Page 14 of Havoc

She says it flat. No hesitation, no arrangin' her face into anything. A woman admits a thing that fast, either she's stupid or she's already decided she ain't payin' for it, and there's nothin' about her that reads stupid.

"Then you know how this goes."

"I know how you think it goes." She steps forward. One step, and it puts her inside arm's length, which is a place people do not walk to. "It's not in that room. It's not in the car. It's not in a bag anywhere you're gonna find in the next two weeks, and there's exactly one person breathing who knows where it is, so you can take a minute and figure out how you'd like to be standin' when you tell your president that."

Sun's comin' in low behind her and she's squintin' into it and her hands are steady.

Behind us the ice machine kicks on and grinds.

"You're gonna get in your car," I say.

"Am I?"

"Yeah."

"And go where?"

"Ain't your business yet."

"See, it's my whole business." She hasn't raised her voice one time, and she doesn't now. "I've been in a room by myself for four days waitin' on people like you to figure out where I was, and I've started thinkin' maybe y'all weren't as good as everybody says."

Y'all. Not you people. Not your kind. She uses the word the way somebody uses a word they grew up inside of, and something in the back of my neck goes tight.

Her eyes come off my face and drop again. Down to the patch on my chest.

She's lookin' at the snake.

"Can I ask you somethin'?"

"No."

"The crown." She points with her chin, and she does it slow, like she wants me to see her hand stay where it is. "Snakes don't get crowns. Cottonmouth's a swamp animal, it's got no business in a crown, and whoever drew that put it on afterward. You can see it — the coils are underneath it. Somebody built the snake and then somebody else stuck a crown on his head."

Nobody's ever said that to me.

Nobody's ever said anything about it. It's a patch. It's been on my back since I was twenty-one years old and it's the first thing I put on in the mornin' and the last thing off at night, and it has never one time occurred to me that a man sat down and drew it and made choices.

"So who put it on?" she asks.

"Storm."

"Why?"

And there it is.

I have worn that crown for fifteen years. I have bled on it. I have buried two men wearin' theirs. And I'm standin' in a motel lot in Rosalie Parish with a woman I came here to collect, and she has asked me one question about my own back, and I have got nothin' to say.

"Don't know," I say.

Something happens in her face.

It goes across fast and it's gone fast, but I catch the front edge of it — her mouth opens about a quarter inch and her chin comes up like there's a sentence loaded and comin', somethin' she's had ready for a while.

Then she looks at me. Really looks, the whole cut, the rings, the hands.

And she closes her mouth and swallows it back down.

"Okay," she says.