Page 88 of Havoc

"Havoc."

"Don't."

"I ain't gonna tell you not to go." He's got his hand on the post. "I'm gonna tell you you got no location, no plan, and no idea how many men that fella brings, and you'll get to Baton Rouge at three-thirty and drive around a city of two hundred thousand people until it's dark."

"Then I'll drive around it."

"That's what I figured you'd say." He looks off at the road. "Go see the boy."

"What?"

"Go see the boy," Warden says, "and don't tell me what he says to you, and don't say I sent you."

* * *

Blitz is on four milligrams of somethin', and he is furious about a Jell-O cup.

"It's lime. There's cherry on the cart. I saw the cherry go past this door twice."

"Blitz."

"They give the cherry to the—" He gets his head over. His eyes are about a quarter closed and there's a tube runnin' into the back of his left hand. "Hey. Hey, is it you?"

"It's me."

"Havoc." He gets his hand up about four inches. "Havoc, they burned my room."

"I know it."

"Three monitors."

"I know."

"That's — " and his face does somethin' and he blinks about six times fast and looks at the ceilin'. "Okay. Okay. What do you need?"

I ain't said anything yet.

"You got that look," he says. "You come in here with the look. What?"

So I tell him.

I tell him all of it standin' at the foot of a hospital bed with a monitor beepin', and about halfway through he gets the bed rail and pulls himself up on it about six inches and makes a sound doin' it that I'm goin' to hear for a while.

"Ransom's phone," he says.

"What?"

"Ransom left his phone in here. On the chair, under the jacket. He'll be back in about ten minutes and he don't know his own passcode so he never locks it." Blitz has got both hands out. "Give it here."

"Blitz—"

"Give it here."

It takes him nineteen minutes, and I do not ask him one question about how.

I stand at that window with my back to him and I look down at a parking lot and I listen to a twenty-four-year-old with a hole through his side breathe wrong for nineteen minutes, and twice he says hold on.

"Okay," he says.