Page 31 of Havoc

I can see his back going. Once, hard, and then he gets ahold of it.

"Get in," he says. "Please."

That word costs him something. I hear it cost him.

I get in.

He shuts my door for me, which I do not ask him to do, and walks around the front through the headlights, and we drive nine miles back in the dark without either one of us saying a word.

At the house he pulls the drive and cuts the engine and the frogs come in through the vents.

"Coffee can," he says.

"I took two hundred."

"I know what you took." He gets out. "Take the rest of it tomorrow if you want. It ain't the money keepin' you here and both of us know it."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HAVOC

She won't put weight on it, and she won't let me look at it again.

Comes out of the hall around seven with her boot in her hand and walks the whole way to the kitchen on the ball of that foot without one sound out of her, gets her coffee, and stands there drinkin' it like a woman waitin' on a bus.

"Sit down and let me see."

"It's fine."

"It ain't fine, I taped it in the road with a flashlight in my teeth."

"Then you already know what it looks like."

She takes the cup out onto the porch.

I stand in my own kitchen with the pot in my hand and I don't follow her, and it takes me most of a minute to work out that I'm angry, and about twice that long to work out I ain't angry at her.

* * *

Warden's in the lot when I get to the clubhouse, sittin' on the low wall by the shop bay door with his forearms on his knees.

He waits until I've killed the engine.

"Why'd you send Mercy to a motel?"

No lead-up. He don't do lead-up.

"Storm wanted the north end covered."

"Storm gave the north end to Blitz and the phones." Warden's lookin' at the gravel between his boots. "Mercy's mine. Anything Mercy does, I know about before he does it, and I didn't know about that."

"Then take it up with him."

"I did." He looks up. "He told me you asked him to see if anybody'd been by. He told me that part twice. He didn't tell me the other part, which means he's decided it's yours to tell, and I've known that man nine years and he don't decide that about anybody."

Behind us somebody drops something metal in the shop and swears at it.

"Desk clerk went to Opelousas," I say.