Chapter 31
thirty-one
Remy
The Lincoln moves through the wrought-iron shadows of St. Charles Avenue and the live oaks reach across the road like they've been holding hands for two hundred years and decided not to let go.
Jax has been quiet for about a mile, which is unusual enough that I clock it. He's driving with both hands on the wheel and his head turning slow as we pass the houses, the white columns and slate roofs surfacing one after another from behind hedges thick enough to swallow a man.
"Okay so I need to say something and I need you to not take it personally," he says.
The words come fast, his real-time processing voice, but the volume sits lower than usual.
"We just drove past four houses with columns.
Actual columns. And the oaks have that whole dramatic canopy thing happening over the road like a movie about plantations, and you grew up here and you live in a townhouse in the Marina and you eat protein bars for dinner?
That's not humble, Saint. That's a cry for help. "
"Focus, Jax."
"I am focused. I'm focused on the fact that you had columns and you never once mentioned it, not in four years of me thinking you were, like, a regular guy from—"
"Jax."
He goes quiet. Not offended. His attention shifts from the houses to the hall ahead, reading me the way he reads a corner before he commits to it.
The Lincoln rolls past a wrought-iron gate set into a brick wall, and behind the gate is a yard I have not seen in eight years and a porch with a swing on it and a woman with white hair sitting in the swing reading what looks like the Times-Picayune.
I do not turn my head.
"That's the one," Jax says, soft.
"Keep driving."
He keeps driving. We hit St. Charles and the Lincoln rolls toward downtown, and I count the streetcars passing in the opposite direction the same arithmetic I use for pulse rates, the steady count of waiting for a body to respond.
The Windsor Court sits on Gravier in the CBD, eleven stories of brick and limestone, the kind of hotel where attorneys book suites for the week and conference reps tip in cash.
Landry's name is on a room here under a corporate affiliate of LeBlanc Holdings because Landry, given a choice between going home and letting Mama see him with a split lip, would choose the affiliate every time.
We park in the garage across the street.
Jax kills the engine and pulls a hard case from under the passenger seat, sets it on his lap, and unlatches it without speaking.
Inside, two Sig P365s nested in foam, two spare magazines each, a folded comms earpiece, and the small black plastic rectangle Vanessa cut us before we left SFO.
He passes me mine. The weight settles in my hand and my body recalibrates around it the way it has for twelve years, the same way Landry's body would recalibrate around a fountain pen.
Jax's eyes flick to the case, then to my face. "How do you want to play it?"
"Eleventh floor. East side. He's the only one in there. We go in clean."
"He's gonna freak out, Saint."
"Yeah."
We take the service elevator. Two floors up, two floors past where the doors should open, the kind of small reroute that buys forty seconds of nobody watching.
The eleventh-floor corridor is carpet thick enough to swallow our footsteps and lighting set warm and low because rich people don't like to see themselves in mirrors at the end of a long day.
Room 1108. I do not knock.
Vanessa's keycard reader takes the lock in under two seconds.
The latch clicks back, soft. Jax stacks behind me on the right, his sidearm low and ready, and I push the door inward with the muzzle of mine, sweeping the room corner to corner with the discipline of muscle memory built somewhere a long way from medical school.
Empty.
Bed unmade. Suit jacket over the desk chair, sleeves of a white dress shirt rolled neatly at the cuff and laid across the blotter the way a man lays down armor when he intends to put it back on.
Briefcase open on the desk, contents shifted, two folders stacked unevenly against the lamp.
The wet-room sound of a shower running behind the bathroom door at the far wall.
I motion Jax to hold the entry. He nods, settles his back against the inner wall by the door where he can see the corridor through the peephole and the room from his peripheral, the same blocking he'd take at a corner on a course.
I cross to the desk. My eyes catch the suit jacket first and the suit jacket is what tells me everything before the bathroom door opens.
The lapel is bloodied along the inside fold, dark red dried to brown, the kind of bleed-through that means a split somewhere on his face dripped while he tried to keep it off the outside fabric.
Beneath the chair, his dress shirt is balled and damp, the collar darker than the rest, three small spots that should not be there.
Same goddamn place. Same ribs.
I don't know it yet. My hands know it.
The water shuts off. The bathroom door opens twelve seconds later and my brother is standing in it, a hotel towel around his waist and another in his hand pressed against his side, and the sight stops the room.
Landry LeBlanc does not flinch. He sees me, sees the weapon at my hip, sees Jax at the door with his hand on his own, and his green eyes do exactly what they did when we were boys and he caught me coming in through the kitchen window at two in the morning.
They go flat. They go formal. They calculate.
"Remington."
The split lip has been cleaned. The bruise along his jaw is six hours old, already deepening from red to purple.
His left pupil sits slightly larger than the right under the bathroom's recessed bulb, and the towel against his ribs presses with the kind of careful pressure that means it hurts to breathe.
"Landry."
I holster the Sig. I cross the room in three steps and he does not step back. He tightens.
"I don't recall asking for company."
"You didn't." My hand finds his chin and tilts it toward the bathroom light before he can lift his guard, and his other hand comes up reflexively to brush me off, the same gesture he used to use when Mama tried to comb his hair after church.
I don't move. I press the orbital bone below his left eye with my thumb and watch the pupil response and the pupil response is slow on the left and his jaw locks under my fingers.
"Stop."
"How long ago."
"Stop."
I move my fingers along the mandible, pressing gently at the angle where the bone curves toward his ear.
He flinches and the flinch tells me what I need to know about the joint.
I drop the chin and slide the wet towel away from his side and the bruising spreads across the lower left quadrant, deep purple fading to green at the edges, and when I press two fingers against the ninth and tenth ribs he sucks air through his teeth and the sound is the same sound our father used to make picking himself up out of the boat.
Same ribs. Lower cage, left side, same goddamn place.
The scar under my own shirt pulses once.
For one bad second I am eighteen and pressing my hands against someone who shares my blood and my bones and feeling the damage underneath, and the basement smell of the house we grew up in is in my nose and my mouth and Landry is the same Landry standing in the bathroom doorway at two in the morning in his pajama bottoms saying come on, Tripp, get in the bath, we'll clean it before Mama sees.
Landry's eyes drop to where my fingers have stopped moving against his ribs.
"Are you quite finished."
"Not even close." I press again, lighter. "Breathe in."
He breathes in. Shallow, guarded, the kind of breath that stops short of where the pain lives. Contused, not cracked. He will be miserable for a week.
I step back. Give him the distance his posture has been demanding since I walked in.
"Now tell me what happened."
He puts on a robe. He sits down at the desk. I lean against the dresser, arms folded, and Jax stays by the door because Jax has been read by Landry's eyes twice now and knows that the third time will turn into a question.
"I had a meeting at three." The heir's voice is back, the one that survived eight years of distance unaltered, pulled tight as wire. "American Civic Trust. Quarterly briefing on the grant disbursement schedule for the literacy initiative. I've sat that meeting twice a year for six years."
I do not move. American Civic Trust. Five-oh-one-c-four, Blanchard board chair, central hub of the network Vanessa's team has been mapping for ninety days.
I do not move and my face does not move and the only place the information lands is the part of my chest that has been bracing for this since the wheels went up at SFO.
Pulled at the threads. The threads pulled back.
"Who else was in the room."
"Three names you'd recognize." He lists them.
Two are LeBlanc-side advisors I grew up hearing at Sunday dinner.
The third is a Baton Rouge attorney whose firm represents a media fund I have been reading internal memos about for six weeks.
"And a fourth man, introduced as a board observer.
He sat in. He didn't speak during the briefing. "
"Describe him."
"Sixties. White hair, cut close. Athletic build under a Brooks Brothers suit. Watch was a Patek. He noticed I noticed."
I file the description against three faces in a folder Cole keeps in San Francisco. Two of them are dead. One of them is supposed to be in Brussels.
"Then?"
"Then the briefing ended and the observer asked me to stay behind.
" Landry's fingers find the edge of the desk, pressing flat against the laminate.
"He had two questions. He wanted to know whether LeBlanc Holdings had been approached recently about restructuring our advisory exposure to the Trust. And he wanted to know whether I'd spoken to my brother in the past month. "
The room recalibrates.