Chapter 2
Judge
The compound is quiet by the time I get back from Lafourche.
Three hours on the road and nothing to show for it. My contact down there, a retired deputy named Cutter who owes the club a favor he's been paying down in dribs and drabs for two years, gave me a beer, a handshake, and the same blank wall I've been hitting from every direction for three weeks.
Nobody's seen anything. Nobody's heard anything. Four girls are gone from Magnolia Bend and the surrounding area, and the silence around it is so clean it has the smell of something deliberate.
I park the bike and just sit for a minute, engine off, looking at the compound lights.
Sisco's office window is still lit. It always is at this hour. So is the gun room, because I knew I'd be coming back to it.
I pull out my phone and look at the notes app.
Three weeks of leads run cold, every one of them logged out of habit.
Cutter in Lafourche. A junkyard owner outside Bogalusa who heard something and then, when I drove out there, had somehow heard nothing after all.
A waitress in Laurel who saw a van and gave me a description so generic it described roughly half the vans in Mississippi.
The truck rental place on Route 49 where the manager has been on vacation since before the first girl went missing and we can't get access to the records without him.
I turn the phone over and get out of the truck.
Three weeks. Four girls. A trail that goes cold inside forty-eight hours every single time, like someone behind this thing knows exactly how to not be found. That tells me they've done it before, this isn't opportunistic, and there's infrastructure behind it. Four is probably not the whole number.
I've known all of that since week one.
Knowing it and being able to do anything with it are two different problems.
I go inside.
The gun room smells like solvent and old wood. I close the door behind me and don't bother with anything extra. The single overhead bulb is enough. I've got a disassembled AR laid out on the bench from earlier, and I pull up the stool and pick up where I left off.
Strip. Clean. Inspect.
My hands know what to do. The rest of me can go wherever it needs to go.
It goes to Tommy Morata.
We call him Grudge.
Grudge has been a prospect for eight months. He came to us hot-tempered and half-feral. Templar saw something in him worth shaping: good instincts, better loyalty, the kind of stubbornness that becomes an asset once you teach it where to point. Most days I'd say Templar was right.
But his sister went missing three weeks ago, and most days feel far off.
He was at breakfast this morning the same as every morning.
Same chair, same time, same coffee going cold in front of him while the table made noise around him.
West made a joke about the Saints game that landed wrong.
Boomer argued back out of reflex. Sisco read his phone.
And Grudge sat in his chair, stared at the middle distance without saying a word, and nobody pushed because there's nowhere to push him toward.
Maria Morata. Twenty years old. Dollar General parking lot on a Tuesday evening. The stock clerk said she seemed fine.
They always seem fine.
I reach for the cleaning rod.
The door opens. I don't reach for anything because I know those footsteps.
"You're back." Sisco leans in the frame with his mug, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He takes in the bench, then me. "How'd Cutter go?"
"He doesn't know anything."
"You believe him?"
"Yeah." I run the rod through the barrel. "He was embarrassed about it. The man likes to be useful."
Sisco comes in and leans against the far wall, which means he's staying awhile.
He does that, finds a surface and holds it up and waits.
It used to feel like pressure. Now I know it's just how he is.
He has more patience than anyone I've ever met, and he spends it the same way a good card player spends his chips: carefully, where it counts.
"Templar's calling church at eight," he says.
"With what?"
"With nothing. Same as last week." He takes a sip. "You eat tonight?"
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
I set the rod down and look at him. He looks back, unhurried, like he's got all night and probably does.
"Kourtney left a plate for you in the kitchen," he says. "Just letting you know."
"I'll get it."
He nods and doesn't push it. That's the thing about Sisco. He delivers the information and gets out of the way of it. Told me once that his job is making sure people have what they need to make good decisions, not making the decisions for them. I've thought about that more times than I can count.
"Grudge was in the parking lot again tonight," he says. "Just standing there. Kourtney went out to him."
"He come inside?"
"Eventually."
I look down at the bench. The pieces of the rifle laid out in a clean row, every one doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
"Tell me we have something," I say. "Anything."
Sisco is quiet for a moment. "Sting is still running the financial angle. That truck rental place on Route 49, the manager got back from vacation today. Sting's going in first thing."
"That's something."
"It's thin."
"It's something," I say again, because right now thin is what I've got.
He finishes his coffee, sets the mug on the edge of the bench, and pushes off the wall. "Get the plate. Sleep if you can. Eight o'clock."
"Yeah."
"Judge." He stops in the doorway and looks at me. "We're going to find them."
I don't answer. He doesn't wait for one. He already knows the only answer I have is to keep working, and that's not the kind of thing you say out loud without making it smaller than it is. He goes back down the hall, and a few seconds later I hear his chair creak and his keyboard start back up.
I pick up the next piece.
I was six years Special Forces before I came to the Saints. Three tours, two of them back to back, and all of it built on the understanding that the mission is the thing. You go where they send you, you do what needs doing, you bring your people home. That's the whole job. I was good at it.
I was good at it until Op Nightfall, and then I was good at it the way a cracked bone is good: still functional, still load-bearing, but wrong in a way that announces itself every time the weather changes.
Kandahar. A classified extraction through a route with three confirmations, two redundant intelligence sources, and every box checked.
The first shot came from the wrong direction, and I knew.
Not suspected. Knew, the way you know things when your whole system has been trained to read a situation in the half-second before it kills you.
Somebody sold the route. Somebody with access and motive and enough distance from the consequences to keep living comfortably with what they'd done.
I never proved it.
I tried. That part doesn't make it into the official record; the six months I spent after, running every thread I could find, pressing every contact, trying to build something that would hold up in front of someone with the authority to act on it.
I was meticulous. Thorough. I came up with exactly nothing that couldn't be explained another way.
Eventually the Army made clear, in the way institutions make things clear without ever saying them directly, that my continued pursuit of this particular question was not something they were going to facilitate.
So I stopped pursuing it officially.
I never stopped knowing.
Six men didn't come home. Kell. Webb. Broussard.
Harding. Yuen. Crane. I got out last, which the official record frames as something worth celebrating.
Leadership under fire. Six weeks later, a general I'd never met put a commendation in my hand and said words about selflessness and extraordinary threat.
I took it because standing in that room and saying what I actually thought would have meant explaining why, and I didn't have the proof to back it up yet.
I put it in a box. Went back to Fort Bragg. Started drinking.
Not the kind that makes people do something about it.
Not bottles on the floor or missing formation or the visible variety of falling apart that draws concerned parties.
The quiet kind. Efficient, the way I do most things.
Enough whiskey every night to get the names to stop running long enough to sleep, just functional enough during the day to keep everyone comfortable.
I told myself I was managing because that's what men who are not managing always tell themselves, and I was very good at it right up until I wasn't.
Templar showed up in Madison on a Wednesday afternoon in February.
I don't know exactly what brought him there.
He doesn't fully explain it and I've stopped asking because that's his right.
What I know is that he looked at me the way he looks at things he's already decided about, without surprise and without judgment, just a man taking in information and deciding what to do with it. And he said, “Pack a bag.”
“Where are we going?” I replied.
“Magnolia Bend. You'll figure out the rest.”
I packed a bag. I got in his truck. I left everything in that apartment that I'd been using to kill myself slowly, and I didn't go back for any of it.
That was four years ago. And what the Saints gave me that the Army couldn't is a harder thing to put words to, but I've had four years to try.
It's not structure. It's not brotherhood, though the brotherhood here is the most honest thing I've found.
It's a question. Templar looks at a situation and asks what should be done.
Not what's been sanctioned, not what's within acceptable parameters, not what some chain of command has pre-approved.
Just: what should be done, and are we the ones to do it, and what does it cost.
That question closed a gap in me that I didn't understand was killing me until it wasn't there anymore.
Four girls are missing.
What should be done is find them.
It's past two when I lock the bench and turn off the light.
The kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove. I find Kourtney's plate in the refrigerator — chicken with rice and gravy, cornbread wrapped in foil — and I eat it standing at the counter because sitting down feels like stopping and I'm not there yet.
I think about the breakfast table this morning.
The whole table going through its motions.
West with his joke that nobody laughed at, Boomer refilling his coffee for the third time, Sisco doing whatever Sisco does on his phone that always looks urgent and probably is.
And Grudge in his chair with his hands around his mug and his eyes somewhere past the far wall, and none of us saying a word to him about it because what word is there.
Before Maria went missing, Grudge ate like a man who was afraid someone would take his food.
Fast, focused, already looking forward to the next thing.
He's twenty-eight years old and he's been angry since before he came to us, the particular anger of a man who grew up watching people he loves get hurt and didn't have the power to stop it.
That anger has been useful to the club. It's made him effective. It's also made him someone who needs a very specific kind of handling, which is basically the handling of not handling him at all: giving him a job, giving him brothers, and trusting him to do the rest.
His job right now is to sit at that breakfast table every morning and not fall apart.
He's doing it.
That's its own kind of strength, and I'm not going to waste it by treating him like he's fragile.
I rinse the plate, set it in the rack, and go down the hall.
Sisco's light is still burning. His keyboard’s going low through the wall, steady as a clock, the sound of a man who will be at this until three or four in the morning because that's just what he does.
I've been here four years and I've never once seen Sisco leave something unfinished.
He carries the club's entire history in his head.
Every deal, every debt, every name of every person who's ever crossed us or done right by us, and he tends it the way other men tend a garden. Carefully. Constantly.
I go to my room, pull off my boots, sit on the edge of the bed in the dark for a moment, and then lie back with the ceiling fan turning overhead and the compound breathing around me.
Old wood. Night sounds coming through the window: insects, a truck on the far road, Magnolia Bend being exactly what it is at two in the morning.
Maria Morata. Kayla Fortner. Destiny Acre. Bree Thibodaux.
I run the names the way I run them every night.
Slow. One at a time. Everything I know about each of them held carefully: ages, neighborhoods, the last ordinary things they did before ordinary stopped being available to them.
Kayla's mother talking about cosmetology school like it was still a plan that was going to happen.
The stock clerk saying Maria seemed fine, just a girl getting in her car, nothing to worry about.
A man who lets the names blur has started to let go.
I'm not letting go.
Tomorrow, Sting goes to the truck rental place. Tomorrow, I find a new angle or I run the old ones again. Tomorrow, I sit across from Grudge in church and I don't say I'm sorry, because sorry is for when you're done and I am not done.
The fan turns overhead.
I close my eyes.