It Was Felix Who Hunted...

 It was Felix who hunted. Who went out in the boat with his father to haul up and shoot the gators that they took to the depot, trading tags for money. State-sanctioned gator murder. It was no frightened hare, nor fleeting, white-flagged doe that Felix pursued, but a fellow hunter. A fellow predator. Harlan had spied long enough to know that at some point in the past year or so, as Felix’s dimensions changed rapidly from those of a lanky boy to those of a broad, strong man, he and his father had traded tasks. Felix had been the gun man since he was eight: the one who wielded the .22 Remington and delivered the kill shot to the gator’s head at point-blank range when it surged up out of the water. But now that he was big enough, powerful enough, he’d become the rope man. It was his father who waited with the gun, and Felix who dragged the big bull gators up out of the muck and into the light

One of my absolute favorite aspects of writing characters over a course of years is having the chance to tell their formative tales. I'll never grow tired of reaching back into their pasts and using their early childhood memories, and their adolescent experiences to paint the portrait of the adults they are in the present-day action of a story. That's why I'll never get tired of writing about Mercy's early life growing up hunting gators with his daddy. 

In Lord Have Mercy, I get to revisit some of those memories from an outside perspective, and with the new knowledge that Remy was keeping even more secrets than Mercy ever suspected. 

Part Two, Fortunate Son, is available now!