Page 28 of Havoc

"Anything else, sir?" he says.

"No."

"Alright." He nods. Takes half a step back. "Evenin'."

And he goes on down to the end of the room where the light don't reach, and puts his boot up on the rung, and watches the door.

Warden's across the bar with a bottle he ain't drinkin' from.

He watched the whole thing. He's been watchin' since I came through that door at four o'clock, and he don't look away when I catch him at it, and after a second he tips his head about an inch toward the hall.

"When you're ready," he says.

CHAPTER TEN

LENNOX

Eleven hours is a long time in a house with nothing in it.

He's gone by nine. I hear the bike before I'm all the way awake and by the time I get to the front window there's dust hanging over the shell road and nothing else, and then it's me and the frogs and a heat that comes up through the floor by eleven and doesn't let go until dark.

So I search it properly this time.

Under the sink. Behind the tank of the toilet. The kitchen drawers, all four, one of which holds sixty or seventy dollars in loose change and a set of allen wrenches. No car keys. No spare to anything. He's got a coffee can up in the cabinet over the stove with about nine hundred dollars in it in twenties, sitting where a man leaves money when he doesn't think anybody's ever coming in his house.

And in the bedroom, in the drawer of the nightstand, under a folded shop rag, there's a pistol.

I stand there over it for a while.

Then I put the rag back the way it was and shut the drawer.

Here's the arithmetic, and I do it standing in a stranger's bedroom in my socks. A woman walking out of a swamp with a stolen gun is a woman who has given every man who finds her a reason to do the worst thing first. It doesn't protect me. It converts me. I go from a problem somebody has to think about into a problem somebody can solve.

The money I take. Two hundred, out of the middle, and I leave the rest at the same angle.

If I'm going to be a thief in this house, I'd rather be one on purpose.

Shell Road runs two miles to the blacktop, and the blacktop runs seven more to Route 9, and I've had all day to look at it on the folded map in his glovebox.

I go at four in the afternoon because I want the light.

That's the mistake. I know it's the mistake by the second mile.

August in this parish at four o'clock is a thing you can lean on. The shell throws the heat straight back up into your face and there's no shade anywhere on that road because the trees are all standing in water twenty feet off either side, and by the time the drive's out of sight behind me my shirt's through and the salt's already coming up white on the strap of my bag.

Half a mile after that, the deerflies find me.

Nobody warns you about deerflies. They come in behind your ear and they take a piece out, an actual piece, and there's blood down the side of my neck by the third one and I'm swinging at the air like a crazy woman on an empty road in the middle of nowhere.

Two miles in, my heel goes.

I've got the wrong boots. I've had the wrong boots since Baton Rouge and I knew it and I did it anyway, and the back of my right heel is a wet mess inside the sock by the time I hit the blacktop, and I stand at that intersection with my hands on my knees breathing like something dying and look at seven miles of empty two-lane going off into the shimmer.

Two cars pass in forty minutes. Neither slows.

Four miles is where the light starts to change.

Four miles is where the road goes down close to the water on the left side and something moves in it that's bigger than a fish, and the frogs come up all at once the way they do, ten thousand of them, so loud it's like standing next to a machine.