Page 92 of Havoc

Her car's in it.

Gray Corolla with the wheel well eaten through on the driver's side. Sittin' right in the middle of that lot with the driver's door standing open.

And nobody in it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

HAVOC

Warden gives it to us in about forty seconds behind a dumpster on South 13th. "Store's got a loading dock on the alley and a front on Choctaw and one gap in that fence where the panel's down. That's three ways in and there's five of us."

"Six," Cricket says.

"There's five of us," Warden says, "and you're gonna hold the gap."

"I can⁠—"

"You're gonna hold the gap, and if anybody comes out of it you holler, and that's the whole job and it's a real one." Warden doesn't look at him while he says it. He's lookin' at the roofline. "Raider, front. Deacon, dock. Havoc and me through the fence. Mercy⁠—"

Mercy's already gone.

That's the other thing about those forty seconds. He was there at the start of them and he wasn't at the end and not one of us saw him leave.

Warden looks at the space where he was.

"Alright," he says.

We come through that fence gap into a loading yard full of pallets and standing water, and there's a man on the dock steps with a phone up to his ear and Warden is on him before he's got the phone down. Not a shot. Warden puts him into the rail and takes the phone and throws it into the weeds and that man is out of the rest of his day.

Inside it's a furniture store with no furniture in it.

Forty thousand square feet, concrete, columns every twenty feet, and about a third of the fluorescents workin' in strips down the middle so the whole place is stripes of white light and black in between. There's price tags still stapled to the columns. There's a rolled-up carpet remnant standing on end like a man.

Voices somewhere ahead and to the left.

And then everything happens at once.

Glass goes at the front of the building, which is Raider, and somebody shouts, and there is a shot from somewhere down there that goes off those concrete walls like the building itself came apart.

Then four more.

I'm running down a stripe of light between columns and I do not know where anybody is. That's the truth of it. Warden's on my right and then he ain't. There's a man comin' around a column at eleven o'clock and I hit him with everything I've got and both of us go down into a stack of empty pallets that comes apart underneath us, and I get up and he don't.

More shooting at the front.

Somethin' comes past my head close enough that I hear it and there ain't a word for that sound.

Deacon comes through the dock doors at the back like a wall fallin' over.

I hear shootin' behind me too, out in the yard, back toward the fence.

And I keep going.

I want that written down in the plainest way I can put it. I heard shootin' behind me at the fence gap where I had left a twenty-one-year-old boy with a burned arm and no eyebrows, and I heard it, and I registered it, and I kept running forward because she was forward.

There's an office at the back left corner with a glass wall onto the sales floor and the blinds half up.

She's in a chair.