The gun room is quiet.
Outside the compound is fully awake now; voices, boots, the smell of coffee from the main building, the ordinary noise of people who belong here living their morning. Grudge is somewhere in that noise, drinking coffee that will go cold in front of him, looking at the middle distance, waiting for news that his sister is alive.
I look at the screen one more time. The truck at the tree line. The sticker on the rear window catching the cargo light at the edge of the frame. The frame I almost didn't look at, the one I'd been dismissing as unusable. A photographer's eye doesn't miss things.
Except when it does. Except when it needs thirteen passes to see what was always there.
"Okay," I say. I save the exports, close the document. "Let's go find Templar."
Judge looks at me for a moment with that look, the one that sees whatever it's looking at without deciding in advance what it's going to find. Patient, direct, completely present, no performance anywhere in it.
Something in my chest does something inconvenient.
"Okay," he says, and leads the way out into the morning.
I follow him through the compound and think about useful, about the gun room two nights ago, and about how thoroughly I have spent seven years making myself someone who doesn't need anything from anyone.
That project is not going well.
Chapter 8
Judge
The plate comes back in eleven minutes.
I send the text to Faye at the DMV at ten in the morning and she sends the reply before I've finished my second cup of coffee. Salvatore Morata. 1987 Ford F-250, dark green. Registered address on County Road 14, Magnolia Bend. One prior, a DUI from 2009, pled down, served no time.
Grudge's uncle.
The man who raised him.
I take the phone to Templar's office and close the door. He reads it. His expression doesn't change. He hands the phone back and looks at the ceiling for a moment.
"Grudge can't know yet," I say.
"No."
"We need to move on Sal before he knows we're looking."
"Quietly. We sit on County Road 14, we watch, we build a picture." He looks back at me. "You and Recon. Nobody else."
I go find Recon.
We're on County Road 14 by noon.
Recon's truck, not our bikes. We park a quarter mile down from Sal's address under a stand of pines and watch. The salvageyard is visible from here, a cinder block building, stripped vehicles, and a chain link fence with a padlock.
The dark green F-250 is parked on the far side of the building, close to the tree line and barely visible. He's here.
We sit for two hours. A delivery truck comes and goes. A man in coveralls works the yard. Nothing else.
At two-fifteen my phone rings; an unknown number.
I pick up.
Static. Then a voice, low, controlled, the specific cadence of someone who has made calls like this before and knows exactly how many words to use. "You pulled a plate this morning. Salvatore Morata. I'd stop looking in that direction."
The line goes dead.
