Page 96 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

With a swallowed curse, he turned away from Rat Boy and checked the ID display. It was his wife, same as the first six times, and the sight of her name set his teeth on edge – further on edge. She’d been the type to call, and email, and pester, and generally want to talk to him every ten minutes in the first years of their marriage, but time, and kids, and his own disinterest had cooled that desperation. He’d called her a few days ago to tell her his assignment had been extended, and she’d said, “Be careful, love you!” This, though, this incessant calling, was out of character.

Maybe one of the kids was sick, or his dad back in the hospital. Something. In any event, he knew he couldn’t afford to let her jam up his phone for the next whoever knew how long.

“Marianne, now’s really not a good time,” he snapped when he answered.

Before he could say I’ll call you later, she let out a high, breathless sound of distress that set all of his hair on end.She knows. That was his first thought. His mind flashed not to his kids, or to her, injured, bandaged, deathly sick.She knows. That constant, back-of-the-consciousness terror that had plagued him for all of his adult life: that someone had learned his secret. That someone knew what he’d paid Miss Carla, and others like her, for.

“Joe, I’ve been calling and calling you!” she burst out, and he could tell that she was near tears; could envision her clutching at the diamond solitaire necklace he’d given her for their fifteenth anniversary, a bloodless, candlelit dinner affair after which he begged off of sex with a headache.

Usually, when she got like this – a more and more frequent occurrence, which was annoying, because he’d thought wives were supposed to carelessas marriages aged – he put on a soothing voice and talked her down from her spiral with a familiar list of platitudes. But today, in light of his current circumstances, he snapped, “Yeah, stop doing that! I told you I’m on a case!”

“Stop yelling at me!” she yelled back. Then hiccupped and failed to suppress a sob.

“Jesus – fine, okay, yeah. I’m sorry,” he said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“If you hadn’t beenyellingat me, I could havetold you–”

“Marianne.” He didn’t think he sounded all that patient, what with his teeth gritted, but it was the best he could do.

She took a series of shuddering breaths during which he listened to men unload lots of clinking, metallic gear onto the tables behind him. One of them laughed, an ugly barking sound.

Finally – only a few seconds that felt like hours – Marianne collected herself and said, “This woman called me. An agent. She said some things…Joe, the things she was saying…” Her breaths verged toward hyperventilation. “Terrible things, about you, and that you’re being arrested, and I had to know…”

Whatever else she said after that was lost to the blood pressure whine that started up in his ears. He tried to think: agent. A female agent. But who? He couldn’t…he didn’t know…And maybe it was all a trap, yeah, that was it, it was all bullshit, someone–

His phone beeped to tell him he had an incoming call. When he pulled back to check the screen, he saw an unfamiliar number with a Quantico area code.

Face numb, heart beating so high and quick in his throat it threatened to choke him, he said, “Marianne, I’ll have to call you back,” and hung up on her to accept the other call while she was still midsentence.

He accepted the other call with a trepidatious, “Hello?”

“Agent Fallon?” an unfamiliar, professionally cool female voice asked.

He debated, briefly. He was up to his eyeballs in shit at this point, and if this woman was an agent, she could very well have his phone tracked, so what was the point in lying? “Yeah.”

“This is Special Agent Isabella Duet. I’m currently working the Grendel case in New Orleans.”

“Oh, fuck,” he blurted. Who could blame him? With the way things were going, he was either going to shit his pants or suffer a massive coronary any moment now.

“Look,” she said, tone shifting to a tired, down to earth register. “You could pretend you don’t know what this phone callis about, and I could ask you a bunch of leading questions like I was going to get a straight answer out of you, or we could be honest with one another.”

When he didn’t respond, because he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say, she continued, “I know two things. One: Boyle took Remy Lécuyer. Two: you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Shock stilled the racing of his pulse. “What?”

She sighed. “I’m speaking to you off the record here. This case is fucked. It won’t get solved, and I don’t care what Boyle does or doesn’t do. But that’s an innocent boy, and I want to find him. I think you want to get as far away from Boyle as possible. We could help each other out.”

Help each other out. That was how Boyle had phrased it two years ago when Fallon had been promoted to his second-in-command. Fallon could still smell the bourbon on the other man’s breath, and see the bright glimmer of fervor in his eyes on that evening in the bar. When Boyle had gripped his shoulder harder than necessary and steered him to a dim corner booth.We’re the same, you and me. We’ve got…wants and needs.Those wants and needs hadn’t been the same, obviously, but it had been so easy, then, to get roped into the idea of mutual protection; ofFBIprotection, thanks to a few high-placed individuals with wants and needs of their own.

But two years had made him warier, and smarter.

He sighed. “Do you really think I’m gonna fall for that?”

“Hey, Mulder,” one of the thugs shouted, and he held up a finger over his shoulder.

A quick glance proved that Remy was no longer playing with garbage, but instead sat with his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them in a pose that, despite conventional wisdom, looked neither frightened nor defensive. He was staring at Fallon, eyes huge and luminous brown in the dimness of thebuilding, like some Amazonian creature watching him through the trees. Decidedly unsettling.

What’s he looking at?

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