The Mafia Biker and The Lawyer

Chapter 2

She turned back. It was him. The man from the parking lot, closer now, the MC patch was readable, it said Iron Vow across the top rocker, something she’d never heard of. He was looking at her with an expression that wasn’t quite assessing and wasn’t quite neutral something in between, like he was deciding something.

“Depends on who’s asking,” she said.

“Remy Doucet.” He didn’t extend a hand.“I heard you’re in there for Josephine Arceneaux.”

Nicki kept her face neutral. “I can’t discuss my client.”

“I’m not asking you to.” He paused. “Jo’s good people. I grew up on the same block as her for about four years, back when I was still in the Seventh. We’re not close anymore, but.” Another pause. Shorter. “What happened to her tonight isn’t random.”

“A lot of things aren’t random,” Nicki said. “That doesn’t tell me who you are or why you’re in a police station parking lot having this conversation with me.”

Something shifted in his expression.

“I’ve got people in this city. I hear things. What I heard tonight is that the charge against Jo was put together fast, which means someone already had the pieces ready to go and the someone who had the pieces ready has been buying up property in the Seventh Ward through a shell company for the last eighteen months.”

Nicki was still. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“I can be.” He looked at her steadily. “But not here.”

She studied him for a long moment. The MC patch. The comfort in his stance. The fact that he’d clearly been here before she arrived and had still been in that parking lot when she came out, which meant he’d waited.

“I don’t take meetings with people I don’t know,” she said.

“I know.” He reached into his jacket, she tracked his movement automatically and he pulled out a card. Plain, no logo, just a number. He held it out. “But you’ll look me up before you decide not to. That’s how you work.”

She took the card. “You don’t know how I work.”

“You’re Nicki Arceneaux,” he said. “Ninth Ward Legal Aid. You’ve gone up against three development corporations and a city councilman in the last two years and you’re zero for one on losses. You’ve got a reputation. I did my research.”

She put the card in her pocket. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

He turned and walked back toward the truck. The big man was already in the passenger seat. Remy Doucet got behind the wheel, and the truck pulled out of the lot without hurry, red taillights disappearing around the corner.

Nicki stood in the parking lot for another moment. The air tasted like jasmine and heat and the distant, chronic smell of the river.

She took out the card and looked at the number again.

Then she put it back in her pocket and went to get in her car.

She had a bail hearing to prepare for. She had a case file that was already wrong in ways she hadn’t named yet. She had a cousin sitting in a holding room because someone had decided she was inconvenient.

She’d think about Remy Doucet when she had time to think but she already knew she was going to call.

She looked him up before she even got home.

She was stopped at a red light on St. Claude Avenue, phone propped against the steering wheel in the way she technically knew was inadvisable, and she typed Remy Doucet New Orleans into the search bar like someone who already suspected they weren’t going to like what they found.

The results were sparse in the way that meant careful, not absent. A few mentions in local news, nothing major, nothing charged. His name appeared once in a 2021 piece about a community rebuilding effort in the Seventh Ward after a bad storm season, listed among donors alongside a construction company called Doucet & Sons that apparently no longer existed under that name. There was a brief mention in a crime-related piece from 2022 that named Iron Vow MC in connection with a warehouse dispute in Gentilly, but no charges were filed, no arrests were made, the club’s name was dropped in the third paragraph, and not returned to. His social media presence was essentially nonexistent. No personal accounts she could find. Nothing gave her a clear picture.

What she got instead was the man who moved through this city without leaving much of a formal record, which in her experience meant one of two things,either he was very careful, or he was protected, or most likely both.

The light changed. She put the phone down.

Iron Vow MC. She turned it over in her head. She’d lived in New Orleans her whole life and she’d never heard of them, which was interesting on its own. The bigger clubs, the ones with long histories and ugly reputations you heard about whether you wanted to or not. The fact that she hadn’t placed Iron Vow from the name alone suggested either they were newer, or they were quiet in a deliberate way. None of the options was exactly reassuring.

She got home at 11:15. Her apartment was on the second floor of a double shotgun in Bywater, the kind of place that had good bones and bad window seals and a landlord she had drafted two separate lease amendments for over the years, which he’d signed both times with the resigned expression of a man who knew when he was outgunned. She changed out of her work clothes, made herself eat something with leftover red beans, a heel of French bread, and sat at her kitchen table with her laptop and the arrest report she’d managed to get a copy of before leaving the station.

She read it twice.

Then she read it a third time.

The problem wasn’t what was in the report. The problem was the precision of it. Everything was correct in form, the description that had supposedly flagged Jo, the probable cause for the stop, the discovery of the package, the weight, and the classification. Whoever had written it knew how to write an arrest report that would hold up on first review. There were no obvious procedural errors, no sloppy language, nothing that would get it thrown out on a technicality before it even reached a preliminary hearing.

That was the tell, actually. Real stops, the messy, incidental kind rarely read this clean on paper. This read like someone had known what they were building up.

She made notes until past midnight, then forced herself to stop and sleep.

Jo made bail at ten the following morning. The judge set it higher than Nicki had hoped and lower than she’d feared, and a woman from Jo’s organization had shown up with a cashier’s check before Nicki even finished arguing the motion, which said something about the kind of loyalty Jo had earned in her work.

In the car afterward, Jo was quiet for a long time. She had that particular post-arrest stillness that Nicki had seen in clients before, it was the body’s way of processing the fact that it had been briefly, subject to a system it had no control over.

“You okay?” Nicki asked.

“I’ll be okay.” Jo looked out the window. The city moved past in its usual unhurried way, the old houses and corner stores and the particular quality of light that belonged only to New Orleans in the morning. “I kept thinking about my grandmother. If she’d found out I’d been arrested. She’d have…” Jo stopped. Her grandmother had been dead for three years. “She’d have made me feel terrible and also made me a full meal about it.”

“That’s accurate,” Nicki said.

Jo almost smiled. “Who’s paying for my defense? Legal Aid?”

“Legal Aid is where I work. I’m representing you as your attorney and your family.” Nicki glanced at her. “Don’t make it a thing.”

“Nicki…”

“Jo.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me when we’ve dealt with whoever put that plastic bag in yours.”

She called the number on the card at two in the afternoon, standing outside the Legal Aid office on her lunch break with a coffee she wasn’t really drinking.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Arceneaux.”

“I told you I’d think about it,” she said. “I thought about it.”

“And?”

“And I want to know what you know. But I’m choosing where we meet.”

There was a brief pause. She got the impression he was deciding whether to push back on that, and then deciding not to. “Fine.”

“Café Dauphine. Four o’clock.” She knew the place, it was well-lit, public, two doors down from a police precinct she’d worked with before. Neutral enough to be safe, busy enough that a conversation wouldn’t carry. “If you’re late, I leave.”

“I won’t be late.”

He wasn’t. She arrived four minutes early and he was already there, in a corner booth with his back to the wall and a cup of black coffee in front of him. She noted the positioning without commenting on it. Some habits were legible regardless of biography.

She sat down across from him.

In better light he was more specifically himself, His eyes were dark, and they tracked her the way someone’s eyes did when they were genuinely paying attention and had learned to be careful about it. He’d swapped the jacket for a dark shirt, but she’d seen the patch and that was enough.

“You got her out,” he said.

“That’s my job.” She put her notepad on the table. He looked at it. “I’m an attorney. I take notes. If that’s a problem, we can end this now.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Good.” She folded her hands. “Start with the property.”

He did.

What he laid out over the next twenty minutes was the kind of thing that, once you heard it, rearranged several things you’d already known into a shape that was worse than the individual pieces had been. A shell company, three layers removed, incorporated in Delaware, with a local registered agent a law firm on Poydras Street had been quietly acquiring properties in the Seventh Ward and parts of the Ninth over the last eighteen months. Cash purchases mostly, moving fast on estates and distressed sales, a few eminent domain-adjacent pressures that hadn’t made the news. The end goal, as far as Remy had been able to piece it together, was a corridor of contiguous blocks running from the river to the edge of Gentilly that would be worth an extraordinary amount to a developer who wanted to build without the obstacle of existing community infrastructure.