Page 62 of Havoc

The room makes a sound.

"Say why," Deacon says.

"'Cause I got one job." Warden's got both hands on the table and he's lookin' at the wood. "I don't like it and I ain't gonna pretend I do. But that woman has been in this parish eleven days and there's a man in New Orleans who knows she's here, and he knows it because our VP told him, and he has got eighteen thousand dollars of our money in his pocket and a reason to come get the rest.

"Every hour she's in Rosalie, this club is standin' in the open. Blitz's mama lives four miles from here. Deacon's got a sister. Junie sleeps over that bar.

"So yes. And I'll carry it, and I'll be the one puts her in the car, and I'll think about it the rest of my life. But yes."

"Yes," Tyrant says. "Same reasons. Plus the book."

"No," Raider says.

"No," says Deacon.

Blitz has got his hands under the table.

"No," he says, and his voice comes out about sixteen years old.

Ransom is quiet for a long moment.

"Abstain," he says. "And I want it wrote down that I hate it, Tyrant, put that in there too. Put Ransom abstained and said he hated it."

"I ain't writin' that."

"Write it."

He writes it.

Then everybody at that table looks down at the end of it, into the corner where the light don't get, and Mercy sits with his hands folded and his back against the wall.

"No, sir," he says.

Warden turns his head.

"Say again?"

"No, sir." Mercy hasn't moved. "I don't believe we ought to give her to him."

"You got a reason?"

"Yes, sir." He says it courteously, like a man answerin' about the weather. "If we give her to Lucien Arceneaux, then in about two weeks somebody's got to go to New Orleans and get her back, or else live with not gettin' her back. And I've been thinkin' on which one of those this table would pick."

Nobody asks him what he means.

I have sat at that table with that man for nine years and not one time has anybody asked him what he means.

Four no, two yes, one abstain, and mine.

"No," I say.

"Yours don't count," Tyrant says. "Not on this one. You're the interested party and it's in the book, article nine."

"Then it's four to two."

"It's four to two," Tyrant agrees, and doesn't sound happy about it. "And it needs the President, 'cause it's a standin' matter with an outside house."

Every man in that room turns to the top of the table.