It’s a full table. Every patched member is present, which means the chapel is tight with bodies and the kind of quiet that settles before something nobody wants to say out loud gets said.
Templar is at the head. Pawn is to his right, and I’m beside Pawn. The Morata Brothers Salvage file is on the table.
Grudge is at the end of the table. He's known since last night. I told him myself, in his room, after Recon confirmed Sal's associate network and the picture became undeniable.
He sat on the edge of his bed with his forearms on his knees and listened to everything without interrupting, and when I finished he looked at the floor for a long time and said nothing. That was worse than anything he could have said out loud.
This morning he came to the breakfast table and ate and didn't speak, and when Kourtney put her hand on his shoulder he didn't pull away.
He sits at the end of the table now and looks at nothing.
I lay out the file. Sal Morata knew the operation's schedule. He showed up at the bayou clearing before the loading startedand stayed until the containers were sealed. Not to work. To watch and confirm.
He's been feeding the operation local intelligence for long enough that two men knew exactly which gap in our fence to cut and how long they had before the patrol rotation would catch them. His niece disappeared from a parking lot in Magnolia Bend. He lives in Magnolia Bend. He was standing at the tree line watching those containers get loaded. He knew exactly what was in them.
Grudge speaks once. "He knew it was her."
"Yes," I say.
"He watched it happen."
"Yes."
Grudge nods once, short, and goes back to looking at the table. That's all he gives us, and it costs him something to give it.
The rest of church is business. Pawn lays out the tactical problem. We have forty-eight hours at most before the operation decides Sal is a loose end and handles him on their own timeline, which means we lose whatever he knows about the route structure and the local network. Templar listens. Recon gives the security report. The vote is unanimous.
Church ends at twelve forty-seven.
Recon rides beside me, our bikes the only noise between us. Sal's address is the house behind the salvage yard on County Road 14. We park a quarter mile short, in the same stand of pines as before, and we walk in on foot.
Sal is in the yard.
He's bent over the engine of a stripped F-150 when we come through the gate. He doesn't hear us until we're close enough that running is off the table.
He straightens up slowly and turns and looks at us, and what crosses his face isn't surprise. It's the expression of a man who has been waiting for this and has run out of road.
He's maybe sixty. Silver hair. Hands roughened by decades of this work. The kind of man who coached Little League and drove ninety minutes round trip to watch his nephew play football on Friday nights.
He wipes his hands on a shop rag.
"Tommy doesn't know," he says. His first play, the only card he has left. He thinks if he can convince us Grudge is in the dark, it buys him something.
"He knows," I say. "We told him last night."
Sal goes still. That lands on him hard, harder than us being here, harder than anything else I could have said. The card he's been holding is gone.
He looks at me for a moment with the specific expression of a man watching his last option disappear, and then something in him settles into a different kind of stillness.
"How is he?" he asks.
The question catches me off guard in the way genuine things do. He's not bargaining. He's not pivoting. He just wants to know how his nephew is.
"He's standing," I say.
Sal nods. His jaw is working. He looks at the shop rag in his hands like he's trying to remember what he was doing before we came through the gate.
"He looked up to me his whole life," he says. Not a plea. Just a fact he needs to say out loud before he can't anymore. "I was the one there for him. Whatever else I did."
