Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HAVOC
The safe's in the floor of the shop office under a square of carpet somebody cut with a razor in two thousand nine and never trimmed straight.
Four men in this club have the combination. Storm, Ransom, Tyrant, me.
Sunday mornin' the shop's shut and the yard's empty and Storm's truck is gone to Baton Rouge until three, and I stand in that office for a while with the carpet already pulled back and my hand flat on the door of it.
Here's the part I'd like on the record.
I know exactly what I'm doin'. There ain't one second of this where I'm confused, where somethin' comes over me, where a man could stand up later and say he wasn't thinkin'.
I know the number. I know who counts it.
I know Tyrant reconciles on the first and the fifteenth and today is the ninth, and I know that gives me six days and not one more.
I take eighteen thousand.
Run money, mostly. Duplessis's eleven from Friday sittin' right on top in the same bank envelope he handed me, and seven under it from the two weeks before.
I put the carpet back. I flatten it with my boot.
And I don't write a word anywhere, because there ain't anywhere to write it that wouldn't be worse.
* * *
Lucien picks up on the second ring like a man who's been holdin' the phone.
"That's early. Two days early. I'm impressed."
"Ain't got her."
Pause.
"Then this is a strange call to be making."
"I got somethin' else." I'm standin' out at the fence line again with the wind comin' across the yard.
"The fella she sold to went sideways on us.
He's got a cousin in Port Allen who's got the item and the cousin wants paid before he hands anything over, and that's two days of drivin' and two days of talkin' and I ain't got seventy-two hours to do a nine-day job in. "
"So you want time."
"I want to buy it."
"Buy it."
"Eighteen thousand." I let it sit. "Cash, today, in a bag, my hand to yours. Nine more days on the clock. Day nine you get her and you get your property both, and if you don't, you come to this parish with whoever you want and I won't say a word about it."
The wind.
Here's what I'm listenin' for, and Ransom taught me it without ever knowin' he was teachin' me anything.
A man who works for a family says I'll have to run it past somebody.
"Where?" Lucien demands.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
He didn't ask what account it goes against. He didn't ask how it gets booked or who's told or how it shows up against a twenty-two-year balance that his uncle has been carryin' since before I could drive.
He asked where.
Eighteen thousand dollars is nothin' to the Arceneaux family. It ain't nothin' to a nephew holdin' a bag in a parkin' lot by himself.
"Gonzales," I say. "The Chevron off the interstate. Four o'clock. You come alone and I come alone, and if there's a second car in that lot I keep drivin' and you can explain to your uncle where the last nine days went."
"You're a careful man."
"Nope."
"No?"
"Careful men don't make this call," I say, and hang up.
* * *
Four o'clock in a gas station lot in Gonzales, and it takes eleven seconds.
He's older than his voice. Good shirt, good shoes, a rental car, and a face that don't do anything at all while he's countin' with his thumb through the bills in the envelope, and when he's done he puts it inside his jacket and looks at me for a while.
"You know what I like about this," he says.
"No."
"You didn't tell your president." He smiles, and it's a small one, and it goes nowhere near his eyes. "A man who's cleared it with his table doesn't drive an hour to a gas station by himself on a Sunday. He sends two prospects and a lawyer."
"Nine days."
"Nine days." He gets in the rental. "You and I are going to do a great deal of business, I think."
He pulls out and I stand there in the heat off the concrete for a full minute afterward with both hands empty.
The clubhouse is loud by eight because it's Sunday and Deacon cooked.
I sit at the end of the bar and I get one beer and I don't drink it, which is apparently a thing everybody in this buildin' has been noticin' for a week, and I put my hand flat on the wood on either side of it and I sit there.
Junie comes down the bar with the rag over her shoulder.
She doesn't say anything for a minute. She wipes a spot that doesn't need it.
"You want to come up?" she asks.
Not a question. That's how she's done it for eight years. She doesn't ask a man a question he'd have to answer.
"No."
She stops wipin'.
"Okay," she says.
"Junie—"
"You don't got to do the next part." She puts the rag down. "Eight years, Havoc. I know what no is. Ain't nobody in this world ever had to say it to me twice and you ain't gonna be the first."
Behind us Cricket's losin' at cards and hollerin' about it.
She stands there a beat longer than she needs to.
"Can I say somethin' kind?" she asks.
"Ain't sure."
"Well, I'm gonna." She leans on her forearms so we're level. "You have come up those stairs with me forty, fifty times in eight years, and I want you to hear that I never minded one of 'em, 'cause I never did, and I'm not the kind of woman who says a thing like that to be cruel about it later."
"I know it."
"But you ain't never once come up 'cause you wanted to."
The room goes on around us.
"You come up 'cause you didn't want to be by yourself in your own head for forty minutes.
" Her voice hasn't changed. There's nothin' underneath it and there never was.
"And I let you, 'cause I like you, and 'cause a woman in my job gets to decide what she's doin' it for, and I decided a long time back. "
I got nothin' to say to any of that.
"So when you say no to me," Junie says, "the only thing I want to know is whether it's 'cause you finally don't need it."
"Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She straightens up.
"Good," she says. "That's real good, Havoc."
Then she picks the rag back up and goes on down the bar and starts givin' Cricket hell about his cards, and that's all of it, and it takes about ninety seconds, and I sit there with a beer I ain't touched and I feel worse than I have in nine days.
Warden's waitin' by my bike at half past nine.
He's got his back against the fence post and his arms folded and he ain't makin' any effort to be anywhere else, which is how I know it's this and not somethin' else.
"Two days," he says.
"Two days what?"
"Two days I've known." He comes off the post. "Friday night I put Cricket on the phone about a bike he moved out of a motel lot on Wednesday and the boy lied to me. Twenty-one years old, first time in his life he ever lied to a patched man, and he was so bad at it I had to look at the ground.
"So Saturday I drove out to your place at six in the mornin' and sat at the head of that shell road for forty minutes, and at ten past seven a woman came out on your porch and stood there in a shirt that was yours."
The lot's quiet.
"You want to say anything?" he asks.
"Not yet."
"Alright." He nods. "Then I'll say mine.
"I ain't Storm's dog. Anybody in that buildin' who thinks I run to him with things ain't been payin' attention, and I've sat on more than you'd believe for men who deserved it less than you do.
But I have got exactly one job in this club and it's the door.
Who comes in it, who goes out of it, and what walks in behind a man who ain't payin' attention.
"There is a woman in your house that ten men were sent to find. Every hour she's out there and this table don't know it, this club is exposed and every man in it is exposed and don't none of 'em know to duck."
"Nobody knows where she's at."
"Somebody always knows." Warden don't raise his voice. He's never raised his voice at me one time in fifteen years and that's the whole reason it works. "You've had nine days. That's more rope than I've give anybody. It's more than I'd have got.
"So here it is, and I want you to hear that it ain't a threat, 'cause a threat's a thing a man does when he's got a choice. This is the job.
"You bring it to the table in the mornin'. Or I do."
Somewhere back in the building somebody wins a hand and the whole room hollers about it.
"And Havoc." He steps out of my way. "You bring it yourself, you're a man who comes forward. I bring it, you're a man who got caught. Ain't the same room. Ain't the same vote."
* * *
Porch light's on when I get home.
Second time in three days, and I still ain't the one turnin' it on.
She's in the dock chair with her heel up on the rail and the shoebox closed on her lap and both hands flat on the lid of it, and she's been sittin' there long enough that the mosquitoes have quit botherin' with her.
I come up the steps and I don't sit down.
"It's Monday in two hours," she says.
"Yeah."
"You asked me a question on that dock."
"I did."
"Come sit down."
So I sit.
And she tells me.
She tells me about a shoebox in a storage locker on Airline Highway and two hundred and sixty-four checks.
She tells me about a house on Prytania Street with a room on the second floor at the back nobody uses, and a wall in it with a boxer's robe and a rifle and two license plates and a cut hangin' fourth from the left with the rockers still on it.
She tells me about four hundred and twenty dollars, a shovel out of a hardware store in Gonzales, and the third water oak behind a bait shop nine miles up the road from where we're sittin'.
She tells me her father's name.
She says it out loud on my porch at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, and it is a name I have said in a room with a fire goin' every New Year's for fifteen years, and I have never one time in my life asked a single man in that buildin' who he was.
"Say it again," I say.
"Emile Doucet." Her voice does not move. "You know him as Tithe. It's the sixth name on the paper in that frame, and he's my father, and he's been in the ground in Baton Rouge under a stone with two dates on it since I was eleven years old.
"And your president has been sending my mother money since the November after he died and he has never once written my name on anything."
The frogs.
I sit on my own porch in the dark next to a woman I have lied to two men and a table about, and I finally understand that I have not only been keepin' a secret for nine days.
I've been keepin' the wrong one.
"Get your boots," I say.