Page 71 of Havoc

Storm is in the doorway.

I don't know how long he's been in it.

Nobody heard him come down that hall, and I have been listenin' for that man's boots in that hall for fifteen years.

"Put it down," he says.

Blitz puts the magnifying glass down.

"Ain't nobody workin' on that page." Storm comes into the room. He don't raise his voice and he don't come near the table. "Not this mornin', not this week. Tyrant, shut the book. Blitz, you don't run one number off that sheet — not an account, not a name, not a date, and if I find out you have, you and me are gonna have a different conversation than the one we're havin'."

"Prez, it's a lead⁠—"

"Twenty-two years." Storm's got both hands down at his sides. "Twenty-two years I've run this club and I have asked this table for damn near nothin'. I'm askin' now. Leave it be."

Nobody moves.

"Whose is it," Ransom says.

"It's the woman's."

"Storm—"

"It's her daddy's coat and it's her daddy's hand and it came out of her daddy's linin'." He looks at me for the first time. "Havoc. It goes with her. It doesn't stay in this buildin'."

Then he goes back down that hall, and this time I hear the boots the whole way.

Blitz is already talkin' before the screen door bangs.

Ransom tells him to shut his mouth and for once he does it.

And I stand there in a room with six men in it and a sheet of ledger paper on a desk under a lamp, and I take it up and fold it careful along the creases that ain't split yet and put it inside my shirt, and here is the thing I can't get past and won't be able to for a long while.

Storm didn't ask what was on the page.

He came down that hall and he stood in that doorway and he shut the whole room down inside of forty seconds, and not one time did that man ask a single soul what the sheet of paper said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LENNOX

Wednesday night, I can't sleep. Neither can he, and we don't talk about why.

My father's coat is folded over the back of a kitchen chair eleven feet from this bed. It has been there since four o'clock yesterday morning and neither of us has moved it, and there is a four-inch hole in the lining that I opened with a knife on the hood of my own car, and a sheet of ledger paper in a sandwich bag on the counter with a hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars written on it in my father's handwriting.

Settled. That's the word I keep landing on. I've been landing on it for about nineteen hours.

He's on his back with one arm over his eyes.

"Are you awake?"

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"Ain't been asleep," Havoc says.

The window unit cycles off and the frogs come up into the gap and then it kicks back on.