Page 82 of Havoc

Not for anybody. That's what's awful about it. He does it out loud with his hands going like he's got an adding machine in front of him and there's nobody standing in front of him at all.

"The shop's gone. Whole east bay, the lift, both compressors. The office is gone and the paper in it's gone and that's eleven years of Marisol's filing." He's looking at a spot on the wall. "Yard's a total loss on the east side and the fence is down two hundred feet and we can't claim any of it, 'cause the adjuster comes out and sees accelerant on a scrapyard owned by a motorcycle club and there ain't a company in this state that writes that check.

"Fang's got no front wall. That's four weeks minimum and no income while it's shut and Junie's got eleven people on that schedule.

"Marisol's got smoke in her lungs at sixty-one and her insurance is through us, which means it's through nothin'.

"And that boy up there's got a hole in him."

He stops.

"Six months," he says. "That's what it took to take six months off this club, and it cost them a truck and one man they left at the gate."

"Ransom." Deacon, from the corner.

"I'm doin' the numbers."

"You're doin' 'em out loud in a room with civilians in it."

Ransom looks around the waiting room like he's just arrived in it.

Then he puts his rings back on, one at a time, and goes and stands by the window.

At four in the morning, Deacon asks the nurse if he can go up.

She says two at a time and he says he only needs one and he's back down in eleven minutes.

Somebody asks him how the boy is.

"Sleepin'."

"You say somethin' over him?"

"I did."

"He hear it?"

"Don't matter if he did," Deacon says, and sits down for the first time all night, and puts both hands flat on his knees and looks at the floor.

Gigi arrives at four-thirty.

She comes through those doors with her hair wet and her shirt inside out and she is already crying before she's got the room in focus, and Junie catches her about six feet in.

"He's all right. Gigi. Gigi, look at me, he's all right, it went through him."

"I wasn't there⁠—"

"You weren't supposed to be there."

"I switched⁠—"

"You switched three days ago 'cause I asked you to." Junie's got her by both arms. "You listen to me. I put you on Friday. That's mine. Don't you dare stand in this hospital and make that yours."

Gigi's whole face is ruined.

She hangs onto Junie and cries and cries and I stand there against a wall with eleven stitches in my arm and I think, she's twenty-seven and she's never seen anything like this before, and I go and get her a cup of water out of the machine, and she takes it with both hands and says thank you and can't look at me.

I don't think about it again for a long time either.