Page 27 of Havoc

"Boy," he says, without lookin' at him. "Every time you talk, Tyrant gets richer."

Blitz shuts his mouth.

Mercy's at the end of the room where he always is, which is wherever the light don't quite get to.

He ain't drinkin'. He never is. He's got his back against the wall and one boot up on the rung of the stool and he's watchin' the door the way Raider watches the door, except Raider's watchin' it to leave and I have never in nine years worked out what Mercy's watchin' it for.

"Got a minute?"

"Yes, sir."

He says that to everybody. Storm, me, Cricket, a woman at a gas pump. Fifteen years and I've never once caught him bein' anything but polite and it has never one time made me comfortable.

"Blue Star motel, north end. Room eleven."

"I know it."

"I want to know if anybody else has been by askin' after her. New Orleans people, or local boys workin' for New Orleans people." I keep it flat. "Just askin'. Nothin' else."

"Just askin'," he says.

"That's right?"

"Yes, sir."

He goes.

* * *

He's back at seven forty and the room's loud by then, Cricket losin' at cards, Blitz arguin' with the television.

Mercy comes up on my left and stands there until I turn.

"Nobody's been by," he says. "Not the family, not anybody workin' for 'em. Desk man's had four rooms rented in nine days and two of 'em were the same fella."

"Alright. Good."

"He did have your description."

The room keeps goin' behind me.

"Sunglasses on the counter, a fella on a bike, a woman leavin' with him around six." Mercy's hands are down at his sides. His voice hasn't come up once. "He'd told it twice already. To his wife, and to the boy who brings the towels."

"Mercy—"

"He won't tell it again."

He says it the same way he said yes sir. Same weight, same courtesy, the front half of a smile sittin' there on his face because that's where his face lives.

"His sister's up in Opelousas," he says. "He's gone up to spend some time with her. Left this afternoon. Wife's runnin' the desk and she don't know what anybody looks like, and I'd say she won't."

Nobody at that bar is lookin' at us.

Not Tyrant, who hears everything. Not Junie, who's four feet away with a rag in her hand and has gone real interested in a glass she already dried.

I never asked him for that.

I asked him one thing, and he went and did the one thing, and then he stood in a motel office and worked out on his own what I hadn't said out loud yet — that there is a reason I don't want a man describin' me leavin' that lot with a woman — and he fixed it before I knew it was broke.