Page 1 of Havoc

CHAPTER ONE

HAVOC

Most men start talkin' before I do.

Roy Duplessis is on minute three, and he ain't slowed down once.

Something about a cousin up in Lafayette who was supposed to come through.

A transmission that ate four hundred dollars he'd already set aside. He's got a real nice kitchen to be sayin' all this in — granite counters, one of those refrigerators with a screen in the door that tells you when you're low on milk.

Some of it got bought with money he owes us.

He keeps glancing past my shoulder at the door I came through, like it might've grown another one while he was talkin'.

There's a wet ring on the counter where he set his beer down when I knocked. I pick the bottle up. Set it back inside the ring, dead center, and the little sound it makes stops him mid-sentence.

Roy's bigger than me across the shoulders. There's a shotgun in this house somewhere and he's thought about it twice already — I watched him think it, both times, the way a man's eyes go flat and come back — and both times he decided against it.

Smart man.

"Eleven," I say.

"Havoc—"

"Eleven, Roy."

His hands come up. Palms out, the way men do when they've run out of sentences. "Two weeks. Two weeks and I'll have all of it, plus whatever Ransom wants to put on top of it, I swear to God."

"Ransom already put it on top."

"Then give me a number. Give me a number and I'll⁠—"

"Ain't my job to give numbers."

Which is the truth. My job's this part. The part where a man works out on his own that the arithmetic already happened somewhere else, in a room he wasn't invited to, and the thing standin' in his kitchen is only here to let him know the answer.

He looks at my hands.

They all do, sooner or later. I got rings on and ink down past the knuckles, and I ain't lifted either hand off the counter since I walked in, and that's the whole message right there. A man who means to hit you keeps his hands loose and low. A man who doesn't has got no reason to move them at all.

Roy gets there.

His shoulders come down about an inch and something back behind his eyes lets go, and I watch the fight leave him without it ever havin' shown up.

"Friday," he says.

"Friday."

"I got a little girl, man."

"I know it."

Her drawing's up on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a crawfish. Purple horse with too many legs and a sun in the corner takin' up a third of the page.

"Ain't nobody said one word about your girl, Roy." I straighten up off the counter. "Nobody's goin' to. That's the entire reason I came out here by myself instead of bringin' somebody."

He looks at me then. Really looks, first time since he opened his door, and I can see him workin' on whether I meant that kind or whether I meant it the other way.