Page 45 of Havoc

The dock creaks under us.

"I didn't run here, Havoc." She's got both hands flat on the boards on either side of her, and her voice comes out level as anything. "I chose here."

"Chose it for what?"

She looks back out at the water.

"Ask me Monday," she says.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

LENNOX

Sunday he's gone before eight and I have the house and the heat and one day left.

Monday. He said it out loud on a dock with his feet in the water and he didn't dress it up, and I've been carrying it since like something in a back pocket that keeps catching on things.

I make the bed. I wash the two plates. I sit on the porch with my heel up and the shoebox open on my knees and go through the checks again, which I have done eleven times now and which produces nothing new, and around eleven o'clock I hear a truck coming up the shell road.

It's not his car.

I'm off the porch and around the side of the house with my back against the propane tank before it's out of the trees, and I stand there with my heart going and my hands doing nothing, and it occurs to me while I'm crouched behind a propane tank that this is a very stupid place to hide from anybody who has ever seen a propane tank.

The truck door opens.

"Ma'am?"

A boy's voice. It cracks in the middle of the word.

"Ma'am, I got groceries."

He is about twenty-one years old and he is holding two plastic bags and a gallon of milk and he is wearing a leather vest with no patches on the front of it except one that says PROSPECT, and he is sweating through the whole of it.

"You can come out," he says to the yard in general. "I ain't — I mean I'm not anybody. He sent me."

I come out from behind the tank.

He looks at me and then immediately looks at the ground beside me, which I understand is a thing he's been taught.

"Cricket," he says.

"That's a name?"

"It's the one they gave me." He shifts both bags to one hand and puts the other out, then pulls it back, then puts it out again. "Sorry. Ain't sure if I'm — nobody said what the rules were."

I shake his hand. He nearly drops the milk.

"There's butter in there," he says.

"What?"

"Butter. He said get butter." Cricket looks down into the bag like it might have changed. "He called at seven this mornin' and said go to the Winn-Dixie and get butter and whatever else looks like food, and I said how much butter, and he said⁠—"

He stops.

"He said what?"

"He said, how the hell would I know, Cricket. So I got four."