Chapter 23 #2
"Nothing makes me," I say. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you I earned it, because I didn't. A man opened a door and I walked through it, and if your wife's angry about that then she's right to be and I'd take it from her. I'll take it from her all night. She's the one it cost something."
He looks at me.
"But she's not the one standing here," I say.
"You are. And you're not mad about your wife, you're mad because a rule you like got broken and you want somebody to say sorry about it so it goes back to being solid.
It doesn't work that way. It's broken. It was broken the second the door swung, and it's not going to un-break because I apologize to a man at a bar. "
Nobody says anything.
Junie sets the rack down without a sound.
"I'll get your third one," I say, "and it's on me, and I'm not doing that to be nice. I'm doing it because I want you to sit down and stop looking at me."
He stands there for about four seconds.
Then he barks out one laugh, short and ugly and real, and picks up the glass I put in front of him.
"Hell," he says, and goes and sits down.
Gigi is looking at me over the top of a lime with her mouth open.
"Okay," she says. "Okay, no, I love her, we're keeping her."
"You don't get a vote," Junie says.
"I'm getting a vote. I'm taking one."
Gigi's phone lights up on the cooler beside her.
She turns it face down without looking at it and goes back to the limes.
Havoc comes for me at nine and the room does a thing when he walks in.
It's small. If I hadn't been standing behind that bar for seven hours I'd have missed it.
Two men at the pool table look up and then very deliberately look back down.
A patch by the door says brother and puts a hand out and Havoc takes it, and it's fine, and it's completely fine, and it is nothing at all like the way that same man said brother to the fella who came in behind him.
He's in a black t-shirt.
Everybody in that room knows exactly where his cut is sitting.
* * *
We don't make it out of the kitchen.
I'm not going to pretend it's anything but what it is.
He gets the door shut behind us and I've got both hands in the front of his shirt and I'm hauling him backward and my hip catches the counter hard enough that I'll find the bruise tomorrow, and neither of us says one word for about a minute and a half.
Eleven days. It doesn't get less. Nobody tells you that.
He gets me up on the counter and there's a bowl or something that goes off the edge and breaks on the floor and neither of us looks at it.
"Eli."
"Yeah."
"Don't stop for the—"
"Ain't stoppin' for anything," he says into my neck, and his hand's already at the button of my jeans, and I've got a fistful of the back of his shirt and I am done being careful about the noise—
Headlights come across the kitchen wall.
We both go still.
"That ain't the road," he says. "That's the drive."
Storm is out of the truck by the time we get to the porch and he doesn't come up the steps.
He stands in the yard with his hands down and the headlights behind him and his shadow going up across the front of the house, and he looks at Havoc.
"Give me twenty minutes with her."
"No."
"Havoc."
"I said no."
"It's all right," I say.
"Lennox—"
"Eli." I put my hand flat on his chest, and I feel him take it, and I watch a man do something he does not want to do. "Twenty minutes. Go inside."
He goes inside.
He goes about six feet inside and stands where I can see his shape through the screen, which is fine, and Storm looks at the door and doesn't say anything about it either.
He turns the headlights off and comes and sits on the bottom step, which puts him below me and I don't think it's an accident.
For a while he doesn't say anything. He takes his hat off and holds it in both hands between his knees.
"I've had four days to work out how to say this," he says. "I ain't got it. So I'm gonna say it badly and you can do whatever you want with it."
"Okay."
"Your daddy didn't get killed by New Orleans." He looks at the dirt. "He got killed by the Gallow Kings, and he got killed because I asked him to leave with me."
The frogs are going.
"Summer of oh-four, I decided I was out.
Fourteen years in that club and it had gone somewhere I wasn't goin', and I sat in a boat with Scourge for two hours one afternoon and we worked out that a man don't leave a club like that by himself.
You leave alone, you're a problem they solve.
You leave with numbers, you're a thing they got to negotiate with.
"So I went and got numbers."
He turns the hat around.
"Emile was the last one I asked and the hardest one, 'cause he had the most to lose. He kept the Gallow Kings' book. He knew every dollar those men had ever moved and every man they'd moved it for, and there ain't a club on this earth lets that walk out the door.
"He knew it. He said it to me. He said, Storm, I'm the one thing in this club that can't quit."
The porch board creaks under me.