Page 59 of Havoc

"I don't have one."

"Then get out of Rosalie." He turns to go. "Tonight. Take that boy's car and drive north and don't stop in this parish and don't call anybody and don't come back here. There ain't a thing for you in this town and there ain't a man in that buildin' who can keep you if there was."

"No."

He stops.

"I said no." I'm shaking now, all of it, the whole thing coming up out of wherever it has been for four months, and my voice is doing something I have no control over and I keep going anyway. "You sent my mother money for twenty-two years so you wouldn't have to look at me. You put his name on a wall so you wouldn't have to say what happened to him. And now you've had eleven minutes to look at me and you want me gone by morning.

"I dug him out of a room in New Orleans, Storm. He's in the ground behind a bait shop nine miles up that road and I'm the only person alive who knows which tree.

"So I'm going to go get him. And then I'm going to bring him in that building and put him on that wall under his own name.

"And you can be standing there when I do it or you can be somewhere else. I don't care anymore which."

Storm doesn't move for a long moment.

Then he walks off into the dark by the fence and I don't hear him go, not one step of it, and I stand there in a parking lot with my hands shaking and my heel screaming and forty people behind a wall, and I have never in my life felt so completely by myself.

Behind me the door opens.

I know it's him from the sound the boards make.

CHAPTER TWENTY

HAVOC

She's standin' in the middle of that lot with her hands goin' and she don't turn around when I come out.

"Don't," she says.

"Ain't sayin' anything."

"Good."

So I don't. I stand there about four feet behind her with sixteen bikes and my whole life in a building behind me, and she gets it under control on her own the way she does everything, and it takes a while, and I let it.

"He knew my birthday," she says finally.

"I heard."

"He knew my middle name, Havoc."

"I know it."

"And he told me to leave town."

"Yeah."

She wipes her face with the back of her wrist, once, hard, like she's mad at it. Then she picks the shoebox up off the concrete step and holds it against her chest with both arms.

"Take me home," she says.

Not back. Not out of here.

I don't say anything about it. I open her door.

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