Page 178 of Slack Tide Kill

Then he saw it.

A single pair of red tail lights up ahead, weaving through the storm like a phantasm, cutting a black wake down the center of the flooded road.

"It's him." Sally leaned forward in her seat, a line of red blood running down her cheek. "He's almost there."

Liam tightened his grip on the wheel, thoughts rushing through his head. Was this what Sally had felt, facing down the Rooks in their sewer boat, charging across a field in her Mustang?

Endangering everyone. But this was more than a job. He looked at Sally; already braced, hands clutching the seatbelt across her chest, eyes latched onto him.

"Do it," she said.

He floored the gas and roared toward the van.

73 THE RIVER

Jack Mercer didn't hear the blast, but he knew the Dymchurch sea wall was gone. He'd waited until the last moment, almost out of range, to push the button and trigger the gasoline bomb hidden at the edge of Gerald Spate's caravan park. Planted in one of the exact weak points his 'friend' Arthur Bledd had so often railed about.

Greatstone. Dymchurch. Scots Float.

The marsh's clearest points of failure.

If there was anything he'd learned from their endless conversations, nurturing a connection that would allow him to easily poison Bledd and finish a job 30 years in the making, it was that Arthur Bledd was a real boor.

He laughed.

"What's funny?" asked Glory Hallelujah. Sitting by his side. Just one more job nearing completion.

"Thinking about Sally Rogers," he covered easily. "How she led us right to Bledd, but let Logan blind her to the truth."

Glory seemed to accept that. She still had the manila folder out, straining to read the materials within, but struggling. The light was weak, the rain a constant distraction, the print font tiny. He'd done that on purpose, along with the dense paragraphs of information.

All of it was true or close to true, constructed over the last few hours, much of it repurposed from his own story, combined with a hodge-podge conspiracy of muddled genealogy, curious happenstance and random interconnections that only needed to last 10 minutes longer.

His expertise. It was how he'd stayed above suspicion for decades. Watching. Listening. Waiting. Covering with the near-guilt of others, and every time, it felt better.

The first had been a thrill. Tom Richter had been so easy. A hint of friendship, a spiked beer, then he was laying him down on the beach. Smoothing his hair, like he was someone's beloved son. Now all alone in that desolate space.

It had felt so right.

Then Harrow, left for Nancy Cagen to find. Then Cagen herself.

The thought of that hag's death left a bitter taste in Mercer's mouth even now. Killing her should have been better than all the rest combined. Laying her down between the great sound mirrors, those vast listening ears, should have felt amazing. Slicing off her ears. Watching her try to beg through the ketamine haze.

Instead, he'd felt only pain. As if he was the one dying, not her. As if the past was dragging him down, not the other way around.

He'd had such hopes, coming back to Dungeness at 31 years old. Already enmeshed in the police. Returning to a father who was only 14 years older. It hadn't exactly been a welcome with open arms, but Reg had given him a role in his world; a hole the police had never managed to fill.

It was a place to be. His first real taste of belonging, in a lonely, solitary life spent bouncing between foster homes and government care facilities. Even if he wasn't allowed to join Reg in the pub with his mates, or come around to his home, the man was still his father.

Then Reg asked him to kill Richter.

Kill him and pin it on Bledd. This is how you prove yourself, son. And it had been so easy. He'd just done it then gone back to Reg. Proud. Expecting to finally be accepted.

Reg had slapped his face.

"Are you fucking mental, boy?" the older man spat, standing out on the barrens of Dungeness beach. "You've just put every copper in Kent on my doorstep. They'll be all over me for years. And you've done this, you psycho little shit!"

Mercer's jaw had stung, but worse was the rising tide of shame. "But… I did exactly what you asked."