Page 18 of Havoc

And he doesn't take it.

The gate goes by and the light goes by and the sound of the music comes through the glass for about a second and a half and then it's behind us, and the road goes dark again, and my father's charter is hanging on a wall eleven hundred feet back and getting further away at fifty-five miles an hour.

In the side mirror the yellow shrinks to a smear and then to a dot and then the trees take it.

"You didn't call anybody," I say.

He doesn't answer.

"At the motel. You had your hand on the phone for a full minute and you didn't make a call, and now you've gone past your own gate at fifty-five with a woman in the car you were sent to collect." My voice is coming out even, which is another thing I don't control anymore. "Nobody in that building knows my name."

Nothing. Both hands on the wheel.

"Which means one of two things." I turn back and look out the windshield, because I don't need to watch him for this part. "Either you're not very smart, and I've been in this car ninety minutes and you're not stupid.

"Or you've got a problem."

The road runs out ahead of us into the dark and there's nothing on either side of it but water.

"And if you've got a problem," I say, "then so do I, and I'd like to know its name before we get wherever we're going."

CHAPTER SEVEN

HAVOC

Nine miles past the gate the blacktop quits and turns into shell, and after that it's another two to the house.

She didn't ask again about the problem.

She asked once and she let it sit, which takes a kind of discipline most people ain't got, and it means the question's still in the car with us the whole rest of the way. It rides between the seats. Every mile it don't get answered it gets a little bigger.

Water on both sides now, close enough you can hear it when the tires slow. Frogs so loud they come through the glass. The headlights swing across the front of the place and there's my bike sittin' in the drive at an angle a prospect thought was straight.

Cricket came and went and didn't touch anything and didn't stay.

Good kid.

"This is yours," she says.

"Yeah."

"There's no light on."

"Nobody home."

She gets out with the shoebox under her arm and stands in the drive lookin' at the house, and I watch her do it, and I don't understand until later what she's seein'.

It's a house. Front porch with two boards I keep meanin' to pull. A window unit. Propane tank. My old man's dock chair on the porch because I've never got around to burnin' it.

She looks at it for a long time.

Inside I turn on the kitchen light and she comes in behind me and sets the box on the counter and does a slow half circle in the middle of the floor.

"Huh," she says.

"What?"

"Nothing."