Page 32 of Havoc

"I know where the desk clerk went."

"Then you got the whole thing."

"I got a piece of a thing." He stands. He's got four inches on me and he uses about none of them, which is his way. "Here's where I'm at. Three days ago you went out that gate alone after I asked you twice not to. You come back a day later and put a man like Mercy on a motel where a woman was stayin' who nobody's supposed to have found. And you're standin' in front of me right now with your hands open and your feet square, which you have never once done in fifteen years unless you were fixin' to lie to somebody."

My hands go down at my sides before I've decided to move them.

Warden watches them do it.

"There's nothin'," I say.

"Alright."

"I mean it."

"I said alright, Havoc." He steps past me toward the bay. "I ain't the man who takes it off you. I'm the man who tells you the clock's runnin'. Which one you want in front of you is your business."

The phone goes in my pocket at eleven forty while I'm under the Shovelhead again.

Number's not in it. Area code is.

I take it out to the fence line where the yard noise covers.

"Yeah."

"Is this the Vice President?"

Voice comes through smooth and unhurried and about forty years old, and there's a little bit of a smile in it, the kind a man puts on when he's alone in a room and don't need one.

"Who's this?"

"Lucien Arceneaux. We haven't spoken. I've been dealing with your president, but I find it's usually the second man who actually does the work, so I thought I'd save us both some time."

Same thing he did to Ransom. One rung down.

"You want somethin', say it."

"Six days ago I asked your club for a small favor and I've heard nothing since. Storm tells me your people are working. I'm sure that's true. But I've been in this business a long time and 'working' is the word men use in the second week." A pause. "It's the second week."

"We got her located."

It comes out before I've built it.

Silence on the line, about two seconds of it, and I stand there at a chain-link fence in the sun and listen to a man decide how much of that he's buying.

"Located," Lucien says.

"North of Baton Rouge, movin' every couple days, payin' cash. We got a line on her through a fella she sold somethin' to." I keep it goin'. "Here's the part you're gonna want to hear and ain't gonna like. She don't have it on her."

"Explain that."

"She stashed it before she ever crossed the parish line. First thing she did. She ain't carried it one mile since." True, every word of it, which is the only reason it walks. "So if my men grab her hot in a motel lot, you get a woman and you don't get your property back, and then we're all standin' around waitin' on her to feel talkative. You want it done clean, we take her somewhere she'll tell us where it's at, and we bring you both."

The yard grinder starts up sixty feet behind me and quits.

"That's a very sensible answer," Lucien says.

"It's the true one."