Page 95 of Havoc

He never told anybody what he wanted said if this happened. Nobody ever asks a prospect that. There ain't a note and there ain't a last word and there ain't going to be, not ever, and I have got to carry that instead of something.

I get my hand under the back of his head anyway.

There ain't any reason for it. He's gone. I do it anyway and I hold it there and the concrete's burning through the knees of my jeans and somewhere off behind us on Choctaw a car goes by with its music up.

Deacon comes and stands over the both of us.

He doesn't say any words. He's the Chaplain and he's got a hundred of 'em and he doesn't say one, and later on I understand that's because he's savin' them for a room in Rosalie with the whole club in it and that boy's cut on a table.

But right then he takes his hat off in a parkin' lot in East Baton Rouge Parish at twenty past four in the afternoon.

And every man out there does the same.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

LENNOX

Four pounds of butter.

That's what's in my head standing in that lot and it will not get out of it. Four pounds, because he'd asked how much and Havoc had said how the hell would I know, Cricket, and he'd stood in a driveway in ninety-six degrees holding a gallon of milk and gone red to the ears telling me about it.

Deacon has his hat off. They all do. Havoc is down in the weeds with his hand under the back of that boy's head and he has not made a sound and he is not going to.

I don't go to him.

That's the last decision I make on my own for about twenty minutes, and it's the only right one I've made all day. He is on his knees in a fence gap with a dead child and I am the reason he is there, and whatever he needs in this exact minute it is not a woman standing over him.

So I stand ten feet off with a split lip and I let him have it.

"Two minutes," Raider says.

He's up on the low wall at the corner of the lot looking down Choctaw with his hand shading his eyes.

"Raider."

"Somebody's called it in by now. Somebody in one of them houses. We got two minutes and then we got sirens and then we got a boy in a parking lot and five men with no story."

"We ain't leavin' him," Warden says.

"I ain't said to leave him."

"Then say what you're sayin'."

"I'm sayin' we got two minutes to put him in somethin' and we ain't got a truck." Raider comes off the wall. "Deacon, can you carry him?"

"Yes."

"To where," Warden says. "Six blocks? In the open? On Choctaw?"

Nobody's got an answer.

And that's when the cars come in off South 13th.

Three of them.

Not police. Two black sedans and a gray one, and they come in through the broken gate at about ten miles an hour and they fan out across that lot in a way that takes about four seconds and puts one of them behind us.

Warden turns and puts himself in front of me without looking at me.