Page 48 of Havoc

Then he's red to the ears and he's in the truck and he's gone, and I stand in that drive in the heat with the dust hanging and four pounds of butter in a refrigerator behind me.

Storm says six of the names the same.

He gets to my father and he slows down and he looks at the table.

Twenty-two years of checks. A name on a wall in a frame a man built badly with his own hands. A room no woman has ever been in.

And a boy who noticed something nine grown men have decided not to.

I go back up on the porch and I sit down in the chair with my heel up and I look at the water for a long time, and somewhere in there it stops being a question of whether I tell him.

Monday's tomorrow.

He asked me what I chose here for, and I said ask me Monday, and I am going to be sitting in that chair when he comes up those steps tonight, and I am going to tell him every word of it.

And then he is going to have to decide what kind of man he is in front of ten people who already think they know.

I did that to him.

The heron comes back around six and stands in the shallows and doesn't move, and I sit there and let myself be sorry about it for one hour, and then I stop, because being sorry has never once gotten a single thing done.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HAVOC

The safe's in the floor of the shop office under a square of carpet somebody cut with a razor in two thousand nine and never trimmed straight.

Four men in this club have the combination. Storm, Ransom, Tyrant, me.

Sunday mornin' the shop's shut and the yard's empty and Storm's truck is gone to Baton Rouge until three, and I stand in that office for a while with the carpet already pulled back and my hand flat on the door of it.

Here's the part I'd like on the record.

I know exactly what I'm doin'. There ain't one second of this where I'm confused, where somethin' comes over me, where a man could stand up later and say he wasn't thinkin'. I know the number. I know who counts it. I know Tyrant reconciles on the first and the fifteenth and today is the ninth, and I know that gives me six days and not one more.

I take eighteen thousand.

Run money, mostly. Duplessis's eleven from Friday sittin' right on top in the same bank envelope he handed me, and seven under it from the two weeks before.

I put the carpet back. I flatten it with my boot.

And I don't write a word anywhere, because there ain't anywhere to write it that wouldn't be worse.

* * *

Lucien picks up on the second ring like a man who's been holdin' the phone.

"That's early. Two days early. I'm impressed."

"Ain't got her."

Pause.

"Then this is a strange call to be making."

"I got somethin' else." I'm standin' out at the fence line again with the wind comin' across the yard. "The fella she sold to went sideways on us. He's got a cousin in Port Allen who's got the item and the cousin wants paid before he hands anything over, and that's two days of drivin' and two days of talkin' and I ain't got seventy-two hours to do a nine-day job in."

"So you want time."