Page 7 of Havoc

"Say the rule out loud, Storm."

He's the biggest man in this club by forty pounds and he doesn't raise his voice above where he's got it now, ever, and when he talks the room turns.

Storm looks at him for a long moment.

Then he puts both hands flat on the table, same as mine.

"We find her first."

"Find her and then what?" I ask.

"Find her first."

"Then what, Storm?"

"Then we come back in here and we decide." He leans forward. "Findin' a woman ain't the same as handin' one over. It ain't close to the same, and every man at this table knows the difference. Right now we got a name and a picture and a call from a man I don't trust to tell me what day it is. I ain't givin' him a yes, and I ain't givin' him a no while he's the only one holdin' anything. We find her, we look at what we're actually lookin' at, and we sit back down."

Tyrant writes something in the book.

Ransom starts puttin' his rings back on, which means he's done talkin'.

Warden hasn't moved once.

"Blitz," Storm says.

"Yeah."

"How long?"

He's already got the phone out from under the table. "Depends what he gave you. He give you a name?"

"Lennox Vance."

"Then two days. Three if she's payin' cash for everything."

"Two."

"I said two days, Prez, I ain't sayin'—"

"Two."

Blitz shuts his mouth.

Storm stands up, and the meetin's over, because he stood up.

Chairs go back. Ransom says somethin' to Tyrant about the ledger, and Tyrant tells him nobody's allowed to speak to him about the ledger before eight in the mornin', and Deacon claps Blitz across the shoulders hard enough to move him a foot sideways on his way past. Warden goes out last with his hand on the door frame, and he stops there and looks back at Storm for about as long as it takes to decide not to say something, and then he doesn't say it, and he leaves.

Mercy's the only one who takes his time.

He gets up. Pushes his chair in, which not one other man in this club has ever done. On his way around the table, he slows a half step by the photograph and looks down at it with his head tipped over a little, courteous, the way you'd look at a stranger's baby in a grocery line.

"Pretty," he says.

Then he's gone, and the door swings shut behind him, and I sit there in a room that's suddenly got nobody in it.

The picture's still lyin' in the middle of the table where Warden pushed it.

Nine men walked past it and out that door and not one of 'em looked down.