Page 82 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

“Get toilet paper!” Ham called at his retreating back, and he slammed the door so hard on his way out he heard something crash to the floor inside. He hoped like hell it was that stupid fucking jackalope. Or maybe one of those grinning, arms-around-each-other’s-necks group photos. Brothers holding brothers. A brotherhood he wasn’t going to be allowed to join, was he? He had months and months left of his prospect year, and they wouldn’t even tell him about a member’smurdered family. Felix’s family, who he’dhad lunch with. He…

He couldn’t see. He stopped beside the van, and scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve, for all the good it did. The tears had turned on like a tap, and were pouring down his face, breath unsteady thanks to the hot, hitching anger in his chest. He searched for grief, groped for it, but all he found was an incomprehensive, whipcord anger snapping and snaking andthrashing free like a fireman’s hose abandoned on the ground. He couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t banish it.

But he couldn’t stand here crying like a baby where anyone might see, so he climbed into the van, started it up, and blinked furiously at the tears as he pulled out of the lot.

Before he was conscious of it, he was past the turnoff for the store, and headed for Burgundy Street instead.

He hadn’t been back since he prospected, thanks to the halfhearted efforts of the club girls, but Deehadallowed him to return after that first time, and after getting booted. She wouldn’t see him herself, but she’d set him up with several of the other girls, three of them at once, even, and he had the sense that she was…well, trying to keep him around, in some way, for some reason. Maybe she was simply toying with him, letting him wonder a little, before she took him back into her bed. He could be patient, especially when she provided alternative company so willing to please.

He wasn’t looking for company today, though.

He left the van several blocks down the street and rang the bell three quick times in succession, because once he pressed it the first time, his finger just kept going.

“Jeez, hold your horses,” the girl who answered the door said, rolling her eyes. It was Katie. “Oh, hey there, Harlan. You here for lunch hour?” Her grin sharpened. “Two for one special today, on sale.”

“I need to talk to Dee.”

The smile dropped off her face. “Aw, come on. You know she won’t see you.”

“Not for sex.” His tears had dried on the drive over, but he was sweating copiously, now, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s important. I need to ask her something.”

Katie frowned, and stood in the half-open doorway, not letting him in yet. He knew that he could shove her back andmarch in uninvited – it was so tempting that he curled his hands into fists to keep from doing it – but he thought that would only end with him get manhandled by Dee’s meat-necked security thugs.

He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself. “I know she said she wouldn’t let me pay for her time anymore. I promise this isn’t about that. I…” He leaned in closer – she leaned back, he noted with a sour feeling in his stomach – and whispered, “It’s about her husband. Her ex, I guess. Felix’s father.”

Katie’s eyes flew wide. “Shit.”

“Yeah. I need to talk to her.”

“I…shit,” she repeated, and shook her head. “Okay, okay, come in.”

He did, and she pointed to the bench in the entryway. “Stay here, and I’ll go tell her you want to talk. Stay here,” she said again, and pointed to the bench for emphasis.

He sat. “Okay.”

Katie wasn’t gone a minute, not even long enough for Harlan to start second guessing his decision to come here, and then she waved for him to follow her.

In the back of the house, in her lavish private suite, Dee was dressed in a floral silk kimono and what was clearly last night’s makeup, smudged and uneven and caked into the lines of her face, betraying her true age. She paced barefoot back and forth across the rug, smoking a cigarette.

She whirled at the sound of Harlan’s entrance, and snapped, “Shut the door.”

He did, with a shrugging apology at Katie as he did so.

“What did you hear?” she demanded, the moment the latch was in place. Her voice was so loud and shrill he thought closing the door had been a waste of time. “What did you hear?” she repeated, when he didn’t respond quickly enough.

He’d started sweating again, and his eyes burned, and he thought he needed a Gatorade soon if he kept leaking fluids at this rate. “Nothing! I heard – well, I heard that Remy and his mother were dead. And something about some guy named Oliver Landau, but I don’t–”

She flew across the room, eyes bulging.

When Harlan tried to stagger back from her, he slammed into the door and could go no farther.

She gripped the front of his cut with one hand, and jabbed the burning cherry of her cig toward his face. “Oliver?” she shrieked. “You heard about Oliver? What did you–”

He’d shut his eyes when the cig got too close, but slitted them open when her screams cut off suddenly.

Her eyes had gotten somehow wider, wilder, fixed, feverish, and unblinking. They weren’t focused on his face, but on his chest – his cut, he realized, as she traced the top snap button with the thumb of the hand that gripped his collar. Slowly, still staring, lips parted, cig smoldering forgotten and in danger of burning her fingers, she flattened her hand, and trailed it down over his chest, skin rasping faintly on the smooth black leather.

“Prospect,” she murmured. “You’re a prospect.”

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