Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
HAVOC
Nine miles past the gate the blacktop quits and turns into shell, and after that it's another two to the house.
She didn't ask again about the problem.
She asked once and she let it sit, which takes a kind of discipline most people ain't got, and it means the question's still in the car with us the whole rest of the way. It rides between the seats. Every mile it don't get answered it gets a little bigger.
Water on both sides now, close enough you can hear it when the tires slow. Frogs so loud they come through the glass. The headlights swing across the front of the place and there's my bike sittin' in the drive at an angle a prospect thought was straight.
Cricket came and went and didn't touch anything and didn't stay.
Good kid.
"This is yours," she says.
"Yeah."
"There's no light on."
"Nobody home."
She gets out with the shoebox under her arm and stands in the drive lookin' at the house, and I watch her do it, and I don't understand until later what she's seein'.
It's a house. Front porch with two boards I keep meanin' to pull. A window unit. Propane tank. My old man's dock chair on the porch because I've never got around to burnin' it.
She looks at it for a long time.
Inside I turn on the kitchen light and she comes in behind me and sets the box on the counter and does a slow half circle in the middle of the floor.
"Huh," she says.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You said huh."
"I say a lot of things." She sets her duffel down against the wall. "You got a bathroom or is that also nothing?"
"Down the hall on the left."
"And the room across from it?"
"Yours."
"Mine." She looks at me. "For how long?"
"Ain't worked it out."
"You keep saying that."
"'Cause it keeps bein' true."
She goes down the hall and I hear the door open and I hear her stand there, and I know what she's lookin' at, which is a bed and a dresser and nothin' on the walls, and then she comes back with her arms crossed.
"There's no lock on that door."
"No."
"On either side."
"That's right."
"Okay." She nods slowly. "Then we're going to have a conversation about it, and we're going to have it now, standing up, while we're both dressed and neither of us is tired."
"You can push the dresser."
"I'm not asking permission to move furniture.
I've moved furniture." She's got her chin up.
"I'm telling you what I'll do, so that later on nobody's surprised.
If you come through that door tonight, I will take an eye out.
Not a threat, not a speech. I'm a hundred and thirty pounds and I've got no reach and I've got no training, so it's an eye or it's nothing, and I'd rather you knew now than found out. "
The refrigerator hums.
Nobody has said anything like that to me in my adult life. Men don't say it because men are figurin' the other thing, and women don't say it because by the time they've thought it they've already decided to be small.
"Ain't comin' through the door," I say.
"Fine."
"You want the dresser moved, I'll move it."
"I said I'd do it."
"Didn't say you wouldn't." I take the beer out of the refrigerator and put it back and shut the door. "Bathroom's got a window. Painted shut in ninety-one and I never fixed it."
"I noticed."
"Figured you did."
And then it comes down on me all at once, standin' there with my hand still on the refrigerator door.
Her phone.
Blitz has been sittin' on that number for a day and a half.
He pulled a location off it once and he'll pull it again the second Storm tells him to, and there ain't a thing in the world stoppin' him from pullin' it right now out of boredom, because he's twenty-four and he's got three screens and a chip on his shoulder the size of the parish.
That phone has been in this car for two hours. It is currently eleven feet from me on a woman's hip in my own kitchen, in a house that is exactly one query away from bein' a dot on a map on Blitz's middle monitor.
I've done this for fifteen years. I have never once in fifteen years left a phone on a person.
"Give it to me," I say.
She goes still.
"You left it with me on purpose."
"No."
"You left it with me for two hours—"
"I said no." My voice comes out harder than I want it and I take it back down. "It wasn't on purpose. It was me not thinkin'. Give me the phone."
"So the not thinking's over."
"Lennox."
Her name comin' out of my mouth stops both of us about equally.
She takes it out of her back pocket. She doesn't hand it over — she sets it down on the counter between us and slides it and takes her hand back, and I pick it up and hold the button down and watch the screen go black.
"Six missed calls," she says.
"I know it."
"You know whose."
"Yeah."
"Are you going to tell me?"
I put the phone in my inside pocket where the photograph's been sittin' for a day and a half, and now there's two things in there.
"No," I say.
The back porch faces the water and there ain't a light on it, which is the reason I sit out there most nights.
The frogs are goin'. Somewhere off in the dark a gator makes the sound they make, which after thirty-six years is about the same to me as a truck goin' by.
I get out the phone. Mine, not hers.
And it lights up in my hand before I've touched it.
STORM.
I look at it through the whole first ring and the whole second one.
"Yeah."
"Where you at?"
"Home."
"Blitz says you took his room number and went out at half past four and didn't come back." No accusation in it. Storm don't put accusation in things, which is the worst part of talkin' to him. "So I'm askin'."
Here's what I've got. Maybe two seconds of it.
I could say she's in the back bedroom. Four words. Storm would say stay put and forty minutes later there'd be trucks in my drive and it would be out of my hands and off my chest, and whatever happened after would happen to a table and not to a man.
Fifteen years I have not lied to him. Not about money, not about women, not about a job that went sideways in Vidalia in twenty-nineteen when a lie would've saved me a broken hand.
Fifteen years.
"Motel was cold," I say.
The frogs.
"Cold."
"She'd already cleared out. Desk man says she paid through Thursday and left this mornin' with her bag."
"Blitz had a location on her at four."
"Blitz had a location on a phone. Phone was in a trash barrel by the ice machine.
" Comes out of me smooth. Comes out easy, like somethin' I've been carryin' around ready-made.
"She ain't stupid, Storm. She figured somebody'd run the number and she ditched it, and I'd bet she did it two days ago and it's been sittin' in a bin ever since. "
Long pause on the line.
I sit on my own back steps in the dark and I listen to a man I'd take a bullet for decide whether to believe me.
"Well, hell," Storm says.
"Yeah."
"That's a smarter woman than Lucien made her sound."
"That's what I thought."
"You want Blitz on it again in the mornin' or you want to run the pawn shops first?"
"Pawn shops."
"Alright." I hear him move — the chair in his office, the one that pops. "Havoc."
"Yeah."
"You'd tell me."
Not a question. He don't ask questions. He puts a thing out on the table and lets a man pick it up or not.
"Yeah," I say.
"Alright then. Get some sleep."
He hangs up.
I sit there a while with the phone face down on my knee and the frogs hollerin' and the water movin' around out there in the black where I can't see it.
Behind me, down the hall, a dresser goes across a wood floor about four feet.
Then it stops.
Then it goes another six inches, which is her doin' it twice so I'd hear it the second time.