Page 123 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Still, she wasn’t taking chances.

She flashed the lights once to let the boys know they had incoming, though they could doubtless hear the engines approaching; Maggie could, even over the low idling of the Jeep. Then it was dark again, and Maggie braced her hands on the wheel, like that would actuallydo something.

Too late to second-guess things now: a flash of white in the corner of her eye. The boat.

Maggie could see the winch cord because she knew to look for it, a faint flicker of silver against the black of the canal. But the man piloting the boat didn’t see it, and certainly wasn’t expecting it.

It caught the windshield first, and snapped it off as if it was nothing more than part of a child’s toy boat. It broke into multiple pieces, some of which flew high, some of which tumbled back into the boat and struck the men aboard it. There were shouts of alarm – that turned to screams, because the boat’s pilot was standing behind the wheel, and the cable caught him across the throat, and cut through him neatly and cleanly.

Maggie saw his head topple, and his body flopped forward against the wheel, spinning it hard to the right. The others were seated, and avoided decapitation, but the boat surged, and bucked, and careened to the side, and struck the far bank with an awful crunch of collapsing metal and fiberglass.

Then the second boat roared up. The men aboard it had watched their comrade lose his head, and so they ducked. The cable took the windshield, but nothing else, and the boat sped past and away into the night, out of view.

~*~

Toly was adept at waiting. He’d waited plenty in his bratva days: spying, stalking, holding himself back, silent and unseen, until the moment came to strike. Usually, he waited in dark doorways, on cold rooftops; frigid corners in the deep of winter. Urban landscapes. The wilderness unsettled him, but after a half-hour or so, the routine of waiting soothed his country-jangled nerves and allowed him to settle in the driver’s seat of the Rover, scanning routinely and calmly through his night vision binoculars for anything out of place.

When his radio crackled to life, he was expecting it, hovering in that perfect pre-op calm in which all his movements felt precise and efficient, and in which his heartrate slowed to accommodate for the rapid-fire spinning of his thoughts.

Maggie’s voice came through the line: “Toly, there’s a hostile boat headed your way. The guys are in the boat behind.”

“Copy that.”

More crackling, and then her voice turned strained, as, holding the radio, he climbed out of the Rover and moved to the array of switches, finger poised and ready. “Toly, we can’t find Ava.”

For the first time, his perfect calm splintered. The night insects sounded suddenly loud – or, no, wait, that wasn’t a giant mosquito. It was a boat approaching.

He pressed the radio switch. “I thought she was up a tree.” A thought occurred. “I heard a rifle shot.”

“That was her,” Maggie confirmed. “But when I went to get her, she was gone. Her footprints went off into the swamp and then disappeared.”

What a lovely, unnecessary complication.

He shook his head, and said, “The boat’s coming. I’ll check in after. Keep me posted.”

“Copy, over and out,” she said, all business again, and Toly tucked the walkie-talkie into his pocket. Losing Ava was a whole new problem, but she’d struck out on her own, it sounded like, and Toly couldn’t abandon his post to search for her.

The approaching whine intensified to a deep growl, and Toly held his breath, listening intently. Now, he thought.

“Christ, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he muttered, and threw the switches.

The winches lurched, and engaged, and started to wind up. Limbs and pulleys creaked overhead as the cables started fighting with their payloads.

Toly tipped his head back and searched the canopy, waiting for the sharp snap of a broken branch, for the whipping strike of a snapped cord.

He unslung his rifle and walked around behind the Rover, peering around its windows in the hopes the car would shield him when something inevitably broke.

But the winches kept turning, and the pulleys kept squeaking, and the lines rose and rose up out of the water, dripping, vibrating as the gators fought.

Winches and diesel generators were stronger than a man’s arms, though, and, just as the boat blasted into view, the gatorsdid what Mercy had predicted they would do: they stopped trying to stay under and fight the lines, and burst upward with strong swipes of their tails.

Whoever was manning the boat must have seen the water froth at the surface as the gators jumped. He backed off the throttle, and the boat dipped low at the prow as it slowed suddenly.

One gator struck the side of the boat with the end of its snout like a torpedo. It didn’t do any damage, but the driver whirled around with a confused exclamation. “What the hell–”

“Gators!” someone else shouted. “Holy shit, it’s gators!”

The winches kept turning, and hauled the other three gators, thrashing and hissing, up into the boat.

---