Page 89 of Havoc

I turn around.

"He's got a rental. Same one he had Sunday, he never turned it in, and it's got the toll transponder in it 'cause they all do." Blitz's face is the color of paper and he is grinnin' like a man who's won somethin'. "It came up 110 through Gonzales at two-fifty and it went off at Washington Street eleven minutes ago.

"That's Old South Baton Rouge. Choctaw, Highland, in there. That whole quarter's empty warehouses and shut-up storefronts."

"That's four square miles."

"It's four square miles until three fifty-eight," he says, "when he turns the car off somewhere and don't move again, and I'm gonna be sittin' right here watchin' it happen."

He holds Ransom's phone out.

"Put your number in," he says. "I'll text you the corner."

I put my number in.

And then I stand there a second, because there's a thing I ought to say and I ain't got the equipment for it, and he sees me not have it.

"Go on," Blitz says. "And Havoc — hey."

"Yeah."

"You never asked me the second time," he says. "So don't you come back here without her."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

HAVOC

Three-oh-five when I come out of that hospital, and the heat comes up off the blacktop into my face like a hand on the chest.

My bike's where I left it in the second row.

There's four more parked around it.

Warden's leaning against the front fender of a truck that ain't his with his arms crossed.

Raider's got his helmet on the seat and a cigarette he ain't lit and he's lookin' at the highway, which is where he always looks.

Deacon takes up the whole end of the row by himself.

And Mercy is sittin' on his bike in the middle of all of it with both boots on the ground and his hands folded on the tank, and he's been there long enough that there's a ring of condensation on the pavement under the water bottle he set down beside him.

Nobody called him.

I have gone back over it a hundred times since and there is not one way anybody called him. I was in that room nineteen minutes and Warden sent me there himself and Blitz never said a word to anybody, and Mercy has been sittin' in a hospital parking lot in Rosalie since before I came down.

I stop about ten feet off.

Warden comes off the truck.

"Storm said no."

"He did."

"Then y'all ain't the club."

"Nope," Warden says.

That's all of it. Ten words, maybe eleven, and Deacon gets on his bike and Raider puts the cigarette back in the pack and Mercy picks his water bottle up off the ground.