Page 10 of Havoc

My phone's face down on the nightstand, and it lights up at eleven forty.

Number I don't know. Area code I do.

It rings four times and quits.

Thirty seconds later, it starts again.

CHAPTER FOUR

HAVOC

Blitz takes nineteen hours.

Most of them I spend in the yard with my head down inside a Shovelhead that a man in Breaux Bridge has been payin' us to fix for six weeks. It don't need me. Two of the boys who work the shop could've had it turned around Monday. But there's a thing that happens to my hands when I've got nowhere to put them, and everybody in that clubhouse has learned to give me a wide berth on days when I'm inside a motor I don't need to be inside of.

Cricket comes across the gravel around noon with a paper plate.

"Deacon made too much."

"Set it down."

He sets it on the fender, which is the exact wrong place to set anything, and I look at him until he picks it back up and holds it.

He's got four rags on him.

One in the left hip pocket, which is the one Tyrant wanted. One in the right. One hangin' out the back, and one tucked up under his belt in front like a man expectin' a flood.

"Four," I say.

"Yes, sir."

"Book says one."

"The book says you carry a rag. Didn't say a number." He's grinnin' before he's even finished sayin' it. "So he can't fine me for four. I checked."

"You checked."

"Made him read it out loud."

"How'd he take it?"

"He wrote somethin' down," Cricket says, and then his face falls about an inch, and I have to turn back into the motor so he doesn't see me.

The photograph's been against my chest since last night.

Nineteen hours and I ain't looked at it once. Kept it flat inside the cut on the left side where it sits under the pocket, and every time I've bent over this bike I've felt the corner of it dig in, and I have not once put my hand in there.

That's not the same as forgettin' it's there.

Blitz comes out the side door of the clubhouse at ten after four and crosses the whole yard at a jog, which is somethin' he does about twice a year.

"Got her."

The room he works out of used to be a pantry.

Three monitors on a folding table, a chair he stole out of the office, and cabling zip-tied up the wall to a hole he cut in the ceiling without askin' anybody. It's about eleven degrees colder in there than the rest of the building on account of a window unit he put in himself, and it smells like hot electronics and energy drinks.

He drops into the chair and spins it around.