Page 13 of Dominion's Guard
By the time the mug is empty, the thought I've been circling for the last hour finally stops circling and sits down.
Lawrence lived in the Garden District. His wife filed the missing persons report yesterday morning. His address is public record, information you can pull from a property tax database in under two minutes if you know where to look.
If NOPD and Rapier Strategic are working the case from the outside, building evidence chains and conducting interviews, they'll get to Lawrence's house eventually. Andy will request access. Remy will coordinate through whatever channels thePascal family maintains with the old-money families of the Garden District. They'll do it by the book, and the book takes time, and time is the one thing I keep hearing isn't on anyone's side.
I could get there first. I could be in and out before anyone knows I was there. The wife filed a missing persons report, which means she's scared and probably spending time at a relative's house or a friend's. Garden District homes have alarm systems, but Garden District alarm systems weren’t designed to keep committed, career criminals out. In other words, they aren’t designed to keep out people like me.
The thought is clean and sharp and it arrives like a homecoming, and the familiarity of it is its own kind of warning.
I told myself I was done. I shook Margot's hand and I walked away from the life. I've spent years pouring drinks and earning honest pay and building something that didn't require gloves and exit strategies, years proving that Margot's investment paid off.
But Lawrence is dead. The cameras were wiped. Someone with serious resources executed a man in my parking garage and erased every trace of it in minutes.
I am sitting in my apartment, surrounded by Rapier Strategic operatives, counting ceiling cracks while a detective with a deadline tries to build a case from nothing. The same detective who told me to my face that he knows I'm holding back, and who I am fairly certain will not stop pulling at that thread until the whole sweater unravels.
If Andy finds out what I can do before I find out what happened to Lawrence, the conversation shifts fromwhat did you witnesstowho are you really, and that is a conversation I intend to have on my own terms. Or preferably never.
I know how to get answers faster. I just have to break every promise I made to do it.
The decision isn't dramatic. There's no moment of resolve, no deep breath, no steeling myself for what comes next. The decision is my body moving before my mind finishes the argument, the same way it moved when a job went live and planning gave way to execution.
I pull on black leggings and a black long-sleeve shirt and the soft-soled shoes I wear behind the bar because they grip without sound. A pair of nitrile gloves from the box I keep for bar prep goes into my jacket pocket, the same gloves I use to handle citrus and raw garnishes, repurposed for something Margot never had in mind when she taught me food safety. My hand pauses at the bottom of my bag where the tension wrench and pick set live, tucked into a leather wallet I haven't opened since Margot hired me. I've carried them every day since Margot caught me, not because I planned to use them, but because they're mine, and they remind me of the distance between who I was and who I'm supposed to be.
Tonight the distance closes.
The Rapier Strategic detail is watching my building entrance and the street-facing windows. My building is a converted warehouse with a renovation history that involved cutting corners and leaving structural remnants that a building inspector might call code violations and a former burglar would call gifts.
The service corridor on the ground floor leads to a utility room that connects to the basement, and the basement has a hatch that opens into the narrow alley behind the building where the dumpsters sit. The hatch has been painted shut for years, but I freed it during my first week here out of old instinct, a way out nobody maps because nobody thinks of trash access as egress.
Andy would map it. The thought arrives uninvited as I lower myself through the hatch into the humid alley air. Andy reads rooms with the same eye I turn on buildings, and if he everstood in my building he'd find the service corridor in under five minutes because he thinks like a man who expects people to run. The fact that I'm proving him right by running in a direction nobody anticipated is either deeply ironic or deeply stupid. Possibly both.
The alley connects to a cross street a couple of blocks from my building. I walk it at a normal pace, just a woman heading out early, and I don't look back. If the operatives are covering the front entrance and the street-facing perimeter, this angle is outside their surveillance arc. Rapier Strategic is thorough, but they're protecting me from external threats coming in. They didn't account for the threat they're protecting going out.
My MINI Cooper is in the parking garage where it always is, second level, same spot. I take the pedestrian entrance from the cross street rather than the main entrance, which puts me on the first level with a flight of stairs between me and the car.
The garage is empty at this hour, the overhead lights buzzing their pale greeting into the air that still carries a faint astringent bite underneath the usual exhaust and motor oil. I take the stairs quickly, and the old rhythm settles into my body like a language I never forgot: soft feet on hard floors, weight distributed heel to toe, each step placed rather than taken.
I ease the MINI out of the spot with the headlights off, letting the engine idle low through the garage before I hit the street and merge into the thin early-morning traffic heading uptown.
The Garden District is a short drive away. I know the neighborhood with the same intimacy I bring to every wealthy residential corridor in New Orleans: its architecture, its alarm tendencies, its landscaping habits, and the rhythm of its household staffing schedules. Old money keeps predictable hours. Early risers walk their dogs by seven. Housekeepers arrive between eight and nine. The gap before that is the windowwhen the houses sit in their gardens breathing slowly, waiting for the day to fill them.
Lawrence Blanchard's address was easy enough to find. Orleans Parish property records are online, searchable, and free. I pulled it before I left, sitting on my bathroom floor with my phone balanced on my knee while the last of my courage argued with the first of my skill set. If Andy ever gets hold of my search history, the look on his face will be worth the felony charge. Almost.
The house is what I expected: a graceful two-story with a wide front gallery, columns framing a door painted the deep green that Garden District homeowners favor because it signals wealth without shouting about it. Live oaks line the block, their branches knitting a canopy over the street that filters the early light into patches on the sidewalk. The landscaping is maintained by a service, evident from the uniform hedge line and the commercial-grade mulch around the flower beds.
I drive past once without slowing. The driveway is empty, the windows are dark, and the morning paper sits uncollected on the steps, which means either the delivery was cancelled or nobody's been home to bring it in. A neighbor's house shows kitchen light, but the angle faces away from the Blanchard property.
I park several blocks over on a residential street where a blue MINI Cooper with an Irish Channel resident sticker will be unremarkable. I sit for a full minute, scanning the rearview and the sidewalk and the slow pulse of the morning around me. The old protocols fire without effort: I check the perimeter, identify the exit route, and calculate how long it takes to reach the car on foot at a run.
My hands are steady. My breathing is shallow and even. The low thrum in my blood is one I recognize from every job before this one, the controlled anticipation that sharpens every sense and narrows the world to inputs and exits.
I walk to the Blanchard house with my hands in my jacket pockets and my head down. The side yard is accessible through a wrought-iron gate with a simple latch and no padlock. The alarm panel is visible through the glass sidelight beside the back door, an older residential system that blinks green for unarmed and red for armed. It blinks green. Either the wife disarmed it when she left or she never set it, which happens more often than security companies want to admit, especially in neighborhoods where the crime is white-collar and the residents believe wrought iron and good insurance are sufficient protection. Margot would call it hubris. I call it an open invitation from the universe, and who am I to be rude.
The back door is locked with a standard deadbolt and a knob lock. I pull on the nitrile gloves, and the snap of thin rubber against my wrists is so familiar it makes my teeth ache. The tension wrench slides in first, and the pick follows, and my fingers find the pins with a familiarity that sends a flush of warmth up my forearms and into my wrists. The deadbolt turns in seconds. The knob lock follows.
It has been years since I've done this. My hands don't care. They remember every angle, every micro-adjustment of pressure and torque, and they execute with the fluid confidence of a bartender free-pouring a Sazerac in the dark. The comparison sits in my throat like a laugh I can't afford to let out.
The door opens into a kitchen that smells like old coffee and dried flowers. I close it behind me, leave my shoes on, and listen. The house is silent in the way that empty houses are silent, a quality of stillness that occupied houses never achieve because human beings displace air and create friction just by existing. This house is holding its breath, though the signs of recent occupation are everywhere: a coffee mug rinsed and left in the sink, a cell phone charger plugged into the wall with nothing attached, a woman's cardigan draped over a kitchen chair.
