Page 81 of Havoc

Storm has been standing in the middle of that lot for twenty minutes with his back to all of us, looking at it.

He hasn't said one word since he got here.

I stand there with my hands hanging and gravel dust all over me and the heat off that fire on the side of my face, and I go back through it. Every piece. The phone I didn't take off her for two hours. The lie on my own back steps. Eighteen thousand dollars in a Chevron parking lot in Gonzales, into the hand of a man who took it without asking his uncle.

And a boy in a cold room with three monitors, saying it's fine, it's fine, and me deciding I didn't have twenty minutes.

Marisol is sixty-one. Cricket's got no eyebrows. There's a hole in Blitz you could put a finger through.

Nobody in this lot has said whose fault it is.

They don't have to. I can count.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

LENNOX

Eleven stitches in my left forearm, and the woman who does them is about my age and has a Sharpie behind her ear and does not ask me one question.

"Bar fight?"

"Something like that."

"Mm." She ties off. "Keep it dry for four days. There's a man out in that hallway with no eyebrows who's told me twice you're with him."

"That's not⁠—"

"Honey, I know," she says. "He's told everybody in this building he's with everybody."

The waiting room on the second floor holds about thirty people, and by two in the morning there are forty in it.

Nobody from the club sits down.

That's the first thing I notice and I don't understand it until later. There are chairs, and there are men who have been on their feet since eleven o'clock, and not one of them takes one. Warden stands at the end of the hall with his back to a wall where he can see both doors. Tyrant stands. Raider stands out by the elevators.

Deacon holds up an entire corner of the room by himself with his arms crossed and his chin down.

Cricket sits, because Cricket has been made to sit by a nurse.

He's got his left forearm wrapped from wrist to elbow and a burn on the back of that hand they've done something to that's shiny, and every single person who comes through that waiting room gets shown it.

"It's second degree," he tells a woman waiting on her husband's gallbladder. "They said second. Third is when you can't feel it and I can feel it, so."

"Well, bless you."

"I pulled two people out."

"I heard that."

"Did you?"

"Everybody in here's heard it, baby."

He sits back, satisfied, and about ninety seconds later, he's up showing it to a security guard.

I watch a room full of terrifying men let a twenty-one-year-old boy do this for four straight hours, and not one of them tells him to stop.

Around three, Ransom comes down from surgery and stands in the middle of the room with his rings off and starts counting.