Page 13 of Havoc

He stands there against the post with his arms at his sides and he watches me all the way down Route 9 until the trees take me, and I know he does, because I check the mirror twice.

CHAPTER FIVE

HAVOC

The motel's two rows of doors under a tin awning with a pink VACANCY buzzin' over the office, and there's four cars in the whole lot at half past five in the evening.

Hers is the gray Corolla around the back with Louisiana plates and a wheel well eaten through on the driver's side. Room eleven's door is shut. Curtain's pulled but not all the way, and there's a gap of about two inches down the hinge side where somebody stopped payin' attention.

I put the bike in the shade at the end of the row where the office window can't see it and I sit down on the low wall by the ice machine and I wait.

Twenty minutes, maybe. A truck comes in and a man in a Cintas shirt gets out and goes into room four and don't come back out.

Then eleven opens.

She's got the ice bucket in one hand and she's already three steps out before she sees me, and she stops.

Not a flinch. Her feet stop and the rest of her keeps goin' for about half an inch and then that stops too, and she stands there in a motel lot in the heat with a plastic bucket hangin' off two fingers and looks straight at my chest.

At the cut. At the rockers first, top and bottom, the way somebody looks who's read one before.

Then up at my face.

"Well," she says. "That was fast."

Which is not what women say.

I've done this a while. There's about four things a person does when they turn around and find me standin' in their afternoon, and every one of 'em comes out of the body before it comes out of the mouth. They go for a door. They go for a phone. They start talkin', which is the most common, or they go grayish around the mouth and put a hand out for a wall.

She sets the ice bucket down on the concrete. Straightens up. Puts her thumbs in her back pockets.

"You gonna say somethin' or you want me to guess?"

"Lennox Vance."

"Mm." She tips her head. "You get that off a phone or off a picture?"

"Both."

"Figures." She looks past me at the road, then back. "Where's the rest of you?"

"Ain't any rest of me."

"There's always a rest of you."

"Not today."

She takes that in. She's got a stillness about her I ain't been expectin' and it's puttin' me a half step off my own footin', because I came out here with a whole afternoon already written in my head and she ain't sayin' a single one of her lines.

"Okay," she says. "So it's the two of us in a parking lot. What do you want?"

"You know what I want."

"I want to hear you say it. I've had a long month and I'd like somebody to be plain with me."

"You took somethin' out of a house on Prytania."

"I did."