Chapter Three
Jenna
BY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, we had a routine.
An uneasy one, the kind you build with a person you're doing twenty rounds with every day and haven't knocked out yet.
He had his stool. I had the rail. There were unspoken rules about the coffee and the bathroom and the narrow space behind the bar where we kept ending up at the same time, and neither of us had broken any of them, which I chose to read as a draw.
Proof was running at half-capacity for the afternoon shift, which was still twice what I'd have called a crowd two years ago.
Mardi Gras brought the tourists out in waves, and by the time Saturday hit, the waves had started crashing.
Outside, I could hear the second lines rolling down Bourbon in slow, brassy surges, the crowd noise rising every time the doors swung open.
Inside, the ceiling fans were losing the fight against the body heat and I'd been sweating through my work clothes since noon.
Dane was on his stool at the service end of the counter with sightlines to both doors and the hallway.
His thermal was the same shade of dark blue I'd seen him in all week, and he had his phone face-down on the wood in front of him, which meant he was watching the room, not the screen.
I'd caught him at it twice already. He had a way of going still that most people couldn't manage.
Not tense, just present, the kind of stillness that saw everything without looking like it was trying.
I'd noticed it. I'd noticed it and kept working anyway, because noticing things about Dane Gatlin was turning into a full-time occupation and I already had one of those.
"Refill?" I said, passing him.
"I'm good."
"You've had half a coffee since noon."
"I've also had a granola bar and two antacids and I'm not complaining about those either."
I grabbed the carafe anyway and topped him off, because the man was going to be functional if I had to force the issue.
He picked up the cup and watched me over the rim with those gray eyes and didn't say thank you, which I'd already learned was just how he was.
Not rude. Just efficient. He said exactly what was necessary and not one syllable more — and then sometimes, with no warning, he'd say considerably more, and you'd be laughing before you noticed you'd been redirected.
I'd caught that too.
"Huck," I said, sliding toward the middle of the counter. "I'm going to do a floor check. You've got the bar."
Huck looked up from the back bar, looked at Dane, looked at me, and said nothing. Which was Huck for fine.
The afternoon crowd was loose and good-natured, nobody in that particular gear-shift zone that happened around eight or nine when the fun started going sideways.
I worked the floor, checked in at the tables, ran a ticket to the courtyard.
Through the French doors I could see the Edison lights already on, though it was still daylight, and the jasmine along the back wall was in full bloom, the smell of it thick and sweet over the fry oil and bourbon.
I pulled a dead bloom off the trailing vine and stood there for a second just breathing it in.
Okay, so maybe I wasn't entirely unaffected by the week.
I went back inside.
THE GUY AT THE FAR end of the rail had been nursing the same beer for forty minutes and getting louder about it, which told me two things: he'd started somewhere else and he was going to be a problem. I watched him for another ten minutes to be sure, then cut him off.
"You're done," I told him. "I'll call you a cab."
He didn't like that. He grabbed my wrist when I reached for his glass.
The grip of a man used to making things stop when he wanted them stopped, short and certain.
He was wrong about that.
I broke the grip with the rotation I'd learned from a self-defense class I'd taken three years ago because someone had left a similar bruise on my bartender's forearm and I'd decided we weren't doing that anymore.
His hand came free. I set the glass behind the counter out of his reach and looked at him with patient, level calm that said I'd done this before and I wasn't angry, just done.
"Cab," I said. "Or walk. Your choice. But you're finished here."
He decided to walk. They usually did.
I turned around and Dane was two feet behind me.
He'd crossed from his end of the bar to mine without making a sound — in whatever four seconds it had taken for the grab and the break — and he was standing with his weight forward, jaw set, eyes on the guy's retreating back. The look on his face was one I hadn't seen before.
It wasn't the professional assessment or the scanning attention he kept trained on the room. This was hotter than that and a lot less controlled. When he tracked back to me the heat didn't go anywhere — just shifted targets. For one full second I felt it land, direct and warm, square in my chest.
He covered it. His face shifted, smoothed back into neutral, and the whole thing probably lasted four seconds start to finish. But I'd already seen it, and we both knew that, and neither of us said a word about it.
"I had it," I said.
"I know."
"I've had it a hundred times."
"I know that too." His jaw was still tight, just slightly. "You all right?"
"Fine." I moved back behind the counter. "He barely touched me."
"Barely," Dane said, and left it there, and the word sat between us carrying more weight than one syllable had any right to.
I picked up a glass and polished it and didn't look at him, and the air between us shifted in a way neither of us acknowledged.
I WAS IN THE STOCKROOM signing for a delivery — four-fifteen, afternoon crowd still running, Dane on his stool — when Huck appeared in the doorway with the particular expression he used for things he didn't want to deliver.
Same expression he used for everything else. Eyes carrying different freight.
"Jenna."
"What."
"You need to come look at something."
The "something" was my car, parked in the lot where I always left it during the week.
My car, a four-year-old Accord I'd bought with the proceeds of Proof's second profitable quarter and named nothing because I'm not a person who names cars, sitting in the lot with both driver-side windows smashed and glass spread across the concrete.
I registered that first. Then I registered the photo.
Someone had taped an eight-by-ten to the driver's seat. The photo was of me, taken from outside, through the bar's front window. I was behind the counter, head down, pouring. The angle was from the street.
I stood very still and breathed through it.
Dane was beside me before I'd taken two breaths, and when I stepped toward the car he put one hand on my arm, not a grab, just a stop with fingers barely touching my sleeve, and made a short, sharp sound that wasn't a word.
"Don't go closer," he said. "Not yet."
He pulled out his phone and started photographing the car from where we stood, then the lot, then the surrounding buildings.
He moved around the perimeter of the space without touching anything and without rushing, and I watched the shift happen in real time — the ease gone, the warmth gone, whatever lived underneath it taking over, stripped down and cold and competent.
It was colder. It was also, and I wasn't proud of this, slightly reassuring.
He called it in. Perry Hebert arrived in twenty minutes with a uniform and a look I'd seen on him once before, the night of the murder — tight around the eyes, jaw working.
They went through it. Dane stayed close to me through the whole thing, not crowding, not hovering, just present in a way that I kept noticing and kept trying not to let show.
By the time Hebert left, the afternoon light had gone golden and the lot was quiet again. I had a police report in my hand, two smashed windows, and a photo someone had taken of me through my own front window while I was working.
I flipped the police report over. Put it in my back pocket. Looked at Dane.
"I need to get back," I said.
He looked at me for a long second. "Okay."
WE DIDN'T TALK ON THE walk back to the apartment after I handed off to Huck.
Three hours before the Saturday night shift, and the banter that had been running between us all week had gone quiet.
Not hostile. Different: the air still and heavier than it had been.
I made coffee because I needed my hands busy and Dane sat on the far end of the kitchen counter and watched me do it without offering to help or getting in the way, and for a few minutes the only sound was the percolator and Bourbon Street coming through the walls at a distance.
I thought about Beth Kessler.
He'd said it on Friday night, the name and the story.
I'd let him and gone back to the bar work because anything else would have been wrong.
But I'd been carrying it since, turning it over.
How he'd told it mattered as much as the story itself.
Flat, no soft edges, no invitation to comfort him.
He'd been stating a fact, the way you state a hard truth you've had years to make an imperfect peace with — because that was the only kind available.
This is what happened. This is who I am because of it.
I knew that voice. I used it all the time.
I poured two cups and set one at his elbow and leaned against the counter across the narrow kitchen and looked at him.
"The photo was taken through the front window," I said. "They've been watching the bar."
"Yes."
"Which means they've been watching it for at least a day, maybe more. Close enough to get that angle from the street."
"Yes."
"And you knew that before Hebert got there."
A pause. Not long. "I suspected it."
"So when we walked in this morning, you were already looking for it."
"I look for it every day. I didn't have evidence until this afternoon." He picked up the cup. "I'm sorry about your car."
"It's a car."
"It's yours."