Page 85 of Havoc

"I dug it out of a hole behind a bait shop with my own hands and I would light it on the shoulder of the interstate," I say, "and then you'd have nothing at all to hand your uncle when he asks."

The frogs are going. The sun's coming up over the water and it's already ninety degrees.

"Baton Rouge," Lucien says. "There's a lot behind a shuttered furniture store on Choctaw. Four o'clock."

"Four o'clock."

"Miss Doucet." He pauses. "Your father would have negotiated exactly that way. I'm told he was very good."

He hangs up before I can ask him how he'd know.

I take the ledger page out of the lining envelope and I put it in the middle of the kitchen table under the salt shaker.

I don't take my father's cut. I take his name and I leave the rest of him folded on a chair, because whatever else happens, that coat is going on a wall in that building and it does not need me alive to do it.

The note takes forty minutes and it ends up being four sentences.

Eli —

Nobody dies over me. That's not noble, it's arithmetic, and you'd have done it Tuesday if you'd thought of it first.

The page on the table is worth more than I am and you know it, so don't be stupid about which one you go after.

I chose here. That hasn't changed.

— L.

I take his car keys off the hook and I stand in the doorway of that room for a long time, and he is asleep with one arm off the side of the bed and his boots still on, and I do not wake him up because if I wake him up I will not go.

The screen door has a spring on it.

I hold it the whole way shut with both hands and I ease it into the frame so it doesn't bang, and that is the last thing I do in that house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HAVOC

Sleep takes me at twenty past seven in the mornin' with my boots on and it doesn't let go until ten after twelve.

Five hours. First real sleep I've had in six days. I got it on the worst mornin' of my life, and I wake up on top of a made bed in an empty house with my mouth dry and my arm hangin' off the side and I know before I've got my eyes open.

The house is a different temperature when there ain't nobody in it. I'd never noticed that in eleven years because there was never anybody in it.

Her side of the bed ain't been slept in.

Car's gone out of the drive. Keys are gone off the hook.

Her duffel's still against the wall in the back room with everything in it, which is how I know she ain't run anywhere, and her father's cut is folded over the back of a kitchen chair with the arms tucked in the way you fold one.

On the table there's a sheet of ledger paper under the salt shaker.

And a note.

Four sentences.

I read it standin' up and then I sit down and read it eleven more times, and the last one takes longer than the first ten put together because I get about halfway and have to stop.

Nobody dies over me. That's not noble, it's arithmetic, and you'd have done it Tuesday if you'd thought of it first.