I liked him immediately.
I spent the rest of the morning installing the camera. The alley was worse in daylight: narrow, one exit, a dumpster that blocked the sightline from the stockroom door. I mounted the unit above the entrance, wired it to feed both our phones, and tested angles until the full alley was covered from entrance to dead end.
Then I stood where the shooter had stood.
Twenty feet. She'd been right there, arms full of cardboard, two steps past the dumpster. The streetlight would've caught her face the way it caught his. And the only reason she was alive was that she'd run, and that stiff deadbolt had held long enough for her to get inside.
My jaw went tight. I forced it loose and went back inside.
"Camera's live," I told Jenna, pulling up the feed on my phone. "Motion alerts. Thirty-day loop."
She glanced at the screen, nodded, and went back to the well.
At 3:47 that afternoon, she texted me a screenshot. The alley camera feed. A fat orange tabby sitting on the dumpster lid, staring directly into the lens.
SUSPECT IN CUSTODY, the text read.
She was six feet from me. Wiping bottles, not looking up. Fighting a smile and losing.
I pocketed the phone and didn't respond. Because if I responded I'd laugh, and if I laughed she'd know I thoughtshe was funny, and if she knew that, this job was going to get complicated.
FRIDAY NIGHT WAS LOUDERthan Thursday. Four days before Fat Tuesday and the Quarter had tipped past busy into feral. Second lines rolled through the cross streets every twenty minutes, the brass so loud it rattled the bottles on Proof's back wall. The sidewalks were body-to-body, the air sweet with spilled daiquiris and powdered sugar and the perfume of a hundred women who'd come to New Orleans to do things they wouldn't do at home. Balconies above the street were packed, beads flying, someone flashing for throws on the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann while a crowd roared approval. The whole city smelled like sex and sugar and the river, and the heat hadn't broken even after dark -—it just thickened, pressed against the skin, turned every doorway into a gasp of air conditioning that hit like a cold hand on a hot neck.
Jenna handled it like a pilot handles rough air: steady hands, quick decisions, small adjustments that held the machine together while nobody noticed the shaking.
I held my spot at the end of the rail. Huck worked beside her and their rhythm was built without discussion -—she ducked, he reached, she poured, he restocked, two people moving through tight quarters without collision. She poured drinks from three conversations at once without writing down a word. She cut off a guy who outweighed her by a hundred pounds and did it smoothly enough so that he thanked her for it. She put a hand on her barback's shoulder when he dropped a tray and said whatever he needed to hear, because he straightened up and kept going.
I'd run details for politicians and executives and a federal judge who conducted a courtroom the way some people conductorchestras. Jenna ran Proof with that kind of command -—total control, zero waste -—and she did it in heeled boots with her hair sticking to the back of her neck and her wrists turning fast on the pours and a smile that was real and entirely her own.
At some point on Friday night the reasons I was watching her stopped being professional, and I didn't catch the exact moment they changed.
Around ten she leaned across the bar to hear a regular over the noise, and her hair fell forward and she tucked it behind her ear without breaking the conversation, and her fingers were still wet from the ice well, and I watched a drop of water slide down the side of her neck and trace the line of her collarbone and disappear under the black fabric of her top. Something pulled low in my gut watching it disappear. She laughed at whatever the guy said and her whole face opened up -—not the customer smile, the real one -—and her back arched slightly as she straightened and I felt myself go hard on the barstool, a full, unmistakable throb that had nothing to do with how it’d been since a woman was in my bed and everything to do with the specific curve of this specific woman's throat in this specific light.
I shifted on the stool and checked the entrance and the hallway and the courtyard door because I needed to look at anything that wasn't her.
She came to the end of the rail at eleven-fifteen. Wrote on a cocktail napkin, folded it once, and slid it across the wood to me.
"Unknown number," she said. "Rang twice. Dead air, then they hung up."
I unfolded it. Neat handwriting. The number, the time -—11:12 PM -—and underneath: 2nd call. 1st was 9:47, didn't pick up.
Two calls. She'd gotten the first one ninety minutes ago and hadn't said a word.
"You should've told me when the first one came."
"You were watching the room. I was pouring drinks."
"Jenna."
"I'm telling you now." Steady eyes. No quiver. No softening. She'd logged the times, written the number, and brought me the evidence like she was handing off a delivery receipt. "Probably a burner."
"Probably."
"If it happens again—-"
"I'll write down the time and hand you a napkin."
She turned and walked back to the rail, and that was the end of it.
