Page 93 of Havoc

Not tied. That's the thing that stops me for half a second in the doorway — she ain't tied to anything, she's sittin' in an office chair with one ankle crossed over her knee and her arms folded and her chin up, and there's a man standin' behind her and another one by the file cabinet, and Lucien Arceneaux is sittin' on the edge of the desk in a good shirt with his sleeves rolled.

There's blood on her mouth.

Not much. A split at the corner and a smear where she's wiped it with the back of her hand, and one whole side of her face is comin' up already.

She sees me in the doorway, and her eyes close for about a quarter second.

"Well," Lucien says. "That's a shame."

It doesn't last.

The one by the file cabinet reaches and Warden comes through that door behind me and puts him through the glass wall — the whole panel, all of it, and the sound of forty square feet of plate glass hittin' a concrete floor in an empty building is a thing I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.

The one behind her chair gets a hand in her hair.

And Lennox drives the heel of her boot down the front of his shin and takes him off her, and she is out of that chair and behind me before he's got his hands back up, and Deacon fills the doorway behind her and that man looks at Deacon and puts both his palms flat on the wall.

Which leaves Lucien Arceneaux sittin' on the edge of a desk.

He doesn't run. I'll give him that, and it's the only thing I'll ever give him. He looks at the glass on the floor and he looks at Warden and then he looks at me, and he starts to say somethin' with that smile already on his face —

And I take him off the desk.

He goes down hard, and I go down with him.

I get him by the collar of that good shirt and I put him into the floor twice and the second one opens his eyebrow and he stops being a man in a nice shirt and starts being a man on a concrete floor with a face.

There's a piece of angle iron on that floor from a display rack. About sixteen inches. It's in my right hand and I could not tell you when I picked it up.

He's got his hands up.

"Wait—"

"Shut your mouth."

"Wait." He's got blood in his teeth and he is talkin' as fast as I have ever heard a man talk. "You do this and my uncle burns your parish to the dirt. Not me. Him. He'll do your shop and your bar and he'll do your president's house and he will find the boy in the hospital, do you understand what I'm telling you, he will find the boy in the hospital⁠—"

"I know it."

"Then—"

"I know it," I say. "I knew it before I came in the buildin'."

And there it is.

Sixteen inches of angle iron and a man's face under my knee and the whole of it is one second of work. I have been good at one thing my entire adult life and this is it, and everything in my hands and my arms and the whole length of my back is already leaning into it, and there is not one part of me that does not want to.

Behind me Warden doesn't say a word.

He could. He's four feet away and he's the Sergeant at Arms and it is literally his job, and he stands there and he lets me have it, because whatever comes next has got to be mine.

Lennox is in the doorway.

She ain't sayin' anything either.

That's what does it. Not her sayin' don't. She'd never. She's standin' in a doorway with her mouth split open, and she has already put a price on this once today at six-forty in the mornin' on my kitchen porch, and if I bring this piece of iron down then everything she bought with her own body this afternoon goes for nothing.

Storm. Deacon's sister. Junie behind that bar. Marisol on oxygen. A twenty-four-year-old with a tube in his side who told me not to come back without her.