“There was a man. Forty-five, fifty, maybe. Good suit. Same stool every night, always with one hand around his glass, watching the room.” He glanced at the door as we passed. “I spent most of July finding reasons to be near that end of the bar without actually going in.”
“What happened when you ran out of reasons?”
“I climbed onto his lap.”
“And?”
“He laughed and bought me a drink. We talked about architectural preservation for two hours. Then we stopped talking, and I went home at three in the morning.
He was quiet for half a block. Then, “I was nineteen and very pleased with myself, so I probably learned less than I thought I did at the time.”
“You learned that you could go in.”
“I could go in.” He looked ahead. “He moved to Savannah, eventually. Some preservation project. We’d run into each other around the neighborhood a few times before that, and he always nodded.” Luca stopped walking and turned toward me. “I still think about something he said. About how the walls that actually matter are the ones you can’t see. You can work around the visible ones.”
He turned back toward the other end of Bourbon. “I think he was still talking about architecture,” he said.
It wasn’t a comment about architecture, and Luca knew that I knew that, but neither of us said so.
At the corner of St. Ann he stopped and pulled out his phone. He tapped a few times.
“Uber,” he said. “Six minutes.”
We waited, and the street moved around us. Someone passed by with a frozen daiquiri in a yard-long cup shaped like a guitar. A couple argued quietly in French outside a restaurant. On the balcony above the corner bar, two men leaned on the railing shoulder to shoulder. They turned toward each other and shared a kiss.
The Uber arrived. It was a gray Camry. The driver was a woman in her sixties with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror.
The car was cold inside. The air conditioning operated at full blast, and I shivered.
Luca noticed. We both sat in the back at close quarters in someone else’s car at night. The city swept past the windows, its noise muffled behind the glass.
We didn’t talk. The ride was a short one. The driver turned onto St. Charles, and the live oaks closed overhead.
When she pulled to the curb, we got out, and the heat wrapped around us immediately.
The house was empty and aggressively quiet. Dominic hadn’t returned yet. An annotated score lay open on the piano rack. Ceiling fans turned in every room.
I did a quick sweep of the ground floor—parlor, salon, kitchen, back hallway. Luca was standing in the kitchen when I finished. He’d already poured a mug of coffee for each of us.
I took mine from him and leaned against the opposite counter. “The attack will happen at the concert,” I said.
Luca turned.
“That’s not news. You’ve been certain of that since you arrived.”
“I’m confirming it.”
“All of that evidence you’ve been working from.” Luca set his mug down. “The bullet, baton, and the Orpheum sightlines.”
“Yes.”
“They all point outward.” He crossed his arms. “You’re watching the walls.”
“What should I be watching?”
“The people inside them.” He looked at me. “You’re mapping access points. I pay attention to other things. We might not get the same answer.”
“Until the answers diverge, which they haven’t—“
