Page 102 of Havoc

She came to Rosalie with four hundred dollars, a nineteen-dollar shovel, and a plan she knew was no good, to put a dead man's coat on a wall.

She's standin' eleven feet from it.

And there's a boy's leather hangin' three feet to the left of it who was alive when she got here.

Afterward, Storm comes and finds me by the shop door.

He's got somethin' folded over his arm and he doesn't hand it to me right away.

"Shelf ain't where that goes," he says.

"Storm—"

"Vote was Thursday. Ain't nobody told you 'cause I asked 'em not to." He puts it in my hands. "You took eighteen thousand dollars and you lied to me on your own back steps and you did it for eleven days, and I ain't forgot a minute of it, and you and me are gonna have a long conversation this winter that neither one of us is gonna enjoy.

"But I abstained. And a man who abstained doesn't get to hold a patch over somebody else's head.

"Put it on."

I put it on.

It doesn't feel like anything. I want to be honest about that. I stood in a hallway and put my cut back on eight days after a boy died in a fence gap holdin' a spot I let Warden give him, and it did not feel like one single thing.

Out in the lot at seven, Raider's loadin' saddlebags.

He's got both of 'em on and a bedroll, which he doesn't use for a run under three days.

"Where you goin'?"

"Storm's sendin' me."

"Where?"

"He didn't say and I didn't ask." Raider pulls the strap. "That's how he wanted it, so that's how it is."

"How long?"

"Long as it takes."

He gets on. And then he stops, with his hand on the throttle, and he looks off across that gravel lot toward the fence line — and there's a woman standin' out there by herself in the dark.

Gigi.

She's been out there since three o'clock.

She came with Junie and she got as far as the door and she has not been inside that building one time all afternoon, not for the vote and not for Deacon and not for the coats goin' up, and Lennox went out twice with a beer and both times come back in with it still full.

Grief takes people funny. Everybody said so.

Raider looks at her for about two seconds.

Then he pulls out onto the shell road and he's gone.

They're all gone by ten.

I go back down that hall by myself with the buildin' empty behind me and I stand in front of that wall for a while.

Charter in the middle in a bad frame. Emile Doucet on the right.