Page 44 of Havoc

"Nobody. Just somebody who told me once this was the prettiest swamp in Louisiana."

"It is."

"I know it is." Her voice does something and comes back. "I've been mad at it for twenty years for being pretty. Which isn't fair to the swamp."

A gator comes up forty feet off the bow and looks at us and goes back down without hurryin' about it, and she watches the ring of it spread out and don't say a word, and there's a heron up in the branches doin' nothin' the way they do.

We stay out there an hour and a half.

Nobody's huntin' anybody. Nobody's got a phone. She sits up in the bow with her elbows on her knees and I sit in the back with my hand on the tiller I ain't started, and it's ninety-four degrees and the both of us are runnin' sweat, and I could not tell you the last time I went two hours without workin' out where every man I know is standin'.

Eleven years I've had this boat under that house.

Never once brought anybody out in it.

Back at the dock I tie it off and she sits on the edge with her feet in the water, which I've also told her not to do, and I sit down next to her because it's mine and I'll lose my own feet if I want to.

"I got the thing," I say.

"The morning thing."

"Yeah."

"Okay." She braces up on her hands. "Go ahead."

So I tell her.

Lucien Arceneaux called me Friday at eleven forty on my own phone instead of Storm's. Seventy-two hours. That's Monday. After Monday he stops askin' this club and starts puttin' his own men in this parish, and there's about six of 'em I know by name and every one of 'em is worse than me by a distance.

I tell her I lied to him. I tell her the lie — that she stashed it, that grabbin' her hot gets him a woman and not his property, that she has to be brought somewhere she'll say where it's at.

"That's why you're still breathin'," I say. "Not because I said so. Because that's the version where he needs you alive, and I handed it to him myself on a Friday, and it's true, which is the only reason it walked."

She takes all of it without her face movin'.

Then she puts her head back and looks up through the cypress at a sky you can barely see.

"Thank you," she says.

"Ain't a favor. You'd have found out Monday."

"I know. I'm saying it anyway. You'd be amazed how few people tell you things on the fifth day instead of the ninth." She brings her chin back down. "My mother had four years to tell me one thing and she used all four of them not doing it. So you get a thank you. Take it."

The water goes past.

"Now I owe you one," she says.

"You don't."

"I do, and I'm going to pay part of it, and you're not going to like which part." She turns and looks at me. "You've had it wrong since the parking lot. All of you. Storm, that man on the phone, the kid with the computers. Every one of you has been working off the same idea and it's wrong."

"What idea?"

"That I was running."

I don't say anything.

"I wasn't running," she says. "I've never once been running. I got in a car in Baton Rouge nine days ago and I drove straight here, on purpose, with a full tank and a map and a plan, and I have been trying to get to Rosalie the whole time you thought I was trying to get away from it."