Wells #2
I keep breathing through the constriction that starts low and climbs. "Yeah, for the most part. Left for college, lived outside the city until my dad died, but close enough that I was around a lot. I never got too far away."
"I bet it was a great place to grow up. So much to do and see."
"I can't complain. How did you end up in New Orleans?"
She shrugs, the motion quick and dismissive, already pulling back from what she offered.
"I needed to get out of Covington. I came for a job."
She takes another sip of her drink. The straw rattles against the ice. She doesn't elaborate, and I don't push.
"Maybe you can show me where you grew up sometime. I've never been to Covington."
She nods. "I'd like that. We should make a day of it. There's a cool gator hatchery there. I haven't been in years, might be fun to check out."
"Absolutely. That is one thing I can say I've never seen."
She locks her arm in mine and rests her head on my shoulder. I like this, the two of us in the daylight, more than anything that ever happened behind a screen and a mask.
I pull in front of the valet stand of the Black Orchid, the lounge bar my dad treated as a second office. It's still where Vin spends most of his non-working hours.
The sun hits the windshield at an angle that makes me squint. My phone is dark on the passenger seat.
I could leave this alone. Ridge told me to drop it. The case has already eaten a year of my life. But Dane's account sits on one side, Vin's memory on the other, and between them is a gap I can't close without asking questions that might fracture something I've built my life around.
The morning with Cera lifted something I've been carrying about all of this. I stood in the sun and moved through shapes I didn't know my body could make and enjoyed being with her, with no threads to trace through portals, no screens, no bank records or phone logs to pull apart.
But those things are my life. I might enjoy experiencing things with her, but I can't completely shut all of this down.
I pull my phone and message Vin.
You here yet? Just pulled in.
The reply comes just as the valet opens my door.
Already in a booth. Ordered you a bourbon.
I step out of the car and hand him my key.
Vin looks up from his phone as I approach the table. He's in a collared shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, his phone in one hand and a glass in the other. He stands to greet me.
"Wells."
He extends his arm and offers a firm handshake. His expression is calm, patient, the way it always is when I walk in with something tangled.
"What you got that was so urgent to meet on a Saturday night? Couldn't wait until Monday?"
Vin is into restoring antiques and has turned into a sort of hermit. He doesn't like his weekends to be disrupted because that means he has to pull himself away from his workshop.
"Something's come up with Dad's case, and I wanted to run some of the details of that night by you."
Vin's mouth tightens. He exhales through his nose.
"Ridge told you to drop it, Wells. You can't let that keep weighing you down. It's been over a year now."
"I know what Ridge told me."
"Then why are you still obsessing about it?"
I slide into the booth opposite him.
"The staging moved through our lanes. A vendor slot opened during a window when no one was watching. The payments behind it thread toward the offshore money I couldn't crack from above. Someone inside buried a murder inside ordinary operations."
Vin doesn't move. His gaze stays level.
"You traced all that?"
"Enough of it."
He nods, slow and deliberate.
"What else?"
"I went to Florida. Found Dane Carter."
Vin's expression doesn't change, but something flickers behind his eyes.
"Dane's still breathing?"
"I can't say what happened after I left, but it was about a week or so ago."
"What did he tell you?"
I measure my next words. This is Vin. He's family in everything but blood. He stood beside my father for thirty years and held this company together after he died, supporting Ridge as he stepped in.
"He said Duvall paid him and Ronnie to stand outside and call a burner if anything went sideways. And he said neither he nor Ronnie ever called you in that night, that you showed up on your own.
Vin reaches for his glass, takes a sip, and sets it down with a soft clink against the table.
"I don't know who called me, but someone called me there that night."
I don't answer right away, wondering if it was Duvall. Or maybe even Juno. I make a note to run every burner from that night to where the money behind it sleeps, not just who dialed who.
"My statement's been on file for over a year, Wells. A discrepancy got flagged on the Gulf shipment that night, manifests that didn't line up, so I drove over to check it myself. Twenty minutes, in and out. I found nothing, and I was gone long before your father ever turned up."
''Who would it have been if not Dane or Ronnie? What made you think it was him?"
"Maybe Dane's lying to save his own ass, I don't know.
Dispatch flagged it, or Ronnie did, I don't remember which, and it doesn't matter.
You want to hang your father's murder on a drunk's recollection of who dialed a phone two years back?
Why are you asking? I don't understand what this has to do with anything. "
"It matters because I want to know everything about what led up to my father being executed. Surely you want that too, right?"
"We already know, Wells. Son, you've got to understand there are some things we will never know. The big one, we do. Duvall wanted your father dead to serve his own needs. Now he's dead, too."
I don't answer. Vin watches me, his gaze sharp but not defensive.
Every answer he gives, most things I already know, arrives a half beat before I finish the question. Every discrepancy gets wrapped in context I can't argue with because I wasn't there and Vin was.
He leans back again, his hands folding on the table.
"Wells, the offshore trail ate a year of your life. You traced every shell company, every trust, every dead end, and you came up empty. You really want to let it consume you again?"
The weight I've been carrying since Florida shifts. The pressure eases slightly because he's right.
“No, I don’t. You’re right. That was an especially dark year.”
"Then let me work the inside-access question. Quietly. No one knows those operations the way I do. If someone buried something, I'll find it. Can you trust me to do that?"
I nod. The relief is real. I’m handing the shadow to someone safe, competent, and loyal. Vin is someone who doesn't want this to destroy me like it almost did before.
"If I were you, I'd stop looking inside these walls and start looking at who stood to gain the most from your father in the ground. The buyers he kept freezing out, the lanes he wouldn't share. Start there, not with a dead drunk's memory of a parking lot."
“You’re right. Thank you."
Vin stands. He walks around the desk and claps a hand on my shoulder.
"That's what I'm here for."
I walk out and wait for my car to be brought around. The sun has set completely. The spring night is cooler than it was this morning at the park.
Vin doesn't waver. He never has. And he's thorough with his recollection, unlike an untrustworthy nobody like Dane.
Vin, family in everything but blood. The relief of having someone I can trust work through this with me, even if to put it to rest, is enormous. My brother wants nothing to do with it, but I can't just let it go. Not yet. Leaving a thread alone has never been something I know how to do.
I'll keep pulling it, quietly, like I always have. Not because it will change anything, or bring my dad back. Because it's there.