Chapter 11
Jesslyn
Ifind it four days after Sal Morata went into the ground in his own salvage yard.
I've been working the background frames; the ones I shot before the operation started, before anything was happening, when I was setting up for herons, the light was still good, and my lens was running on autopilot while my brain catalogued the morning.
In the far background of one of those frames, behind the cypress and the waterway, there's a structure. I've been at it for two hours with the enhanced resolution, pulling what I can from the degraded edges of the frame, and what I can pull is enough.
Corrugated metal roof, partially visible.
A dock post. The specific angle of a commercial fishing shed that I've seen before, on the eastern edge of Lake Borgne where the marsh opens up and the road runs along the water for a mile before it cuts inland.
I spent three days shooting that area two years ago for a wetlands piece, and the geography has been sitting in the back of my mind since I first started mapping the bayou frames.
If I'm right, I can put the operation's staging point within a few hundred yards.
Not the clearing. That, I already placed.
But where the route originates before it hits the bayou.
Where the girls are held before they're moved.
If that structure is what I think it is, it's a thread someone with federal authority can pull on that could unravel the whole operation up the chain. .
I need to be in New Orleans to confirm it. I need the specific ground-level vantage point, the road, the angle from the water. Satellite imagery won't give me what I need. I know this kind of work and I know what it requires.
I close the laptop and go find Judge.
The common room is empty by ten. The brothers drift out in ones and twos. Kourtney is last after she's wiped down the bar, Sisco to his office with his laptop under his arm, Recon heading to the perimeter for his check. The compound settles into its nighttime sounds.
Judge is at the far end of the table with the security assessment Recon filed, a pen moving across the margins. He looks up when I sit across from him.
I tell him what I found. I walk him through the frame, the structure, the angle, what it means if I'm right. I tell him I need to go to New Orleans and get eyes on the eastern shore of Lake Borgne. It’ll take half a day, and I’ll be back before dark.
He listens to all of it without interrupting.
"No," he says.
"The lead is real."
"I didn't say it wasn't."
"Then—"
"Delacroix sat across from you at that table. He looked you in the face. He knows what you look like."
He sets the pen down. "If he has anyone watching Lake Borgne, and if that structure is what you think it is, he does. If you show up on that road with a camera, you're not a stranger asking questions. You're the witness who got out of his café."
That lands. I knew it and I was building around it anyway, which is not the same as not knowing.
"I can work at a distance," I say. "Long lens. I don't have to get close."
"How close is close enough to confirm the structure?"
"Close enough that a long lens covers it."
"And if someone is running the route that day? If a vehicle comes down that road while you're on it?"
"Then I drive away."
"In a car they can follow."
"Judge—"
"He knows your face." He says it again, flat, because it's the point that ends the argument and he knows it.
"By now, he knows everything else about you.
Your name, your magazine, your editor. He can work backward from the tip line call and get to most of it.
But your face he has from six feet away in a French Quarter café, and that doesn't change no matter how careful you are on that road. "
I look at him across the table. He's right. I've been constructing the argument around that fact rather than through it, and he found it in about thirty seconds.
"The lead is still real," I say.
"I know it is."
"We can't confirm it without boots on the ground."
"Not yours."
"Then whose? You send one of your brothers down there and they don't know what they're looking at. I do."
I lean forward. "My read on this evidence is the whole reason we have anything. It's the reason the feds can build a case once we tell them what we have. It's the reason Sal's name came up at all. You don't get to use what my eyes can do and then tell me my eyes can't leave the compound."
"I'm not saying your eyes can't leave the compound. I'm saying your face can't go to Lake Borgne." He looks at me steadily. "Those are different problems with different solutions."
"Then tell me the solution."
"I'm working on it."
"You're stalling."
"I'm thinking." His voice doesn't change. "There's a difference."
I look at him. The jaw set, the eyes level, the specific quality of a man who has made a decision and is prepared to hold it but is not, I notice, telling me I'm wrong about the lead.
"You're treating me like cargo," I say.
Something moves in his face. "I'm trying to keep you alive," he says.
"So am I. That's the whole point." I hold his gaze. "The lead is real. I know how to work it, and your alternative is to sit on what might be the location of a holding facility while four girls are still missing. So tell me the solution, because I'm not willing to table this."
He stands.
He walks around the end of the table and stops in front of me, close enough that I have to look up to hold his eyes, and I don't step back.
I don't step back because stepping back would concede something I'm not willing to concede. And because the honest truth is that his proximity has been doing something to my thinking for eleven days, and I am done pretending it isn't.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"You're right," he says. "The lead is real and it needs to be confirmed. And we'll confirm it." His eyes don't move from mine. "With cover. With me. Not you alone on a road where Delacroix's face is on the other side of any vehicle that comes around the bend."
That's not a refusal. That's a plan with the shape of a plan, and it costs him something to say it, and I can see it costing him.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Together. Not alone." I hold his gaze. "But soon. The window on this won't stay open."
"I know." He's very close. The Mississippi night is coming through the open windows and the compound is empty and quiet around us. "Soon."
He steps in and his hand finds my jaw and he kisses me — not like the porch, not slow and deliberate and tender. The porch was tender.
This is something else, his mouth hard against mine from the first second, his hands going to my hips and pulling me against him, my hands going to his shirt and gripping it because I need something to hold onto.
He walks me backward. My back hits the wall and I don't fight it.
I want the wall behind me with all of this bearing down. He gets his hands under my thighs and lifts me. I lock my legs around him and we are immediately, urgently close in a way that makes all the arguing feel like foreplay, which maybe it was.
He gets my jeans open. I get my hands into his. He pushes inside me against the wall and I pull in a breath so sharp it scrapes my throat, both of us still fully feeling where we just were in that argument, all the friction of it now running a different direction.
He moves and I move with him. My hips roll to meet every thrust, his mouth at my throat biting down soft and then not so soft, finding the exact place that makes my grip on his shoulders turn into something more like clawing.
I drag my nails down his back and feel him shudder and drive deeper in answer. I do it again because the sound he makes when I do it is the most honest thing I've heard from him yet; that low broken sound that he can't manage, that he doesn't try to manage.
He shifts the angle, my head goes back against the wall, and I stop being quiet about it. His name comes out of me in pieces. The sound bounces off the empty walls and I don't care.
His thumb finds me where we're joined and presses in slow circles and my whole body pulls tight.
"Look at me," he says, low — the same instruction as the shower, the same specific thing he needs from me.
I look at him. His eyes are dark, his jaw is set, and he's watching my face with the same focused attention he brings to everything. He’s reading me, adjusting, using what he learns.
His thumb keeps working. His hips don't stop. He holds my gaze and keeps going, and I feel stripped down to something very simple, something with no composure left in it. Just his name in my mouth and his hands on me and the Mississippi dark pouring through the open windows.
I come hard, my whole body clenching around him, his name out of me loud and unmanaged. The orgasm rolls through me in long waves while he drives through every one of them without slowing.
He follows me over with his forehead against mine, his grip on my hips tightening past careful, going deep and staying there and shuddering through it, a sound against my throat that I feel in my chest.
We stay like that against the wall. His weight on me. My legs still locked around him. Both of us breathing, coming back down from it.
We end up on the couch in the corner, his arm around me, both windows open to the warm dark. My head is on his chest. His heartbeat is slow and steady now.
I've been thinking about whether to say this. Whether it's the kind of thing you offer or keep, and what each costs.
"I'm from Lacombe," I say.
He doesn't say anything. He waits and gives the space for what's coming without filling it.
"Small town on the north shore. Forty-five minutes from New Orleans on a good day. My mother's family has been there for four generations, which in a town like that means everyone knows everyone and everything, or they think they do."
I look at the ceiling. "My mother got pregnant with me at seventeen.
The man wasn't from there. He wasn't from anywhere, just passing through, gone before she knew she was pregnant.
In a town like Lacombe, in a family like ours, that kind of thing doesn't go away.
It settles in. It becomes part of the story people tell about you and about her and by extension about me. "
Judge's hand moves in my hair, slow.
"She wasn't cruel about it," I say. "She never called me a mistake.
She was a good woman who got dealt a hard thing and carried it with more grace than I probably would have.
But I grew up knowing the shape of what I represented to that town.
You learn it early; in how people look at your mother at church, in the things that don't get said, in the way certain doors stay closed without anyone explaining why.
Not cruelly excluded. Just quietly, consistently, not quite included. "
I stop for a moment. "I learned early that the way out of being the thing people define you by is to leave the place where they're doing the defining. So I left and I haven’t stopped moving since.
New assignment, new city, new country when the work takes me there.
I told myself it was the job. And it was the job. It was also running."
"That's why you never stop moving," he says.
"Was," I say. "Past tense."
He turns his head and presses his mouth to my hair. Not quite a kiss, something more deliberate. Something that means he understood the specific word I chose and what it cost me to choose it.
"Past tense," he says.
"Yes."
He pulls me slightly closer. I let him.
"The lead is real," I say, after a while.
"I know."
"And we're going to confirm it."
"Yes."
I close my eyes. Outside, the Mississippi night is warm and thick, the particular quality of Southern dark that has never felt like anywhere else I've been in seven years of going everywhere.
I'm not going anywhere right now.
That's new. That's the past tense made present, made concrete, made into a man's heartbeat under my ear, his hand in my hair, and the warm dark of a Mississippi night through open windows.
I stay where I am.