Daddy was heavier, almost as tall as he was, strong and solid, despite the leanness, his weight crushing the air from Mercy’s lungs as he toted him up the rise. He eased him down into his bed of earth, and then realized he couldn’t let go. He cradled his father in his arms, as he lay on the upturned dirt, and pressed her forehead to Remy’s cold neck.
It was not a moment of danger that caused his life to flash before his eyes, but this final chance with the man he loved so much. Every morning, every hunt, every lesson, every book passage, every smile, every “I’m proud of you, Felix.”
“I want it to be me,” Mercy whispered, “who gets in that hole. I want it to be me.”
But finally, he relinquished Remy to his grave, and shoveled the dirt over him, until he was packed just as tightly and lovingly as his mother beside him.
He’d done it. He’d concentrated on what he had to do.
And then Mercy lay down on top of his father’s grave and the sobs tore him apart, until he finally lost consciousness.
The heat woke him. The oppressive weight of the sun beating down on his leather-clad back grew too heavy, and his eyes opened. He was sweating, as he laid there, palms pressed to the dirt, and his lungs were full of the smell of the ground, of green things, of the swamp. He thought he caught a whiff of Daddy’s aftershave, but that wasn’t possible. Because Daddy was dead.
Slowly, he pushed up onto his hands and knees, and he knew. Heknew. There was an emotion building and boiling inside him, filling up every corner of him, down to his fingers and his toes. His face was stiff with dry tears, but he felt this new emotion burning that stiffness away.
Rage. It was rage. For the first time in his life, he knew what rage tasted like, and it was nothing like the petty shit people pretended it was. It was driven, it was burning, it was consuming. It was amazing.
And with that rage, came the knowing. Oliver Landau had killed his father, acting on Dee’s instructions to come for the money owed her.
Well, Oliver Landau was going to die today. And Mercy was going to enjoy every second of it.
**
“She’s with her gentlemen,” Barbara said when she answered the door.
“Good.”
Mercy didn’t care if it was locked or not – he didn’t check; it felt good to kick in the door to the guest bedroom. One of those little bursts of violence that fed the rage, made it stronger and more focused.
The girl, Simone was there, and his mother, and the three men from the day before. They were having a fucking orgy or something. He didn’t know. He didn’t register any of it. He saw Oliver’s stupid tattoos and went for him. Caught him around the throat and lifted him off his feet, his arms picking up the burden effortlessly. It was easy as breathing, to pick a man up and hold him by his windpipe.
Oliver clawed at his hands, and someone, probably Dee, slapped him in the back, the head, kicked at the backs of his knees.
Like flies landing on him, all of it.
“Don’t get comfortable,” he told the two cohorts, and then he left, dragging a naked Oliver Landau with him, his mother screaming behind him.
He’d brought Remy’s old Ford, and he tied Oliver with rope, gagged him with an old rag, and tossed him into the bed, beneath the cover of the camper shell. “You’re going to wish,” he said before he closed the tailgate, “that I’d put a bullet in you just now.”
“Please,” Oliver whispered. “God,please.”
“Please what?” Mercy asked.
The breath wheezed in and out of him. “Just…end it, already.”
“End it?” Mercy feigned ignorance. “Like…let you go?”
Oliver’s eyes closed tight, more tears sliding down his cheeks.
“Oh. You meant kill you, right?”
Slow, halting nod.
“Aw, come on now, don’t hurt my feelings, Ollie. I thought we were having fun.”
The first thing he’d done, once he’d dragged Oliver into the house, was pull one of Nanette’s old loose flannel nightgowns down over the man’s head. “So you can remember what she smelled like when she died,” he’d explained, as he was tying him in one of the kitchen chairs. He’d set everything up in the kitchen of the little tar paper house out in the swamp, his home. Where no one could see or hear them.
He’d started with a knife. “Those are the stupidest fucking tats,” he’d said. “Let’s see what you look like without them.”
