Page 84 of Havoc

Here is the arithmetic and I do it standing against a wall at half past five in the morning.

Marisol has smoke in her lungs at sixty-one. There's a boy of twenty-four with a hole through him. There's a six-year-old asleep on a horse pillow in a plastic chair. There's a building with no front wall and a shop with no roof and six months gone out of a club that has been running twenty-two years.

Every one of those things happened because a man on Prytania Street wants something and cannot have it.

And the thing he wants is sitting in a house on the edge of the basin, folded on a kitchen table, with a sheet of paper that came out of its lining.

And so am I.

There is exactly one thing in this world that makes all of it stop, and it is not a vote and it is not nine more days and it is not a hundred and sixty men on motorcycles.

It's me getting in a car.

He drives me home at seven and neither of us says anything and he falls asleep in his clothes on top of the bed at twenty past, which I have never once seen him do.

I sit on the edge of it for a while and watch him.

Thirty-six years old, and he looks about twelve, and there is a mark inked at the corner of his eye and about four days of nothing on his face, and I put my hand flat on his chest and count it going and then I take my hand back.

The number is in my phone. It has been in my phone since the eleventh of the month, six missed calls, area code 504.

I take the phone out to the porch.

He answers on the second ring like a man who has been holding it.

"Well," Lucien Arceneaux says. "Miss Doucet."

"You know my name."

"I've known your name for nine days. I make it my business to be thorough." Something moves on his end. A drawer, a chair. "I confess I did not expect to hear from you directly. This is very sensible of you."

"I want three things."

"You're not in a⁠—"

"You've spent a hundred and eighty thousand dollars' worth of your uncle's goodwill on a leather coat, Mr. Arceneaux." My voice is completely level. It is going to be level for the rest of my life. "You burned a scrapyard and shot a bar in a parish where you don't have a single friend, and you did it over an item your uncle doesn't know is missing, from a room he doesn't know you emptied.

"So yes. I want three things."

Silence for about four seconds.

"Say them," he says.

"The Cottonmouth Kings are finished. Tonight, permanently, in writing if you people do that. Nobody goes back to that yard. Nobody goes near that bar."

"And?"

"Nobody touches Havoc."

"Ah."

"Say it."

"Nobody touches your biker. Fine." I can hear the smile. "That's two."

"The third one is that I bring it to you myself and I bring it tomorrow, and if there is a single man waiting for me anywhere other than where you tell me, I put it in a fire. It's twenty-two-year-old paper and dry leather. It takes eleven seconds."

"You wouldn't."