Page 12 of Havoc

I want to be honest about that, since I'm the one tellin' it. He gave me a door, and I looked at it and walked past it, because I had somewhere to be and because askin' him the rest of the question meant sittin' in that chair for twenty more minutes, and I did not have twenty minutes in me.

"Write the room number down," I say.

"You got it in your head."

"Write it down anyway."

* * *

Storm's truck ain't in the lot.

Which is convenient, and I notice that it's convenient, and I go out to my bike without lookin' for anybody to tell.

One man's quicker. That's the arithmetic. Four bikes rollin' into a motel lot at suppertime gets somebody's face in a window and somebody's hand on a phone, and then it's a whole different afternoon for everybody. One man on one bike is a fella visitin' a fella. One man doesn't spook a woman in a room with a chain on the door.

It's the right call. I'd make the same call for any job on any day of the week and Storm would back it.

My hands are wrong on the grips.

Not shakin'. Nothin' anybody'd see from six feet. But there's a thing they do when I've decided somethin' before I've finished thinkin' it, a kind of lightness through the knuckles, and they're doin' it now while I'm sittin' in a gravel lot in the heat with the engine off, and I ain't got a reason for it.

I take the photograph out.

Nineteen hours it's been folded against my chest, and the crease has gone soft already. She's mid-step on a sidewalk with her hand up against the sun. Dark hair off her face. A jacket too heavy for August, which I didn't think about last night and I'm thinkin' about now, because a woman wears the wrong jacket in New Orleans in August for exactly one reason, and it's that she's carryin' somethin' under it.

Somethin' she was already gone with when that picture got took.

I fold it back up. Put it away.

Warden's standin' at the gate.

I don't know how long he's been there. That's the thing about Warden — he doesn't arrive anywhere, he's simply present, and then you notice. He's got his arms down at his sides and his head tipped a little and he's lookin' at the road behind me instead of at me, which is his way of givin' a man room.

"Where you goin'?"

"Out."

"Alone?"

"Yep."

He nods. Once, slow. Then he steps out of the gateway and back against the fence post to let me through, and he does it without takin' his eyes off the road.

"Havoc."

I stop with my boot down.

"Take somebody," he says.

"Don't need anybody."

"Ain't what I asked."

Twenty-two years that man's been countin' who goes out that gate and who comes back in it, and I have never once given him a wrong number, and we both know it.

"No," I say.

Warden doesn't say anything else.