Page 96 of Havoc

Doors open.

Six men get out and not one of them has a hand near anything, and they stand by their own cars and don't come any closer, and every one of them is somewhere between forty and sixty and dressed for an office.

The back door of the middle car opens last.

The man who gets out of it is small.

That's what I wasn't ready for. He's maybe five foot seven and he's built like a bird and he's got to be seventy, and he's wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and slacks and old-man shoes, and he stops beside his own car and takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and touches it to his forehead, because it is ninety-nine degrees.

He looks at the boy in the fence gap for a long moment.

Then he says, "Ah."

"Nobody is coming."

That's the first thing he says to us, and he says it in a voice you'd use to tell somebody the kitchen closes at nine.

"There were four calls to the parish in the last eleven minutes, and there will not be a car. That's the first thing I want understood, because it will change how you listen to the rest of it." He puts the handkerchief away. "My name is Rémy Arceneaux."

Nobody says anything.

"You are the Cottonmouth Kings' Sergeant at Arms." To Warden. "You are the Road Captain." To Raider. "I know the Chaplain by reputation." He looks at Deacon and does something that's almost courteous.

Then he finds Havoc, who has come up out of the weeds and is standing there with dirt on both knees and nothing on his face.

"And you are the one who paid my nephew eighteen thousand dollars in a gas station."

"Yeah."

"That was very stupid."

"It was."

"Well." Rémy nods. "At least we can begin from an agreed position."

They bring Lucien out through the dock doors.

Two of the office men have got him by the arms and he's on his own feet and there's blood down the front of that good shirt from his eyebrow and he is talking before he's clear of the building.

"Uncle — Rémy, listen to me, this is not — these people burned⁠—"

"Ferme ta bouche."

Lucien shuts his mouth.

"You emptied a room on Prytania that I told you in two thousand nine you were never to open." Rémy has not raised his voice and he does not raise it now. "You sold the contents. You sold a rifle that belonged to a man I owed, and you sold a pair of gloves I would have liked to keep, and then you discovered that something was missing from an inventory you had no business taking, and rather than come to me you spent four months and a great deal of money trying to put it back before I noticed.

"You called in a debt that is mine. You did it in my name. You put men in another parish and you burned a business and you shot a bar full of people, over a coat, to conceal a theft from your own family.

"And then you took a woman."

"She came⁠—"

"I know what she did." Rémy looks at me for the first time. "She telephoned you and negotiated three terms and you agreed to all three and had no intention of honoring any of them, which is the part I find genuinely embarrassing. Not the stealing. The stealing is ordinary. It's the lying to a woman who came to you honestly that I'll have to think about."

Lucien starts to say something.

Rémy takes a pistol out from under his own untucked shirt at the small of his back, and he shoots his nephew once through the chest, and he puts it back.