Page 20 of Havoc

I've done this for fifteen years. I have never once in fifteen years left a phone on a person.

"Give it to me," I say.

She goes still.

"You left it with me on purpose."

"No."

"You left it with me for two hours⁠—"

"I said no." My voice comes out harder than I want it and I take it back down. "It wasn't on purpose. It was me not thinkin'. Give me the phone."

"So the not thinking's over."

"Lennox."

Her name comin' out of my mouth stops both of us about equally.

She takes it out of her back pocket. She doesn't hand it over — she sets it down on the counter between us and slides it and takes her hand back, and I pick it up and hold the button down and watch the screen go black.

"Six missed calls," she says.

"I know it."

"You know whose."

"Yeah."

"Are you going to tell me?"

I put the phone in my inside pocket where the photograph's been sittin' for a day and a half, and now there's two things in there.

"No," I say.

The back porch faces the water and there ain't a light on it, which is the reason I sit out there most nights.

The frogs are goin'. Somewhere off in the dark a gator makes the sound they make, which after thirty-six years is about the same to me as a truck goin' by.

I get out the phone. Mine, not hers.

And it lights up in my hand before I've touched it.

STORM.

I look at it through the whole first ring and the whole second one.

"Yeah."

"Where you at?"

"Home."

"Blitz says you took his room number and went out at half past four and didn't come back." No accusation in it. Storm don't put accusation in things, which is the worst part of talkin' to him. "So I'm askin'."

Here's what I've got. Maybe two seconds of it.

I could say she's in the back bedroom. Four words. Storm would say stay put and forty minutes later there'd be trucks in my drive and it would be out of my hands and off my chest, and whatever happened after would happen to a table and not to a man.