Page 98 of Havoc

"You have it, or she does, or it's in a hole somewhere. I don't want it." Rémy's face has nothing on it at all. "It was never mine. It was left with me a long time ago as a courtesy to a man who's dead, and I have kept it upstairs in a shut room for twenty-two years, and I did not once take it off the wall, and I want that understood too.

"Hang it up. You should. You'll want to have looked at it."

He turns to go and then he stops, and he comes across that lot toward me, and Warden moves and Rémy lifts two fingers off his own thigh and Warden stops.

He gets to about five feet away.

Up close he smells like drugstore aftershave and he has got the flattest eyes I have ever seen in a human head.

"Doucet," he says.

"Yes."

"You have his hands." He looks at them, and I have got them balled up at my sides and I don't unball them. "Not the face. The hands."

"Did you know him?"

"A little."

"How?"

Rémy considers me for a moment, and there is something behind his face that moves and settles and does not come out.

"He was the only honest man in that room," he says.

"What room?"

"Take your father home," Rémy Arceneaux says, and gets into the back of the middle car.

They leave a gray sedan.

That's the last thing. The men get into two of the three cars and they take Lucien with them and they take him in a way that tells me they have done it before, and the gray one stays where it is with the keys in it and the back seat laid flat.

Nobody in that lot wants to touch it.

Deacon carries him.

Six of us stand there in ninety-nine degrees and the biggest man in the Cottonmouth Kings picks a twenty-one-year-old prospect up off the weeds in a hurricane fence gap and carries him thirty feet across that lot in both arms, and Warden goes ahead and opens the door for him, and Havoc takes the helmet out of the weeds and carries that.

And I hold my father's coat in my head the entire time — folded over the back of a kitchen chair sixty-two miles away, where I left it, because I thought it didn't need me alive to get where it was going.

Everybody comes home. That's the deal I made.

I got the words right and the arithmetic wrong.

CHAPTER THIRTY

HAVOC

Eight days.

That's how long it takes to bury a prospect, because a coroner in East Baton Rouge Parish has got a caseload and doesn't care whose boy it is.

Ransom drove down there four times. Ransom, who has got a treasurer's job and a hole in his club's income and about nine hundred things to do, put on a clean shirt four separate mornings and sat in a county office and was polite to people until they gave us a date.

Thursday the club voted on Rémy Arceneaux's offer.

Seven to two, and both the no votes said afterward they'd have changed 'em if it would've done any good, and Ransom read the terms out in a voice like a man readin' his own diagnosis, and Storm said all in favor and every hand that went up went up slowly.