Page 5 of Havoc

I get my jeans and my cut, and I go down the stairs slowly, and I'm four steps from the bottom when Storm's door opens at the end of the hall.

He doesn't say my name.

Doesn't have to. The room drops about thirty decibels all on its own, the way it does every single time — Tyrant's pen quits movin', Cricket goes stone still with the broom held up off the floor, and every man in that building finds something extremely important to look at.

Storm stands in the doorway with one hand up on the frame and looks at me the whole way down.

"Chapel," he says. "Now."

CHAPTER TWO

HAVOC

Nine of 'em are already sittin' when I come through the door.

Nobody looks up. Chairs are full and the room's got that pressure in it a room gets when men have been waitin' on somebody and have run out of things to say about the weather, and Storm goes past me and around the table to his own seat without a word.

Chapel's the same room it's been for twenty-two years. Long table down the middle, scarred to hell from a decade of men settin' things on it they shouldn't have. Ten chairs, and every chair's got a shape worn into it by whoever's been sittin' in it longest.

Behind Storm's seat there's the charter.

He built the frame himself out of cypress and did a bad job of it, and the glass has got a chip out of one corner from a fight in oh-nine that nobody talks about anymore. Under it, the paper's gone the color of weak tea. Seven names in seven different hands, signed the same night in this same room before I was old enough to shave.

Sixth one down is signed differently from the rest. Bigger. Somebody who wrote like he wanted you to know he'd been there.

TITHE

We drink to those seven every New Year's. Storm says the names, we say 'em back, and that's the whole ceremony. Fifteen years I've said that one out loud and I've never once asked who he was, because Storm doesn't talk about the old days and every man in here learned early not to walk up on it.

Mercy's already in his seat down the far end. He got here before me and he'll be the last one out and I couldn't tell you when he came in. He's got his hands folded on the table and he's watchin' Storm the way you'd watch a preacher you liked.

Storm sits.

He doesn't say anything for a while. Nobody fills it. Ain't a man at this table who's ever won that game with him.

"Lucien Arceneaux called me at four," he says.

Ransom lets out a breath through his nose.

"Called you." He's got his rings off and lined up on the table in front of him, which he does when he's workin'. "Not me."

"Called me."

"That's a message all by itself."

"It is."

"Twenty-two years I've handled every conversation that family's had with this club." Ransom picks up the middle ring and turns it over. "Now the man calls my president directly and doesn't go through his treasurer. That ain't a favor he's askin'. That's him showin' us where he thinks we sit."

"I know where we sit," Storm says.

He reaches inside his cut, takes out a photograph, and lays it face down on the table. Slides it. It goes about eight inches and stops on its own.

Nobody puts a hand on it.

"A woman took somethin' out of a house on Prytania Street," Storm says. "Nine days back. Lucien wants her found. Wants her, and wants what she took, and he wants both brought to him personally."

"Brought," Warden says.