Forty-Nine
“Fucking traitors,” Mercy grumbled, and Ava glanced over at him sharply.
She waited until she had his attention, then lifted her brows in silent question, daring him to dig the hole deeper.
“Well, you are,” he muttered.
She snorted as she resumed packing. Her cross-body purse was large enough to fit their cash, her gun and extra clip, all four of their phones – real and prepaid – and her wallet with all their insurance information. “You look like death warmed over,” she said, “but I’m a fucking traitor. Not your concerned wife, no. A fucking traitor.”
“Don’t forget your brother. He’s one too.”
“Right. Can’t overlook that.”
She zipped the bag closed, slipped the strap over her head, and gave him a frosty glare.
His fever was stronger today, a hot pulse that thumped against her palm when she pressed it to his forehead. “Your hand’s cold,” he’d complained earlier, when she’d felt for his temperature. His color was worse, his skin clammy. The wound looked angry and ragged. At the very least, it needed debriding. She was beginning to worry about the infection becoming even more serious, leading to sepsis.
She’d dissolved into tears that morning, during her pleas that he go to a doctor. He’d finally caved, but he was being an asshole about it.
“What if it was me who was sick?” she asked. “What would you do if I was sitting there, eat up with fever, my whole arm going putrid?”
“Feeling dramatic, are we, Miss Brontë?” he asked.
“Feeling abused,” she corrected. “Answer the question, Mercy.”
He sat on the sofa, hands clasped in his lap, sick and miserable. He glanced away and said, “I’d take you to the ER.”
“Exactly.” There was no sense of triumph in his admission. She wouldn’t feel better until he’d been examined and prescribed some heavy antibiotics.
The phone rang and she stepped to answer it. “That’s Aidan. Are you ready to go?”
He extended his arms to demonstrate that he was. Leather jacket, hair tied back in a queue, Colt in his waistband, shotgun propped against the sofa.
She nodded and answered. “Hey.”
“Hey, you ready?” Aidan asked, sounding only a little more awake than he had last night.
“Yeah.” She gave him directions to Lew’s from the clubhouse, Mercy chiming in when she needed help remembering the street names.
“Be careful,” Aidan admonished before he hung up, and it warmed her cold insides, made her feel like help was near at hand, just moments away.
“Okay,” she said, turning back to Mercy. “They’re gonna meet us. We should get going.”
Someone knocked on the front door.
Ava jumped.
Mercy lifted his brows. “Your brother get himself a teleportation device?”
She ignored the joke. “That man we dumped – he was alone. I didn’t see anyone else with him. I didn’t–”
Mercy lifted a hand, telling her to calm down. “I’ll just go see.” He stood and collected the shotgun. “You’ve got your piece on you?”
She nodded, laying a hand on her bag and the shape of the gun within it.
“Good. Stay behind me. If I tell you to, run. Okay?”
Like hell was she going to leave him behind while he was in this condition.
“Ava,” he said, firmly, like he was lecturing a child, “run if I tell you. Okay?”
“Fine,” she muttered, and followed him to the door.
Mercy leaned over and twitched one of the lace curtains aside first, before he unlocked the deadbolt.
Larry O’Donnell stood on the small porch, wringing a pair of leather work gloves in his hands. Ava noticed the nervousness in him first thing, and figured Mercy did too.
“Hey, man,” Mercy greeted. “Look, now’s not a good time. We’re heading out.”
Larry didn’t seem to hear him. He twisted the gloves and swallowed, throat working. His mouth opened, lips quivering, his leathery face eerily slack.
“Larry.” Mercy reached out and put a big hand on the man’s shoulder. “What is it?”
It took three tries, the breath whispering through his shaking lips, before Larry finally said, “I didn’t want to. You have to believe me, Felix, that I didn’t want to.”
“God,” Ava whispered, the blood draining from her face. Panic stole over her, rendered her motionless, stalled her heart for one awful second.
Mercy lifted the shotgun to his waist, the barrel aimed at Larry’s stomach. “What did you do?” he asked, a ferocious darkness coming into his voice, hardening it.
Larry wasn’t Larry in his eyes anymore, Ava knew. No longer the family friend, the trusted neighbor, the confidante. Now he was just someone who’d betrayed them.
Tears welled in Larry’s eyes, bright like crystal in the morning light. “They have Evie,” he whispered. “I had no choice, Felix. Believe me. You’d do the same if it was your wife.”
Then a man stepped into view, sliding from his vantage point at the corner of the cottage, stepping in close behind Larry and towering over him. He was a huge man, with massive chest and shoulders, no neck, shiny shaved head. He curled one massive arm around Larry’s throat, in a loose chokehold, and aimed the .45 he held to Larry’s temple.
His voice thick and toneless, like the rest of him. “We don’t care about the girl. Come with us, Lécuyer, and she can walk away.”
Ava shuddered hard. No one ever meant that, when they said it.
She saw Mercy’s mouth curl up in an ironic half-smile. “Are you the Grim Reaper?” he asked.
The big man frowned in confusion.
Mercy shoved her to the side the same moment he pulled the trigger.
The blast was deafening.
As Ava landed on her hands and knees on the boards, she felt the slivers of splintered doorframe pelt her back and arms. She heard the thump of heavy bodies on the porch floor outside.
As the gunshot was still echoing, a hand curled tight around her forearm and lifted her. Mercy got her on her feet and half-shoved, half-carried her through the cottage, toward the back door.
“We gotta move,” he said. “Still got your gun?”
“Yeah,” she said, breathlessly, as she stole one fast glance behind them as they whirled out the back door.
The buckshot had torn through Larry and the man standing behind them. The porch was a pulpy red mess.
Outside, Mercy scanned for more men, and then wasted no time heaving up the door to the tunnel. He gave her arm a rough yank, urging her to the hidden stairs. “Go.”
Too shocked to do anything but comply, she scrabbled down the stone steps, gasping as she entered the utter blackness of the tunnel below.
She turned, and saw Mercy come down behind her, pull the door shut behind him, sealing off every last scrap of light.
She could see nothing. Her eyes might as well have been closed.
She heard a metallic scraping, fumbling sound above her, at the door.
“Merc–”
“Ava, go!” he snarled. “I gotta lock this door. Go! Get to the church. I’ll catch up. Don’t wait for me.” He grunted as he struggled with the door in the dark. “Get in the boat. Get it started.”
She didn’t move. She wasn’t leaving him. If he even suggested it –
“Now!”
Breath lodged high in her throat, she whirled and went, hands skimming along the damp stone of the walls, steps echoing dully in the low hallway. She couldn’t hear if he was following her yet over the pounding of her heart. She couldn’t remember how long the tunnel was, but it seemed she fumbled forward for hours, the panic winding tighter and tighter.
What if Larry had told these men about the tunnel? What if there was an ambush waiting for her at the other end behind the pulpit?
Something bit into her shin and she fell forward, catching herself with her hands against the ascending staircase. She’d reached the end.
Patting her way upward, her hands slipped through moss and unidentified sliminess, until she found the door overhead. She braced her feet on the steps and heaved upward with all her might. The door lifted about an inch, then slammed back down, sending her to her knees again.
“Damn it,” she hissed, making another attempt.
She strained and strained…
And then there was something strong and solid against her back, and the door was levitating up. Mercy, coming up behind her, his strong arms flinging the heavy metal door aside like it weighed nothing.
He hustled her up the steps, onto the pulpit, into the abandoned, sun-drenched church that smelled strongly of jasmine and wild grass. He still had the shotgun propped on his shoulder, but was missing his belt; that’s what he’d used to secure the door.
It was a mad sprint through the muggy heat, to the cypress cave, down those earth and wood steps until they were leaping into the bateau. Saints Hollow was abandoned in less than ten minutes, without a backward glance.
Mercy handed her the shotgun before he started the motor. “You know how to use that,” he said, like he was reassuring both of them of a fact they already knew.
“Yeah.”
With his usual deft touch, he whipped the bateau from the lacing roots, out into the shallow water, and then they were flying, the narrow banks crowding close, the moss trailing against her cheeks as she scouted the way ahead. Through the last moss curtain and out into the open swamp. And then Mercy turned the Evinrude loose, the bow of the small boat lifting up off the water as the oversized motor propelled them across the glass-top water.
Ava spotted the other boat behind and to their right. It had been circling, waiting, ready in case Larry and his gigantic captor failed to get the drop on them. She counted two men, and the slender, gleaming barrels of rifles.
At a distance, a shotgun was no match for the .30-06s they carried.
She gestured to Mercy, not able to shout over the roar of the motor, and he risked a glance over his shoulder, grim-faced when he turned back.
He made a down gesture with his free hand, and she dropped down low in the bow, as Mercy arced the boat to the left and ran beneath a drooping branch. Ava saw the glimmer of a fat black snake as they passed beneath, a water moccasin sunning himself, and didn’t have time to be afraid of it.
As the bateau glided across the water, she peeked over the edge, the fine spray of swamp water misting across her face, and saw that they’d left the open water behind, and were in a heavily shaded finger of swamp, the cypress crowding close, owl-faced raccoons watching them from the banks.
She glanced at Mercy’s face. His concentration was fierce as he weaved the bateau between submerged logs and jutting roots.
If the men with the rifles were following them, they were no longer in sight. And Ava guessed, rather than return straight to Lew’s, they would pursue them, too afraid to let them slip away into the swamp somewhere.
Because that, in fact, was exactly what they did.
Mercy finally slowed the bateau and ran it aground on a mucky stretch of grass. He leapt free, landing ankle-deep in the water, and extended a hand for her to balance against as she jumped down.
They slogged through the water, up onto the sloped shore. Nutria scattered in front of them, giant brown rats, wet and slick.
Mercy gripped her hand tight in his, fingers clamping and mashing hers down. “Stay with me, baby,” he said. “We’ll be alright.”
Ava had no doubt, that had they taken a stroll through this stretch of swamp, she could have found hundreds of things to be afraid of. Snakes, spiders, sleeping gators, dark hollows of trees that looked like men crouched and ready to spring. But this was no stroll. Mercy ran – jogged, really – and he wouldn’t let go of her, towing her along in his wake, the underbrush swaying and slapping at them, a melody to the percussion of her heartbeat. They jumped roots and logs and dodged prickly yucca fronds. Her legs burned and ached. Breathing and keeping upright were her sole focus, the threat of capture receding behind the screen of physical exertion.
When Mercy pulled up, she slammed into his back, grasping at his jacket to keep from falling. He was pointing, she saw, when she’d caught her balance.
Through the last layer of trees, there was a ramshackle building on the water’s edge, a small dock, array of outbuildings. Lew’s.
Mercy took a huge breath, chest heaving. “We need to get to the bike,” he said. “Do you remember the combination to the lock?” When she said it aloud for him, he nodded. “Open the door. I’ll keep watch.”
She nodded, hand closing tight on itself in anticipation. “Do you see anyone out there?”
They both crept forward to peer between the tree trunks.
All was quiet.
“Okay,” he whispered.
Ava felt like a drawn bowstring, all tight and quivering, as they stalked carefully across the property, to the outbuilding. Her hand was slick on the lock as she turned the dial. Click. Door was open.
Mercy pushed the door wide and propped the shotgun against the wall. “Thanks, Lew,” he said, absently. To her: “We can’t carry it on the bike.”
She nodded.
They donned their helmets and swung aboard.
Before he started the Dyna, he reached back and covered her knee with his hand. One silent squeeze that said so much, and brought a lump to her throat.
She leaned forward and kissed his shoulder, wrapped her arms tight around his waist. “I’m with you,” she whispered. “All the way.”
Her first thought, when she saw the white van, was Aidan. Aidan was coming, meeting them. Backup. Salvation.
She felt herself relaxing, the awful tension leaving her arms so she could grip Mercy’s waist without shaking. She touched his shoulder. Look.
His head shifted as he turned to regard the white van, sitting up ahead at the cross street, the only vehicle in sight on this long stretch of bayou road.
He slowed the bike as they neared the van. Closer, closer…
Close enough for Ava to realize she didn’t recognize the driver. Or the passenger.
Not Aidan.
She saw the driver window roll down.
She clutched Mercy’s shoulder.
He cranked the throttle the same moment she saw the gun emerge from the window.
She couldn’t hear the shot. She felt it, as it ripped into Mercy, the reverberation moving through him, and then her. The hard shudder of his large body within her arms.
It was like he got slapped. The bike wobbled, dipped. He wrestled for control of it.
And then he got hit again, another shock wave passing through the both of them.
The bike slowed, slowed, slowed…
There was the van, looming up on the left. Then veering over into them.
Ava felt Mercy’s hand covering both of hers where they were linked over his stomach. In one fast move, he pried her fingers loose from one another, and shoved her backward, throwing his shoulders into the movement, heaving her from the bike.
It all unfolded in slow motion after that.
Ava closed her hands on empty air. She felt her body break away from everything solid: no strong back for her chest, no waist for her arms, no seat for her backside. No bike, no Mercy. Just the empty sapphire sky yawning above her, welcoming her, the sun beating down on her. She floated. She flew. Suspended in the sultry Louisiana morning, staring up at heaven, she felt the tiny beads of sweat rolling down her back, trickling between her breasts, gathering at her temples beneath the helmet.
He’d thrown her free of the bike. He wouldn’t take her with him, as he went the final distance. He wouldn’t accept her embrace, here at the end.
You’re falling, stupid! a voice screamed inside her head. Falling. Yes, falling…like the title of the story she’d written. Falling. She was a club girl, born and raised. She knew how to fall off a bike properly.
She closed her eyes and twisted, her body torqueing through the empty air as she pulled up into a ball, and presented the pavement with her left shoulder.
The impact was unlike anything she’d ever felt. She heard her helmet crack against the asphalt. It was like her shoulder exploded, shattering into a thousand fractured bits, and its echoes passed through her in waves that pushed her to the edge of consciousness, the black flickering through her head, her closed eyes. Her lungs and stomach contracted. She made an awful sound that hurt her ears.
She forced her eyes open as she felt herself turn over. She was rolling. Blue sky, black pavement, sky and then pavement again. Her arms and legs tossed limply. She felt like a toy in the hand of a giant, chucked across the street.
And then she stopped, face-down, still awake, unable to breathe.
She heard the squealing tires and the crunching metal and the thumping of car doors.
Mercy.
With a desperate gasp for breath, she heaved herself up, not stopping to interpret the damage to herself. Her left hand refused to move, so she rolled onto her side with the aid of the right, and blinked to clear her fuzzy eyes, struggling to interpret the scene before her.
The van had cut the bike off, and the Dyna lay on its side next to the van. Mercy was on his back, sprawled across the pavement. He wasn’t moving.
Three men had exited the van, and were walking toward him. One had sunlight in his golden, wind-tossed hair.
Larsen. It was Jasper Larsen, getting his revenge at last.
**
Fourteen Years Ago
The smell of rain woke her. Ava turned her head toward the window and breathed in deep the earthy scent of fresh rain, feeling the breeze stroke her face, hearing the soft shushing of the window lifting.
Her eyes opened. Backlit by the street lamp, she saw the window yawning open, silver flecks of rain falling in on top of her desk. And she saw the black shapes of two men climbing into her room.
She screamed.
The men, picking their way carefully so far, clambered over the window ledge. Featureless in the dark, one loomed over her bed. She smelled rain and sweat on him as his hand covered her mouth.
She bit him.
He let out a startled yelp and raised his other hand; she saw the glimmer of metal. He was lifting a knife.
And then suddenly the second man, down at the foot of her bed, was being set upon by a long tall shadow. There was a muffled grunt, a gasp, and then he crumpled with a gurgling sound.
Ava heard Mercy’s voice. “Close your eyes, sweetheart, don’t look.”
She obeyed, screwing them tightly shut.
The remaining intruder cursed and yelled. There were the sounds of a struggle. Slick, metallic sounds, heavy wet sounds, things she couldn’t interpret. She felt the tears seep between her lashes and knotted the blanket in her small fists.
Was Mercy okay? The man had a knife. What if he cut Mercy? What if he hurt him badly?
The tears coursed down her face and she prayed for his safety.
Then she heard a loud thump, like something heavy hitting the floor, and then she smelled Mercy, right up close, the cologne he wore and the leather of his cut and the faint flowers of his shampoo. His huge, warm, familiar hands touched her face. “You okay, fillette? You alright? I took care of it. They can’t hurt you.”
The rough pads of his fingers brushed across her cheeks, wiping at her tears, leaving something warm and wet behind.
She opened her eyes, and saw the dim outline of his face hovering above hers in the shadows, his eyes two glittering points, the streetlamp carving down the high, thin ridge of his nose. She read the concern in him, the warmth and love, no different from that of her parents.
The lights flipped on, suddenly, the brightness assaulting her eyes.
Maggie gasped from the doorway. “Oh my God!”
Mercy pulled back from her, straightening. “It’s okay,” he told Maggie. “She’s fine.”
Ava sat up and she saw the two men on the floor, their wide, staring eyes, like they’d seen something that had startled them. Then she saw the blood. So, so much blood. Seeping onto the pale carpet from the gaping holes in the men’s bellies.
Mercy had blood on his hands, smeared up his arms. He was breathing hard, the fabric of his shirt stretching tight across his chest.
“She’s fine,” he repeated. “They didn’t hurt her.”
**
Present Day
Ava watched the three men close in on her husband, and she realized they didn’t know or care if she was still alive. All their focus was on Mercy. The man who’d taken Jasper’s father and uncle that night in her bedroom, fourteen years ago.
They were going to kill him, right there in the middle of this stretch of road.
That was what they meant to do, anyway. Fourteen years ago, the Larsens had been gunning for her, and never suspected Mercy. Jasper was about to make the reverse decision, and it was going to be just as lethal.
Her left arm wouldn’t lift. Useless. She’d deal with that later. With her right, she fumbled the zipper of her purse open, reached in, curled her hand around the grip of the nine mil Ghost had given her.
Pain exploded through her as she staggered to her feet. She pushed it down. No time for that. Ignore it. Deal with it later. Head spinning, she managed to get both legs straight, and then she was standing, and then she was walking toward the men. Her vision swam, the pavement tilting under her.
She closed one eye.
The scene locked into place, still, able to be aimed at.
She tried again to lift the left arm, wishing she could have its support. But it refused to budge.
One-handed then.
She put the first man in her sights. Took a deep breath…
Bam! He fell forward, dead before he hit the ground, unable to break his fall. His face hit the pavement with a sick sound.
Bam! The second staggered, clutched at his arm, twisted toward her, lifting his own gun. Bam!
Then it was just Larsen, his hair a pale halo in the sunlight, as he turned to stare at her, uncomprehending. He was screaming.
Ava had been walking forward as she shot; a handful of feet separated them.
She emptied the rest of the clip in his face.
All of it over, all three of them dead, in less than five seconds.
Her daddy would have been so proud of her aim.
She realized it hadn’t been Larsen screaming, but her, a high, thin, animal screeching. It was what had baffled Larsen, given her that element of surprise.
She closed her mouth and the sound shut off like a valve had been closed. She couldn’t catch a deep breath, and she needed one badly. Her chest ached.
“Mercy,” she whispered.
She went to him, hitting her knees on the asphalt beside him. “Baby.” She pressed her hand to his chest, his throat. “Mercy. Merc. Felix.”
Blood was soaking through his white shirt in two places. His skin, already pale from the fever, was a shocking white, his lips and eyelids drained of all color. He lay on his back, arms flung wide, his left leg pinned beneath the bike.
She found a pulse, but not much of one, and the rise and fall of his chest was shallow.
“Felix,” she said again, helplessly.
Then she heard the approach of an engine.
**
Aidan was clambering out of the van before it came to a full stop, his gun drawn. The white van, parked at a slant in the middle of the road, had stopped his heart from a hundred feet back. He jogged around the front of it now, Tango scrambling to follow, afraid of what he’d find on the other side of it.
He came to a halt when he saw the muzzle of the Glock aimed at his heart. And then he saw who was on the other side of it.
His sister was on her knees beside the van, Mercy sprawled lifeless before her. She leaned over him, her posture protective, the light in her eyes wild and feral. She was snarling at him, her teeth bared. And her finger was inside the trigger guard.
Three dead men lay scattered. Mercy may have been dead too, for all he knew.
“Shit,” Tango breathed.
Aidan lowered his gun, lifting his free hand palm-up in a nonthreatening gesture. “Ava.” He forced his voice to be calm. “Hey, it’s me. It’s me, hon. Put the gun down.”
She blinked. She sat back. Her left arm hung at an unnatural angle, the shoulder seeming too high. Her jacket was scuffed and torn, helmet lopsided and cracked. “Aidan,” she said, without any recognition.
He eased a step closer. “Yeah. Ava, it’s me. It’s Aidan. And Tango.” He gestured to his best friend. “We’re here. Put the gun down, okay?”
She swallowed. “I had to put the other clip in,” she said, woodenly. “It was hard, with one hand, but I did it when I heard you coming. I used all the other ammo.”
“I can see that.” He glanced at Mercy’s pale face. “You did real good, okay? You got ‘em. Now please, Ava, put the gun down.”
She blinked again, and again. “He’s hurt really badly,” she whispered. “He…” Tears filled her eyes and spilled over. “Oh, God…” Her gun hand dropped, limp, onto Mercy’s chest.
Aidan knelt down beside her, reached to feel Mercy’s pulse. It was there, but he needed to get to the hospital ASAP.
“It’s okay,” he told Ava, as she bowed her head and her tears splatted down onto Mercy’s ruined jacket. “You’re okay, he’s okay. It’s fine.”
He turned to Tango. “Call 9-1-1 and get Grady over here,” he said of the NOLA member who’d driven them out. “We’ve got to get rid of them” – gesture to the bodies – “before the ambulance gets here.”