Page 110 of Havoc

"Tithe's coat came home," I say.

Nothin'.

I put the phone against my ear and I sit in a dark office and I listen to a man breathe on the other end of a line four states away or forty miles away, and I count it out, and I get to six.

Six seconds.

"There was a page sewed in the linin'," I say.

And here it is.

He doesn't ask what page.

That's all. That's the entire thing and there ain't anything else to it and I have known that man for thirty-three years. A fella hears there was a page sewed in the linin' of a dead man's coat and he says what page. Every time. Every man alive says what page, and they say it fast, and they say it before they've thought about sayin' it.

Scourge doesn't say anything at all.

When he finally does, his voice ain't changed one bit, and that's worse than if it had.

"I'm comin' home," he says.

"You don't have to."

"I'll be there Friday."

"Scourge—"

"Storm." Somethin' moves on his end of it. A door, maybe. "Put it somewhere safe till I get there. Don't let that computer boy near it."

Then he's gone.

I sit in this office a while longer with the phone face down on the desk.

Out past the window, there's a fresh slab and a burnt fence and a lot with sixteen bikes gone out of it, and up on the wall in the next room there's a bad frame I built with my own hands in oh-four with seven names in it and one more wrote underneath in ballpoint.

And two coats hangin' either side of it.

One of 'em belonged to a boy who swept this floor for fifteen months and never got told what he was worth.

The other one belonged to the last man on God's earth who'd have known what to say to me right now.

Friday.

He said he'd be here Friday, and I never told him one time where the page was at, and I never said what was on it either.

He's gonna ride four states to look at a piece of paper he ain't asked one question about.

I turn the lamp off.