Page 91 of Havoc

"Six blocks," Raider says. "I'll go up Government and come in from the north."

That's fine. That's a plan.

Then the phone goes again in my hand. I look at it.

FOUR CARS

HIS RENTAL + 3 MORE CAME IN OFF FLORIDA ST LAST 6 MIN. SAME PLATE PREFIX. THATS NOT A MEET HAVOC

THATS A CREW

I stand in the lot of a closed car wash on Washington Street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at three fifty-four in the afternoon, and I look at the words on that screen for about two seconds.

She asked him for three things.

She asked him to leave the club alone and she asked him to leave me alone and she asked to bring it herself, and he said yes to all of it on the telephone at six-forty in the mornin' with a smile in his voice, and she got in a car with four hundred dollars and a sheet of paper she left on my kitchen table.

He was never going to let her drive out of there.

She's got no leverage. That's the part. She's got no leverage because she already gave him the only piece she had when she agreed to bring it herself, and she knew that when she agreed to it, and she did it anyway.

Nobody dies over me.

She wasn't tradin'.

She was payin'.

Five men look at me in a car wash lot.

Warden's got his hand out for the phone and I give it to him and he reads it and his jaw goes once and comes back.

"Four cars," he says. "That's eight men. Could be twelve."

Deacon says nothing.

Raider takes his helmet off the seat and puts it on the ground, which he does not do, which means he is not gettin' back on that bike until this is decided.

"You can go home," I say. "All of you. Right now, and there ain't one thing I'd hold about it, and I'd say the same to any of you standin' where I am."

Nobody moves.

Cricket's got his helmet under his arm and he is white as a sheet and he is not going anywhere.

And then Mercy speaks, and it's the first thing he's said in sixty-two miles.

"Sir," he says, "we ought to hurry."

He says it courteously. He says it the way you'd tell a man his table's ready.

Then he gets on his bike, and starts it, and pulls out onto Washington Street ahead of all of us, and does not look back one time to see whether anybody's comin'.

Four o'clock in Old South Baton Rouge.

Shotgun houses with plywood in the windows and grass up over the porch steps. A church with a hand-painted sign. Two men on a stoop who watch five bikes go by and don't change expression. Heat comin' up off the asphalt in sheets so you can see the far end of the block moving.

We stop one street short.

Choctaw's got a furniture store on the corner with a sun-bleached banner still hangin' in the window that says EVERYTHING MUST GO, and behind it there's a lot with a hurricane fence half down and weeds through the pavement.