Chapter 4
Judge
Echo catches me coming out of the gun room just after eleven.
He's been a prospect long enough to know better than to block a doorway, so he steps to the side and falls in beside me instead, which is the right instinct. "My uncle called," he says. "He has a situation."
I stop walking. "What kind?"
"A woman. A freelance photographer, she was out in the Atchafalaya this morning on a shoot and witnessed something she shouldn't have.
She called the DEA tip line and they routed her straight to the agent running the operation.
" He pauses. "She figured it out before she gave him anything and got herself out. "
I look at him. "Your uncle vouches for her?"
"He does."
"Where is she?"
"At a bar on Bourbon Street. He says she's been there a couple hours." Echo pulls out his phone, reads from it. "Gold hair. Camera bag. Corner booth, back to the wall."
I take the phone and look at the description. Gold hair, camera bag, corner booth. A woman smart enough to walk into a meeting with a dirty federal agent, give him nothing, walk out the back, and put herself in a defensible position while she waited for help she wasn't sure was coming.
"Tell your uncle I'm on my way," I say, and hand the phone back.
The drive to New Orleans takes almost four hours.
I don't turn on the radio. I think about what Echo told me — the tip line, the agent, the café on Chartres — and I think about the four girls, the way I always end up thinking about the four girls when I have unstructured time, because my brain has decided that's the problem it wants to work whether I give it permission or not.
The bar is exactly the kind of place a smart woman picks if she needs somewhere to disappear for a few hours: dark, busy enough that nobody clocks one person sitting alone, close enough to the street that you can see what's coming. I go through the door and find her before I've taken three steps.
Back corner. Booth facing the entrance, back to the wall, a glass she hasn't touched in a while on the table in front of her. Gold hair pulled back, camera bag on the seat beside her rather than the floor, which tells me she's been keeping it close enough to grab.
She sees me the second I clear the doorway.
I watch it happen; the attention sharpening, the body going still, the quick read she runs on me before I've crossed half the distance between us.
Not panicked. Calculating. The look of a woman deciding whether I'm the thing she's been waiting for or the thing she needs to run from.
I reach the table. "David sent me," I say.
She holds my gaze for one beat, then picks up the camera bag, slides out of the booth, and walks toward the door without another word.
I follow her out into the Bourbon Street afternoon and the thick heat, and I think: this is going to be a long four hours.
She doesn't ask about the truck.
Most people ask about the truck. It's a big, black, unremarkable thing, the kind of vehicle specifically designed to not be looked at twice, and somehow that makes people want to comment on it.
She gets in, puts the camera bag between her feet, and looks straight ahead through the windshield while I pull out and point us toward the highway.
We're past the city limits before she says anything.
"Where are we going?"
"Magnolia Bend."
"Mississippi."
"Yes."
She looks out the window at the afternoon moving past. "How long?"
"Four hours."
She nods and goes quiet. I can feel her thinking; the particular quality of a silence that isn't empty but full, a person turning something over and deciding how much of it to put into words.
"The club," she says. "The Saints Outlaws."
"Yes."
"You're with the club like Daniel? David’s nephew," she qualifies.
"Yeah. And Echo–Daniel–sent me."
"What's your name?"
"Judge."
She turns her head and looks at me, and even in the afternoon light coming through the glass I can feel the attention of it.
Not the way most people look at you, registering your presence, clocking your relevance, moving on.
This is different. Slower. The look of someone who is used to finding things in a frame that other people walk past without seeing.
"Is that what people call you or what you're called?" she asks.
"Both."
She looks back out the window. "Jesslyn Meyers."
"I know."
"Of course you do." It's not unfriendly. Just precise. She's filing information the same way I am, building the picture of who she's in a truck with on a Louisiana highway, deciding what it means.
"The man at the café," I say. "Delacroix."
"What about him?"
"You recognized him."
"Before I sat down." She says it the way she says everything. Clean, no performance in it. "I had his face on a memory card. A photographer's eye doesn't lose a face once it's filed it."
"You sat down anyway."
"Running immediately, before I knew who else was watching, would have been worse." She pauses. "He wanted the cards. That's what the meeting was. He wanted to know what I had so he could figure out what to do about me. I didn't give him anything he could use."
I look at the road. "And the cards?"
"All of them. Right here." She touches the camera bag with her foot. "Fifty-three frames. He's in thirty-one of them."
I don't say anything to that. There's nothing to say that isn't either obvious or premature, so I let it sit, and she lets it sit with me, and the highway runs out under the truck.
She asks questions for the first two hours.
Not nervous questions. Not the kind people ask when they're scared and filling silence to keep from thinking. These are methodical. She wants to know about the club, about Magnolia Bend, about what happens when we get there.
She asks about the compound, about who'll be present, about what protocol looks like for someone arriving in her situation.
I answer in as few words as the question will allow, not because I'm being difficult but because the answers are genuinely short. You'll have a room. You'll meet the president. Someone will come out to meet you at the gate.
"What does the president know about me?" she asks.
"That you witnessed something, that you have documentation, that Delacroix knows your face."
"Does he know about the tip line? That they routed me directly to him?"
"He will by the time we get there."
She's quiet for a moment, looking out at the passing tree line. "That's not an accident," she says. "The routing. Someone flagged my call before it went through. Someone who knew what to listen for."
"Probably."
"Which means Delacroix has someone at the tip line, or access to the monitoring."
"Or both."
She nods, and I watch the road and let her work through it. She thinks the way good analysts think: in systems, in connections, following implications without needing to be walked through them. Whatever she does with a camera, she didn't get it by pointing it at pretty things and hoping.
She stops asking somewhere around Hattiesburg.
The questions don't dry up. I can feel that, the inventory still running behind her eyes. But she stops putting it into words, and what replaces the questions is something I notice with the part of my brain that notices things before I give it permission. She's watching me now instead.
Not obviously. Not the way an amateur does it, staring until you feel it and look over. She watches the way she photographs, I'd guess. Peripherally, patiently, catching what's actually there rather than what she's looking for. I can feel it on the side of my face like a change in light.
I pull off for gas outside Hattiesburg. One of those interstate stations that exists only to be passed through, all flat white fluorescent light and concrete.
I get out and start the pump and she gets out the other side and stretches, both arms over her head, and I look at her over the roof of the truck.
She's taller than I expected. Lean, angular, with the physical economy of someone who spends a lot of time in the field.
No wasted movement, no self-consciousness about the body, just a person who lives in it practically.
The camera bag is still over one shoulder even out here, even stretching at a gas station in the middle of Mississippi, and something about that detail lands on me in a way I don't examine too closely.
She catches me looking.
She doesn't say anything about it, just holds the look for a second, steady and unhurried, then goes inside the station. She comes back with two coffees and hands one to me across the roof of the truck without asking how I take it.
Black. She got it right.
I take it without saying anything, and she doesn't expect me to. We get back in, pull onto the highway, and neither of us remarks on any of it.
She drinks her coffee, watches the Mississippi tree line, and doesn't ask any more questions. The light goes flat and then gold and then starts to fade as we push north, the sky going wide and orange at the edges, everything on the verge of something.
Somewhere past Laurel the coffee is gone and the silence between us has settled into something that doesn't need to be filled, which is rarer than people think.
Most silences have an edge to them. You can always tell within thirty seconds whether they're comfortable or not.
This one is neither. It's just present. Two people in a truck with their own versions of a long day running alongside each other without touching.
She falls asleep against the window somewhere in the long straight stretch before Magnolia Bend starts to feel close. I don't notice it happening, just notice at some point that she's stopped being alert and started being absent, her shoulder against the door, her head tipped toward the glass.
Twenty minutes later, her head tips off the glass and finds my shoulder.
I feel it happen. The slight weight of it, the warmth, the way she doesn't startle or correct herself because she's too far under to know. Her hair is against my jaw. I smell something clean, nothing strong, just there.
I should shift. Move slightly, let her head find the window again, put back the distance that's supposed to exist between a Saint on a job and a woman he picked up from a bar four hours ago.
I don't shift.
I drive the last hour with her hair against my jaw, and I tell myself it means nothing.
She's had the kind of day that would level most people, walked through it with more composure than I've seen from trained men in worse situations, and her body is collecting what it's owed.
She fell asleep in a moving vehicle the way people fall asleep in moving vehicles.
I am not remotely convincing, even to myself.
The Magnolia Bend exit comes up and I take it slower than I need to, not examining why.
The roads narrow, the Spanish moss picks up in the last of the evening light on either side, and I know every turn to the compound without thinking, which is useful because I'm not entirely thinking about the road.
I'm thinking about how long it's been since I've let anything get this close. Not this specifically. Just anything. Close enough to matter, close enough you'd feel the absence of it. I stopped allowing that a long time ago, and I've maintained it without much difficulty.
It feels less maintained than usual right now.
She stirs when I slow for the compound gate. Lifts her head, blinks, takes a second to locate herself the way people do coming out of a hard sleep in an unfamiliar place. Then she straightens, pushes her hair back, and looks out at the compound in the evening light.
"We're here," I say.
"I can see that." Her voice is rough with sleep. She looks out at the gate, the fence line, Kourtney already coming across the lot toward the truck. "Is that who's meeting me?"
"Kourtney. She'll get you settled."
She picks up the camera bag and doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks out at the compound with the same steady attention she's been running on everything all day.
"Thank you," she says. "For coming to get me."
She gets out before I can answer, which is fine, because I don't have an answer that would make any sense to say out loud.
I watch Kourtney reach her, watch the two of them exchange something brief, watch Jesslyn Meyers walk across the compound lot with her camera bag over her shoulder and her boots still muddy from the bayou.
She doesn't look back.
I sit in the truck for a moment after they've gone inside, hands on the wheel, looking at nothing through the windshield.
Four hours back. That's all it was.
I get out of the truck and go find Templar.