Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HAVOC
The days run out on a Tuesday.
Ain't a man in that club said the word out loud all week and every one of 'em knew the date.
Warden put two men on the yard at night startin' Saturday without callin' a vote about it.
Ransom moved money. Tyrant took the good ledgers home in a plastic tote and did not offer an explanation to anybody.
Nobody's spoken to me about my cut since Tyrant put it on the shelf.
They've spoken to me about everything else, though. That's the part I wasn't ready for. Warden asked me Sunday which end of the yard I wanted, and I told him, and he put me there, and neither of us said one word about the fact that a man without a patch ain't supposed to stand a line.
Tuesday I go up to the clubhouse at seven in the evenin' and Lennox goes to The Fang with Junie, because it's a Tuesday and Junie's got the bar and Lennox has got a job now whether anybody voted on that either.
I tell her to keep her phone on her.
She says yes, Eli, in the voice she uses when she's makin' fun of me, and I get about four miles down the road before I understand I should have looked at her longer.
At ten past eleven, the whole east side of the yard goes up.
Not a bang. That's the thing nobody tells you. It's a whump, low and soft, like a sheet snappin' out, and the windows on that side of the clubhouse go orange all at once and every man in that room is on his feet before anybody's said a word.
"Yard!"
Warden's already through the door.
I come out into a night that's turned the color of a furnace.
They've done the crushed stacks on the east fence, four rows of 'em, and there's forty years of oil and gas and God knows what in those cars and it is going up in a wall thirty feet high, and the heat off it hits me across the lot like a hand.
Two figures at the fence line.
Then a third at the gate with somethin' in his hands, and Raider hollers DOWN and the gatepost comes apart about eight inches above where my head was.
Here's what it actually is, and it ain't a movie.
It's dark and it's loud and it's over fast. There ain't any planning in it.
Warden's got a shotgun out of the shop and he's usin' the block wall of the bay for cover and he is the calmest thing on that lot, calling it out — two at the fence, one movin' left, Deacon get down — and Deacon is a mountain who does not get down, and Tyrant is behind a truck axle with a pistol he probably ain't fired in six years.
Somebody's screaming somewhere and it goes on a long time.
Raider gets to the gate side by going around the outside of the fence line, which is a thing nobody would think to do and nobody would survive twice, and there's a fight down there in the dark that I can't see any of and then there's one man on the ground and the other two are running for a truck on the shell road.
It don't last two minutes.
Two minutes, and forty years of scrap is burning, and the office where I've stood a thousand mornings has fire coming out the window.
"Cricket's in the shop."
It's Blitz who says it. He's got the phone in his hand and he's turning in a circle.
"He was in the shop, he was doin' the floor, I told him to stay—"
The shop is on the east side.
The shop is on the east side, and the roof of it is already going, and I get about six steps toward it and Deacon gets a whole arm across my chest and takes me off my feet.
"He's out," Deacon says. "Look at me. Havoc. He's out, he come out the far door—"
And he did.
He's coming around the corner of the burning building with a woman under one arm.
Marisol who does the shop books, sixty-one years old, been in that office three nights a week for eleven years, and Cricket has got her whole weight on his hip and he's carrying her out of a fire in a swamp parish with his own sleeve smoking, and behind him there's a kid from the shop floor about nineteen years old with a shirt over his face.
He puts her down in the gravel.
Then he turns around and goes back toward the building and Warden catches him by the back of the cut and throws him — actually throws him, six feet — and stands over him hollering in a voice I have never in fifteen years heard that man use.
Cricket lies there in the gravel and laughs.
Twenty-one years old, flat on his back with his forearm burned through his sleeve and his eyebrows gone, laughing.
"There wasn't nobody else!" he yells at Warden. "I checked! I checked both rooms!"
Tyrant's phone goes at eleven twenty-two.
I know the exact time because I've looked at it since. Eleven twenty-two, standing in a gravel lot with the whole east fence burning and a man face down at the gate and Marisol coughing into Deacon's shoulder.
Tyrant takes it four steps away and comes back with his face wrong.
"The Fang," he says. "Somebody came through the lot and put thirty rounds in the front of it."
The world goes very small and very far away.
"Junie called it in. She's—"
I don't hear the rest of it.
Nine miles.
I have run that road ten thousand times in fifteen years and I could not tell you one thing about those nine miles.
Not one. I have got no memory of gettin' on the bike and no memory of the bridge and no memory of the turn, and the next thing that exists is a gravel lot full of people standing outside a building with its whole front wall shot through and every window gone.
She's on the tailgate of somebody's truck.
That's it. That's all of it. She's sitting on a tailgate with a bar towel wrapped around her left forearm and Junie has got an arm around her and she is talking, she's talking fast and loud with her free hand going, and when she sees me come off that bike she stops in the middle of the sentence.
I get to her and I don't say anything.
I put both hands on either side of her face and I put my forehead on hers and I stay there a while.
"Glass," she says. "It's glass. Junie put me under the bar."
"Junie put you under the bar."
"She had me down before the second one." Lennox's hand comes up and gets a fistful of my shirt. "Eli. Eli, look at me. Nobody's dead. There's a man in the parking lot who caught one in the leg, and there's about nine people cut up, but everybody is alive."
Junie is standing three feet away with her apron soaked through with somebody else's blood and her hands shaking and her voice completely level, telling a deputy exactly what kind of truck it was and which way it went.
Eight years behind that bar.
She got a woman under the counter before the second burst.
"Where's Gigi?" somebody says.
"She ain't on tonight." Junie doesn't even turn around. She's got a hand out to the deputy for his pen. "Switched with me Sunday, she took the Friday instead."
Nobody follows it up.
There's a man on the ground in the parking lot with a belt around his thigh and there's a woman crying in a car and there's a building with no front on it, and a deputy who wants to know about the truck, and nobody in that lot has got one second to spare for who was and wasn't on the schedule.
I don't think about it again for a long time.
Blitz went down at the yard and I did not know it.
The east fence was burning and there were men shooting at us and Cricket was carrying a sixty-one-year-old woman out of a building, and then Tyrant said The Fang and I got on a bike and I left, and Blitz was already on the ground behind the shop by then and I did not know it and I did not look for him.
When I get back, it's twenty after midnight.
They've got him on a tarp in the gravel between two trucks with the headlights on him. Deacon's got both hands flat on his left side above the hip and there's a jacket under him and Ransom is kneeling in the rocks by his head talking to him steady, low, the way you'd talk to a horse.
"Ambulance is nineteen minutes out," Tyrant says. "They got two wrecks on the interstate."
"Then we drive him."
"Deacon says don't move him."
"Deacon."
"Through and through," Deacon says, without lookin' up.
"Went in the back of the left side and came out the front and it ain't in his belly and it ain't up in his chest. I can see both holes and they ain't but four inches apart.
If it was the other thing he'd be gray by now and he ain't gray, he's mad. "
"I'm very mad," Blitz says.
His voice is about a third of what it ought to be.
"Somebody get my—" he says, and stops, and starts again. "Somebody get my laptop out that room, it's on the—"
"Room's gone, son," Ransom says.
"It's on the desk—"
"Room's gone."
He's twenty-four.
I get down in the gravel on the other side of him from Ransom and I put my hand around the back of his neck because I can't think of anything else to do with it, and he looks up at me with his whole face gray-white in the headlights and about eleven days of chip on his shoulder finally gone off it.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"Havoc, I got — listen. Listen to me." He gets a hand up and it lands on my forearm. "The system. The one I ran her phone through in the — the location, the login."
"Don't."
"It logs the query." He's got a hold of my arm now. "It logs 'em. Who looked and what they looked at and where from. And I used a fella's credentials out of a skip trace shop in Gonzales and it come out of an address in this parish, and if anybody went and looked at that same record after I did—"
"Blitz."
"—they'd have got the shop, they'd have got Kings Custom, 'cause that's the—"
"Blitz."
He stops.
I sit in the gravel with my hand behind a twenty-four-year-old's neck and the fence line burning three hundred feet away, and I do the only decent thing I have done in twelve days.
"You told me," I say.
"What?"
"You told me. Sixteen days ago. You sat in that chair with your knee goin' and I asked you whose login it was and you didn't answer me, and I stood there and looked at you and I let it go, and I walked out of that room to go get a woman out of a motel.
" My voice is doing somethin' and I let it.
"You didn't hide a damn thing from me. I never asked you the second time. "
His face comes apart.
"That ain't—"
"It is. Say it back to me."
"Havoc—"
"Say it back."
"You never asked me the second time," he says, and then he's crying, and he tells us it's because it hurts, and every man kneeling around that tarp lets him have it.
The ambulance comes at forty past.
They get him up and they take him and Ransom goes in the back with him because Ransom's the one who'd argue with a doctor, and the rest of us stand in a gravel lot at one in the morning and watch it go up the shell road with the lights on and no siren.
The east fence is still burning.
It'll burn till noon tomorrow. Forty years of scrap don't quit because you want it to.
Storm has been standing in the middle of that lot for twenty minutes with his back to all of us, looking at it.
He hasn't said one word since he got here.
I stand there with my hands hanging and gravel dust all over me and the heat off that fire on the side of my face, and I go back through it.
Every piece. The phone I didn't take off her for two hours.
The lie on my own back steps. Eighteen thousand dollars in a Chevron parking lot in Gonzales, into the hand of a man who took it without asking his uncle.
And a boy in a cold room with three monitors, saying it's fine, it's fine, and me deciding I didn't have twenty minutes.
Marisol is sixty-one. Cricket's got no eyebrows. There's a hole in Blitz you could put a finger through.
Nobody in this lot has said whose fault it is.
They don't have to. I can count.