I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but the tears weren’t there. Just the image, stuck on a loop behind my eyelids: the man on his knees, the sound, his body dropping sideways. And the shooter’s face, lit by the streetlight, looking right at me.
The police came in eleven minutes. Two uniforms first, then more. They cleared the alley and asked me to come out of the stockroom. I stood up, pulled back the bolt, and walked out on legs I couldn’t entirely feel.
The detective arrived an hour later, after the uniforms had taken my statement and the paramedics had confirmed what I already knew. He introduced himself as Perry Hebert. Forties, rumpled, running on caffeine and Carnival-week adrenaline with a department stretched past breaking. He shook my hand, sat down across from me at the bar — my bar, which was now a crime scene adjacent — and told me what I’d stumbled into.
The victim had ties to the Dixie Mafia’s gambling operations, and the shooter matched the description of a known enforcer. The DA was convening a grand jury. One week.
“And you’re the only eyewitness,” Hebert said, like he was apologizing for the weather.
“Are they going to come looking for me?”
He didn’t answer right away, which was an answer. He tapped the edge of the counter, and I watched him glance at the stockroom door, then the alley entrance, doing the same math I’d already done. One lock. One door. No camera.
“The enforcer knows you saw his face,” he said. “And he knows where you work.”
I poured myself two fingers of Blanton’s because nobody had told me I couldn’t and because I needed my hands busy, neededthem doing what they knew how to do. The bourbon burned going down. Familiar. Steadying.
“So what does that mean for me?”
“It means you testify, and between now and then, you’re careful.” He gave me his card. “We’ll have units checking the block. But I’ll be straight with you, Ms. Darby. It’s Mardi Gras week. We’re stretched. I can’t put someone on your door twenty-four-seven.”
He was being straight with me. I respected it. I also understood exactly what he was saying underneath it all: you’re on your own.
I locked up Proof at four in the morning and made it the two blocks to my apartment. The stairs were narrow and smelled like old wood and the Thai place on the corner. I let myself in, threw the chain, and stood in my kitchen with the lights off while my eyes adjusted. Small place. One bedroom, galley kitchen, a bathroom with a window that stuck. My grandmother’s couch against the far wall, the velvet catching the streetlight through the curtains. I’d made this apartment mine the same way I’d made the bar mine: slowly, stubbornly, with my own money and my own hands. It wasn’t much. It was enough. It had always been enough.
I double-checked the door and didn’t sleep.
I tried. Got into bed, pulled the covers up, lay there watching the shadows on the ceiling while the last of the Bourbon Street crowd howled their way home beneath my windows. Every time I closed my eyes I saw him. The forehead. The neck. The crease through his eyebrow. The casual way he’d held the gun, like it weighed nothing, like it was just another part of his hand.
At some point a siren screamed past on Chartres and I flinched so hard I bit my tongue. After that I stopped pretending.
I got up at six. Made coffee, cleaned the kitchen, scrubbed the bathroom until the grout looked new. Checked my phone twicefor updates from Hebert. Nothing. Tried the chain a third time. The morning had a rhythm as long as I kept moving, and I wasn’t ready to find out what lived in the silence when the rhythm stopped.
BY NINE A.M. THURSDAY, Sloane Woodall — my attorney, my friend, and the only woman in Louisiana more hardheaded than me — was in full fix-it mode.
“I’m hiring someone,” she said, which was how Sloane started conversations: no greeting, no easing in, just the solution arriving fully formed before you’d had coffee.
“You’re hiring what?”
“Close-protection specialist. Private security. I’ve used this firm before for clients. I’ve already made the call.”
“Sloane.” I switched the phone to my other ear. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You’re the sole witness to a Dixie Mafia execution and you live alone two blocks from your bar during the biggest week of the year. You don’t need a babysitter. You need someone who carries a gun and doesn’t sleep.”
“I carry a baseball bat and I didn’t sleep last night. Close enough.”
“Jenna.” Her voice dropped out of lawyer mode into the real one, the one she used when she meant it. “This isn’t negotiable. He’s already on his way.”
“He?”
“His name is Dane Gatlin. Ex-U.S. Marshal, now private sector. He comes recommended and he carries a gun. I’ll text you the details. I love you. Don’t argue.”
She hung up before I could. Ex-U.S. Marshal. Witness protection. The fact that Sloane had found someone whose old job was keeping people like me alive should have helped. Itdidn’t. It made the whole thing real in a way that Hebert’s card in my pocket hadn’t.
That was Sloane. She’d handled the bar’s LLC, the lease negotiation, and a noise complaint from a neighbor who hated live music, and somewhere between the legal work and the wine on her patio, we’d become friends who didn’t bother with small talk before dropping bombs. When Sloane decided you needed handling, you got handled. That was why she was a good lawyer and a terrifying friend.
My phone buzzed a minute later. Sloane’s text: his full name, the firm’s name, a headshot that told me nothing except that he was white and had a jaw, and my address listed under “client location.” So she’d already given him where I lived. Of course she had.
