Chapter 14 #2
I have heard men make sounds on battlefields that I've spent years trying to forget.
The specific register of Grudge's voice when he sees his sister standing in that container — alive, standing, thin and wrong-eyed with whatever they've given her over the past weeks but alive, her hands already coming up when she recognizes him — is not a sound I want to forget.
I intend to carry it the way I carry the six names, not as a wound but as a reason.
He goes to his knees in front of her. She says his name. He puts his forehead against her collarbone and she puts her hands in his hair and they don't say anything after that.
I look away because that moment belongs to them and always will.
What I see when I look away is Jesslyn.
She is out of the support vehicle — of course she is out of the support vehicle, I told her not to get out of the support vehicle and she is out of the support vehicle — and she's twenty feet from the container with her camera up.
She's photographing Grudge and Maria. Not the facility.
Not Delacroix zip-tied in the main room.
The specific quality of light in a cold storage container in Chalmette, Louisiana, falling on a young woman who is alive because of the memory card Jesslyn carried out of a bayou swamp on a morning that feels like it happened to different people.
I watch her work.
The camera comes down. She looks at the screen. I watch her face do something that doesn't have a single name — not quite pride, not quite grief, not quite relief.
She will never publish that photograph. She knows it.
She made it anyway, because she photographs things the way she experiences them — completely, precisely, nothing missed — and this moment is worth documenting even if the documentation belongs only to her and to the people in it and to no one else ever.
She looks up and finds me across the facility.
She lowers the camera all the way.
Delacroix goes to Sisco's contact at a truck stop outside Laplace; thirty miles north, neutral ground, the kind of location where a vehicle changing hands draws no particular attention.
Carr gets what she needs through channels that don't put her in the same parking lot as us, which is how it has to work. The chain of custody starts there, not here, and what we did tonight stays in the shape it's in.
Delacroix doesn't speak when we put him in the vehicle. He's been calculating since the moment the math stopped working for him on the main floor, already building the cooperation framework in his head, figuring out what he has to trade and who he has to trade it to.
He'll give Carr the routes, some names, the operational structure he had visibility into.
He won't have visibility into the top of it.
Men like him never do; that's the architecture, insulation all the way up.
The two men who went into the marsh know more than he does and they're in the wind, and whatever organization sits above Delacroix is intact and running and already thinking about a replacement.We have won this battle.
The war above it is still running, and I carry that the way I carry everything: forward, because there's no other direction and because stopping would be a lie I don't have patience for.
I find Jesslyn in the facility parking lot when we come back from the handoff.
She's standing beside the support vehicle with the camera hanging from its strap.
Looking at the corrugated metal of the facility as the morning light on industrial metal becomes something different from what it was an hour ago.
She's not photographing it. For a woman who has spent seven years photographing things rather than watching them, the watching means something.
I'm crossing the lot when she turns and sees my arm.
She closes the distance, her hand going to the graze before I've said anything, her eyes doing the quick assessment of someone who has kept pressure on a wound in the dark.
"It's a graze," I say.
"I can see that." She holds my arm for a moment. "Stitch needs to look at this."
"After."
"After what?"
I take her face in my hands and kiss her in front of my brothers, in the parking lot of the Chalmette facility sun shining.
Pawn is leaning on his bike, Boomer's nose is packed with gauze, and Sisco is still on the phone.
I don't look around first. I haven't cared who sees for a while now and this is not the morning to start.
She kisses me back with both hands on my wrists, holding them where they are, her mouth warm and deliberate, complete attention the way she does everything she decides is worth her attention.
When I pull back enough to look at her she's looking at me with those clear eyes and in them I can see the morning. All of it, processed and stored.
"Two got away," I say.
"I know."
"This isn't over."
"I know." Her hands are still on my wrists. "But Grudge has his sister."
He does. That's real. That's the realest thing I've got right now and I intend to hold it.
Sisco appears at my shoulder. "Pawn needs Stitch."
"Tell Pawn he should have stayed down."
"I did. He said something impolite about your opinion." Sisco glances at Jesslyn. "You got everything you need?"
"Everything she needs," Jesslyn says. "And nothing that goes anywhere it shouldn't."
He nods and walks away. I look at Jesslyn in the morning light, and I think about a bayou at sunrise and a woman who walked into a café knowing exactly who was across from her and gave him nothing.
"Come on," I say.
I take her hand, and we go back to our people.