"I know that."
"Maria—" He stops. Starts again. "She was my niece. She grew up in my house some summers. I taught her to drive."
His voice holds. Barely. "I know what I did. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I didn't know what was in those containers. I knew. I knew when her name came up missing and I knew before that."
He looks at me directly. "I'm telling you anyway. So someone knows that I knew what I was."
There's nothing to say to that. I don't try.
Recon has already found the shovels. Two of them, leaning against the cinder block wall of the main building where tools like that always end up in a working salvage yard. He sets one at Sal's feet without a word.
Sal looks down at it. He looks at me. He understands what it means and he doesn't argue about it, which tells me that he worked out what was coming and made his peace with the shape of it. He picks up the shovel.
We walk him to the back of the property, behind the rows of stripped vehicles, to where the ground is soft enough near the drainage line that runs along the rear fence. Recon marks the dimensions with his boot. Four feet by seven. Sal starts digging.
He digs without speaking. The afternoon light is flat and specific over the Delta, the kind of light that makes everything look like it has always looked and will always look this way, indifferent to whatever happens under it. The shovel goes in and comes up and the dirt piles beside the hole.
Sal works steadily, which surprises me. I expected him to slow, to drag it out, and he doesn't. He digs the way a man digs when he's accepted a thing and is doing the last work he's going to do with the particular care of someone who understands it's the last.
It takes forty minutes.
When the hole is the right depth, Sal climbs out, sets the shovel against the fence post, and stands at the edge of it looking down. He doesn't look at me.
He looks at the hole for a long time the way you look at something that is yours in a way nothing else is.
"Tommy's going to want to know where I'm buried," he says.
"He's not going to know you're buried here," I reply.
Sal nods. He understood that before he asked. "Tell him I was proud of him," he says. "Whatever he thinks of me. Tell him that."
"I'll tell him."
He nods again. He sets the shop rag on the fence post, carefully folded, the way you put something down when you know you're done with it. He faces away from me, toward the far tree line. His shoulders set and he stands there straight.
I step up behind him. I press the barrel to the base of his skull at the junction where it meets the neck, the spot that makes it fast, that guarantees nothing goes wrong and nothing lingers.
He's breathing. I can feel it.
Then I pull the trigger.
The shot is flat and close. Sal drops straight down into the hole. Not all the way; the hole is deep enough but his body catches on the edge.
Recon steps forward and settles him the rest of the way without comment, methodical, the way Recon does everything. The shop rag stays folded on the fence post.
I holster my piece, pick up the second shovel, and we fill it in.
The filling takes less time than the digging. It always does. Recon finds a section of old chain link from the scrap piles.
We lay it over the turned earth and pile stripped engine blocks on top of it, the kind of arrangement that will look like storage to anyone who isn't looking for something specific. In six months the ground will have settled. In a year there will be nothing to see.
I look at the spot for a moment. Sal Morata, sixty years old. The man who raised Grudge. The man who stood at the tree line in the bayou dark and watched his niece loaded into a container and kept his mouth shut because the math worked out better for him that way.
I don't feel nothing. The men who claim they feel nothing are lying or broken.
What I feel is the weight of a thing that had to be done and was done, which sits differently in the chest than easy or clean; heavier than either, and necessary. Necessity sometimes leaves a mark on you.
We walk back through the pines to the bikes.
