Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
HAVOC
Blitz takes nineteen hours.
Most of them I spend in the yard with my head down inside a Shovelhead that a man in Breaux Bridge has been payin' us to fix for six weeks.
It don't need me. Two of the boys who work the shop could've had it turned around Monday.
But there's a thing that happens to my hands when I've got nowhere to put them, and everybody in that clubhouse has learned to give me a wide berth on days when I'm inside a motor I don't need to be inside of.
Cricket comes across the gravel around noon with a paper plate.
"Deacon made too much."
"Set it down."
He sets it on the fender, which is the exact wrong place to set anything, and I look at him until he picks it back up and holds it.
He's got four rags on him.
One in the left hip pocket, which is the one Tyrant wanted. One in the right. One hangin' out the back, and one tucked up under his belt in front like a man expectin' a flood.
"Four," I say.
"Yes, sir."
"Book says one."
"The book says you carry a rag. Didn't say a number." He's grinnin' before he's even finished sayin' it. "So he can't fine me for four. I checked."
"You checked."
"Made him read it out loud."
"How'd he take it?"
"He wrote somethin' down," Cricket says, and then his face falls about an inch, and I have to turn back into the motor so he doesn't see me.
The photograph's been against my chest since last night.
Nineteen hours and I ain't looked at it once. Kept it flat inside the cut on the left side where it sits under the pocket, and every time I've bent over this bike I've felt the corner of it dig in, and I have not once put my hand in there.
That's not the same as forgettin' it's there.
Blitz comes out the side door of the clubhouse at ten after four and crosses the whole yard at a jog, which is somethin' he does about twice a year.
"Got her."
The room he works out of used to be a pantry.
Three monitors on a folding table, a chair he stole out of the office, and cabling zip-tied up the wall to a hole he cut in the ceiling without askin' anybody.
It's about eleven degrees colder in there than the rest of the building on account of a window unit he put in himself, and it smells like hot electronics and energy drinks.
He drops into the chair and spins it around.
"Lennox Vance, thirty-three, Baton Rouge. Mama died in April, house went back to the bank in June, and she ain't had a job since two thousand twenty-two." He taps the middle screen. "Motel on the north end of town. Room eleven. Been there since last night."
Nineteen hours.
Storm gave him two days and told him to make it one, and Blitz got it in less than that, and he's sittin' there in the chair with his knee goin' up and down waitin' on me to say somethin' about it.
"How?"
"How what?"
"How'd you get the motel?"
"Man." He laughs. It comes out a half second late. "You want the whole—"
"I want how you got the motel, Blitz."
He turns back to the screen so he's talkin' at it instead of at me.
"Her phone's on. She never turned it off, not once, not since New Orleans. So I ran the number." He shrugs one shoulder. "Got a location off it. Narrowed it down to about a hundred yards, and there's exactly one thing in a hundred yards up there that ain't a soybean field."
"Ran it how?"
"Through a thing I got access to."
"Access how?"
"Havoc."
"Blitz."
"It's fine." He says it too fast, and then he says it again slower like the second one'll take better. "It's fine. It's a system, I got a login, ain't nobody gonna—"
"Whose login?"
The knee stops.
He looks at the screen and I look at the side of his face, and neither one of us says anything for long enough that the window unit cycles.
He's twenty-four. He's been patched for a year and a half, and he's the youngest man at that table by a decade, and every single day of his life he wakes up and goes lookin' for somethin' he can put in front of us that nobody else could have got.
I know what I'm supposed to do here. I've watched Storm do it. I've watched Warden do it, which is worse.
"There's somethin' else," Blitz says.
"Say it."
"She's been gettin' calls." He pulls up a list. "Same number, six times since yesterday evenin'. First one at eleven forty last night, then all through today. Five oh four."
New Orleans.
"She answer?"
"Not once."
So Lucien's got her number and he's been dialin' it for a full day, which means he was workin' his own side of this before he ever called Storm, which means the favor he asked us for last night was never a favor.
It was a second line in the water.
And I stand there in a cold room that smells like burnt plastic and let the login thing go.
I want to be honest about that, since I'm the one tellin' it. He gave me a door, and I looked at it and walked past it, because I had somewhere to be and because askin' him the rest of the question meant sittin' in that chair for twenty more minutes, and I did not have twenty minutes in me.
"Write the room number down," I say.
"You got it in your head."
"Write it down anyway."
* * *
Storm's truck ain't in the lot.
Which is convenient, and I notice that it's convenient, and I go out to my bike without lookin' for anybody to tell.
One man's quicker. That's the arithmetic.
Four bikes rollin' into a motel lot at suppertime gets somebody's face in a window and somebody's hand on a phone, and then it's a whole different afternoon for everybody.
One man on one bike is a fella visitin' a fella.
One man doesn't spook a woman in a room with a chain on the door.
It's the right call. I'd make the same call for any job on any day of the week and Storm would back it.
My hands are wrong on the grips.
Not shakin'. Nothin' anybody'd see from six feet.
But there's a thing they do when I've decided somethin' before I've finished thinkin' it, a kind of lightness through the knuckles, and they're doin' it now while I'm sittin' in a gravel lot in the heat with the engine off, and I ain't got a reason for it.
I take the photograph out.
Nineteen hours it's been folded against my chest, and the crease has gone soft already.
She's mid-step on a sidewalk with her hand up against the sun.
Dark hair off her face. A jacket too heavy for August, which I didn't think about last night and I'm thinkin' about now, because a woman wears the wrong jacket in New Orleans in August for exactly one reason, and it's that she's carryin' somethin' under it.
Somethin' she was already gone with when that picture got took.
I fold it back up. Put it away.
Warden's standin' at the gate.
I don't know how long he's been there. That's the thing about Warden — he doesn't arrive anywhere, he's simply present, and then you notice.
He's got his arms down at his sides and his head tipped a little and he's lookin' at the road behind me instead of at me, which is his way of givin' a man room.
"Where you goin'?"
"Out."
"Alone?"
"Yep."
He nods. Once, slow. Then he steps out of the gateway and back against the fence post to let me through, and he does it without takin' his eyes off the road.
"Havoc."
I stop with my boot down.
"Take somebody," he says.
"Don't need anybody."
"Ain't what I asked."
Twenty-two years that man's been countin' who goes out that gate and who comes back in it, and I have never once given him a wrong number, and we both know it.
"No," I say.
Warden doesn't say anything else.
He stands there against the post with his arms at his sides and he watches me all the way down Route 9 until the trees take me, and I know he does, because I check the mirror twice.