Page 17 of Havoc

"Everybody's got another one."

"Not for you."

Which is fine. It's fine. I've been told no by better men in worse rooms and it has never once slowed me down.

"Okay," I say. "Then here's what I'd like instead. I'd like you to tell me what happens at the end of tonight, because you've had ninety minutes to think about it and I've had nine days, and I'd bet the seventeen dollars in my purse that I've done more work on it than you have."

"Nothin' happens tonight."

"Something always happens tonight."

"Not tonight."

"See, that's not an answer, that's a man buying time. You want to know how I know?" I shift in the seat so I'm facing him. "Because if you had an answer you'd have given it to me in the parking lot. It costs you nothing to tell a woman what's going to happen to her. It's actually easier. Half of what you people do only works if the other person's already run the film in their head."

"You people."

"Don't get delicate on me now."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth and is gone before I can call it anything.

We come up on the bridge over the bayou and the boards go under us in a run of hard flat sounds, six seconds of it, and then dirt again.

"You ain't scared," he says.

"I'm terrified."

He looks over.

"My pulse is about a hundred and ten and it has been since I saw you sitting on that wall and it hasn't come down." I hold up one hand, flat, in the light off the dash. Nothing. Not a tremor in it. "It doesn't get to the outside anymore. It stopped getting to the outside sometime around February and I don't expect it back. So if you were counting on me to look how you're used to people looking, I'd let go of it, because we'll be here all night."

He watches my hand.

He looks at it longer than a man should look at a hand while he's driving somebody else's car in the dark, and then his eyes go back to the road, and the wrist over the wheel comes down and both his hands go on it properly.

I've never in my life said any of that out loud to another person.

* * *

Route 9 comes up at the top of a slow rise and I know it before the sign, because the sky over the trees ahead of us has gone that dirty yellow that means sodium lights.

The salvage yard.

I sat in front of it twenty-four hours ago with my hands on this same wheel.

I can see it before we get there. Chain-link running off into the dark on the right, then the stacks, four cars high and crushed flat, throwing black bars of shadow across the gravel. The gate. KINGS CUSTOM. And back behind it the long low building with every window lit and the lot full, and there must be fifteen bikes in it now.

He slows.

He does. He comes off the gas and the car drops down under fifty and I put my thumbnail into the side of my finger hard enough to feel it, because after everything, after nine days and a shovel and a wall in New Orleans, I am going to be delivered to the exact front door I have been driving toward since Wednesday, and I'm going to arrive in the passenger seat of my own car with a man's hand on the wheel.

I had a whole speech. It's ten sentences long and I've said it in the car and in the shower and out loud in a Waffle House parking lot at two in the morning.

His name is on your wall.

I get ready.

The turn comes level with my window.