Page 86 of Havoc

She's right. That's the part I can't get past. I'd have done it Tuesday.

The page on the table is worth more than I am and you know it, so don't be stupid about which one you go after.

I put the page inside my shirt without lookin' at it.

Her phone's off.

Straight to a recording, and I listen to eleven seconds of a woman's voice tellin' me the mailbox ain't set up because she's had that phone four days and never did it.

I call the other number.

He picks up on the third ring.

"I wondered how long."

"Where."

"Now, that's not how⁠—"

"Where, Lucien."

"Somewhere very ordinary, and by the time you found it we'd be finished." Something creaks on his end. A car seat. He's already moving. "She called me, you understand. That's the part I'd want, if I were you. She called me. I hadn't the least idea where either of you were. She dialed the number herself at six-forty this morning and negotiated me down on three separate points, and she did it very well."

"I got eighteen thousand dollars of leverage on you⁠—"

"You have eighteen thousand dollars of complicity," Lucien says. "There's a difference and you've had a week to work it out. You handed a man cash in a parking lot with no paper and no witness. If I go to my uncle tomorrow and tell him a Cottonmouth King tried to buy me, do you imagine his first question is about me?"

The kitchen's got a fly in it goin' at the window.

"She wanted three things," he says. "Do you want to know what they were? I think you should. She asked me to leave your club alone. She asked me to leave you alone, specifically, by name. And she asked to bring it herself."

"Lucien."

"You have a very serious woman," he says. "I'd have kept better track of her."

He hangs up.

* * *

Sixteen bikes in the lot, and the east fence still smokin' at two in the afternoon.

They're pullin' twisted sheet out of the shop bay with a chain and the tow rig, and Deacon's got a shovel, and Raider's up on the roof of the office lookin' down into it, and every man on that lot stops when I come through the gate.

Warden's in the middle of the yard with a clipboard.

"She's gone," I say.

"I know it."

"You know⁠—"

"Junie called me at eleven. Said she'd been ringin' Lennox since eight and got nothin'." Warden puts the clipboard down on the hood of a truck. "I put it together about forty minutes ago and I went and told Storm, and I'd have called you if you'd have been awake to answer a phone."

"She's meetin' Lucien Arceneaux."

"Yeah."

"Today."