My phone buzzes again, this time with a call from my mother. I let it go to voicemail, like I always do. Whatever drama she's stirring up in our hometown can wait. I have real problems to deal with now.
Those girls in the containers deserve someone to fight for them. Someone needs to speak for them, and if my photos survived the bayou water, I might be the person who can do it.
I press harder on the accelerator, eager to get back to my hotel and start making calls. For the first time since I left home eleven years ago, I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, doing exactly what I'm supposed to do.
Those bastards have no idea what's coming for them.
Chapter 2
Judge
The compound is quiet by the time I get back from Lafourche.
Three hours on the road and nothing to show for it. My contact down there, a retired deputy named Cutter who owes the club a favor he's been paying down in dribs and drabs for two years, gave me a beer, a handshake, and the same blank wall I've been hitting from every direction for three weeks.
Nobody's seen anything. Nobody's heard anything. Four girls are gone from Magnolia Bend and the surrounding area, and the silence around it is so clean it has the smell of something deliberate.
I park the bike and just sit for a minute, engine off, looking at the compound lights.
Sisco's office window is still lit. It always is at this hour. So is the gun room, because I knew I'd be coming back to it.
I pull out my phone and look at the notes app. Three weeks of leads run cold, every one of them logged out of habit. Cutter in Lafourche. A junkyard owner outside Bogalusa who heard something and then, when I drove out there, had somehow heard nothing after all. A waitress in Laurel who saw a van and gave me a description so generic it described roughly half thevans in Mississippi. The truck rental place on Route 49 where the manager has been on vacation since before the first girl went missing and we can't get access to the records without him.
I turn the phone over and get out of the truck.
Three weeks. Four girls. A trail that goes cold inside forty-eight hours every single time, like someone behind this thing knows exactly how to not be found. That tells me they've done it before, this isn't opportunistic, and there's infrastructure behind it. Four is probably not the whole number.
I've known all of that since week one.
Knowing it and being able to do anything with it are two different problems.
I go inside.
The gun room smells like solvent and old wood. I close the door behind me and don't bother with anything extra. The single overhead bulb is enough. I've got a disassembled AR laid out on the bench from earlier, and I pull up the stool and pick up where I left off.
Strip. Clean. Inspect.
My hands know what to do. The rest of me can go wherever it needs to go.
It goes to Tommy Morata.
We call him Grudge.
Grudge has been a prospect for eight months. He came to us hot-tempered and half-feral. Templar saw something in him worth shaping: good instincts, better loyalty, the kind of stubbornness that becomes an asset once you teach it where to point. Most days I'd say Templar was right.
But his sister went missing three weeks ago, and most days feel far off.
He was at breakfast this morning the same as every morning. Same chair, same time, same coffee going cold in front of him while the table made noise around him. West made a joke aboutthe Saints game that landed wrong. Boomer argued back out of reflex. Sisco read his phone. And Grudge sat in his chair, stared at the middle distance without saying a word, and nobody pushed because there's nowhere to push him toward.
Maria Morata. Twenty years old. Dollar General parking lot on a Tuesday evening. The stock clerk said she seemed fine.
They always seem fine.
I reach for the cleaning rod.
The door opens. I don't reach for anything because I know those footsteps.
"You're back." Sisco leans in the frame with his mug, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He takes in the bench, then me. "How'd Cutter go?"
