Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
HAVOC
Three-oh-five when I come out of that hospital, and the heat comes up off the blacktop into my face like a hand on the chest.
My bike's where I left it in the second row.
There's four more parked around it.
Warden's leaning against the front fender of a truck that ain't his with his arms crossed.
Raider's got his helmet on the seat and a cigarette he ain't lit and he's lookin' at the highway, which is where he always looks.
Deacon takes up the whole end of the row by himself.
And Mercy is sittin' on his bike in the middle of all of it with both boots on the ground and his hands folded on the tank, and he's been there long enough that there's a ring of condensation on the pavement under the water bottle he set down beside him.
Nobody called him.
I have gone back over it a hundred times since and there is not one way anybody called him. I was in that room nineteen minutes and Warden sent me there himself and Blitz never said a word to anybody, and Mercy has been sittin' in a hospital parking lot in Rosalie since before I came down.
I stop about ten feet off.
Warden comes off the truck.
"Storm said no."
"He did."
"Then y'all ain't the club."
"Nope," Warden says.
That's all of it. Ten words, maybe eleven, and Deacon gets on his bike and Raider puts the cigarette back in the pack and Mercy picks his water bottle up off the ground.
They're all four wearin' theirs.
I'm in a black t-shirt with a sheet of ledger paper inside it.
Not one man in that lot says a word about it, and they don't look at my chest, and that is somehow the most decent thing anybody's done for me in twelve days.
Cricket's standin' at the back of the row with a helmet in both hands.
I didn't see him because he was behind Deacon, which is where a man that size goes when he doesn't want to be seen.
He's got the sleeve cut off his left arm and the bandage runnin' wrist to elbow and no eyebrows and about a day and a half of no sleep in his face.
"No," I say.
"Yes, sir."
"Cricket."
"I heard you." He doesn't move. "But prospects go where they're told, and ain't nobody told me to stay."
"I'm tellin' you."
"You ain't a patch this week," Cricket says.
The lot goes very still.
He knows what he said the second it's out of him. His whole face does a thing. But he doesn't take it back and he doesn't look at the ground, and he stands there twenty-one years old with a burned arm and a helmet in both hands and holds it.
Raider makes the hinge sound.
And it's Warden — Warden, who threw that boy six feet across a gravel lot at midnight and hollered at him in a voice I ain't heard in fifteen years — who says it.
"Let him ride."
* * *
Sixty-two miles.
We go up 190 and cross at the old bridge because the interstate at four o'clock is a parkin' lot from Prairieville north, and Raider takes point because Raider always takes point, and Deacon rides the back door with Cricket in front of him where he can see him.
Ninety-seven degrees on the bank sign in Gonzales.
Nobody's got anything to say and there ain't a way to say it anyway at sixty-five with the wind, and that's a mercy, because I've got about four hours of things in me and not one of 'em would come out right.
Somewhere past Saint Gabriel, the plants start.
That's what Baton Rouge is from the south — you come up through the cane and then it's forty miles of refinery, flare stacks and white tanks and steam going up in columns, pipe racks running over the road on concrete legs, and the whole thing smells like a struck match and money.
Chain-link for miles. Signs about hard hats.
Then the batture and the river and the bridge, and the city.
Blitz's text comes in at three fifty-one and I feel the phone go in my pocket and I can't do a thing about it doin' seventy in the left lane.
We come off at Washington and pull into a shut-down car wash and I get it out.
brEC LOT CHOCTAW & S 13TH. BEHIND THE OLD FURNITURE PLACE. CAR OFF 3 MIN AGO
I turn it around and show Warden.
He reads it twice and hands it to Raider and Raider hands it to Deacon, and Mercy reads it over Deacon's arm without bein' handed anything and hands it back to me.
"Six blocks," Raider says. "I'll go up Government and come in from the north."
That's fine. That's a plan.
Then the phone goes again in my hand. I look at it.
FOUR CARS
HIS RENTAL + 3 MORE CAME IN OFF FLORIDA ST LAST 6 MIN. SAME PLATE PREFIX. THATS NOT A MEET HAVOC
THATS A CREW
I stand in the lot of a closed car wash on Washington Street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at three fifty-four in the afternoon, and I look at the words on that screen for about two seconds.
She asked him for three things.
She asked him to leave the club alone and she asked him to leave me alone and she asked to bring it herself, and he said yes to all of it on the telephone at six-forty in the mornin' with a smile in his voice, and she got in a car with four hundred dollars and a sheet of paper she left on my kitchen table.
He was never going to let her drive out of there.
She's got no leverage. That's the part. She's got no leverage because she already gave him the only piece she had when she agreed to bring it herself, and she knew that when she agreed to it, and she did it anyway.
Nobody dies over me.
She wasn't tradin'.
She was payin'.
Five men look at me in a car wash lot.
Warden's got his hand out for the phone and I give it to him and he reads it and his jaw goes once and comes back.
"Four cars," he says. "That's eight men. Could be twelve."
Deacon says nothing.
Raider takes his helmet off the seat and puts it on the ground, which he does not do, which means he is not gettin' back on that bike until this is decided.
"You can go home," I say. "All of you. Right now, and there ain't one thing I'd hold about it, and I'd say the same to any of you standin' where I am."
Nobody moves.
Cricket's got his helmet under his arm and he is white as a sheet and he is not going anywhere.
And then Mercy speaks, and it's the first thing he's said in sixty-two miles.
"Sir," he says, "we ought to hurry."
He says it courteously. He says it the way you'd tell a man his table's ready.
Then he gets on his bike, and starts it, and pulls out onto Washington Street ahead of all of us, and does not look back one time to see whether anybody's comin'.
Four o'clock in Old South Baton Rouge.
Shotgun houses with plywood in the windows and grass up over the porch steps. A church with a hand-painted sign. Two men on a stoop who watch five bikes go by and don't change expression. Heat comin' up off the asphalt in sheets so you can see the far end of the block moving.
We stop one street short.
Choctaw's got a furniture store on the corner with a sun-bleached banner still hangin' in the window that says EVERYTHING MUST GO, and behind it there's a lot with a hurricane fence half down and weeds through the pavement.
Her car's in it.
Gray Corolla with the wheel well eaten through on the driver's side. Sittin' right in the middle of that lot with the driver's door standing open.
And nobody in it.