Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HAVOC
"Six," Cricket says.
"There's five of us," Warden says, "and you're gonna hold the gap."
"I can—"
"You're gonna hold the gap, and if anybody comes out of it you holler, and that's the whole job and it's a real one." Warden doesn't look at him while he says it. He's lookin' at the roofline. "Raider, front. Deacon, dock. Havoc and me through the fence. Mercy—"
Mercy's already gone.
That's the other thing about those forty seconds. He was there at the start of them and he wasn't at the end and not one of us saw him leave.
Warden looks at the space where he was.
"Alright," he says.
We come through that fence gap into a loading yard full of pallets and standing water, and there's a man on the dock steps with a phone up to his ear and Warden is on him before he's got the phone down.
Not a shot. Warden puts him into the rail and takes the phone and throws it into the weeds and that man is out of the rest of his day.
Inside it's a furniture store with no furniture in it.
Forty thousand square feet, concrete, columns every twenty feet, and about a third of the fluorescents workin' in strips down the middle so the whole place is stripes of white light and black in between.
There's price tags still stapled to the columns.
There's a rolled-up carpet remnant standing on end like a man.
Voices somewhere ahead and to the left.
And then everything happens at once.
Glass goes at the front of the building, which is Raider, and somebody shouts, and there is a shot from somewhere down there that goes off those concrete walls like the building itself came apart.
Then four more.
I'm running down a stripe of light between columns and I do not know where anybody is.
That's the truth of it. Warden's on my right and then he ain't.
There's a man comin' around a column at eleven o'clock and I hit him with everything I've got and both of us go down into a stack of empty pallets that comes apart underneath us, and I get up and he don't.
More shooting at the front.
Somethin' comes past my head close enough that I hear it and there ain't a word for that sound.
Deacon comes through the dock doors at the back like a wall fallin' over.
I hear shootin' behind me too, out in the yard, back toward the fence.
And I keep going.
I want that written down in the plainest way I can put it. I heard shootin' behind me at the fence gap where I had left a twenty-one-year-old boy with a burned arm and no eyebrows, and I heard it, and I registered it, and I kept running forward because she was forward.
There's an office at the back left corner with a glass wall onto the sales floor and the blinds half up.
She's in a chair.
Not tied. That's the thing that stops me for half a second in the doorway — she ain't tied to anything, she's sittin' in an office chair with one ankle crossed over her knee and her arms folded and her chin up, and there's a man standin' behind her and another one by the file cabinet, and Lucien Arceneaux is sittin' on the edge of the desk in a good shirt with his sleeves rolled.
There's blood on her mouth.
Not much. A split at the corner and a smear where she's wiped it with the back of her hand, and one whole side of her face is comin' up already.
She sees me in the doorway, and her eyes close for about a quarter second.
"Well," Lucien says. "That's a shame."
It doesn't last.
The one by the file cabinet reaches and Warden comes through that door behind me and puts him through the glass wall — the whole panel, all of it, and the sound of forty square feet of plate glass hittin' a concrete floor in an empty building is a thing I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
The one behind her chair gets a hand in her hair.
And Lennox drives the heel of her boot down the front of his shin and takes him off her, and she is out of that chair and behind me before he's got his hands back up, and Deacon fills the doorway behind her and that man looks at Deacon and puts both his palms flat on the wall.
Which leaves Lucien Arceneaux sittin' on the edge of a desk.
He doesn't run. I'll give him that, and it's the only thing I'll ever give him. He looks at the glass on the floor and he looks at Warden and then he looks at me, and he starts to say somethin' with that smile already on his face —
And I take him off the desk.
He goes down hard, and I go down with him.
I get him by the collar of that good shirt and I put him into the floor twice and the second one opens his eyebrow and he stops being a man in a nice shirt and starts being a man on a concrete floor with a face.
There's a piece of angle iron on that floor from a display rack. About sixteen inches. It's in my right hand and I could not tell you when I picked it up.
He's got his hands up.
"Wait—"
"Shut your mouth."
"Wait." He's got blood in his teeth and he is talkin' as fast as I have ever heard a man talk.
"You do this and my uncle burns your parish to the dirt.
Not me. Him. He'll do your shop and your bar and he'll do your president's house and he will find the boy in the hospital, do you understand what I'm telling you, he will find the boy in the hospital—"
"I know it."
"Then—"
"I know it," I say. "I knew it before I came in the buildin'."
And there it is.
Sixteen inches of angle iron and a man's face under my knee and the whole of it is one second of work.
I have been good at one thing my entire adult life and this is it, and everything in my hands and my arms and the whole length of my back is already leaning into it, and there is not one part of me that does not want to.
Behind me Warden doesn't say a word.
He could. He's four feet away and he's the Sergeant at Arms and it is literally his job, and he stands there and he lets me have it, because whatever comes next has got to be mine.
Lennox is in the doorway.
She ain't sayin' anything either.
That's what does it. Not her sayin' don't. She'd never.
She's standin' in a doorway with her mouth split open, and she has already put a price on this once today at six-forty in the mornin' on my kitchen porch, and if I bring this piece of iron down then everything she bought with her own body this afternoon goes for nothing.
Storm. Deacon's sister. Junie behind that bar. Marisol on oxygen. A twenty-four-year-old with a tube in his side who told me not to come back without her.
She already paid for these people.
I ain't got the right to spend it.
I put the iron down on the concrete beside his head.
"She bought you," I say.
Then I get off him.
Warden's got a fist in the back of my shirt haulin' me up and Deacon's got Lennox by the arm and we're movin', and there's still noise at the front of the building.
Comin' back across that floor, I go past a man on the ground between two columns.
He's on his side and he's alive and he's got both hands up around his head and he's sayin' somethin' over and over.
Mercy is kneeling down beside him.
Just kneeling, on one knee, with his forearm across his thigh, close, the way a man kneels down to talk to a child in a store.
He's sayin' somethin' back. Low. I can't hear one word of it.
Warden looks and turns his head.
Deacon looks and turns his head, and he moves so he's between Lennox and that column, and he does it in a way she doesn't notice.
I look.
And I keep walking, and I do not turn around, and I could not tell you to this day what Mercy did in that building because I did not look back and neither did any other man in there.
The yard's full of white sunlight after all that fluorescent and it takes my eyes about four seconds.
Raider's comin' around the corner of the building fast.
He's got his hand out. Not up. Out, flat, like a man tellin' traffic to stop, and he is comin' straight at me and he's already sayin' my name, and I have known that man fifteen years and I have never once heard his voice do the thing it is doing.
"Havoc. Havoc, don't—"
There's a gap in the fence where the panel's down.
There's a boy layin' in it.
He's on his back with one arm out and one knee up and his helmet's about six feet away in the weeds.
The bandage on his left forearm is the whitest thing in that whole lot.
He's been gone a while. That's the thing I can't — he's been gone since about nine seconds into it, since the very front of it, since before I ever got through that dock door, and I heard it happen. I heard it and I put my head down and I ran the other way.
His face ain't got anything on it.
That's what nobody tells you either. There's no expression.
There ain't a last thought sittin' there for anybody to read and there ain't one single thing his face is trying to say to me.
He's twenty-one years old and he's layin' in weeds in a hurricane fence gap in Baton Rouge, and he doesn't look scared and he doesn't look brave and he doesn't look like anything at all.
I get down in it.
Somebody's sayin' my name. Might be Warden.
He carried a sixty-one-year-old woman out of a fire eighteen hours ago and he showed the burn to every single person in a hospital waiting room and he told a nurse he was with me, and he stood in a parking lot this afternoon with a helmet in both hands and said the one true thing nobody else in that lot had the guts to say out loud.
You ain't a patch this week.
He never told anybody what he wanted said if this happened. Nobody ever asks a prospect that. There ain't a note and there ain't a last word and there ain't going to be, not ever, and I have got to carry that instead of something.
I get my hand under the back of his head anyway.
There ain't any reason for it. He's gone. I do it anyway and I hold it there and the concrete's burning through the knees of my jeans and somewhere off behind us on Choctaw a car goes by with its music up.
Deacon comes and stands over the both of us.
He doesn't say any words. He's the Chaplain and he's got a hundred of 'em and he doesn't say one, and later on I understand that's because he's savin' them for a room in Rosalie with the whole club in it and that boy's cut on a table.
But right then he takes his hat off in a parkin' lot in East Baton Rouge Parish at twenty past four in the afternoon.
And every man out there does the same.