Forty-Seven
Standing five feet away, Ava could hear the ferocious growl of her father’s voice on the other end of the phone Mercy held pressed to his ear. She tried to make out what he was saying as she monitored the snapping bacon in the skillet in front of her. She had no luck with the listening, but so far, the bacon was coming along nicely.
“No, I hear you,” Mercy said, leaning back against the wall. He looked put out. “I just don’t know what kinda good it’ll do.”
As anticipated, the news of their hoodie stalker hadn’t gone over well with the home front.
Ava flipped the bacon strips with a fork and took her chance to really scrutinize her husband. He was his usual towering, golden self. His sleeveless muscle shirt put his biceps on glorious display. She’d always loved his arms. They weren’t the ridiculous, bulked up arms of a pro wrestler, but rather the sculpted, long limbs of a man who worked hard for a living. Like all of him. Beautifully contoured, but never intentionally chiseled.
Shit, focus.
She took a good look at his face, and saw the redness in the corners of his eyes, the dark shadows beneath them. Despite his scowl, there was a fatigue in his face, a slackening between his features. A stranger might not have noticed, but to her, who knew every part of him so well, he looked sick.
Her stomach tightened. It was his shoulder. Had to be.
“No, I…” He sighed. “Fine. Yeah. Okay.” He pulled the phone from his ear and held it out to her. “He wants to talk to you.”
She took a fortifying breath and swapped places with Mercy, handing him her fork and taking the phone. It was warm from his hand. Very warm.
Frowning, she put it to her face and said, “Hi, Dad.”
“You haven’t been eaten by an alligator yet, have you?” Ghost demanded, his voice like sandpaper.
Ava bit down hard on the sudden laugh that wanted to explode out of her. She said, “Yes, in fact, I have. I’m talking to you from his stomach right now.”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
She smiled, only because he couldn’t see her. “Sorry.”
He took a deep breath and seemed more composed when he spoke again. “Merc said that guy was following you around the French Quarter.”
“He was.” At his prodding, she repeated the entire story that Mercy had already told him, down to the gator body dump. When Ghost seemed skeptical of that, she said, “That’s how they do it down here, Dad. You’ve got the cattle pasture; the NOLA guys have the gators.”
He made a disgruntled sound. “I didn’t send you down there so you could be feeding corpses to lizards.”
All of this worry was actually touching. She’d spent so much time being angry with him the last few weeks that it was nice to be reminded that he did see her as his daughter, that he loved her and fretted about her.
“Is it any safer up there?” she countered.
A beat passed. “Nah. It’s not.”
“I’m okay,” she assured. “I’ve got the best bodyguard a girl could want.” She glanced over at Mercy, as he removed the bacon from the skillet onto a plate.
“Yeah, well, I’m sending Rottie down with your brother. They’re heading out within the hour and riding straight down.”
A prickling went up the back of her neck. “Rottie? Dad, the entire New Orleans chapter is at our disposal if we need them.”
He made a snorting sound. “None of them can do what Rottie does. This is club business, Ava, don’t worry about it. Expect a call from Aidan when he gets in town.”
After a bewildered goodbye, she handed the phone back to Mercy at Ghost’s instruction. She sliced bread from the baguette and laid the pieces onto the stove top to warm as Mercy had some final argument.
It was a massive relief to hear the phone settle into its cradle with a decisive click.
“Christ,” Mercy said, rubbing both hands across his face and back through his loose hair. “I feel like I just got sent to the principal’s office.” He dropped his hands and glanced at her. “Course, I never did that. But I assume it sucks.”
“Big ones,” she assured, smoothing butter across the warm bread.
He came to inspect the breakfast she’d laid out on the counter. It wasn’t much: just the bread, bacon, yogurt the O’Donnells had stocked for them, and fresh strawberries. “See?” he said, smiling. “I knew there was a chef hiding in those typewriter hands of yours.”
She snorted. “Hardly. And by the way, no one writes on typewriters anymore.”
“Your old man’s right. You’re a smartass.”
She wasn’t going to get distracted with the back-and-forth; she had two items on her agenda. “What was he talking about, sending Rottie down?” She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mercy’s expression tweak with concern. The dark circles were even more noticeable close up like this. “What’s he sending a tracker for?”
He snagged a strip of bacon and made a thoughtful face as he folded it into his mouth and chewed. He glanced at her, weighing things in his mind. He was trying to decide, she realized, whether he should talk to her about club things. That had never been a dilemma for him. No matter how much he’d loved her, he’d never budged on that front.
Maybe marriage had shifted things a little. Maybe being his old lady messed with the delineations in his head.
Finally, he swallowed, looked resigned, and said, “Larsen disappeared.”
She tried to swallow and her throat wouldn’t work. “Maybe he finally came to his senses. Got spooked and took off.” But she knew it was a weak hope, and Mercy shook his head.
“From what your dad said, Larsen set up the rest of his club to take a fall, as a distraction so he could skip town. He and his officers are missing. When I told your dad about what happened last night – he’s convinced that was some sort of scout. Larsen may have wanted the Carpathians to become the only MC in Knoxville, but there’s one thing he wants more than that.” He smiled ruefully. “My head.”
The fear that took hold of her was on old one, a fear that had visited her when she was a child, when Jasper Larsen’s father and uncle had forced open her bedroom window and slid in with the smell of rain to kill her in her bed.
“My guess,” Mercy continued, “is that he realized his club was headed for the shitter, so he decided to at least get what he really wants. Revenge. Ghost thinks he’s headed here. Rottie talked to a gas station clerk who saw a man in a plain white van matching Larsen’s description filling up late last night. He went in for smokes; guy got a good look at his face.
“So Ghost is sending Rottie along to try and sniff him out, somewhere between here and Knoxville. Get to him before he gets to us.”
“I thought this place was impossible to find,” she said, pulse beating in her ears.
He gave her another lopsided non-smile. “That guy from yesterday found it. Not as secret as I thought, I don’t guess.”
“God.” She pressed her knuckles to her lips and bit at the inside of her cheek, trying to fight the welling panic back. “Should we run?” she asked, voice muffled by her hand. “Take off right now and go…” Where? She had no idea.
Mercy shook his head. “I still think it’s safe here. And I’ve got the advantage over them. I know these swamps. This place’ll eat a man alive if he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Eat him literally, she understood, after last night.
He stepped in close, leaning over her. “I promise you, fillette, that I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
She tipped her head back to look up at him. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” She lifted her hand and pressed it to his forehead. She didn’t have her mother’s years of experience feeling faces and gauging temperatures, but she didn’t need it. He had a fever, and not a subtle one. “Let me see your shoulder,” she said.
He backed away from her. “No.”
“It’s infected, Mercy, you know it is.” She took a step toward him. “You’ve got a fever. You feel like shit, don’t you?”
“I feel fine.”
“Don’t give me that tough guy shit. We need to get you to a doctor. You need antibiotics.”
“Like hell.”
“Mercy–”
He lifted a finger in reprimand, and gave her a scowl that reminded her of her father, when he was at his most furious with her. It was a parental gesture, scolding the errant child. “Stop talking about it.”
She folded her arms, and felt the stacked-up stress getting the best of her emotions. “You aren’t really going to act like this, are you?”
“Ava.”
She turned her back on him, fuming silently. Rot then, she thought. But the tears came up in her eyes and she blinked them away as the hot sun fell in through the windows.
With minimal stops, it was about twelve hours from Knoxville to New Orleans. Looking for a runaway wannabe biker stretched the trek to almost sixteen hours. It was almost midnight when Aidan heaved his aching body off his bike and took three great steps away from the thing, not wanting his ass anywhere near the seat for at least a day.
“Jesus,” Tango groaned beside him as he stretched his arms up over his head and was rewarded with a sequence of pops and cracks. “Do I even have an ass left? I can’t feel it anymore.”
“Pussies,” Rottie admonished playfully, but he halted partway through his dismount, his face catching in a comical grimace.
Aidan snorted. “Should I call Mina and tell her not to expect any more kids?”
“She already knows not to expect them.” Rottie managed to get up on his feet. “I can’t afford another damn one.” He doted on them, though, his boys and Mina. Aidan wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone so glad about being tied down. Save maybe his own father.
The New Orleans clubhouse – an unattractive corrugated steel beast – was aglow with life, a beacon in the dark, crowded little neighborhoods down Iberville Street. A tall, fair-haired man was walking out to meet them, backlit by the light spilling from the front door. Bob Boudreaux, the Louisiana president.
“You boys look like you just got scraped off the front of a Peterbilt,” he said with a laugh as he reached them. “Feeling like roadkill, huh?”
Aidan accepted the man’s strong handshake. “Or worse. Thanks for leaving the light on for us.”
Bob shook Tango and Rottie’s hands in turn. He laughed again. “You think we go to bed around here?”
Aidan didn’t know, but he’d heard all the stories about the New Orleans crew. Things were wilder down here, in the Big Easy, more raucous and debauched than in the cooler climes of Tennessee.
“Come on in,” Bob invited. “We got plenty to eat. Decent mattresses. And Gabby’s girls can get you just about anything you need.”
Aidan hung back a step when they reached the door. Through it, he glimpsed bright splashes of color, furnishings the bland exterior belied. He smelled smoke and hops and heard women’s laughter. “Actually,” he said, “I need to make a phone call first.”
Bob nodded, and he and the others went inside, leaving him alone.
Mercy dreamed in his sleep, and in those dreams, he talked. Ava lay beside him, unable to sleep, and listened to the restless, nonsensical murmurings of his fever dreams. He didn’t stir when she touched his face. His skin was warm and dry against her palm. When she eased the sheets down, she saw the angry red veins surrounding his gunshot wound. Looking at it made her want to cry and hit him both at once, so she pulled the sheet back up, and stared at the ceiling, listened to the crickets and frogs.
When the phone rang, it startled her, but she was ready to answer it, springing out of bed and going to the landline in her underwear.
“Hello?” she picked up on the second ring.
Mercy rolled over in bed, but didn’t wake.
“Hey.” Aidan’s voice filled her ear, and she wanted to cry all over again. “Did I wake you up?”
“No. I can’t sleep.” She leaned back against the wall, propping a foot behind her. The steamy night air was cooler than the bed covers had been, and she enjoyed its soft brush against her skin.
Aidan sounded fuzzy and tired. “We just got into town. Rottie and Tango and me,” he said, anticipating her question about his company. “I gotta grab a few hours’ sleep. I wanted to make sure you guys are okay out there in the fucking Land of the Lost by yourselves first.”
She smiled. “We’re fine…” She closed her eyes. “No, that’s not true, actually. Mercy’s gunshot wound is infected. He needs to go see a doctor, but he won’t listen to me.”
Aidan snorted. “You know how he is. He thinks he’s invincible.”
“Yeah, but a lot of good he’ll do me when he’s too sick to walk and I can’t find my way out of this damn swamp.”
She could almost hear him frowning. “I’ll talk to Bob about it. Tango and I can ride out there tomorrow.”
He’d never be able to find the place without a guide, but she appreciated his gesture.
“Yeah, that’d be good. Call first, okay? So we know to expect you.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Aidan? I’m really glad you’re here.”
He made a sound that was half-embarrassed, half-sympathetic. “Night.”
She hung up and tiptoed back to bed. When she slid beneath the sheets, Mercy turned toward her in his sleep, banded a heavy arm across her waist and pulled her into his chest.
Ava rested her face against his fevered skin and closed her eyes. Tomorrow, she thought. Just hold on until tomorrow.