Just her. Just this. Just the specific warmth of a woman who knows exactly who she's kissing and is choosing it anyway.
I pull back enough to look at her. Her eyes open slowly. There's something in her face that she's not hiding. Not the careful composure she carries everywhere, but something underneath it, something that got here before she decided to let it.
She looks at me the same way I imagine I'm looking at her.
"I don't know how to do this," I say.
"I know," she says. "Do it anyway."
I take her hand. She threads her fingers through mine and leans her head against my shoulder, which she's never done before, and I don't move.
I sit there with her weight against me in the Mississippi dark and I think about Sal setting the rag on the bumper, and the six names I run before I sleep, and Jesslyn in the gun room at two in the morning finding the thing I couldn't find.
There's a version of my life where none of this happened. That version doesn't have her in it. I used to think I was built for that version. I kept the distances right and the connections shallow and I told myself that was discipline.
Maybe it was just fear with a different face.
Inside, Kourtney calls about dinner. Grudge answers, his voice coming from somewhere in the back of the building. The sound of a man who has been sitting with something hard and decided to come back to the table.
Jesslyn lifts her head.
"He's hungry," she says.
"He's always hungry."
"Good sign."
I stand. I pull her up by the hand I'm still holding and we go inside, the screen door bangs behind us, and the evening ends the way evenings end: with food and brothers and the ordinary noise of people who have been through something still choosing, in spite of everything, to sit down together.
Chapter 11
Jesslyn
Ifind it four days after Sal Morata went into the ground in his own salvage yard.
I've been working the background frames; the ones I shot before the operation started, before anything was happening, when I was setting up for herons, the light was still good, and my lens was running on autopilot while my brain catalogued the morning.
In the far background of one of those frames, behind the cypress and the waterway, there's a structure. I've been at it for two hours with the enhanced resolution, pulling what I can from the degraded edges of the frame, and what I can pull is enough.
Corrugated metal roof, partially visible. A dock post. The specific angle of a commercial fishing shed that I've seen before, on the eastern edge of Lake Borgne where the marsh opens up and the road runs along the water for a mile before it cuts inland. I spent three days shooting that area two years ago for a wetlands piece, and the geography has been sitting in the back of my mind since I first started mapping the bayou frames.
If I'm right, I can put the operation's staging point within a few hundred yards. Not the clearing. That, I already placed. But where the route originates before it hits the bayou. Where thegirls are held before they're moved. If that structure is what I think it is, it's a thread someone with federal authority can pull on that could unravel the whole operation up the chain..
I need to be in New Orleans to confirm it. I need the specific ground-level vantage point, the road, the angle from the water. Satellite imagery won't give me what I need. I know this kind of work and I know what it requires.
I close the laptop and go find Judge.
The common room is empty by ten. The brothers drift out in ones and twos. Kourtney is last after she's wiped down the bar, Sisco to his office with his laptop under his arm, Recon heading to the perimeter for his check. The compound settles into its nighttime sounds.
Judge is at the far end of the table with the security assessment Recon filed, a pen moving across the margins. He looks up when I sit across from him.
I tell him what I found. I walk him through the frame, the structure, the angle, what it means if I'm right. I tell him I need to go to New Orleans and get eyes on the eastern shore of Lake Borgne. It’ll take half a day, and I’ll be back before dark.
He listens to all of it without interrupting.
"No," he says.
"The lead is real."
