Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
HAVOC
Nine of 'em are already sittin' when I come through the door.
Nobody looks up. Chairs are full and the room's got that pressure in it a room gets when men have been waitin' on somebody and have run out of things to say about the weather, and Storm goes past me and around the table to his own seat without a word.
Chapel's the same room it's been for twenty-two years. Long table down the middle, scarred to hell from a decade of men settin' things on it they shouldn't have. Ten chairs, and every chair's got a shape worn into it by whoever's been sittin' in it longest.
Behind Storm's seat there's the charter.
He built the frame himself out of cypress and did a bad job of it, and the glass has got a chip out of one corner from a fight in oh-nine that nobody talks about anymore.
Under it, the paper's gone the color of weak tea.
Seven names in seven different hands, signed the same night in this same room before I was old enough to shave.
Sixth one down is signed differently from the rest. Bigger. Somebody who wrote like he wanted you to know he'd been there.
TITHE
We drink to those seven every New Year's. Storm says the names, we say 'em back, and that's the whole ceremony. Fifteen years I've said that one out loud and I've never once asked who he was, because Storm doesn't talk about the old days and every man in here learned early not to walk up on it.
Mercy's already in his seat down the far end. He got here before me and he'll be the last one out and I couldn't tell you when he came in. He's got his hands folded on the table and he's watchin' Storm the way you'd watch a preacher you liked.
Storm sits.
He doesn't say anything for a while. Nobody fills it. Ain't a man at this table who's ever won that game with him.
"Lucien Arceneaux called me at four," he says.
Ransom lets out a breath through his nose.
"Called you." He's got his rings off and lined up on the table in front of him, which he does when he's workin'. "Not me."
"Called me."
"That's a message all by itself."
"It is."
"Twenty-two years I've handled every conversation that family's had with this club." Ransom picks up the middle ring and turns it over. "Now the man calls my president directly and doesn't go through his treasurer. That ain't a favor he's askin'. That's him showin' us where he thinks we sit."
"I know where we sit," Storm says.
He reaches inside his cut, takes out a photograph, and lays it face down on the table. Slides it. It goes about eight inches and stops on its own.
Nobody puts a hand on it.
"A woman took somethin' out of a house on Prytania Street," Storm says. "Nine days back. Lucien wants her found. Wants her, and wants what she took, and he wants both brought to him personally."
"Brought," Warden says.
"His word."
Warden doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to — everybody in here heard it land.
Blitz leans in on his elbows. "What'd she take?"
"He didn't say."
"He didn't say?"
"He didn't say. I didn't ask." Storm's voice doesn't go up. It never goes up, and it's the reason the room goes tight when it doesn't. "You want to ring him back and ask him yourself, I'll write down the number for you."
Blitz sits back in his chair.
Tyrant's already got the book open in front of him with a pen laid across the page. "Is this against the debt or on top of it?"
"He says it comes off."
"How much off?"
"He didn't put a number on it."
"Then it ain't off." Ransom sets the ring down. "A favor with no number on it ain't a payment, it's a leash. Somebody in this room tell me the balance. Anybody. What do we owe those people?"
Nobody answers him.
Twenty-two years and the man who counts every dollar this club touches can't tell you the balance, and the man who founded it doesn't offer one, and we all sit there and let the silence do what it does.
"Turn it over," Storm says.
Warden's nearest. He puts two fingers on the corner, flips it, pushes it out to the middle where everybody can see.
She's on a sidewalk. Half turned, caught mid-step by somebody she didn't know was takin' her picture.
Dark hair pulled back off her face and a jacket too heavy for New Orleans in August, canvas bag over the near shoulder, one hand up shieldin' her eyes from a sun that's comin' in behind whoever's holdin' the camera.
She doesn't look like anything.
She looks like a woman on her way to work.
My chest goes tight, and I put it down to Deacon havin' the stove on and this room bein' too damn small for ten men in August.
"No," I say.
Storm looks at me.
"We don't do women."
"Nobody's said we're doin' anything yet."
"It's the one rule we got." My hands are flat on the table.
I don't remember puttin' 'em there. "No women, no kids, nothin' that comes in a needle.
Fifteen years I've heard you say it to every prospect who ever came through that door.
It ain't on the wall but it's in this room, and it's been in this room longer than I have. "
"It has."
"So say it."
"I ain't said different."
"You ain't said same, neither."
Down the table Deacon's got his arms crossed over his chest and his chin dropped and his eyes closed, and he opens them.
"Say the rule out loud, Storm."
He's the biggest man in this club by forty pounds and he doesn't raise his voice above where he's got it now, ever, and when he talks the room turns.
Storm looks at him for a long moment.
Then he puts both hands flat on the table, same as mine.
"We find her first."
"Find her and then what?" I ask.
"Find her first."
"Then what, Storm?"
"Then we come back in here and we decide.
" He leans forward. "Findin' a woman ain't the same as handin' one over.
It ain't close to the same, and every man at this table knows the difference.
Right now we got a name and a picture and a call from a man I don't trust to tell me what day it is.
I ain't givin' him a yes, and I ain't givin' him a no while he's the only one holdin' anything.
We find her, we look at what we're actually lookin' at, and we sit back down. "
Tyrant writes something in the book.
Ransom starts puttin' his rings back on, which means he's done talkin'.
Warden hasn't moved once.
"Blitz," Storm says.
"Yeah."
"How long?"
He's already got the phone out from under the table. "Depends what he gave you. He give you a name?"
"Lennox Vance."
"Then two days. Three if she's payin' cash for everything."
"Two."
"I said two days, Prez, I ain't sayin'—"
"Two."
Blitz shuts his mouth.
Storm stands up, and the meetin's over, because he stood up.
Chairs go back. Ransom says somethin' to Tyrant about the ledger, and Tyrant tells him nobody's allowed to speak to him about the ledger before eight in the mornin', and Deacon claps Blitz across the shoulders hard enough to move him a foot sideways on his way past. Warden goes out last with his hand on the door frame, and he stops there and looks back at Storm for about as long as it takes to decide not to say something, and then he doesn't say it, and he leaves.
Mercy's the only one who takes his time.
He gets up. Pushes his chair in, which not one other man in this club has ever done. On his way around the table, he slows a half step by the photograph and looks down at it with his head tipped over a little, courteous, the way you'd look at a stranger's baby in a grocery line.
"Pretty," he says.
Then he's gone, and the door swings shut behind him, and I sit there in a room that's suddenly got nobody in it.
The picture's still lyin' in the middle of the table where Warden pushed it.
Nine men walked past it and out that door and not one of 'em looked down.
I reach out and take it.
Fold it once, along the middle, and put it inside my cut where it sits flat against my chest — and I couldn't give you a reason for doin' it if you held a gun on me, and I don't spend one second lookin' for one.