Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HAVOC
Floor's cold in the hall and I'm sittin' on it with my back to the wall.
She's gone down the hallway. Bathroom door, water runnin'. I got my knees up and my hands hangin' off 'em and I'm lookin' at the kitchen doorframe from four feet away like it's gonna tell me somethin'.
Ain't a mark on it. Ought to be.
Here's what I know about myself, and I've known it a long time and I've never had cause to look at it straight.
Every single thing I have ever had in this life, I took. The bike. The patch. The chair at that table. My name's a thing I got handed for what I do to people and I have been grateful for it since I was twenty-one years old.
Nobody has ever given me anything.
You put your hand on a man's throat and he gives you what you came for, and that ain't giving. A woman comes up the stairs at the clubhouse because you're the VP and she's been in that buildin' eight years and it's a Tuesday, and that ain't giving either, and Junie'd be the first to say so.
She stood on my porch and she put her hand in my shirt and she said say no.
She gave me an out. She built it herself and she handed it to me and she meant it, and if I'd used it she'd have let go of my shirt and gone in the house, and I would have laid in that bed all night knowin' she meant it.
That's the part I can't get around.
Twenty-two years the Arceneaux have owned this club and I found out today the man doin' the ownin' is doin' it without his own uncle's say-so, and I gave him the one piece of information that keeps her alive.
Sixty hours.
I get up off the floor.
There's a plate in the drying rack and one cup and one fork and there's a woman in my bathroom runnin' water, and I stand in the middle of my own kitchen and I understand about four things at once and every one of 'em is worse than the last.
I ain't handin' her over.
I was never goin' to hand her over. Not from the parkin' lot. Not from the second she quit walkin' and looked at my chest instead of my face and said well, that was fast, and every hour since has been me buildin' reasons on top of a thing I'd already decided before I had a reason at all.
Storm asked me a straight question on my own back steps and I lied into his ear.
And on Monday, one way or the other, ten men are gonna find out.
The water shuts off down the hall.
I stand there and I wait to feel somethin' about it, the way I waited on the shoulder of a road with blood on my hand, and it comes this time.
It ain't fear.
It's worse than fear, and I ain't got a word for it, and I'm thirty-six years old and there's a whole language for this that somebody was supposed to teach me and nobody did.
She comes out into the hall.
Got my shirt on. Hair down. Her foot's bad and she stands off it.
"Don't say anything nice to me," she says.
"Wasn’t gonna."
"Good." She stands there a second. "That was a mistake."
"Yeah."
"I'd do it again in about an hour."
"Yeah," I say.
She goes on into the back bedroom and doesn't shut the door all the way, and I stand in the hall in the dark for a long time and I do not hear the dresser move.