Chapter 4
Judge
Echo catches me coming out of the gun room just after eleven.
He's been a prospect long enough to know better than to block a doorway, so he steps to the side and falls in beside me instead, which is the right instinct. "My uncle called," he says. "He has a situation."
I stop walking. "What kind?"
"A woman. A freelance photographer, she was out in the Atchafalaya this morning on a shoot and witnessed something she shouldn't have. She called the DEA tip line and they routed her straight to the agent running the operation." He pauses. "She figured it out before she gave him anything and got herself out."
I look at him. "Your uncle vouches for her?"
"He does."
"Where is she?"
"At a bar on Bourbon Street. He says she's been there a couple hours." Echo pulls out his phone, reads from it. "Gold hair. Camera bag. Corner booth, back to the wall."
I take the phone and look at the description. Gold hair, camera bag, corner booth. A woman smart enough to walk into a meeting with a dirty federal agent, give him nothing, walkout the back, and put herself in a defensible position while she waited for help she wasn't sure was coming.
"Tell your uncle I'm on my way," I say, and hand the phone back.
The drive to New Orleans takes almost four hours. I don't turn on the radio. I think about what Echo told me — the tip line, the agent, the café on Chartres — and I think about the four girls, the way I always end up thinking about the four girls when I have unstructured time, because my brain has decided that's the problem it wants to work whether I give it permission or not.
The bar is exactly the kind of place a smart woman picks if she needs somewhere to disappear for a few hours: dark, busy enough that nobody clocks one person sitting alone, close enough to the street that you can see what's coming. I go through the door and find her before I've taken three steps.
Back corner. Booth facing the entrance, back to the wall, a glass she hasn't touched in a while on the table in front of her. Gold hair pulled back, camera bag on the seat beside her rather than the floor, which tells me she's been keeping it close enough to grab.
She sees me the second I clear the doorway. I watch it happen; the attention sharpening, the body going still, the quick read she runs on me before I've crossed half the distance between us. Not panicked. Calculating. The look of a woman deciding whether I'm the thing she's been waiting for or the thing she needs to run from.
I reach the table. "David sent me," I say.
She holds my gaze for one beat, then picks up the camera bag, slides out of the booth, and walks toward the door without another word.
I follow her out into the Bourbon Street afternoon and the thick heat, and I think:this is going to be a long four hours.
She doesn't ask about the truck.
Most people ask about the truck. It's a big, black, unremarkable thing, the kind of vehicle specifically designed to not be looked at twice, and somehow that makes people want to comment on it. She gets in, puts the camera bag between her feet, and looks straight ahead through the windshield while I pull out and point us toward the highway.
We're past the city limits before she says anything.
"Where are we going?"
"Magnolia Bend."
"Mississippi."
"Yes."
She looks out the window at the afternoon moving past. "How long?"
"Four hours."
She nods and goes quiet. I can feel her thinking; the particular quality of a silence that isn't empty but full, a person turning something over and deciding how much of it to put into words.
"The club," she says. "The Saints Outlaws."
