Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HAVOC
Sleep takes me at twenty past seven in the mornin' with my boots on and it doesn't let go until ten after twelve.
Five hours. First real sleep I've had in six days. I got it on the worst mornin' of my life, and I wake up on top of a made bed in an empty house with my mouth dry and my arm hangin' off the side and I know before I've got my eyes open.
The house is a different temperature when there ain't nobody in it. I'd never noticed that in eleven years because there was never anybody in it.
Her side of the bed ain't been slept in.
Car's gone out of the drive. Keys are gone off the hook.
Her duffel's still against the wall in the back room with everything in it, which is how I know she ain't run anywhere, and her father's cut is folded over the back of a kitchen chair with the arms tucked in the way you fold one.
On the table there's a sheet of ledger paper under the salt shaker.
And a note.
Four sentences.
I read it standin' up and then I sit down and read it eleven more times, and the last one takes longer than the first ten put together because I get about halfway and have to stop.
Nobody dies over me. That's not noble, it's arithmetic, and you'd have done it Tuesday if you'd thought of it first.
She's right. That's the part I can't get past. I'd have done it Tuesday.
The page on the table is worth more than I am and you know it, so don't be stupid about which one you go after.
I put the page inside my shirt without lookin' at it.
Her phone's off.
Straight to a recording, and I listen to eleven seconds of a woman's voice tellin' me the mailbox ain't set up because she's had that phone four days and never did it.
I call the other number.
He picks up on the third ring.
"I wondered how long."
"Where."
"Now, that's not how—"
"Where, Lucien."
"Somewhere very ordinary, and by the time you found it we'd be finished.
" Something creaks on his end. A car seat.
He's already moving. "She called me, you understand.
That's the part I'd want, if I were you.
She called me. I hadn't the least idea where either of you were.
She dialed the number herself at six-forty this morning and negotiated me down on three separate points, and she did it very well. "
"I got eighteen thousand dollars of leverage on you—"
"You have eighteen thousand dollars of complicity," Lucien says.
"There's a difference and you've had a week to work it out.
You handed a man cash in a parking lot with no paper and no witness.
If I go to my uncle tomorrow and tell him a Cottonmouth King tried to buy me, do you imagine his first question is about me? "
The kitchen's got a fly in it goin' at the window.
"She wanted three things," he says. "Do you want to know what they were? I think you should. She asked me to leave your club alone. She asked me to leave you alone, specifically, by name. And she asked to bring it herself."
"Lucien."
"You have a very serious woman," he says. "I'd have kept better track of her."
He hangs up.
* * *
Sixteen bikes in the lot, and the east fence still smokin' at two in the afternoon.
They're pullin' twisted sheet out of the shop bay with a chain and the tow rig, and Deacon's got a shovel, and Raider's up on the roof of the office lookin' down into it, and every man on that lot stops when I come through the gate.
Warden's in the middle of the yard with a clipboard.
"She's gone," I say.
"I know it."
"You know—"
"Junie called me at eleven. Said she'd been ringin' Lennox since eight and got nothin'." Warden puts the clipboard down on the hood of a truck. "I put it together about forty minutes ago and I went and told Storm, and I'd have called you if you'd have been awake to answer a phone."
"She's meetin' Lucien Arceneaux."
"Yeah."
"Today."
"Yeah." He looks at me for a long moment. "Storm's in the office."
Nine men come in behind me, and nobody asks them to.
That's not a thing that happens. Storm's office ain't chapel, it ain't got a table in it, it's a room with a desk and a filing cabinet and a window that doesn't open.
But they come in behind me anyway, Warden and Ransom and Tyrant and Deacon and Raider and Mercy and two of the shop boys standin' in the hall, and it fills up, and Storm sits behind that desk and lets it.
"Say it," he says.
And here's the thing.
I have never asked anybody for anything in my life.
Not one time. Not for money, not for help, not for a ride, and I'd like to say it's pride and it ain't.
It's simpler and it's worse. You ask a man for somethin' and he can say no, and if he says no, you've handed him a thing about yourself he didn't have before, and my daddy taught me at about seven years old that a man doesn't do that. A man makes it so people offer.
So I've spent fifteen years bein' a thing people offer to.
I stand in the middle of that office with nine men behind me and my chest full of somethin' I cannot swallow around, and it takes me about four seconds to get it out.
"I'm askin'," I say.
Nobody moves.
"Lucien Arceneaux is meetin' her somewhere in Baton Rouge this afternoon and I don't know where and I can't find out by myself.
" My voice ain't doin' what I want it to.
I keep goin'. "She traded herself for this club.
All of it. The yard, the bar, and me, by name, she put me in it by name, and she did it at six-forty this mornin' while I was asleep in my own bed with my boots on.
"I can't get her by myself. I ain't got the men and I ain't got the phones and I ain't got the—"
I stop.
"I'm askin' this table," I say. "I know I ain't got a right to. I'm askin' anyway."
Storm looks at me for a long while.
He's aged about four years since Sunday. That's not a figure of speech. There's somethin' gone out of the middle of his face and it ain't come back.
"No," he says.
The room don't make a sound.
"Say why," Deacon says, from the door.
"I'll say it once and then it's done." Storm puts both hands flat on the desk.
"There's a boy upstairs at Our Lady with a tube in his side.
There's a sixty-one-year-old woman on oxygen down the hall from him.
We got no shop, no bar, no fence, and no insurance, and we are goin' to be eatin' our own savings by Christmas.
"That's what one night cost.
"You want me to send what's left of this club into a parking lot in East Baton Rouge Parish, sixty miles off our own ground, against a New Orleans house — for a woman who ain't club, ain't property, and who walked out of that house this mornin' on her own two feet because she decided to."
"She's Tithe's daughter," Raider says.
"I know whose daughter she is." Somethin' comes up in his voice and goes back down. "I have known whose daughter she is since before any man in this room could ride a bicycle.
"And the book says she ain't got a claim, and I read that book out loud on Monday and I abstained instead of strikin' it, and that's mine and I'll carry it. But I ain't sendin' men who got families over a thing I already ruled I wasn't strong enough to rule on."
"Then rule now," Deacon says.
"I'm rulin' now." Storm stands. "The club doesn't ride for this."
I go out through the yard and Deacon says my name once behind me and I don't turn around.
Warden catches me at the gate.
"Havoc."
"Don't."
"I ain't gonna tell you not to go." He's got his hand on the post. "I'm gonna tell you you got no location, no plan, and no idea how many men that fella brings, and you'll get to Baton Rouge at three-thirty and drive around a city of two hundred thousand people until it's dark."
"Then I'll drive around it."
"That's what I figured you'd say." He looks off at the road. "Go see the boy."
"What?"
"Go see the boy," Warden says, "and don't tell me what he says to you, and don't say I sent you."
* * *
Blitz is on four milligrams of somethin', and he is furious about a Jell-O cup.
"It's lime. There's cherry on the cart. I saw the cherry go past this door twice."
"Blitz."
"They give the cherry to the—" He gets his head over. His eyes are about a quarter closed and there's a tube runnin' into the back of his left hand. "Hey. Hey, is it you?"
"It's me."
"Havoc." He gets his hand up about four inches. "Havoc, they burned my room."
"I know it."
"Three monitors."
"I know."
"That's — " and his face does somethin' and he blinks about six times fast and looks at the ceilin'. "Okay. Okay. What do you need?"
I ain't said anything yet.
"You got that look," he says. "You come in here with the look. What?"
So I tell him.
I tell him all of it standin' at the foot of a hospital bed with a monitor beepin', and about halfway through he gets the bed rail and pulls himself up on it about six inches and makes a sound doin' it that I'm goin' to hear for a while.
"Ransom's phone," he says.
"What?"
"Ransom left his phone in here. On the chair, under the jacket. He'll be back in about ten minutes and he don't know his own passcode so he never locks it." Blitz has got both hands out. "Give it here."
"Blitz—"
"Give it here."
It takes him nineteen minutes, and I do not ask him one question about how.
I stand at that window with my back to him and I look down at a parking lot and I listen to a twenty-four-year-old with a hole through his side breathe wrong for nineteen minutes, and twice he says hold on.
"Okay," he says.
I turn around.
"He's got a rental. Same one he had Sunday, he never turned it in, and it's got the toll transponder in it 'cause they all do.
" Blitz's face is the color of paper and he is grinnin' like a man who's won somethin'.
"It came up 110 through Gonzales at two-fifty and it went off at Washington Street eleven minutes ago.
"That's Old South Baton Rouge. Choctaw, Highland, in there. That whole quarter's empty warehouses and shut-up storefronts."
"That's four square miles."
"It's four square miles until three fifty-eight," he says, "when he turns the car off somewhere and don't move again, and I'm gonna be sittin' right here watchin' it happen."
He holds Ransom's phone out.
"Put your number in," he says. "I'll text you the corner."
I put my number in.
And then I stand there a second, because there's a thing I ought to say and I ain't got the equipment for it, and he sees me not have it.
"Go on," Blitz says. "And Havoc — hey."
"Yeah."
"You never asked me the second time," he says. "So don't you come back here without her."