"Which means Delacroix has someone at the tip line, or access to the monitoring."
"Or both."
She nods, and I watch the road and let her work through it. She thinks the way good analysts think: in systems, in connections, following implications without needing to be walked through them. Whatever she does with a camera, she didn't get it by pointing it at pretty things and hoping.
She stops asking somewhere around Hattiesburg.
The questions don't dry up. I can feel that, the inventory still running behind her eyes. But she stops putting it into words, and what replaces the questions is something I notice with the part of my brain that notices things before I give it permission. She's watching me now instead.
Not obviously. Not the way an amateur does it, staring until you feel it and look over. She watches the way she photographs, I'd guess. Peripherally, patiently, catching what's actually there rather than what she's looking for. I can feel it on the side of my face like a change in light.
I pull off for gas outside Hattiesburg. One of those interstate stations that exists only to be passed through, all flat white fluorescent light and concrete. I get out and start the pump and she gets out the other side and stretches, both arms over her head, and I look at her over the roof of the truck.
She's taller than I expected. Lean, angular, with the physical economy of someone who spends a lot of time in the field. No wasted movement, no self-consciousness about the body, just a person who lives in it practically. The camera bag is still over one shoulder even out here, even stretching at a gas station in the middle of Mississippi, and something about that detail lands on me in a way I don't examine too closely.
She catches me looking.
She doesn't say anything about it, just holds the look for a second, steady and unhurried, then goes inside the station. She comes back with two coffees and hands one to me across the roof of the truck without asking how I take it.
Black. She got it right.
I take it without saying anything, and she doesn't expect me to. We get back in, pull onto the highway, and neither of us remarks on any of it.
She drinks her coffee, watches the Mississippi tree line, and doesn't ask any more questions. The light goes flat and then gold and then starts to fade as we push north, the sky going wide and orange at the edges, everything on the verge of something.
Somewhere past Laurel the coffee is gone and the silence between us has settled into something that doesn't need to be filled, which is rarer than people think. Most silences have an edge to them. You can always tell within thirty seconds whether they're comfortable or not. This one is neither. It's just present. Two people in a truck with their own versions of a long day running alongside each other without touching.
She falls asleep against the window somewhere in the long straight stretch before Magnolia Bend starts to feel close. I don't notice it happening, just notice at some point that she's stopped being alert and started being absent, her shoulder against the door, her head tipped toward the glass.
Twenty minutes later, her head tips off the glass and finds my shoulder.
I feel it happen. The slight weight of it, the warmth, the way she doesn't startle or correct herself because she's too far under to know. Her hair is against my jaw. I smell something clean, nothing strong, just there.
I should shift. Move slightly, let her head find the window again, put back the distance that's supposed to exist between a Saint on a job and a woman he picked up from a bar four hours ago.
I don't shift.
I drive the last hour with her hair against my jaw, and I tell myself it means nothing. She's had the kind of day that would level most people, walked through it with more composure than I've seen from trained men in worse situations, and her body is collecting what it's owed. She fell asleep in a moving vehicle the way people fall asleep in moving vehicles.
I am not remotely convincing, even to myself.
The Magnolia Bend exit comes up and I take it slower than I need to, not examining why. The roads narrow, the Spanish moss picks up in the last of the evening light on either side, and I know every turn to the compound without thinking, which is useful because I'm not entirely thinking about the road.
I'm thinking about how long it's been since I've let anything get this close. Not this specifically. Just anything. Close enough to matter, close enough you'd feel the absence of it. I stopped allowing that a long time ago, and I've maintained it without much difficulty.
It feels less maintained than usual right now.
She stirs when I slow for the compound gate. Lifts her head, blinks, takes a second to locate herself the way people do coming out of a hard sleep in an unfamiliar place. Then she straightens, pushes her hair back, and looks out at the compound in the evening light.
"We're here," I say.
"I can see that." Her voice is rough with sleep. She looks out at the gate, the fence line, Kourtney already coming across the lot toward the truck. "Is that who's meeting me?"
"Kourtney. She'll get you settled."
She picks up the camera bag and doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks out at the compound with the same steady attention she's been running on everything all day.
"Thank you," she says. "For coming to get me."
