Chapter Five
The funeral home felt like home.
Burial moved through the empty rooms with the ease of a man who'd spent ten years in buildings exactly like this one—prep rooms and viewing parlors and the narrow corridors built for pallbearers and quiet footsteps.
The Greenville location had been closed for three years, but the bones were good.
Solid. The kind of construction that held together even when everything else fell apart.
He checked the windows again. Tested the locks on the back door. Made sure the boards he'd nailed over the broken glass would hold if someone tried to force their way through.
Behind him, Diane watched from the doorway of the old workroom.
"You look comfortable here."
He paused, one hand on the window frame. "Most people don't like funeral homes."
"You're not most people." She crossed her arms, leaning against the doorframe. "You move through this place like you know where everything goes. Like the layout makes sense to you."
It did. The flow of a funeral home was designed for a specific purpose—receiving the dead, preparing them, presenting them, and finally releasing them into whatever came next.
Burial understood that flow the way he understood breathing.
The way he understood the weight of a spade in his hands and the particular silence of a fresh grave.
"I spent ten years in buildings like this," he said. "Picking up bodies for the parish. Bringing them to rooms like that one." He nodded toward the prep area. "After a while, the layout becomes instinct."
"That's what I mean." Diane's voice was careful. "You're more comfortable in a building designed for death than you were in my flower shop."
The words landed harder than she probably intended.
Burial turned to face her. In the dim light filtering through boarded windows, her face was half-shadowed, but her eyes were clear. Watching. Waiting for something he wasn't sure he knew how to give.
"Your shop smells like growing things," he said finally. "Like stems that are still alive, arrangements that are still becoming what they're meant to be."
"And that unsettles you?"
"I'm not used to it." He held her gaze. "I'm used to the after. The finished. The things that are done becoming and just... are."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "That tells me something about you."
"What does it tell you?"
"I'm not sure yet." A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "But I'm going to figure it out."
She pushed off the doorframe and disappeared into the workroom. A moment later, he heard her moving things—buckets, containers, the salvaged supplies she'd insisted on bringing from the van.
Burial followed.
The workroom had been the funeral home's arrangement space, back when it was operational.
Counters built for casket sprays and standing wreaths, storage for ribbon and foam and the specific tools of funeral floristry.
Most of it was empty now, but Diane had commandeered the space like she'd been born to it.
Buckets of salvaged flowers lined one counter. Ribbon spools she'd grabbed from the van sat in neat rows. Her scissors—the ones she'd been reaching for when Raymond's men came through the window—lay beside a pile of stems she was already sorting.
"You brought all this from the shop?"
"I brought what I could carry." She didn't look up, her hands moving through the flowers with practiced efficiency. "The funeral is in—" She checked her watch. "Eight hours. Mrs. Delacroix is expecting an arrangement, and I'm going to make sure she gets one."
"The brothers are sourcing roses. White ones, like you said."
"I know. Crossroad texted me." Her mouth curved. "He asked if baby's breath was the same as regular breath. I told him to look for small white flowers that look like clouds."
Despite everything, Burial felt his own mouth twitch.
He watched her work. The way her hands moved through the stems, sorting and trimming and setting aside the ones that wouldn't last. The focus in her eyes, the set of her shoulders.
She was building something beautiful in a room designed for grief, and she was doing it like it was the only thing that mattered.
Because to her, it was.
"Tell me about the delivery routes," he said.
Diane looked up, confusion crossing her face. "What?"
"You said you've been delivering flowers to every corner of Greenville's south side for years. That means you know the neighborhood better than anyone—which buildings have traffic, which alleys get used, where people go when they don't want to be seen."
Understanding dawned in her eyes. "You want me to map Raymond's operation."
"I want you to tell me what you've seen." He pulled a chair up to the counter, settling in across from her. "The gambling sites move, but the patterns don't. Runners have routes. Collectors have schedules. And a woman who delivers funeral flowers probably notices more than people realize."
Diane was quiet for a moment, her hands still moving through the stems. Then she set down her scissors and met his eyes.
"The building on Maple and Fourth," she said.
"Back room traffic after nine PM, mostly men, no deliveries except catering twice a week.
I've brought sympathy arrangements to the dry cleaner next door three times—the owner's wife can see the alley from her window.
She told me once that the men who use that back door always smell like cigarettes and desperation. "
Burial filed the information away. "What else?"
"The warehouse on Industrial. Supposedly abandoned, but I've delivered to the office building across the street and there's always cars in that lot after midnight. Nice cars. The kind people drive when they've got money to lose."
She kept talking, and Burial kept listening.
The picture that emerged was more detailed than anything the brothers had gathered in three years of watching Raymond's operation.
Diane knew which alleys connected to which buildings, which back doors were left unlocked for quick exits, which businesses had owners who looked the other way for the right price.
She knew because she'd been driving these streets for years, delivering flowers to funerals and weddings and hospital rooms, noticing things because a woman alone in a van learned to notice everything.
"The church on Oak Street," she said. "Pastor Simmons orders sympathy wreaths every other week—he runs grief counseling for gambling addicts. Half the people in those meetings owe money to Raymond. I've seen the collection cars parked outside, waiting for the sessions to end."
"They track the addicts through the grief counseling?"
"They track everyone." Her voice went hard. "Raymond's operation isn't just gambling. It's a system. He hooks people, bleeds them dry, and then uses their desperation to hook more people. And he's been doing it so long that half of Greenville doesn't even see it anymore."
The information settled into Burial's mind like soil settling over a grave. Layer by layer, piece by piece, the shape of Raymond Hebert's operation became clearer. Not just twelve gambling sites—a network of control that touched every corner of Greenville's south side.
And this woman had been driving through it for years, seeing everything, saying nothing, because who would she have told?
"Thank you," he said.
Diane blinked. "For what?"
"For seeing what other people missed." He held her gaze. "For remembering it. For telling me now, when it matters."
Something shifted in her expression. The hardness softened, just a fraction.
"I've been watching Raymond's operation bleed this neighborhood for five years," she said quietly. "Every arrangement I've delivered to a family destroyed by gambling debt. Every funeral for someone who couldn't handle the pressure anymore. I've seen it. And I couldn't do anything about it."
"You can now."
Her eyes met his. "Is that why you're here? To stop him?"
"I'm here because you called me." The truth came out before he could stop it. "But stopping Raymond—dismantling what he's built, piece by piece, until there's nothing left but holes in the ground where his operation used to be—that's what comes next."
The sound of an engine cut through the quiet.
Burial was on his feet before the bike even stopped, moving to the window with the smooth economy of motion that came from years of being the last line of defense. Through a gap in the boards, he saw Crossroad pulling up to the back entrance, two plastic bags dangling from his handlebars.
The door opened. Crossroad stepped inside, shaking road dust from his cut.
"Got your roses," he said, holding up the bags. "White ones, like the lady ordered. And the cloud flowers."
"Baby's breath," Diane corrected, but she was already crossing to take the bags, her hands gentle as she pulled out the stems. "These are good. Fresh. Where did you find them?"
"Florist in Clarksdale. She wasn't happy about the early morning visit, but she came around."
Burial didn't ask what "came around" meant. Some things were better left unspoken.
"We've got a problem," Crossroad continued, his voice dropping. "Thibodaux's out of the hospital. He's been asking questions all over the south side—where the florist went, who she's with, where we might be hiding her."
Burial's jaw tightened. "How close is he?"
"Close enough. Scouts say he found the road to this place about an hour ago. He's pulling together his collection crew." Crossroad's eyes were steady. "They'll hit us at dawn."
Diane had gone still, the roses forgotten in her hands. Burial watched her process the information—the fear that flickered across her face, quickly suppressed, replaced by the same stubborn determination he'd seen in her shop.
"How many?" she asked.
"Thibodaux and maybe six collectors." Crossroad glanced at Burial. "Nothing we can't handle, if we're ready."
"We'll be ready."
Burial moved through the building with a new purpose, cataloging everything with fresh eyes.
The narrow corridors that would channel attackers into chokepoints.
The heavy doors that could serve as barricades.
The viewing rooms with their single entrances, perfect for trapping men who didn't know the layout.
He'd spent ten years in buildings like this one. Knew the flow of them, the logic of their design. A funeral home was built to control movement—to guide mourners through a specific sequence of spaces, to keep the dead separate from the living until the proper moment.
That same logic could turn it into a killing ground.
"Crossroad." Burial's voice was calm. Steady. "Call the brothers. Full crew, armed and ready. I want everyone here before midnight."
"And the florist?"
Burial looked at Diane, still standing at the workroom counter with white roses in her hands. She met his gaze without flinching.
"She stays," he said. "And she finishes her arrangement. Mrs. Delacroix's mother gets her flowers, no matter what Thibodaux brings through that door."
Crossroad nodded once and disappeared into the night.
Burial turned back to the building, his mind already mapping the defense. Chokepoints here. Barricades there. Brothers positioned at the critical junctions, ready to funnel Thibodaux's collectors into spaces where numbers didn't matter and knowledge of the ground did.
The funeral home would become what it was always designed to be—a place where people ended up horizontal. And the man who'd spent ten years putting bodies in the ground would be waiting for them with the calm of someone defending ground he understood at a molecular level.