Updated Mar 24, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 2: Leon’s report
ROMAN
Leon reported within the hour.
He was standing in the Noir’s private upper office at one-twenty in the morning, still in his set clothes from the evening’s security rotation, and he was giving the report with the particular care of someone who had understood immediately that the information required more than standard handling.
“She’s a saxophone player,” Leon said. “Plays the late set at Frenchmen’s most nights, sometimes at the Spotted Cat. She’s been on Frenchmen Street three years.” He paused. “She was on Kerlerec at twelve-forty. The three o’clock shift was cycling the route. The cycle took him through the alley.”
The three o’clock shift. Roman looked at his operations report from the evening and already knew who’d been on that route. Gabriel, who was twenty-two and still learning the management of shifts in public space, who had been told a dozen times that the city had ears and not all of them were his own people.
“Did she run?” he said.
“No. She stood there for approximately sixty seconds and then walked home.”
He processed this.
“She didn’t call anyone,” Leon continued. “Her building has a street camera — I checked the feed. She walked in, lights on, lights on for the rest of the night.”
“She’s still awake.”
“Yes.”
Roman set down the operations report.
He knew the name before Leon said it. Ines Delacroix, saxophone player, Tremé. He’d known her music for three years without ever crossing her path deliberately — which was to say, he’d been deliberately not crossing her path for three years, because his panther had a very clear opinion about her presence in his territory and the opinion was one he’d been managing with the care it required.
He’d heard her play three years ago at a small bar on Royal Street, before she’d moved up to the late Frenchmen slot. He’d been passing and the music had come through the open door and his panther had said: *that one.* Not the music abstractly — the player. The specific person behind the sound. He’d known what that meant. He’d kept walking.
He’d kept walking for three years and managed his panther’s restlessness with the tools available to him, which were: distance, occupation, and the iron discipline of twenty years running the city’s most demanding territory.
“She’s not going to let it go,” Leon said.
Roman looked at him.
“She’s a musician. She’s sharp. She’s been in this city for years — she knows when something doesn’t fit the picture.” He held his position at the door with the particular stillness he used when he was delivering information he anticipated was unwelcome. “She sat at the window with a notebook. She was writing something when the feed cut at four AM.”
He was writing a notebook.
“She’s building a case,” Roman said.
“That’s my assessment, yes.”
Roman stood.
“I’ll go myself,” he said.
Leon didn’t argue, which meant he’d already expected this and had decided not to waste time on the argument. He said: “In the morning, or now?”
“Morning,” Roman said. “She needs to sleep.” He paused. “So does Gabriel, apparently. Brief him on corridor management.”
“I’ve already spoken to him,” Leon said. “He understands.”
“Good.”
Leon went to the door.
Roman said: “She didn’t run.”
Leon paused.
“You said she stood there for sixty seconds and then walked home.”
“Yes,” Leon said.
“Not panicking. Not running. Just standing there.”
“Just standing,” Leon confirmed. “And then walking. Normal pace.”
Roman thought about this. The specific quality of someone who had seen something that should have been impossible and had stood with it, not fled from it, for sixty counted seconds.
He said: “All right. Morning.”
Leon left.
He stood at the window of the upper office and looked out at the city.
New Orleans at two in the morning was its own world — the streets still alive, the music carrying, the specific quality of a city that had never fully accepted the idea of night as a stopping point. He’d been running this territory for fifteen years and he knew its sounds the way a musician knew their instrument: by feel, by the particular voice of each quarter, by what it told him when the sound changed.
Her music had been part of the city’s sound for three years. Not background — present. Specific in the way that some music was specific, the way it occupied a particular frequency and held it. He’d heard it from the upper office on nights when the wind was right and the Frenchmen Street clubs were open and she was playing, and his panther had been expressing opinions about it since the Royal Street bar three years ago.
He’d had the discipline to not act on those opinions.
Tonight Gabriel had made the discipline irrelevant.
He thought about what it meant that she hadn’t run. Most people — the ones who witnessed something that couldn’t be explained — ran, or froze and then ran, or went home and called someone and started the process that created the exposure his territory’s entire management structure was designed to prevent. She’d done none of those things. She’d stood, she’d processed, she’d walked home, and she’d started writing.
She was figuring it out.
That was the thing that his panther was finding — he tried not to notice this — interesting rather than threatening. Most people encountered the unexplained and looked for the door. She’d sat down with a notebook.
He turned from the window and went to the operations desk and pulled her file.
The file was thin — she wasn’t a person of concern in the standard sense, which meant the background check was minimal. What he had: Ines Delacroix, thirty-five. Born in New Orleans, third ward. Music program at Loyola, then the professional circuit. Three years on Frenchmen Street at the level that meant she was genuinely good, not just good enough for the city’s tourist-facing venues. The late set at Frenchmen’s was competitive real estate.
He looked at the photograph in the file, which was a pulled image from the club’s public calendar. She was on stage, saxophone at her lip, eyes closed in the way musicians closed their eyes when they were in the thing rather than performing it.
He put the file down.
He went to bed.
He lay awake for longer than he found acceptable and thought about the sixty seconds and the notebook, and his panther had several things to say about it that he declined to engage with.
He got up before dawn and dressed and was at her building on the Tremé by eight.
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