Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
HAVOC
The motel's two rows of doors under a tin awning with a pink VACANCY buzzin' over the office, and there's four cars in the whole lot at half past five in the evening.
Hers is the gray Corolla around the back with Louisiana plates and a wheel well eaten through on the driver's side. Room eleven's door is shut. Curtain's pulled but not all the way, and there's a gap of about two inches down the hinge side where somebody stopped payin' attention.
I put the bike in the shade at the end of the row where the office window can't see it and I sit down on the low wall by the ice machine and I wait.
Twenty minutes, maybe. A truck comes in and a man in a Cintas shirt gets out and goes into room four and don't come back out.
Then eleven opens.
She's got the ice bucket in one hand and she's already three steps out before she sees me, and she stops.
Not a flinch. Her feet stop and the rest of her keeps goin' for about half an inch and then that stops too, and she stands there in a motel lot in the heat with a plastic bucket hangin' off two fingers and looks straight at my chest.
At the cut. At the rockers first, top and bottom, the way somebody looks who's read one before.
Then up at my face.
"Well," she says. "That was fast."
Which is not what women say.
I've done this a while. There's about four things a person does when they turn around and find me standin' in their afternoon, and every one of 'em comes out of the body before it comes out of the mouth.
They go for a door. They go for a phone.
They start talkin', which is the most common, or they go grayish around the mouth and put a hand out for a wall.
She sets the ice bucket down on the concrete. Straightens up. Puts her thumbs in her back pockets.
"You gonna say somethin' or you want me to guess?"
"Lennox Vance."
"Mm." She tips her head. "You get that off a phone or off a picture?"
"Both."
"Figures." She looks past me at the road, then back. "Where's the rest of you?"
"Ain't any rest of me."
"There's always a rest of you."
"Not today."
She takes that in. She's got a stillness about her I ain't been expectin' and it's puttin' me a half step off my own footin', because I came out here with a whole afternoon already written in my head and she ain't sayin' a single one of her lines.
"Okay," she says. "So it's the two of us in a parking lot. What do you want?"
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it. I've had a long month and I'd like somebody to be plain with me."
"You took somethin' out of a house on Prytania."
"I did."
She says it flat. No hesitation, no arrangin' her face into anything. A woman admits a thing that fast, either she's stupid or she's already decided she ain't payin' for it, and there's nothin' about her that reads stupid.
"Then you know how this goes."
"I know how you think it goes." She steps forward.
One step, and it puts her inside arm's length, which is a place people do not walk to.
"It's not in that room. It's not in the car.
It's not in a bag anywhere you're gonna find in the next two weeks, and there's exactly one person breathing who knows where it is, so you can take a minute and figure out how you'd like to be standin' when you tell your president that. "
Sun's comin' in low behind her and she's squintin' into it and her hands are steady.
Behind us the ice machine kicks on and grinds.
"You're gonna get in your car," I say.
"Am I?"
"Yeah."
"And go where?"
"Ain't your business yet."
"See, it's my whole business." She hasn't raised her voice one time, and she doesn't now. "I've been in a room by myself for four days waitin' on people like you to figure out where I was, and I've started thinkin' maybe y'all weren't as good as everybody says."
Y'all. Not you people. Not your kind. She uses the word the way somebody uses a word they grew up inside of, and something in the back of my neck goes tight.
Her eyes come off my face and drop again. Down to the patch on my chest.
She's lookin' at the snake.
"Can I ask you somethin'?"
"No."
"The crown." She points with her chin, and she does it slow, like she wants me to see her hand stay where it is.
"Snakes don't get crowns. Cottonmouth's a swamp animal, it's got no business in a crown, and whoever drew that put it on afterward.
You can see it — the coils are underneath it.
Somebody built the snake and then somebody else stuck a crown on his head. "
Nobody's ever said that to me.
Nobody's ever said anything about it. It's a patch. It's been on my back since I was twenty-one years old and it's the first thing I put on in the mornin' and the last thing off at night, and it has never one time occurred to me that a man sat down and drew it and made choices.
"So who put it on?" she asks.
"Storm."
"Why?"
And there it is.
I have worn that crown for fifteen years. I have bled on it. I have buried two men wearin' theirs. And I'm standin' in a motel lot in Rosalie Parish with a woman I came here to collect, and she has asked me one question about my own back, and I have got nothin' to say.
"Don't know," I say.
Something happens in her face.
It goes across fast and it's gone fast, but I catch the front edge of it — her mouth opens about a quarter inch and her chin comes up like there's a sentence loaded and comin', somethin' she's had ready for a while.
Then she looks at me. Really looks, the whole cut, the rings, the hands.
And she closes her mouth and swallows it back down.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay what?"
"Okay, I'll get in the car."
I make her hand me the keys and she does it without bein' asked twice, which bothers me more than a fight would have.
Her stuff's already packed. That's the other thing. One duffel and a shoebox with a rubber band around it, both sittin' on the bed made up like a woman who has spent four days ready to leave inside of ninety seconds. She carries the box herself. I don't say anything about it.
Cricket picks up on the first ring.
"Route 9 side of the Blue Star, north end. My bike's at the end of the row."
"Yes, sir. Right now?"
"Right now. You ride it to my house and you leave it in the drive and you go home."
"Your house."
"My house."
"Ain't never been to your house."
"Blitz'll pin it for you. Cricket."
"Yeah."
"You didn't get a call from me."
There's a pause on the line about two seconds long, and in it I can hear a twenty-one-year-old kid decidin' that he is now a man who gets asked to do things, and I could not tell you which one of us that pause costs more.
"Didn't get a call," he says.
I hang up.
She's in the passenger seat with her seatbelt already on and the shoebox in her lap and both arms around it.
The car smells like hot vinyl and fast food and somebody's been sleepin' in it, and there's a coffee cup in the holder with lipstick on the lid and a phone charger runnin' out of the dash to nowhere.
I get in and put the seat back four inches and start it.
Then I sit there with my hand on the shifter and I don't move.
Phone's in my left pocket. Two names in it. Storm, and the number Storm gave me last night for a man in New Orleans who has been dialin' this woman six times a day for a day and a half.
Either one of 'em ends this in about eleven seconds. Got her. Where you want her.
Air conditioner's blowin' warm and the fan's got a tick in it. She's lookin' straight out the windshield at a cinderblock wall. She ain't said a word since she put her belt on and she ain't lookin' at my hand and she knows exactly where it is.
"You gonna make a call?" she says.
The parking lot's got nothin' in it. The Cintas man's truck. The pink light comin' on in the window over the office because the sun's finally all the way gone.
I put it in reverse.