Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HAVOC
She won't put weight on it, and she won't let me look at it again.
Comes out of the hall around seven with her boot in her hand and walks the whole way to the kitchen on the ball of that foot without one sound out of her, gets her coffee, and stands there drinkin' it like a woman waitin' on a bus.
"Sit down and let me see."
"It's fine."
"It ain't fine, I taped it in the road with a flashlight in my teeth."
"Then you already know what it looks like."
She takes the cup out onto the porch.
I stand in my own kitchen with the pot in my hand and I don't follow her, and it takes me most of a minute to work out that I'm angry, and about twice that long to work out I ain't angry at her.
* * *
Warden's in the lot when I get to the clubhouse, sittin' on the low wall by the shop bay door with his forearms on his knees.
He waits until I've killed the engine.
"Why'd you send Mercy to a motel?"
No lead-up. He don't do lead-up.
"Storm wanted the north end covered."
"Storm gave the north end to Blitz and the phones." Warden's lookin' at the gravel between his boots. "Mercy's mine. Anything Mercy does, I know about before he does it, and I didn't know about that."
"Then take it up with him."
"I did." He looks up. "He told me you asked him to see if anybody'd been by. He told me that part twice. He didn't tell me the other part, which means he's decided it's yours to tell, and I've known that man nine years and he don't decide that about anybody."
Behind us somebody drops something metal in the shop and swears at it.
"Desk clerk went to Opelousas," I say.
"I know where the desk clerk went."
"Then you got the whole thing."
"I got a piece of a thing." He stands. He's got four inches on me and he uses about none of them, which is his way.
"Here's where I'm at. Three days ago you went out that gate alone after I asked you twice not to.
You come back a day later and put a man like Mercy on a motel where a woman was stayin' who nobody's supposed to have found.
And you're standin' in front of me right now with your hands open and your feet square, which you have never once done in fifteen years unless you were fixin' to lie to somebody. "
My hands go down at my sides before I've decided to move them.
Warden watches them do it.
"There's nothin'," I say.
"Alright."
"I mean it."
"I said alright, Havoc." He steps past me toward the bay. "I ain't the man who takes it off you. I'm the man who tells you the clock's runnin'. Which one you want in front of you is your business."
The phone goes in my pocket at eleven forty while I'm under the Shovelhead again.
Number's not in it. Area code is.
I take it out to the fence line where the yard noise covers.
"Yeah."
"Is this the Vice President?"
Voice comes through smooth and unhurried and about forty years old, and there's a little bit of a smile in it, the kind a man puts on when he's alone in a room and don't need one.
"Who's this?"
"Lucien Arceneaux. We haven't spoken. I've been dealing with your president, but I find it's usually the second man who actually does the work, so I thought I'd save us both some time."
Same thing he did to Ransom. One rung down.
"You want somethin', say it."
"Six days ago I asked your club for a small favor and I've heard nothing since. Storm tells me your people are working. I'm sure that's true. But I've been in this business a long time and 'working' is the word men use in the second week." A pause. "It's the second week."
"We got her located."
It comes out before I've built it.
Silence on the line, about two seconds of it, and I stand there at a chain-link fence in the sun and listen to a man decide how much of that he's buying.
"Located," Lucien says.
"North of Baton Rouge, movin' every couple days, payin' cash. We got a line on her through a fella she sold somethin' to." I keep it goin'. "Here's the part you're gonna want to hear and ain't gonna like. She don't have it on her."
"Explain that."
"She stashed it before she ever crossed the parish line.
First thing she did. She ain't carried it one mile since.
" True, every word of it, which is the only reason it walks.
"So if my men grab her hot in a motel lot, you get a woman and you don't get your property back, and then we're all standin' around waitin' on her to feel talkative.
You want it done clean, we take her somewhere she'll tell us where it's at, and we bring you both. "
The yard grinder starts up sixty feet behind me and quits.
"That's a very sensible answer," Lucien says.
"It's the true one."
"Mm." I hear him move. A chair, maybe, or a drawer.
"Here's mine. I've extended a great deal of patience to your club because of the relationship, and because I'd prefer this stay a small thing handled by small men.
But there's a limit to how long I can leave a matter open before it stops being mine. "
"Meanin'?"
"Meaning my uncle doesn't need to hear about this."
There it is.
He says it easy, like a man complainin' about paperwork, and it goes past most people and it don't go past me, because Ransom has spent fifteen years teachin' me to listen for exactly this.
A man workin' for a family says the family wants.
A man workin' for himself says my uncle doesn't need to hear about it.
Lucien Arceneaux called in a twenty-two-year debt on a Tuesday, and Rémy don't know he did it.
"Seventy-two hours," Lucien says. "Her and the item, at an address I'll send. After that I stop asking your club and I start sending my own people into your parish to find her, and I promise you nobody wants that. Least of all your president, who has a very nice arrangement he'd like to keep."
"Seventy-two."
"It's Friday. So Monday." The smile comes back in his voice. "It's been a pleasure. You're easier to talk to than he is."
He hangs up.
* * *
Roy Duplessis has the eleven thousand in a bank envelope and he brings it to the door before I've got both boots on his porch.
"It's all there. Count it."
"I believe you."
"Count it anyway, man, I want you to count it."
So I count it on his own porch rail in the four o'clock sun with him standin' there hangin' onto the frame of his own door, and it's eleven thousand and it's all there and Friday's Friday and this is done.
"We square?" he asks.
"We're square."
"Okay." His breath goes out of him. "Okay. Good. 'Cause I'll be honest with you, I ain't slept but about—"
And I put him against the door frame.
Forearm across the collarbones, no wind-up, and the whole house shakes on its blocks and something falls off a shelf inside and his head comes back and cracks the wood and his hands come up and get hold of my cut.
Ten seconds, maybe. Neither of us says anything.
His eyes are enormous.
I never touch a man who pays. Fifteen years. That's the entire product — a man pays and nothin' happens to him, and if that ain't true then the whole thing's just violence and there's a hundred men in this parish who'll do violence for forty dollars.
I let go.
He slides about four inches and catches himself.
"What'd I do?" he whines. "Havoc. What'd I do?"
Somewhere in that house a little girl says Daddy? and neither of us answers her.
"Nothin'," I say.
I pick the envelope up off the rail and I go.
Half a mile down the road I pull over on the shoulder and sit there with the engine runnin'.
There's blood on the knuckles of my right hand. Not his. Mine, off the door frame, and I don't remember hittin' the door frame.
Seventy-two hours.
I look at my own hand for a while in the light comin' sideways through the cane, and I can't get it to mean anything.
The porch light's on when I get to the house, which it never is, because I never put it on.
She's in the dock chair with her foot up on the rail and the boot off and my aspirin bottle sittin' on the arm, and she's got the shoebox open in her lap and one of the bundles out, and she shuts it when the headlight swings across her.
I come up the steps.
She looks at my hand.
Then up at my face, and back at the hand, and she does something with her mouth that ain't a question.
"It's mine," I say.
"I can see whose it is."
I go past her and get the door open and stand there holdin' it with my back to her, because the kitchen light's on in there and it's four feet away and I cannot make my legs do the rest of it.
"Havoc."
"Yeah."
"Come sit down," she says.