kid. Big chip on his shoulder. That” – he tapped the edge of the plat – “is his family’s farm. Been in the family for generations, and it’s slowly been sold off piece by piece as the market, and the big factory farms started squeezing out smaller, family-run farms. They’re surrounded on all sides by subdivisions, now, without enough space to grow crops. They sell goats: as pets, as livestock. The milk and the meat, too.”

Dublin breathed a humorless chuckle. “Lemme guess: you want us to buy a goat farm.”

“I do,” Aidan said, shooting him a look down the table, then turned back to Walsh, who watched him steadily. The color was beginning to come back into his face as the bag drained, his gaze sharpening. “I met with that fed woman this morning. Nowitzki. She was panting for a one-on-one, and I gave her one. I also told her we’d buried a shit-ton of bodies on the Parker’s land.”

“You what–” someone down the table started. There were a few curses and sharp inhales as others prepared to join in.

Walsh silenced them with an upraised hand. The other flexed into a fist on the tabletop, needle jumping in his elbow. His gaze narrowed, but Aidan didn’t read it as disapproving. Far from it. “Did she take the bait?”

“Yeah.”

“We rode by,” Roman said. “The feds were tearing that place apart.”

“What the fuck?” RJ said.

It was Michael who shushed him, with a flat stare and a fast, “Shut your mouth.”

He shut it.

Inside, Aidan was a shuddering mess, a horse in a lather before a race, but he thought he was managing to control his outward demeanor pretty well. To Walsh, he continued, “Ihaven’t looked at your books, obviously, but we bought Emmie’s farm, and that ended up being profitable.”

“It breaks even,” Walsh said, “and it’s insurance against developers.”

“Right, well, speaking of developers…” Aidan leaned over the plat and traced the eastern border of the Parker farm. “This subdivision here isn’t finished. We walked through–”

“We?”

“Roman, Carter, and me.”

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