Mercy was twenty-one. He couldn’t get the stink of the bayou out of his clothes, and his hair needed cutting, badly. He wasn’t sure he’d fully come to grips with what had happened only weeks before in the swamps just outside of New Orleans, in the tar paper shack where he’d been raised, but here he was in this Tennessee college city, full of bookstores and soft, friendly Tennessee people. This wasn’t the Deep South, but a more northern, more temperate, more welcoming South. He appreciated, in a gross display of homesickness, the smell of the water. Only here, it was the algae tang of river, and back home, it had been the fetid musk of swamp.
He loved how busy it was at night, all the lights, the cars crawling along on the interstate. New Orleans had been busy too, but in a parti-colored, witch’s brew kind of way. New Orleans was a haunted, spirited city. This was just…just pleasant. Just a nice place to live. The food lacked the inspiration and flavor of home, but there were decent restaurants and bars. It was all so vague and shapeless, so ruled by the color orange. He was glad for the change. Glad enough he thought he could break into tears.
Glad enough to obey blindly when his new president and vice president set tonight’s task before him.
“You made yourself an overnight reputation back home,” Ghost said at church. Ghost, of the shrewd eyes and the complicated blankness of face. “That’s what I want around here: someone with a reputation. Someone to put the fear of God in these bastards who think they can pick us off one by one.”
It didn’t matter that he was only twenty-one, Mercy was six-five, and built in a way that let the world know he’d fill out soon. When he did, look the hell out. It was not his loyalty the Knoxville brothers had been after, not his dedication, commitment to the club. It was his ruthless reputation that made him special in their eyes. The things that he’d done, rather than who he was. None of his Louisiana brothers knew about early mornings on the swamp checking the baits with Daddy. They didn’t know about the Ruger 10/22 or the hissing, moaning gators they’d pulled up into the boat. They hadn’t asked about his Cherokee grandmother, her knitting, her swamp wisdom. Most of them knew about Mama, because that was unavoidable. The story of Mama was a part of the story of his reputation.
No one cared that he was Felix. Or that he could slide a whole chicken carcass onto a shark hook with deft hands, not so much as a spot of grease on his clothes. Or that he liked to read poetry, because his grandmother had recited Longfellow and Wordsworth to him from memory, repeating what had been recited to her, because she’d never learned to read.
He was Mercy now. “Merci beaucoup,” Oliver Landau had whispered before the last of his blood left him. Thank you. Thank you for giving me death, finally.
“Keep up, kid,” Hound said. “I know you can with those legs of yours.”
Tonight, he worked alongside the Knoxville chapter’s tracker, a whipcord thin man named Hound; he could have found a needle in a stack of needles, James had said laughingly. Hound’s apprentice, a nineteen-year-old kid, had been dubbed Rottie, as a sort of kindred naming, and it was with these two, and Dublin, that Mercy worked.
“Coming.” Mercy loped after the others, his new brothers, as they rounded a corrugated steel warehouse and slipped between two industrial brick buildings. Via a trail of evidence Mercy wasn’t sure existed, Hound had led them fifty miles south of Knoxville, to the TVA nuclear power plant in Spring City. A homeless woman, a boisterous, tambourine-tapping, shopping cart-pushing black lady who liked to rail at passing cars about Jesus, had been under the bridge the night Laverne had disappeared. Before the woman’s son had been called, and he’d carted her home for a shower and a hot meal before she abandoned him once again for the streets, Hound had managed to wring a story from her in exchange for a Coke and some peanut M&Ms. She’d seen a man dump the body in the car and run off like, “a scalded cat.” He was, in her words, “a bad-looking man. He needed the lord in a bad way, that one.” His shirt had been an industrial smock; he’d worked, according to her keen eyesight (all that was keen about her these days) at the power plant. She’d seenTVAon his breast pocket.
Four Carpathians worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. One was working tonight. It was him they hunted. From him, Mercy would wring the intel the Dogs wanted, not just an admission to Laverne’s murder, but to all of the recent infractions committed by the expanding street gang.
They reached the edge of the building and halted behind Hound. Having snuck on the property, climbing the fence, they’d crept up from the river and approached the parking lot from the plant-side, rather than the street-side. Their target, Hound reasoned, would never expect a threat while on the TVA property. He would be at his most vulnerable, his most tired, and unarmed. He’d put a lot of thought into this entire situation.
“There.” Hound pointed across the shadowed lot and its dark cones of streetlamp light, toward a man walking to a rusted-out Ford pickup.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but how do you know that’s him?” Mercy asked.
“That’s his truck. This is the time he always gets off. And he walks like a jackass, that’s how.” Matter-of-fact. No room for doubt.
Mercy didn’t want to do what the club was asking him to do if this wasn’t their man. Then again, if the club wasn’t worried about any moral ramifications, maybe he shouldn’t be either.
With a series of hand gestures, Hound sent Mercy right, Dublin and Rottie left, and began to stalk straight toward their prey himself.
Mercy let his legs eat up the distance, unfurling across the pavement in ground-covering strides that stirred the stagnant river air against his face, carried him between the cars until he got close enough to their mark to smell the tobacco stink on him.
This man, Mercy reminded himself, had killed a member’s old lady. If not himself, then by proxy thanks to shitty friendship decisions. This man was of Oliver Landau’s ilk. He brought a mental image of that killer’s face to the forefront of his mind – Landau’s split and bloody lips, swollen eyes – the better to engage his aggression. To tap into that part of himself that stayed dormant like a gator sleeping in the rushes, and came leaping and snapping to the surface when someone spilled blood in the water.
Blood…so much blood on the floor of the tar paper shack. Boot prints in the blood. Grandma limp as a dish rag out at the water’s edge…
No. Those memories would not serve him here. Only the fury. That metallic, constant anger that knew neither emotion nor restraint. Emotionless, like the gators he’d grown up hunting, the black tide inside himself would rise to the occasion and like a puppeteer, he would take total control of the wicked things his hands would do.
“He’s gone crazy!” one of Landau’s friends had shouted that day in the swamp.
But crazy was the farthest thing from the truth. That was the scary part: he wasn’t abitcrazy.
Behind the mark, Hound broke into a jog and called, “Hey, man, hold up a sec!”
The man turned; the streetlamp caught the field of stubble across his cheek, the sharp hook of his nose, the glassy sheen of his eye. “What?”
“I wanted to ask you something,” Hound said, approaching him.
This would be Mercy’s best shot. From the shadows, he closed in with a panther’s grace, reached for the back of the man’s neck with one too-large hand, pinched, and covered his mouth and nose with the other. The man struggled, bowing up like a toddler resisting his mother’s embrace. But Mercy put him in an expert sleeper hold and his gator-wrestling arms accepted the man’s weight as he lost consciousness.
Hound pulled duct tape from his cut pocket and bound the man’s hands and gagged his mouth with a bright silver strip that flashed in the streetlamp. “Let’s move.”
And they did.
**
