Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
HAVOC
Most men start talkin' before I do.
Roy Duplessis is on minute three, and he ain't slowed down once.
Something about a cousin up in Lafayette who was supposed to come through.
A transmission that ate four hundred dollars he'd already set aside. He's got a real nice kitchen to be sayin' all this in — granite counters, one of those refrigerators with a screen in the door that tells you when you're low on milk.
Some of it got bought with money he owes us.
He keeps glancing past my shoulder at the door I came through, like it might've grown another one while he was talkin'.
There's a wet ring on the counter where he set his beer down when I knocked. I pick the bottle up. Set it back inside the ring, dead center, and the little sound it makes stops him mid-sentence.
Roy's bigger than me across the shoulders. There's a shotgun in this house somewhere and he's thought about it twice already — I watched him think it, both times, the way a man's eyes go flat and come back — and both times he decided against it.
Smart man.
"Eleven," I say.
"Havoc—"
"Eleven, Roy."
His hands come up. Palms out, the way men do when they've run out of sentences. "Two weeks. Two weeks and I'll have all of it, plus whatever Ransom wants to put on top of it, I swear to God."
"Ransom already put it on top."
"Then give me a number. Give me a number and I'll—"
"Ain't my job to give numbers."
Which is the truth. My job's this part. The part where a man works out on his own that the arithmetic already happened somewhere else, in a room he wasn't invited to, and the thing standin' in his kitchen is only here to let him know the answer.
He looks at my hands.
They all do, sooner or later. I got rings on and ink down past the knuckles, and I ain't lifted either hand off the counter since I walked in, and that's the whole message right there. A man who means to hit you keeps his hands loose and low. A man who doesn't has got no reason to move them at all.
Roy gets there.
His shoulders come down about an inch and something back behind his eyes lets go, and I watch the fight leave him without it ever havin' shown up.
"Friday," he says.
"Friday."
"I got a little girl, man."
"I know it."
Her drawing's up on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a crawfish. Purple horse with too many legs and a sun in the corner takin' up a third of the page.
"Ain't nobody said one word about your girl, Roy." I straighten up off the counter. "Nobody's goin' to. That's the entire reason I came out here by myself instead of bringin' somebody."
He looks at me then. Really looks, first time since he opened his door, and I can see him workin' on whether I meant that kind or whether I meant it the other way.
Both. But he won't sleep tonight either way, and Friday we'll have our money, so it doesn't much matter which one he lands on.
I let myself out.
The porch light comes on behind me when I'm halfway across the yard, and it stays on the whole time I'm gettin' my helmet off the seat, which tells me he's standin' at the window watchin' me go.
Good.
Twenty-two miles back to Rosalie, and I take every one of them slower than I need to.
The sun went down somewhere around Duplessis's second minute.
Now the road's got that blue in it that comes right after, when the cypress on both sides has gone flat black and the water between the trunks still holds a little light, and there's nothin' out here but me and the engine and about four thousand frogs hollerin' at each other in the dark.
I don't think about the job. Job's done Friday or it ain't, and either way it's Ransom's problem before it's mine.
Mostly I don't think about anything, which is the reason I take the long way.
Route 9 comes up. The salvage yard's lit yellow behind the chain-link, stacks of crushed cars throwin' shadows forty feet across the gravel, and the sign over the gate says KINGS CUSTOM in letters my old man would've had something to say about.
Past the yard the clubhouse squats low and ugly with every window burnin'.
Ten bikes in the lot. Music comin' through the wall loud enough to feel in the handlebars before I've even shut down.
Home, I guess.
Word's never sat right on me.
Cricket's out on the steps with a push broom, holdin' it about the way you'd hold a rifle you'd never once fired.
"Havoc." He snaps upright so fast the handle damn near takes his eye. "Hey. Evenin'. How'd it go — was it good? Did it go good?"
"Sweep the steps, Cricket."
"Sweepin' 'em."
"You're standin' on 'em."
"Right." He hops down into the gravel, which is not the steps, and starts sweepin' the gravel.
Twenty-one years old, three months out from his patch, and he'd walk into the basin barefoot if somebody at that table told him it needed doin'. I leave him to it and go on in.
Inside it's warm and loud and smells like beer and cigarette smoke and whatever Deacon's got goin' in the back, and Tyrant's holdin' court down at the end of the bar with the book open in front of him. Red hair, red beard, both forearms flat on the counter like a man fixin' to hand down a sentence.
Blitz is standin' in front of him with his arms out.
"It was one time."
"Twice." Tyrant doesn't look up. He turns the page. "Tuesday, and again this mornin'."
"Tuesday don't count, the truck was already blocked in when I—"
"Twenty."
"Twenty?"
"Ten a time. It's in the book. You want to read it?" Tyrant spins the ledger around and lays one finger on a line. "Your name's in here eleven times, Blitz. There's men been patched fifteen years and ain't got eleven."
"'Cause they're old and they don't do nothin'."
Over by the door, Raider makes a sound like a hinge, which is what he does instead of laughin'.
"Havoc." Tyrant still hasn't looked up. "Tell him."
"He's right."
"You don't even know what it's about."
"Don't matter."
I take the stool at the corner where I can see the door.
Blitz says something about how the two of us are the same animal and Tyrant writes another line in the book without answerin' him, and behind me Cricket comes through with the broom still in his hands, and Tyrant's head comes up like a dog hearin' a truck in the drive.
"Prospect."
"Yes, sir." Cricket stops dead.
"Where's your rag?"
"My what?"
"You carry a rag. Left hip. Every hour you're inside this buildin'." He's already writin'. "Five."
"Nobody told me about a rag."
"It's in the book."
"Can I read the book?"
"No."
Junie sets a beer down in front of me without me askin' for one and stays where she is with her hip against the bar.
Eight years in this place. She's heard this exact argument enough times to mouth along with it, and she watches Cricket dig out his phone and type RAG into it with the face of a woman watchin' a dog figure out a door latch.
"He's gonna do it, too," she says.
"Yep."
"Gonna have a rag before mornin'. Gonna have four."
Down the other end, Gigi's got a lime in one hand and a knife in the other, and she's tellin' somebody a story usin' both, and whatever the end of it is, it lands, because Junie snorts into her own shoulder before it's even out.
"You didn't hear it," Gigi calls down.
"Didn't have to. You do a face."
"I do not do a face."
"You do a face, baby."
Raider's still by the door with his jacket on. Been in this room four minutes and he's already halfway gone, one shoulder turned toward the lot the way he always sits, always stands, always is.
He looks over at Gigi.
Once. Then back at the door, and he's out of it before anybody thinks to say anything about it.
"Duplessis square up?"
"Friday."
"Friday." She says it back like she's puttin' it somewhere on a shelf. "That's the third Friday that man's had."
"Second."
"Third. He had one in May over the trailer." She hauls a bag of limes out from under the bar and sets it down by Gigi's elbow without lookin' over at her. "I keep better books than Tyrant does, and I don't charge anybody twenty dollars for the privilege."
Down the other end, Gigi says she'd pay the twenty.
"You'd pay forty," Junie says.
She takes the rag off her shoulder and works at a spot on the wood that's been in there since before I had this chair, and the ice machine's been out since Tuesday and she tells me about it, and about Ransom not signin' for a new one, and about haulin' bags up from the Gas-N-Go two at a time in August. None of it needs sayin' to me.
She says it anyway, the way she's said it to men on this stool for eight years, and it fills up the part of the room where a man would otherwise have to think.
My hands are flat on the bar. I take them off it.
Junie's got somethin' else and she puts it down. I know the difference by now between her not havin' anything to say and her decidin' against it, and I don't ask which one this is.
I get about two inches down the beer.
Junie takes the bottle out from under my hand, sets it on the shelf behind her, and goes on toward the stairs without lookin' back to see whether I'm comin'.
The ceiling up in her room's got a water stain on it shaped like Texas.
Afterward she gets up and goes huntin' for her shirt, and I lie there with one arm behind my head lookin' at Texas, and I feel about the same as I did standin' on Roy Duplessis's porch. Which is to say I don't feel a whole lot of anything.
Suits me fine.
"You could stay," she says.
"Nah."
"Wasn't an offer. I'm sayin' the option's there." Her voice hasn't got a thing underneath it, and that's the reason it's her. Junie wants what she wants, says so out loud, and doesn't need me to be anything I ain't.
"I know it."
"Mm." She pulls her hair up off the back of her neck and finds me in the mirror over the dresser. "You come up here when somethin's eatin' you. You know that about yourself?"
"Nothin's eatin' me."
"Okay."
"Nothin' is."
"I said okay, Havoc." She's smilin' when she says it.
She leans back against the dresser with her arms folded.
"My sister's boy made eight on Saturday," she says. "They did it out at the spillway. Somebody's mama made a cake shaped like a crawfish and it had a face on it, and I want you to understand it was the ugliest thing I have ever seen with my own eyes."
"Yeah?"
"Went through two hundred dollars of my own money on that party." She pulls her hair back off her neck again and lets it go. "And I'd do it again next May, so don't nobody come to me about Blitz and his twenty."
I got nothin' to put in that.
"You could ask me about it one of these times," she says. "Not now. One of these times."
"Alright."
"Ain't a complaint. I'm tellin' you it happened."
That's the worst part of Junie. She's kind about it.
"Go on down." She pulls the shirt over her head. "Somebody's gonna want you."
She's right. Somebody always does.
I get my jeans and my cut, and I go down the stairs slowly, and I'm four steps from the bottom when Storm's door opens at the end of the hall.
He doesn't say my name.
Doesn't have to. The room drops about thirty decibels all on its own, the way it does every single time — Tyrant's pen quits movin', Cricket goes stone still with the broom held up off the floor, and every man in that building finds something extremely important to look at.
Storm stands in the doorway with one hand up on the frame and looks at me the whole way down.
"Chapel," he says. "Now."