Page 98 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

Not a stick of furniture remained, however, nor anything like old brown, dried bloodstains. A cabinet door was missing, and he wondered if that was where the buckshot had embedded itself, a damning scatter of holes full of forensic evidence.

It was easy, the easiest thing in the world, to imagine a table, here, and a chair, and Landau tied to it. Blood pooling down his arms, and splattering on the floor while Felix took his revenge, before Landau’s pleas for mercy had finally been answered.

Merci.

Harlan blinked, and Baker was watching him with skepticism. The look of a man who thinks another man has cracked.

“He’ll show,” he said, forcefully, but Baker didn’t look convinced. “Just make sure your men are in place.”

“They are,” Baker said, without checking the windows.

He’d brought three big bruisers, each armed with sidearms and shotguns, and stationed them in a triangulating pattern worthy of any agency commander.

It wasn’t that Boyle doubted him.

It was that he’d learned never to underestimate Felix or his allies.

Baker stared at him a moment longer, then lifted his radio and said, “Status?”

“Still clear,” came the crackling response.

The other two responded the same:clear.

Boyle paced toward the mouth of the hallway that led beyond the kitchen, toward what must be the bedrooms. He hadn’t been down here before, on his one and only trip to Camp Lécuyer.

It was narrow, seemingly too narrow for men of Lécuyer width to pass down without tilting their shoulders. Windowless, mantled with cobwebs, buckled linoleum littered with rat droppings and patched with mildew, Harlan hesitated, filled with a sharp, cold dread that raised goosebumps on his arms despite the cloying heat.Don’t go down there. Down to the doubtless small spaces where the family had laid their heads each night, dreaming of alligators, or gumbo, or their own front porch. Had Felix dreamed of killing, then? Of torture? Had he thirsted for it when he was still on the cusp of manhood, twisting and fretting beneath tangled sheets as he tried to understand the urge that welled up within him like a pricked boil?

Only the dusty glow of light through a rear door gave him the impetus to take the first step, and then the next. He passed a bathroom crusty and disgusting from abandonment, and three bedrooms, one to the left, two to the right, even smaller than he’d thought, wedged in tight by the narrow shotgun walls of the house.

Even on the thresholds, he could tell which one had belonged to which Lécuyer. Beneath layers of dust, the grandmother’s bed was draped tidily with a quilt made of multicolored crochet squares, faded from the sun through the window, the once-white drapes fuzzy with spider webs and spotted with fly droppings.

Remy’s and Felix’s might have been indistinguishable: plain comforters, nightstands, cheap bookshelves. But in one room, the bookshelf was empty. Felix. Somewhere between killing Landau and abandoning the house for good, Felix came back to collect his things.

As though caught in the navel by one of Felix’s shark-gauge fishing hooks, he was drawn into the room.

Felix hadn’t takeneverything. The nightstand drawers were full of odds and ends: tubes of lip balm, bandages, lost buttons, and a stash of janky old toy cars and action figures leftover from boyhood. Amidst the dust bunny colony beneath the bed, he found a stash of dirty magazines – but not many. Mostly car, boat, and bike magazines. Positively tame by teenage boy standards. Saving himself for his fillette? Harlan pushed back to his feet with a sneer.

He blamed his headrush on standing suddenly…but it didn’t clear. His breath came quick, and with each inhale, he imagined he could smell the man himself beneath the heavy tang of dust and mildew and emptiness. The skin, and soap, and faint spice of cologne he’d smelled up close in person in a holding cell in Knoxville, right before a phone blew up in his face.

He was on his way to the closet when a shout issued from the kitchen.

Harlan swore, and headed that way at a run.

He saw the blood, first.

A fresh, bright skein of it like a blast radius across the old stains on the linoleum. Baker was down, side of his head blown out, unmoving.

It was one of his guys who’d shouted. Who knelt down, now, to take a needless pulse check.

The second guy walked to the window, the one that had been busted out by the tree limb. He raised his gun, leaned over the sink, peered out – and the back of his head blossomed like a red flower. His body jerked forward, and he fell into the sink, and then backward onto the floor.

Harlan lifted a hand to shield his face from the fine mist of blood, and the flying chunks of bone and flesh, and only then, as he fell back to the hallway and drew his gun, did he register the tinkling of glass. The shot had hit thebackof the man’s head; it had come through the window on theopposite sideof the kitchen.

“What the fuck?” he demanded. He tried to rally, and step back into the room, but his feet wouldn’t cooperate.

The third man wasn’t listening to him. “Fuck this,” he said, turned toward the front room, headed for the door, and then fell back as though thrown, body falling down with a meaty thump, no attempt made to twist away or break his fall. He’d been shot in the face.

And all three rounds, Harlan realized belatedly, had been shot through a suppressor, near-silent puffs of air displacement he had initially attributed to the thudding of his own heart.

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