Page 33 of Havoc

"Mm." I hear him move. A chair, maybe, or a drawer. "Here's mine. I've extended a great deal of patience to your club because of the relationship, and because I'd prefer this stay a small thing handled by small men. But there's a limit to how long I can leave a matter open before it stops being mine."

"Meanin'?"

"Meaning my uncle doesn't need to hear about this."

There it is.

He says it easy, like a man complainin' about paperwork, and it goes past most people and it don't go past me, because Ransom has spent fifteen years teachin' me to listen for exactly this. A man workin' for a family says the family wants. A man workin' for himself says my uncle doesn't need to hear about it.

Lucien Arceneaux called in a twenty-two-year debt on a Tuesday, and Rémy don't know he did it.

"Seventy-two hours," Lucien says. "Her and the item, at an address I'll send. After that I stop asking your club and I start sending my own people into your parish to find her, and I promise you nobody wants that. Least of all your president, who has a very nice arrangement he'd like to keep."

"Seventy-two."

"It's Friday. So Monday." The smile comes back in his voice. "It's been a pleasure. You're easier to talk to than he is."

He hangs up.

* * *

Roy Duplessis has the eleven thousand in a bank envelope and he brings it to the door before I've got both boots on his porch.

"It's all there. Count it."

"I believe you."

"Count it anyway, man, I want you to count it."

So I count it on his own porch rail in the four o'clock sun with him standin' there hangin' onto the frame of his own door, and it's eleven thousand and it's all there and Friday's Friday and this is done.

"We square?" he asks.

"We're square."

"Okay." His breath goes out of him. "Okay. Good. 'Cause I'll be honest with you, I ain't slept but about⁠—"

And I put him against the door frame.

Forearm across the collarbones, no wind-up, and the whole house shakes on its blocks and something falls off a shelf inside and his head comes back and cracks the wood and his hands come up and get hold of my cut.

Ten seconds, maybe. Neither of us says anything.

His eyes are enormous.

I never touch a man who pays. Fifteen years. That's the entire product — a man pays and nothin' happens to him, and if that ain't true then the whole thing's just violence and there's a hundred men in this parish who'll do violence for forty dollars.

I let go.

He slides about four inches and catches himself.

"What'd I do?" he whines. "Havoc. What'd I do?"

Somewhere in that house a little girl says Daddy? and neither of us answers her.

"Nothin'," I say.

I pick the envelope up off the rail and I go.