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She listens to all of it without interrupting once. When I'm done, she picks up the pen, tears the four pages out of the notebook, and rewrites every one of them in the code her sister used, the one I watched her read off a phone screen in the barn. It takes her eleven minutes. Then she folds the originals, holds them to the lantern, and drops them burning into the coffee can I use for ash.

"Which way is east?" she asks.

I've trained men. The old man had me train half of the family’s crew the year I turned twenty-five, big country boys who'd been hunting since they could walk, and I had to tell some of them the same thing four times. I told her once. She didn't write it down. She didn't need to.

It should make me glad.

Instead, it makes the back of my neck go cold.

Cole Landry lives in a brick ranch on two acres off the Mill Road with a chain-link fence, an above-ground pool with a green cover on it, and a trampoline in the side yard with the netting torn loose on one side. We lie on our bellies in the pines along the east line, and I pass her the binoculars with my hand cupped over the lenses so the sun doesn't catch them.

His wife comes out at three-fifteen to get the mail. She's small, blond, wearing scrubs, and she stands at the box going through envelopes and shaking her head at one of them. At three-forty, the school bus drops two kids at the end of the drive. The boy is maybe nine and runs straight for the trampoline with his backpack still on. The girl is younger. She walks slower. She stops in the middle of the drive to look at something in the grass, and she crouches down, picks it up, and holds it close to her face. I can't see what it is from here.

I watch Evie watch the girl.

I wait for her to say something. I wait for her face to do the thing faces do when a plan meets a child. I've seen it on grown men with blood already on their hands, that little shift where the mouth goes soft and they start doing arithmetic they weren't doing a minute ago.

Her face doesn't move.

"Delilah was nine when he started working road patrol," she says without lowering the glasses. "She used to wave at his car. He used to wave back."

She hands me the binoculars, rolls onto her back in the pine straw, and looks up at the sky through the branches.

"I'm not doing this to his kids," she says. "He did it to his kids. He did it every time he drove a girl out to that barn and drove home and tucked them in. I'm just the bill."

Landry's cruiser pulls in at five-ten. He gets out, stretches, picks the boy up off the trampoline and swings him around. The boy shrieks, and the dog comes out barking from under the porch, and Landry kicks at it and misses. He goes inside. The light comes on in the kitchen.

At six-fifteen, he comes back out in jeans and a Saints jersey, gets in his personal truck, and then he stops with the door open, takes his phone out of his pocket, and looks at it. He dials. He waits. He hangs up and dials again, and he stands there in his driveway with the phone against his ear for a long time. Then he puts it away, gets back out of the truck, and goes to the cruiser instead.

"He's calling Marcus," I say.

"And he's taking the car with the radio in it."

"He's nervous."

She rolls back onto her stomach, takes the binoculars from me, and watches the cruiser back out. "Good," she says.

The Thibodeaux curve is a long left-hander on Parish 12 with a line of dead cypress along the outside and the ditch below them full of black water and cattails. There are no houses for four miles in either direction. There's one streetlight at the mouth of the curve that the parish stopped paying for sometime in the nineties, and it's been dark ever since.

We wait in my truck on an oil lease track a hundred yards back with the engine off and the windows down. It's cold, the first real cold of the year, and she has her hands jammed in the pocket of the canvas coat I gave her because hers is in her truck under the tarp. It's too big for her. The sleeves come down past her knuckles.

At eleven-thirty-one, headlights come around the bend from the direction of the Cypress, riding high, weaving a little. The light bar's off.

"Early," she says.

"He had fewer beers. He's worried."

I start the truck and pull out behind him with the lights off and close the gap on the straight. He's doing fifty in a forty-five with one hand on the wheel and the dome light on, and I can see the glow of a phone screen against his ear. When the road starts to bend, I put my lights on high and come up fast. He sees me in the mirror and brakes out of pure habit, which is exactly what I want. I put my front bumper against his left rear quarter and turn the wheel.

The cruiser comes around like a door swinging shut. The back end goes over the edge first, and the rest follows, nose up, and it slides down through the cattails into the water and stops at an angle with the headlights shining up into the dead trees.

I'm out before the engine stops ticking. Evie's out on her side with the pistol up.

Landry's already getting his door open. He's not hurt badly; the airbag's gone off and his nose is bleeding, and he's reaching for his hip with the hand that isn't holding onto the frame. I get to him while he's still halfway out, put my hand over his on the holster, and pull the gun and the hand together until the fingers let go. Then I pull him the rest of the way out by the collar and drag him up the bank, and he comes the way a man comes when he's been drinking and doesn't understand yet what's happening.

The tree line is thirty feet back from the road. I put him on his knees in the leaves with his back to a cypress stump and his own flashlight in his face, and Evie comes and stands beside me with the pistol pointed at his chest.

He squints up past the light. He sees me first, and he doesn't know me, not at first. Then he does. I watch it go through him the way it went through Marcus; that current, that stiffening.