Page 19 of Havoc

"You said huh."

"I say a lot of things." She sets her duffel down against the wall. "You got a bathroom or is that also nothing?"

"Down the hall on the left."

"And the room across from it?"

"Yours."

"Mine." She looks at me. "For how long?"

"Ain't worked it out."

"You keep saying that."

"'Cause it keeps bein' true."

She goes down the hall and I hear the door open and I hear her stand there, and I know what she's lookin' at, which is a bed and a dresser and nothin' on the walls, and then she comes back with her arms crossed.

"There's no lock on that door."

"No."

"On either side."

"That's right."

"Okay." She nods slowly. "Then we're going to have a conversation about it, and we're going to have it now, standing up, while we're both dressed and neither of us is tired."

"You can push the dresser."

"I'm not asking permission to move furniture. I've moved furniture." She's got her chin up. "I'm telling you what I'll do, so that later on nobody's surprised. If you come through that door tonight, I will take an eye out. Not a threat, not a speech. I'm a hundred and thirty pounds and I've got no reach and I've got no training, so it's an eye or it's nothing, and I'd rather you knew now than found out."

The refrigerator hums.

Nobody has said anything like that to me in my adult life. Men don't say it because men are figurin' the other thing, and women don't say it because by the time they've thought it they've already decided to be small.

"Ain't comin' through the door," I say.

"Fine."

"You want the dresser moved, I'll move it."

"I said I'd do it."

"Didn't say you wouldn't." I take the beer out of the refrigerator and put it back and shut the door. "Bathroom's got a window. Painted shut in ninety-one and I never fixed it."

"I noticed."

"Figured you did."

And then it comes down on me all at once, standin' there with my hand still on the refrigerator door.

Her phone.

Blitz has been sittin' on that number for a day and a half. He pulled a location off it once and he'll pull it again the second Storm tells him to, and there ain't a thing in the world stoppin' him from pullin' it right now out of boredom, because he's twenty-four and he's got three screens and a chip on his shoulder the size of the parish.

That phone has been in this car for two hours. It is currently eleven feet from me on a woman's hip in my own kitchen, in a house that is exactly one query away from bein' a dot on a map on Blitz's middle monitor.