Page 80 of Havoc

His voice is about a third of what it ought to be.

"Somebody get my—" he says, and stops, and starts again. "Somebody get my laptop out that room, it's on the⁠—"

"Room's gone, son," Ransom says.

"It's on the desk⁠—"

"Room's gone."

He's twenty-four.

I get down in the gravel on the other side of him from Ransom and I put my hand around the back of his neck because I can't think of anything else to do with it, and he looks up at me with his whole face gray-white in the headlights and about eleven days of chip on his shoulder finally gone off it.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey."

"Havoc, I got — listen. Listen to me." He gets a hand up and it lands on my forearm. "The system. The one I ran her phone through in the — the location, the login."

"Don't."

"It logs the query." He's got a hold of my arm now. "It logs 'em. Who looked and what they looked at and where from. And I used a fella's credentials out of a skip trace shop in Gonzales and it come out of an address in this parish, and if anybody went and looked at that same record after I did⁠—"

"Blitz."

"—they'd have got the shop, they'd have got Kings Custom, 'cause that's the⁠—"

"Blitz."

He stops.

I sit in the gravel with my hand behind a twenty-four-year-old's neck and the fence line burning three hundred feet away, and I do the only decent thing I have done in twelve days.

"You told me," I say.

"What?"

"You told me. Sixteen days ago. You sat in that chair with your knee goin' and I asked you whose login it was and you didn't answer me, and I stood there and looked at you and I let it go, and I walked out of that room to go get a woman out of a motel." My voice is doing somethin' and I let it. "You didn't hide a damn thing from me. I never asked you the second time."

His face comes apart.

"That ain't⁠—"

"It is. Say it back to me."

"Havoc—"

"Say it back."

"You never asked me the second time," he says, and then he's crying, and he tells us it's because it hurts, and every man kneeling around that tarp lets him have it.

The ambulance comes at forty past.

They get him up and they take him and Ransom goes in the back with him because Ransom's the one who'd argue with a doctor, and the rest of us stand in a gravel lot at one in the morning and watch it go up the shell road with the lights on and no siren.

The east fence is still burning.

It'll burn till noon tomorrow. Forty years of scrap don't quit because you want it to.