A café. Not a field office. Easier for everyone involved.
I write that down too.
"Of course," I say. "What time?"
We agree on nine o'clock. I thank him and hang up. Then I pack every card into the bag, all of them, every frame, pick up my jacket, and go.
The walk from the hotel to the French Quarter takes twelve minutes. I've made it a dozen times over three years of shooting this city and I know it by feel, by landmark, by the quality of light at different hours. This morning the light is already thick withhumidity, the sky going white at the edges the way it does before a Gulf Coast day commits to being brutal.
I walk and I think about frame thirty-one.
A photographer's eye doesn't stop working just because the camera is in the bag. The image is still there, still turning. The cargo lights, the silver at his temples, the specific arrangement of a face in the moment before a man knows anyone is watching. I've been staring at that face for the better part of an hour. I will know it when I see it.
The café on Chartres is small, with wrought iron chairs, black and white tile, chicory coffee, and the damp of the morning coming in through the open door. I take the room in before I take anything else: four occupied tables, a couple near the window with a map spread between their plates, two men at the back with their eyes on their phones, a woman alone at the counter. Front door. Kitchen in the back, which means a back exit. One window to the street, painted shut by the look of it.
He's at a corner table. He stands when he sees me coming, and the recognition lands before I've taken three steps. Same jaw, same eyes, same precise arrangement of a face I have been carrying in my eye all morning, now standing in a navy suit with a warm, professional smile.
The man from the bayou is a DEA agent.
He's smiling at me like I'm exactly where he wants me.
"Ms. Meyers. Vincent Delacroix." He extends his hand. "Thank you for coming in."
"Of course." I shake it, sit down, and put my bag on the floor between my feet where I can feel it against my ankle. "I wasn't sure who else to call."
"You did exactly the right thing."
He signals the server. I order coffee, wrap both hands around the mug when it arrives to keep them still, and I talk.
I give him the shape of the story and none of the substance: the blind, the pre-dawn drive, the sound of engines in the dark, I was scared and I left.
I don't tell him about the memory cards. I don't tell him about frame thirty-one, the one with his own face lit clean in the cargo light, sharp enough to count the silver in his hair.
He asks careful questions. Geography, timeline, how close I was, what I could make out in that light. The questions of a trained investigator establishing the reliability of a witness, and underneath them the questions of a man checking what I know against what I'm not supposed to. I answer with enough to seem cooperative and nothing he can use.
He has kind eyes. I notice the craft of them; warmth built in deliberately, the way a set decorator builds warmth into a room, every element chosen and placed. I've photographed enough people in enough situations to know the difference between eyes that are kind and eyes that have learned to perform it.
His have learned.
After twenty minutes I set my mug down. "I'm sorry, but could I use the restroom? I've been anxious all morning."
"Of course." He gestures toward the back.
I pick up my camera bag. His eyes move to it just for a second, the flicker of a man who wants to say something and can't find the framing that wouldn't give him away. I give him the slightly apologetic smile of a woman who takes her bag everywhere out of habit, and I walk toward the back of the café.
The kitchen is narrow and loud, two cooks and a dishwasher, nobody paying attention to me. The back door is propped open with a milk crate, the alley behind it bright and already stinking in the morning heat.
I go through it without looking back.
I walk at a steady pace for four blocks before I start running.
Not a sprint. A jog, purposeful, the way a woman runs when she's late for something ordinary. I know this city. Three years of shooting it means I know which streets move, and I take those, cutting through alleys until I come out on Bourbon where it's already filling up with tourists finding their bearings.
I find a bar that's dark, cold, and half-empty and slide into the corner booth with my back to the wall. I pull out my phone and call David.
He picks up on the second ring. "Jesslyn. How'd the shoot go?"
The normalcy of it — his voice, that question, the assumption that I'm calling to check in the way I always check in after the first day of a shoot — almost breaks me. I press my hand flat on the table and breathe.
