SEVEN Wells #2
"Hopefully the third-grade level graphs will make it easier for them to grasp," I say, turning back to my screen, clicking off the window and pulling up the one that is safe for other eyes.
She lingers for a second, her eyes locked on me. I don't look at her.
She moves toward the door, and the room shifts with her absence before she's even gone. The air is thinner, and I hate clocking it.
"Cera."
She stops and turns back.
"Make sure everyone gets your deck before the meeting. I don't like sitting there waiting for things to land when I'm in the middle of my presentation."
Her mouth curves, not quite a smile.
"On it."
She leaves before I can come up with anything else. There is nothing left to say, unless I start inventing reasons to hold her here. The door clicks shut, and the silence fills the room like water.
I light a cigarette and let the smoke curl toward the ceiling. I can smoke in my office because I had a top-of-the-line purifier installed. No one likes cigarette smoke anymore, so I make it disappear.
My hand tightens around the mouse as I bring the minimized window back up. Then, my gaze shifts to the door.
I force it back to the screen and pull up the Singapore breach logs. The packet captures load in neat rows, timestamps, and IP addresses, and authentication failures that paint the shape of the intrusion. I've been sitting on this for two days, waiting for the next thread to surface.
The next wire transfer hits at 14:47. It's the same shell company in Malta and the same credit union in Baton Rouge. The pattern is real. The question is whether it's a coincidence or something more.
I flag the account and start building the trace map, watching the money carve a path through jurisdictions designed to bury it.
I zoom in on the Baton Rouge node and cross-reference the account holder. The name pings back clean, no criminal record and no prior flags in our system. A sixty-two-year-old retired schoolteacher who probably has no idea her credit union account is washing money for a Singapore breach crew.
This belongs with Ridge. I save the file and close the window anyway. Right now, it is just suspicious, nothing I can act on.
I never contact Peoria during the day. But I have never wanted to talk to her as badly as I do right now.
I open my OnlyFans account and send her a message from one of my VPN servers.
Any chance you're around tonight to meet? I'll make it worth your while.
I stub out my cigarette and look out at the black night over the Mississippi.
Peoria answered within the hour and agreed to meet at nine, earlier than usual. It is still an hour away, and I haven't been able to settle on anything since she wrote.
Since the job, she cannot sit with me for hours anymore, even with the calls moved an hour earlier. When she first mentioned finally getting a new position, I braced for the rest of it: the slow fade, the nights that thin out until she stops showing up at all.
But she still shows up three times a week, as reliable as anything I own. I try not to measure how much that grounds me, or how much I have come to count on it.
A news alert sits unread at the top of my feed with my father's name in the headline. I open it like everything with his name on it, braced and reading anyway.
It's a small thing, a notice. The Krewe of Argentum is honoring him next month for the dockworkers' children he funded for decades, the schools and the scholarships, the one charitable habit of his that wasn't entirely for show.
The piece calls him the victim of a mugging in the Warehouse District last year. I read the line twice, and the old, ugly satisfaction settles in. We buried it so well that a man tied to a chair in a warehouse became a robbery gone wrong by the time it hit the morning paper.
It's a grim thing to take pride in. I take pride in it anyway. A murder investigation would have scared off every partner and every dollar he ever shook a hand for. The lie is what kept the company breathing.
There's a photo with the piece, an old one from a gala years back. My father stands in the center, mid-laugh, looking like the version of him I almost never got. Ridge is on one side of him. Vin is on the other, mid-laugh with him, the closest thing to a brother my father ever had.
I linger on my father's face longer than I mean to, and something in the picture pushes me back toward the thing I've never finished, the money I traced to what it paid for and never once to where it was born. I've let it sit too long.
It's been sixteen months since that October night. I still think about it every day.
I'm reaching to close the article when one of my own alerts fires in the corner of the screen, a name I flagged a long time ago and never took down. I open it before I've decided to.
Longshoreman found dead in his apartment off Tchoupitoulas, an apparent overdose, no sign of forced entry, no suspicion of foul play
Then I read the dead man's name. Ronnie Louvre.
I know it on sight, a name I buried and never expected to dig back up. He was one of the two men who stood guard outside the warehouse the night my father was killed. He was a footnote, a loose end nobody bothered to pull once the case was closed and the people who closed it were satisfied.
The official version reads clean if you don't look too hard.
After my father was killed, we chased the obvious enemy first, Boudreaux, the rival who'd wanted our lanes for years.
When that didn't hold, the thing with Coco happened, the kidnapping that nearly put the whole city at war and pulled every one of us in the wrong direction at once.
By the time the smoke cleared, all of it pointed at the Duvalls, a Gulf logistics family caught running product through our port.
The story wrote itself from there. Duvall moved drugs through Stone, my father found out, Duvall had him killed to bury it, and the family made sure Duvall answered for every bit of it.
The book closed. Everyone who mattered agreed it was finished.
I never fully agreed. The money that was paid for the hit never resolved to a single name, and a freight family that size doesn't sit on that kind of cash offshore. I told myself it was grief making me see a hand where there was only a closed case.
Now he's dead, neat and quiet, more than a year after this city shut the book on all of it.
My thumb goes still on the screen. Men like him don't overdose on a schedule.
They don't turn up this clean and this convenient long after everyone agreed there was nothing left to find.
Someone made sure he stopped being a loose end, which means whoever actually ordered my father killed didn't die with the Duvalls.
He's still out there, still cleaning, patient enough to wait a year between cuts.
I need to know who is still out there. And I need to know why.
Nine o'clock waits for me across town. I carry Ronnie Louvre's name and my father's face toward it, and for once, I’m not reaching for her to forget the day. I am reaching for her because of it.