Page 107 of Havoc

"I know you ain't."

"I'm going to use it." I shut the door. "All four. I'm going to make something with every single box and I'm going to do it here, and when the last one's gone I'll get more, and that's what we're doing."

He comes and stands behind me and puts both arms around me and his chin on the top of my head, and we stand in a kitchen on the edge of a swamp in the middle of the morning with the heat already coming up through the floor.

"Junie wants me Thursday through Sunday," I say. "At the bar. The front wall's supposed to be done in six weeks, and she says she needs somebody on the well who can do more than pour beer."

"You told her yes?"

"I told her Thursday through Sunday and I want Mondays off, and she said nobody works Mondays and I said good."

"That's a job."

"That's a job."

"In Rosalie," he says.

"In Rosalie."

His arms tighten up.

"Say the thing," I say. "Go on. You've been holding it since the parish line."

"I chose here," Havoc says, into my hair, and I can hear that he's smiling and I don't have to turn around to check.

"Don't be smug. It's my line."

"It's a good line."

"It was a great line," I say. "I said it on a dock. There was a heron."

EPILOGUE

STORM

The last one out is always me, and it has been for twenty-two years.

Eleven o'clock on a Wednesday and the lot's empty except for my truck and a bike belongin' to a boy sleepin' upstairs who ain't supposed to be sleepin' upstairs, and the contractor's trailer sittin' out by the burnt fence with a magnet sign on the side of it that says a company name out of Metairie.

They poured the new slab today. It's better concrete than the old slab. I stood out there at four o'clock and watched a man run a power trowel over it and I could not make myself go any closer than about thirty feet.

Six weeks and the east bay'll be up.

It'll be a good shop. That's the part I ain't said to anybody. It's gonna be a better shop than the one my hands built, and every man who walks into it is gonna know who paid for it, and in about two years there won't be one of 'em left who remembers what the old one looked like.

That's how it works. That's exactly how it's supposed to work, and Rémy Arceneaux has been doin' it since before I was ridin'.

Havoc gave me the page on Saturday.

He came out to the shop door after everybody'd gone home and stood there a minute and then he took it out of his shirt, folded up in a sandwich bag he'd got from somewhere, and held it out.

"It's hers," I said.

"She says it's the club's."

"Then it's yours. You're the one who⁠—"

"Storm." He put it in my hand. "I can't read the name on it. She can't read the name on it. Blitz'll have it inside a week if anybody gives him a reason and you know it.