#TeaserTuesday: Let's Get Started

“You ever dug a hole before?” she asked Gray as she tied her hair back and secured it with the elastic off her wrist.

“Yes.” He paused. “Have you?”

“Not this kind of hole, but I think all holes are pretty much standard.”

“This one needs to be deep. At least six feet.”

She popped her door. “Let’s get started, then.”

I'm very pleased to say that I managed to cut my way through the worst of the tangles in that difficult Beware of Dog scene earlier today, and the ball is rolling once more. But I'm not sharing a BoD teaser this Tuesday. Instead, I'm going back to a previous book.

All this read-along discussion of Ava's beginnings has me thinking more and more about the final-form adult Ava we see in Lord Have Mercy. In the decade that I've written her, the transformation has been a slow, organic process, but looking at book one alongside book ten makes it look stark. 

There's so many scenes I loved in LHM; scenes that felt necessary, well-earned, and a long time coming. This was one of them. I'll add most of it under a cut so it doesn't clog up the main page, and to hide major spoilers. 

If you still haven't ventured back to the swamp with the whole gang in Lord Have Mercy, consider this your gentle reminder that there's more than four-hundred-thousand words of craziness out there for your reading pleasure. What are you waiting for? 

She wouldn’t call the digging therapeutic, because nothing could have been that, at the moment, but it was…good. A positive way to burn calories. It felt like doing something, and something far more useful than vacuuming.

They started by flattening the grass down with their feet, for lack of a better tool. Ava briefly wondered if there was something they could use back at the barn, but the idea of swinging an old school scythe was so absurd she almost laughed about it. Instead, they stepped on their shovels, broke ground, and kept going.

It was hard work. By one foot down, Ava’s arms where shaking, and sweat was pouring down her back. She ditched her light hoodie and soldiered on in just her tank top. They didn’t talk, but she could hear Gray’s regular, deep exhales just as she could hear her own.

Two feet. Three. Shovel after shovel full of soft, black, Tennessee earth tossed up and over the side. Her shoulders burned, her lungs burned, her eyes burned, where sweat ran into them. She dashed the back of her hand across her forehead and kept going, though she felt the skin of her hands tear and bleed.

In a distant back part of her mind, she recognized that if they managed to get all six feet down, she’d be so sore and exhausted she wouldn’t be strong enough to reach up to the top of the hole and hoist herself up. But she kept digging, and kept digging, and when she swayed sideways off balance, she used her shovel to right herself.

Between one shovelful and the next, she realized she could no longer hear the thunk-shhh of Gray’s shovel behind her.

She stopped.

“Ava.”

“What?”

“Someone’s coming.”

She lifted her head, and listened, and sure enough, she could hear the approach of an engine.

She waited for fear, but instead felt an electric surge of…not eagerness, but readiness.

“You armed?” she asked.

His answer was the quiet rustle of drawing his gun.

Ava wore one on her hip, in one of Mercy’s borrowed holsters, the nylon kind you threaded a belt through. She flipped open its strap and withdrew the Beretta stowed there: not as comforting as the .357, but easier to carry on her person and better than nothing.

The hole was knee-deep, and so the headlights flared to life above them, nothing but twin, burning beams in the dark. Ava squinted against them, and focused instead on the engine’s rumble: deep and powerful. A truck.

She drew her gun as well.

The lights cut off, and the engine died, and she said, “Hold on,” when Gray lifted his gun.

The doors opened, and a familiar voice called, “You can shoot us, but then you’ll have to finish the hole yourselves.”

“Dad.” Surprise jolted through her, though maybe it shouldn’t have.

Beside her, Gray stowed his gun and resumed shoveling.

 

~*~

 

Ghost had brought Michael and Harry with him, and both of them pulled shovels from the bed and went to work. Gray didn’t stop for a break until Ghost shoved a water bottle at him and issued an order.

Ava sat on the dropped tailgate of the truck, playing with her own empty water bottle, the water that had been in it minutes ago sloshing cold and unpleasant in her stomach. Now that she was sitting, exhaustion was rapidly working to jellify all her muscles. She was shaking, faintly, and picked at the bottle label in an attempt to cover it.

“Why haven’t you ever invested in an excavator?” she asked, genuinely curious. “One of those little ones.”

They’d shut off the Caprice in favor of the battery lanterns Ghost had brought along, and their blue-white glow highlighted his frown in stacks of deep furrows gouged across his brow. “Huh.”

“You never thought about it?”

He shrugged. “If it ain’t broke, I guess. We’ve always done it the old-fashioned way.”

“Something to consider.”

“Hm.”

Over by the hole, getting deeper and deeper by the minute, Gray crumpled his empty bottle and picked up his shovel again. A human grave was a narrow space for three grown men, but Gray was skinny, and they made it work.

She knew what was coming before Ghost took a deep breath and turned to her, so she decided to beat him to the punch.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said, and he turned to her, brows lifted in a mild, questioning sort of surprise.

“You do?” He shifted closer, hand resting against the taillight. “Lay it on me, then, mind-reader.”

Ava frowned. He was being careful with her, in a way he normally wasn’t. In the last few years, sometime after Millie was born, he’d softened toward her, no longer the dictator he’d always been; it felt as though something like a friendship had blossomed between them, but one that could sharpen quickly back to father/daughter in times of crisis.

Tonight, he was being not just friendly, but lax with her. Casual in the way that a tiger was casual right before it pounced. She didn’t trust it. Could swear she saw the bulge of a backed-up lecture sitting in his throat, just below his Adam’s apple.

But he was playing it cool. Hadn’t once indicated that he didn’t approve of what she’d done at the house.

“You’re gonna tell me that I took a tremendous risk,” she said, lifting her chin so they were on eye level. Daring him. “That I might have shot my own husband, and that there might be witnesses. That I murdered someone in my own home, where my children sleep, and that I–”

“Stop.”

She did. So fast and so hard that her teeth clicked together. She was breathing in sharp, insubstantial whistles through her nose, and when she clenched her jaw, it trembled. Again, that little voice in the back of her head pointed out that she wasn’t doing well, and again she slapped it down.

“Okay, I’m gonna say my piece, and then we’ll put this to bed and not worry about it anymore. Okay?”

The statement was so out of character for him that she could only nod, shocked.

He nodded in return. “Don’t go getting a big head about it or anything” – a lone brow cocked in warning – “but when it comes to Mercy, I trust your judgement better than anyone’s, including my own. Sometimes including his. If you say you know for a fact that this guy wasn’t Mercy, then I know it wasn’t.”

His faith, the way he sounded sure of her, physically rocked her back so she had to drop the water bottle and catch herself on her hands.

“I am worried about witnesses. Not because of the local cops, because they’re in our pocket, but the feds could still come sniffing back around – forget could, they definitely will. But that’s not a disadvantage: Boyle’s gone way, way off book. There’s no way the FBI can defend what he’s done publicly, on TV or in court, which means they can’t go after you for their real life Mercy doll.

“What we don’t know,” he continued, “is whether or not this guy was important to anyone. He could be an agent, or he could be some jackass Boyle hired without anyone’s knowledge. We’ll go through his wallet, and have Ratchet do a search. But someone will know he’s dead, and someone might want retribution for that.” Both brows lifted: are you ready to accept that?

She exhaled. “Yeah.”