Three
“You don’t belong in the swamp. None of us do.”
Sometimes, usually in the wee hours, when he’d saturated his liver with Johnnie Walker and his mind was playing tricks on his senses as sleep swept up to consume him, he thought he heard his grandmother’s voice. “God, he lets us pass through Her, lets us take what we need to live from Her. But she is too wild and strong a beast for any of us to own. Never forget that. Never forget how small you are, Felix. When a man starts thinking he can control the beast, that’s when She swallows him whole. No one remembers his name; he ain’t nothin’ but bleached bone washing up amongst the reeds, bits of him deep in the belly of a gator somewhere along the slimy bottom.”
She’d been Cherokee, as frail, leathered and wrinkled as a week-old raisin, her hair thin white ribbons down her bony back, her gnarled fingers trembling as she threaded her woven baskets together, one sun-dried stalk of reed grass at a time. She’d been from Georgia, originally, and married a French Canadian who’d been passing through on his way to the gulf. She’d talked of her former beauty, of how handsome her pale, blonde, retiring Frenchman had been. With only two teeth left in her head, she sipped tin mugs of broth and watered moonshine round the clock, as she sat and worked on the porch of their tar paper shack where it perched at the water’s edge, in a deserted, stagnant clearing. A break in the canopy of laced oak limbs poured molten, humid sunlight down onto the water’s glimmering brown surface; steam rose, day and night, choking their yard, peeling thick strips of the tar paper, baking mildew in flaky patches along the porch boards. Gnats, flies, and mosquitoes teemed in competing clouds, their droning a constant sad soundtrack to the plop of frogs into the water, and the deep-throated groaning of the alligators as they basked on the far bank.
He returned there more than he wanted to, to that shack in the swamp, with its lawn of weeds and wildflowers, the rusted out Ford, the rutted drive that flooded with every rain, the outhouse, reeking of shit, swarming with flies, filled with the hissing of the snakes that fed on the rats in the refuse down below that awful wooden perch. He returned to his grandmother spitting tobacco juice and predicting when the next storm would come barreling in over the tree canopy.
He returned to Daddy’s voice: “Get your ass a’movin’, Felix! Let’s go!” Daddy was never happier than when they were loading up the boat first thing in the morning to go check the lines. He got that big grin that split his tan face nearly in two, his gapped teeth flashing, yellow and stained along the gums from the tobacco. He whistled and sang to himself, old French songs that sounded bawdy even if Mercy didn’t know the words.
The old bateau with its patched bottom and the outboard Evinrude that gleamed like a shiny humpbacked beetle at the stern, Daddy’s one financial splurge. “You don’t want a bad motor,” he always said. “Good way to get stuck out in the bayou.”
Mercy could still recall – when the drink was in him and he hovered under dense clouds of consciousness – the thump of the aluminum lunchbox and thermos settling down in the bow. He remembered the jangle of the fishing poles they took every time, to catch themselves dinner on the way back. The soft thunk of the gunstock where it touched down across the seat. That was his responsibility, that old Ruger 10/22 that he cleaned after every trip out, wiping it down by kerosene lantern in the shack’s tiny kitchen. Daddy had taught him to shoot it; it didn’t kick hard, so his ten-year-old shoulder could support the stock when it went off. He could control the long barrel. In the last two years, his finger had become familiar with the trigger. That Ruger .22, he thought, when he looked back on it, had been like his first lover. The first thing in all his life that had amplified him in some way, projected a stronger version of himself into the air, until he heard the low-level buzzing of his real self and his amplified self struggling to merge, as the atoms tried to cleave to one another and create a whole new conglomerate boy. Not a boy, a man. That gun had been the first thing to touch his hands and make a man out of him.
Daddy, so quiet and drawn through most of the week, transformed on line-checking days. He was up frying bacon and eggs and hash in the kitchen, the greasy smells flooding the shack, bringing Mercy up out of bed by his nose. They ate by lantern light, left a covered plate in the oven for Gram, then loaded the bateau in the mist-swirled dawn. It was eerie and beautiful, that time of morning on the swamp. The singing frogs and crickets, the chattering birds, the indigo tree trucks with their gray beards of moss, all shadows and monster-shapes against the pearlescent water and its shifting, endless waves of mist and steam. With lunch, ball caps, thermoses of coffee and water, the rods, reels, and rifle, they climbed into the bateau and the Evinrude started with a snort and a belch of white smoke.
As they whipped along down the black highways of water, the swamp breathed around them. It inhaled and exhaled; like they traveled through the belly of some dark and fearsome beast, it seemed to expand around them, great lungs working. The swamp was a wicked, unforgiving mistress, but Daddy knew all the safest pathways; he could find their way home using the stars. He remembered markers that Mercy could never keep track of. He navigated the bayou with awe-inspiring grace. “I don’t fight it,” he explained. “I’m good to her and She’s good to me.”
Just as the sun was scaling the tree tops, and the steam was thinning, they reached the first of the lines. Mercy saw, by the bowing of the branch to which it was hooked, and the way the strong length of rope disappeared down into the water in a straight tight line, that the bait – a whole chicken carcass concealing the hook – had been taken. A gator awaited them on the bottom, and hopefully, he was a big one.
Daddy piloted the bateau around in a smooth arc and shut off the motor, letting the small boat’s momentum carry it alongside the rope with a practiced expertise, the same way regular men might handle razors when they shaved their faces. The bateau rocked on the fleeting waves kicked up by the Evinrude’s wake, then went still, hovering on the black, glass surface of the water.
“The gun,” Daddy said, and Mercy picked it up, hefted it to his shoulder and let the barrel trail down toward the water.
So many times they’d done this, their bodies knowing the routines and rituals of it better than their minds. Daddy slipped on his leather gloves and leaned over the side, taking the rope in both hands. It was taut as a fresh guitar string; it vibrated when Daddy plucked it. His arms, red from the sun and laced with shiny white scars, gleamed with anxious perspiration, all wiry tendon and muscle over heavy bone, dusted with dark hair, horribly puckered and pockmarked in the places where gator teeth had sunk deep and ripped chunks of flesh. Strong arms. Strong hands. A truly invincible father. And never had Mercy admired him so greatly as in these moments when he wound the unbearably tight rope around his hands and started to pull. There was nothing so awesome or beautiful, in Mercy’s eyes, as the sight of his father pulling an eight foot gator up from the depths.
“It’s a big one,” Daddy said, and the sweat popped out on his brow. His shirt clung to his chest as he gave another slow pull. “And he’s fighting it. He’s backed in under the reeds. You get ready now, Felix. You get that gun ready. The moment his head’s up, you get the bead, ya hear? I’m countin’ on you, son.”
Mercy nodded. His breath backed up in his throat; his lungs swelled to bursting. He dug the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and laid his cheek on the stock, so he had the perfect view down the barrel, through the sights. Sometimes, he wasn’t so proud to admit, he said a little prayer right at this moment. A prayer that he’d hit his mark; a prayer that Daddy didn’t get bit again; a prayer that this was a big one, and not a sunken log, and that it’d bring them a pretty penny when they turned it in. His stomach growled, and he settled his finger in next to the trigger. Roast, he thought. Not canned chicken, but it’d be a roast they had if this gator was as big as they thought.
“Here we go,” Daddy said. And he gave the real pull, the deep one, where his shoulders worked like a winch and his back bowed and all the veins popped out on his arms and in his face. The rope started to come up, giving just a little. And then there were the bubbles, the little tiny ones that burst at the surface. “Yeah, here he comes, here he comes,” Daddy chanted, his own prayer. “Here he comes. Yeah. Come on, sucker. Show us your ugly–”
Mercy saw the disturbance just beneath the surface. There was an almost imperceptible sound, like the gathering of breath. Now, he thought. Here he comes, here he comes. Underwater, he knew the gator’s long serrated tail dug down in the mud and whipped back and forth, strong as a propeller, sending him up, up…
The water drew back; there came the rushing sound, the hiss, the froth, the great sucking of air as the water was pulled down and down by the sweeping speed of the gator as he made his launch up toward the side of the bateau.
From the foam, fast as blinking, his scaled snout broke the surface, his shining ivory teeth, open jaws, long flat wedge head. He hissed and water slopped into his mouth as he lunged up toward Daddy.
Bang. The .22 bucked and the gator’s headlong rush ended with a lurching thud against the side of the bateau. He went still, and then his body sank, bobbing back down into the water, his jaws frozen in an open-mouthed grimace.
Mercy kept his gun trained, just in case, but he saw the neat hole behind the eyes, on the top of the head, and knew the first shot had done the trick.
“That’s a way,” Daddy said. “That’s a good boy, Felix.”
Together they dragged the weighty corpse up over the side of the boat, until its swamp-slimed scales slipped and it flopped over into the bottom of the bateau, belly-up. Its tail and claws twitched: death throes. It would twitch for hours, yet. That had scared Felix his first time out, sure that the gator would come back to life and swing around to chomp on his leg. But now, he climbed over the quivering head and settled into his perch in the bow, plucking up the coffee thermos and taking a swig. Daddy always put something in the coffee that made it extra warm on the way down, something that left his head pleasantly heavy and full of fuzz. He took three long swallows and passed it back; Daddy accepted it over the body.
“That’s a good way to start the day,” he sang out, and began to whistle between slugs of black coffee as he settled at the Evindrude and fired it up again.
The gator writhed in its throes, and Mercy patted the soft white underside of his jaw as the bateau’s prow slid through the water, and they went off in search of quarry at their next baited line.
No one from Acadia had been surprised when Felix Lécuyer grew up and joined the Lean Dogs, and adopted the name Mercy. No one in his club was surprised that one of his skillsets was hunting alligators. Nothing about him surprised most anyone, really. He was too big to ever go unnoticed, and too convincing to ever be mistaken for something else. They were qualities that made him believable; duplicity was not his game, only strength and force and honesty.
No, no surprises from Mercy, from the displaced Cajun boy.
But then he’d been asked to watch out for Ghost Teague’s wife and daughter, and before he was able to recognize what was happening, he’d gone and surprised himself – and shattered the tiny world he’d built for himself outside of New Orleans. It was home he’d gone, after that, letting the steam of Louisiana swallow him up again; he’d slid down her throat, that one gator he could never kill: home. He hated it there, but that was where he belonged; he was nothing but a swamp rat with a taste for violence and a penchant for dealing it out. Dangerous creatures needed to live amongst other dangerous creatures, in appropriate cages with thick steel bars.
So why was he back in Knoxville, then? He could fool himself all he wanted, blame it on the power shift in Tennessee, say that he was needed, act like his presence at the mother chapter would somehow strengthen the club as a whole. He could even blame it on his love of this college town, so different from the murky, French depths of his birthplace.
But none of that was the real driving force. He knew that as he stood in the parking lot and watched Ava Teague climb into her truck with her new boyfriend in tow. She hadn’t glanced his way once, but he’d looked his fill, from behind the dark lenses of his shades.
She’d always been long-limbed; rangy as a colt as a girl, with that little bit of gangly awkwardness that hadn’t gone away until sometime around her seventeenth birthday. That last, important birthday before things had changed irrevocably. She was still leggy, still had those slender, graceful arms, but she was all grown up now, filled out in all the right places, rooted solidly in her body; she owned it now, her bones and beautiful skin and the waving sheets of mahogany hair that flapped over her shoulders as she walked into the breeze. The sight of her sweetheart face, her long lashes, little nose and lush mouth still pulled at his gaze, a magnet, feminine and gentle, soft ivory curves of cheeks and chin and smooth forehead. Her body, when she walked, worked itself into sinuous, artful shapes. She might have taken up ballet, if she’d been born into a different family.
Mercy had sensed the change in her, though, even from across the parking lot. Gone were the ripped jeans and Converse sneakers of her teenage years, the old leather jacket that used to smell like his cologne the way she always wanted to be tucked up under his arm. She wore a sunny yellow skirt she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a few years ago, her sandals feminine and pretty – but so unlike her. She looked, now, like the sort of girl who needed those around to her to see her as a girl. I never needed that, he thought. He could look at her plump tits and her tight calves and appreciate the swing of her skirt, and still wish she was in jeans and one of her brother’s old t-shirts. Still wish she was the same Ava who’d cried with unabashed fervor the night he’d walked away from her.
The girl he watched start her truck and leave the lot was a whole new girl from the one he’d known – a woman. A woman who’d had a story published in an online magazine, a crumpled, well-worn copy of which he carried inside his duffel bag. He’d read her story – the words she’d formed in her little head and typed out on her computer – hundreds of times, one reading right after the next, feeling that this glimpse inside her mind was a way of being close to her again. He didn’t pretend that the man in her story wasn’t him. She could change the hair color and the accent, the height and the bad fashion choices, but she couldn’t disguise that lingering hurt in her heart – that was all him. And she’d poured it into her writing.
That’s what he’d thought, at least, up until just a few moments ago, when he’d laid eyes on her again. After seeing her posh boyfriend, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe she’d found a bandage for her wound after all. Maybe she hadn’t squirmed inside, merely passing by him, the way he had for her.
If he was smart, he wouldn’t bother to pursue the idea further.
Good thing for him, he’d never been too bright.
“Merc.”
He snapped back to the present, heat moving beneath his skin to be caught drifting off into his thoughts, guilty to be standing in front of Ava’s brother while he was reminiscing about her.
He shoved his hands in his back pockets and focused on Aidan; Aidan, like everyone, was a glance down from his full height. Mercy forced a smile across his lips, something vague and benign, something that wouldn’t give away his memories. “What?”
Aidan had this habit of hiding his true expression behind a semi-permanent smirk, one corner of his mouth plucked up like he was always pleased with himself. He had dark, hard to read eyes. Now, his smile could have been genuine, or it could have been assessing. He stared up into Mercy’s face. “I asked if you wanna head with us over to the Bell Bar. Mags and the girls are gonna be a while decorating and shit, and if we stick around, we’ll just catch a buncha shit.”
“You think you won’t catch shit if you leave?” Maggie’s voice pierced their male bubble. The rubber soles of her Frye boots hadn’t made a sound across the pavement, and she stood behind them, hands on her hips, five-feet-four-inches of don’t-fuck-with-me, as beautiful and blonde as always. Ava may have had her father’s dark hair and eyes, but her looks were straight Maggie.
Aidan grinned and gestured toward the clubhouse she’d just come from. “You’ve got fifteen hangarounds in there wanting to kiss ass. They’d do your nails if you asked them to.”
Maggie pretended to inspect her red fingernails. “I could use a third coat.” Then she looked back at Aidan. “But I don’t want you guys being late. I want everyone in the room when James walks in.”
Aidan probably rolled his eyes behind his shades, but he nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Then Maggie’s hazel gaze swung over and up, and latched onto Mercy, and he wanted to squirm all over again. He didn’t – Jesus, how unmanly – but as he met her eyes unflinching, he felt the old dull flutter in the pit of his stomach, like back when Ava was seventeen and Maggie was keener than any mother had a right to be.
“Mercy,” she greeted, her tone unfathomable. “Good to see you.”
He ducked his head. “Mags.”
She studied him a moment; he felt the weight of her gaze, sensed the urge in her to say a whole tirade of things. Instead, she said, “Ghost is looking for you. He’s around here somewhere.” And she left them with a little wave and walked back to the clubhouse with a straight, strong back and sure steps. Maggie had never once struggled to find her place within the club. Her husband adored her, and she knew it; with that boosting her natural confidence, she’d become a central matriarchal figure, stronger even than Bonita. It seemed only fitting that as Ghost became the new president, Maggie would finally take her rightful place as queen of the MC.
Ava didn’t know it yet, but she had that same steel in her.
“Bell?” Aidan prompted.
“Dude,” Tango said, “you’ve gotta see the new bartenders they’ve got in there. I mean–” He formed an hourglass with his hands and whistled.
That would be a smart move: throw a few back, find something warm and curvy to warm his lap, see if she felt like coming to an outlaw MC party with him (most bartenders did). But he shook his head. “Nah. I better find your old man,” he told Aidan. “See what he wants before tonight.”
Aidan nodded. “Suit yourself.”
Mercy’s NOLA brothers, Grady and Matt, went with Aidan and Tango, Bell Bar-bound. Mercy struck off across the massive Dartmoor property, in search of the man he hoped would be his new president.
Dartmoor, owned by the club financially, and Ghost personally, had begun as a weedy patch of dirt along the river, and ended up a shining beacon of MC enterprise. London transplant Walsh, a scrupulous money man, had helped boost marketing efforts about ten years ago, and Dartmoor thrived, an industrial complex worthy of the road on which it sat.
In buildings of corrugated steel, all clean and sparkling, were a bike repair shop, an auto-body garage, a self-storage company, a truck rental company, and a nursery that sold live plants, seed, mulch, and outdoor hardscape materials. The clubhouse sat at the far end, with a gate they closed at night to separate it from the retail spaces. The whole property was cordoned off with chain link and barbed wire, a massive sign planted on the east end that could be seen from boats on the river and cars on the interstate. Walsh was trying to talk the officers into setting up a boat storage garage, and putting a launch out into the water, on club property. That was Walsh – always pushing for business expansion, pushing in no way when it came to anything personal.
It had been a long time since Mercy had enjoyed this walk in the daylight, breathing in the scents of river and warm pavement. The sun beat down gently, lovingly, heating his skin in a pleasant way. He’d always loved Tennessee, how forgiving and temperate it was. No quicksand, no snakes, no gators. No bizarre banshee screams in the night. No blood. No horror.
Just the havoc he’d wreaked.
The firing and fading of bike engines echoed off the acres of asphalt and steel, a happy growling. The men called to one another, shapeless shouts that were tinged with excitement about the night’s party. It would be a huge blowout: blaring music, tons of beer, strippers, groupies, the works.
Yay, works.
Mercy found Ghost in the Dartmoor Trucking offices, the VP sorting through paperwork while the helpless desk manager looked on, her hands knotted together.
“Mr. Teague,” she was saying, her short blonde curls teasing at her ears as she peered over the biker’s shoulder. Her half-moon reading glasses were pushed up on her forehead and the nosepieces had left dents at either side of the bridge of her nose. Mid-forties, she was related to the club only through business, which Mercy knew was the way Ghost liked things. While club family often got hired for the information-sensitive jobs, Ghost liked business-minded outsiders in his offices who wouldn’t rest on their laurels, assuming the club would give them a free pass for being lazy. “I’m sure I can find it, if you’ll just let me…” She gestured to the desk that her boss had commandeered, clearly fidgety to have been displaced.
“If you can find it, why am I having to look for it?” Ghost asked. He glanced up long enough to tap his cigarette ash into a Coke can on the edge of the desk, and caught sight of Mercy. Ghost didn’t startle – it just wasn’t possible – but he paused a moment, guarded dark eyes moving up and down the full height of him.
“Merc,” he said. “Good trip up?
“Can’t complain.” Any trip in which he was traveling north of the swamps was a good one. “Mags said you wanted to see me.”
“Yeah.” Ghost nodded and went back to his papers, sighing. “Just let me…oh, here.” He shoved the mess at the desk manager and got to his feet. “I want it in my hands by the end of the day.”
She clutched the uneven stack to her chest, trying not to drop it. Her glasses slid down out of her hair and landed on her nose, lopsided. “But your party – I can have it for you first thing tomorrow–”
“Tonight,” Ghost insisted.
She sighed. “Yes, sir.”
Ghost dropped the last nub of his smoke into the soda can and gestured toward the door. “Let’s walk.”
Mercy fell into step beside him, keeping his long strides in check so they kept pace with one another.
Though a few inches shorter, Ghost was an imposing figure in his own right. The kind of man who made taller men want to bend their knees so they were on the same level. Lean and hard with muscle, his parentage of Aidan had never been in question: the same strong nose, dark hair and eyes, low brows that gave him a perpetual scowl, and a firm jaw that was always grinding. He’d boxed in the army, and he still had a fighter’s wide shoulders and catlike grace. Ghost never fidgeted; he had no nervous tics. He occupied a room with such indomitable presence, a radiant, unaffected confidence that was a part of his every fiber, and never a show.
“You saw Walsh in Atlanta back in the fall,” Ghost said as they strolled across the parking lot, in the general direction of the panel trucks that sat waiting to be rented. “I’ve no doubt he told you that things were shaking up around here.”
Ghost, like any good politician – and there were politicians in the MC world just as there were in the civilian world – had a habit of talking in veiled circles, leading you into agreeing with him before he’d ever posed his question. Mercy knew this, and still, he never managed to avoid the traps.
“He told me James was stepping down,” he said. Little nod, easy non-smile. Relaxed. Just talking. “Congrats, by the way.”
Ghost snorted. “Don’t act like it’s a blessing.” Then: “The truth is, it’s a bad time for a power shift, but James just can’t put his leg over the bike anymore, so it has to happen. The only thing worse than having a new president in this situation is having a lame duck president. We wouldn’t want word getting out that the club was breaking its own rules; undermines our presence.”
“Wouldn’t want word to get out to who?”
Knoxville wasn’t New Orleans, or even Newark. This, the mother chapter, was afforded the luxury of a low-crime place to call home. The last time any real outside threats had been present had been almost fifteen years ago, when the Carpathians had moved into town. Mercy had been part of the party that had sent them fleeing. Things had been quiet since. Well, unless you counted that business with Ava five years ago.
But Ghost said, “The Carpathians are back.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was, man. But two nights ago, Briscoe and Dublin got jumped outside Bell Bar.”
“Jesus. Are they alright?”
“Yeah. One of the fuckers had a knife. Briscoe needed stitches.” Ghost paused and turned a serious look up to Mercy. “But they were flying colors. Three-piece patch colors. Wherever they’ve been since we last saw them, they’re real one-percenters these days.”
Back in the day, the Carpathians had been a small time riding club trying to go outlaw, illegitimate, and therefore underestimated in their danger. If they were a real MC now, that automatically granted them more power, just their patches alone.
“What’s worse,” Ghost continued, “is that someone’s using them to launder money. The Carpathians are dealing meth, and they’re sending the cash up the food chain somewhere, getting guns and bikes and real estate to build a clubhouse in return. They’re someone’s hired butt monkeys, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to make things personal. They hate us, and they want blood.”
“An eye for an eye,” Mercy agreed, heaving a sigh. “Guess we shoulda known that one would come back to bite us in the ass.”
Ghost scowled to himself, glancing off toward the trucks. “It shouldn’t have to be now, though,” he said, allowing himself a rare moment of pure frustration. “Not after Georgia and London just got done with all that.”
Aiding a family of vigilante security contractors, Georgia president, Stack, had been forced into a full-scale war on a business tycoon that had led the Georgia boys to London. Mercy had been part of the team that had hopped the pond. He’d been there with his brothers, and Sly Hammond, as Sebastian Rolland was exposed to the world as the perverted mastermind that he’d kept carefully hidden.
Ghost looked over, his dark eyes sharp and assessing. “I think I’m gonna need you around here, Merc. You’re the only one in this club who does what you do the way you do it.” He grinned at the goofiness of the statement, then sobered again. “I want you to transfer here. If you can.”
If he could – but there wasn’t really an option, was there? When the president of the mother chapter wanted you at his table, a man couldn’t very well say “no thanks” and keep his distance.
Feeling suddenly like a teenager and too small inside this big body, he rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah. I mean…yeah. I can. If you’re sure?” He lifted his brows.
Ghost studied him a moment, then gave him one of those firm non-smiles and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about that old shit. We all want you here. Let’s call it a fresh start.”
It was unnerving the way the man seemed able to read his thoughts. Almost as disturbing as the knowledge that there was no such thing as a fresh start.
When he left Ghost, Mercy put the clubhouse at his back and ambled down the long Dartmoor lot toward the end of the compound. He loved his brothers, loved socializing as much as the next Dog, but he felt cold inside now, full of an old familiar chill that had everything to do with Ava. He’d denied she was the cause of the sensation five years ago, but in the long stretch of time since she’d left for college, he’d faced the reality with the help of a lot of Scotch and a cache of old photos: Of all the horrors he’d committed, it was what he’d done to Ava that haunted him. Ava, his one chance for brightness, and he’d dashed it to bits. For her sake, he’d told himself. So she could have the future she deserved.
At the opposite side of the property from the clubhouse, the first, vivid impression of Dartmoor, was Green Hills Nursery. Every one of the separate businesses bore its own name, all of them somehow related to the rolling moors of England after which the property, and their club, had been named. Green Hills had almost a thousand square feet of indoor/outdoor aisles of plants on raised tables, sorted according to sun and shade, perennial and annual, interspersed with fountains, birdfeeders, and garden art. A rectangular space had been cordoned off with low counters that served as an office and a place for customers to checkout with their purchases. In back, parked semi trailers held pine straw, bags of sand, cattle manure, fertilizer, potting soil and mulch. There was a gravel pit. In front, two original preserved oaks shaded the hardscape and stone samples, the concrete statues, the wheelbarrows and miscellaneous garden gear for sale. It was in the process of closing up for the afternoon, the last customers pulling away and the staff chaining the wheelbarrows together so they didn’t walk off in the night.
Ava had worked here in high school. Mercy smiled to himself, as he remembered her green polo shirt and khaki shorts, the smudge of dirt on her forehead as she stole a moment in the shade with him, her kiss tasting like Coke and cherry Chapstick.
The reverie was broken by the sound of approaching bikes. Mercy glanced toward the road and saw three turning in at the Green Hills gate. Most of the crew used the clubhouse gate – there was a gate at each business front – but on occasion, the guys would use a different one, as a way of keeping an eye on things.
He recognized them before they pulled up alongside him and killed their engines. His mood soured, but he kept his face from showing that.
He tossed a smile toward Collier, James’s sergeant at arms. Mid-forties and just beginning to gray at the temples, Collier was the epitome of his officer’s rank: composed, controlled, precise in all things. He took his job seriously, serving as bodyguard for his prez and VP, keeping the order within the club.
Riding alongside him was Andre, a perpetual fuckup of a kid with a coke habit he couldn’t kick and two baby-mamas whose child support he usually flaked on paying. He was harmless, and up for anything most of the time – so long as that “anything” wasn’t important. He was the last man Mercy would ever want covering his flanks in a fire fight.
And then there was Michael.
Mercy’s replacement.
On the first group run where NOLA and Knoxville convened after Mercy’s departure from Tennessee – five years ago when he’d abandoned the city he loved for the sake of the girl he’d ruined – he’d met Ghost’s new go-to guy. Odds were, Michael was his birth name, but there was a certain air of the Biblical about him, the archangel of unswerving devotion and brutality. Mercy had never seen him smile, heard him laugh, detected a hint of humor in anything he’d ever said. Walsh detested him. Mercy tended to agree, but when it came to efficiency, there was no better Angel of Death in the MC. If someone needed to go tits-up, Michael was the man to get it done; most of the time, he could make it look like an accident. He was damn good at a sending a loud and clear message, too, if that was what the occasion called for.
His face, beneath his helmet and behind his riding glasses, was a nondescript mask of exact planes and angles. His eyes were dark and flat behind the clear lenses of the glasses. His straight nose, his unforgiving mouth, unremarkable clean-shaven chin – all were plain, all enabled him to melt seamlessly into crowds. Not an extractor, like Mercy, but a true soldier.
“Hey, Merc.” Collier pulled off a glove and offered Mercy a handshake that was readily accepted. “How you been, man? You just got back from London, right?” He pulled a face. “Shit. How was that?”
“Ah, you know me.” Mercy grinned. “Always up for a field trip.”
“I can’t believe you guys didn’t kill that English prick,” Andre said, and spat on the pavement to display his opinion of that.
Collier turned to him with a tired sigh. “It’s not just about killing, Andre. It’s about doing what helps the club the most.” He glanced back at Mercy, shaking his head. “What the hell’s wrong with this generation?”
“Participation trophies,” Mercy said. “And Adderall.”
Collier nodded in agreement.
Mercy glanced at Michael. Gave him a little up-nod. “Hey. How’s the murder business?” He said it jokingly, though why he bothered, he didn’t know.
Michael gave him a flat look. “Fine.”
Collier lifted his brows in silent apology for his comrade. “So, you patching Tennessee again?”
“Looking that way.” Mercy shrugged. “We’ll see how things go at church.”
Michael’s face gave one small twitch of reaction.
Collier said, “We’ll be glad to have you back. With things shakin’ up, we made need you around here.”
“That’s what Ghost tells me.”
Andre, oblivious, said, “Wait, though, isn’t Ghost’s daughter back in town?”
Collier thumped him hard on the arm.
“Wouldn’t know.” Mercy affected a pleasant non-smile. “Don’t much care. I’m just glad to get out of the swamp again.”
Collier nodded, like he approved of that answer. “Like I said: we’re glad you’re here.” He cranked his bike again and it snarled to life. “See you tonight?”
“Yup.”
The three rode off down the lot and Mercy watched them go, hands in his pockets. Wondering just how many people would give him that questioning look, or even dare to mention Ava out loud. They might have been glad to have him back, but there was a warning there: Don’t push Ghost again.
Right: no fresh starts.