Page 63 of Havoc

Storm has not spoken since he said the word vote.

He's sittin' with his forearms on the wood and his hands loose and his head down about ten degrees, and he has been sittin' like that through Deacon and through Warden and through all of it, and when he finally lifts his chin his eyes are red the way a man's eyes go when he ain't slept and has not been cryin' and would like you to believe both.

"Abstain," Storm says.

The room does not make a sound.

Twenty-two years. I have sat at that table for fifteen of them and I have watched that man rule on a hundred things nobody wanted ruled on, and I have never one time — not once, not on a patch, not on a killin', not on a man's wife — heard him take himself out of a vote.

Tyrant's pen is up off the page.

"Prez—"

"I said abstain."

"Then it doesn't carry. Four to two ain't a decision without you, it's a⁠—"

"Then it doesn't carry," Storm says.

* * *

I take my cut off.

Nobody's askin' me to. That's the reason to do it. I get it off my shoulders and I fold it once, the way you do, and I lean forward and put it in the middle of that table on the scarred wood where a photograph slid to a stop eleven days ago.

"I lied to this table for nine days," I say. "I lied to Warden in the lot on Friday and I lied to my President on my own back steps and I took eighteen thousand dollars out of a floor safe and put it in a man's hand in Gonzales.

"That ain't about her. Every one of them's mine and I did every one of 'em on purpose.

"So there it is."

I sit back.

And nothing happens.

Warden looks at it. Tyrant looks at it and doesn't write anything. Blitz has gone the color of a bedsheet and Deacon has his eyes shut and Raider is lookin' at me straight on with somethin' in his face I can't read at all.

Storm looks at it for a long time.

Then he stands up.

"Meetin's done," he says, and walks out, and he leaves it lyin' there.

Nobody takes it.

Nobody puts it back on me either.

Men file out past that table and every one of 'em looks at the thing sittin' in the middle of it, and Tyrant's the last one and he stops with his hand on the back of his chair, and he looks at me, and he opens his mouth and shuts it again.

Then he picks the cut up.

He folds it differently — proper, the way it goes in a locker — and he sets it on the shelf under the charter where the club keeps the two we've buried.

Not on me. Not off me.

"Till somebody says something different," Tyrant says, and goes out, and shuts the door behind him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE