Page 180 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

I left her there and walked back through the Sanctum’s long corridor toward the exit, the fluorescent light casting everything in the same institutional gray, and I thought about a man who had taken his sixteen-year-old daughter to a cold-storage facility on the West Bank to show her how a man with real power operated.

The distance between the lesson he’d intended and the one she’d actually absorbed was going to cost him everything.

I spent the rest of that Friday making phone calls that had nothing to do with the thing I was planning.

That was how you did it. You didn’t move toward the target. You rearranged the landscape until the target moved toward you.

The federal DEA field office in Metairie received an anonymous tip—through two redirected numbers and a burner routed through a cell tower in Baton Rouge—that a regional logistics company on Veterans Boulevard had been used as a front for trafficking pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl precursors through false medical-supply manifests. The tip was detailed, professional, and included three specific manifest numbers that corresponded to real shipments that could not be explained cleanly under scrutiny. The tip also named Trey’s personal vehicle, which would be parked in front of the building at seven the following morning because Trey was a creature of habit, and I’d had eyes on the Metairie office since Yaya first mentioned it.

At the same time, a man named Claude—who owed me a debt that predated my father’s grudges and would never appear on any document connecting him to the Landry family—made contact with Corinne through a mutual acquaintance in the freight industry. Claude, presenting as a compliance officer from a national shipping carrier, indicated that Baptiste Logistics had been flagged for audit following an anomaly in two recent federal disaster relief billing submissions. The audit, he explained regretfully, would include physical inspection of all currently manifested cargo in the regional fleet. He mentioned, with the appropriate mixture of professional sympathy and bureaucratic helplessness, that such audits tended to move quickly once initiated.

Corinne was not stupid. I’d done enough research to know that. She had spent two decades keeping Victor’s financial architecture clean, and the thing about people who were very good at keeping secrets was that they recognized exposure the way other people recognized fire—not by reasoning through it but by feel.

She made a call within forty minutes of Claude’s visit.

I was parked three blocks from the Metairie office when Priest, sitting in a surveillance vehicle near the building, confirmed the call had gone through. He said it in the way he said most things these days—tired, careful, with the specific quality of a man who had spent time in an off-books jail cell, reconsidering his relationship with other people’s violence. I let him say it that way. He’d earned the right to be tired for a while.

“She called an unlisted number,” Priest said. “The phrase was, priority routing, West Bank.”

There it was.

“How long before Trey moves a vehicle?”

“Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow morning.”

“Tonight,” I said. “Victor doesn’t wait when he activates this. He said luck is for people who can’t afford to plan.”

Priest was quiet for a second. “Where’d you hear that?”

“From someone who knows him.”

The cold-storage facility on the West Bank sat at the end of a gravel access road between a decommissioned processing plant and the river. From the outside, it looked exactly like what the county records claimed it was, a building waiting to be demolished, its corrugated metal skin the color of rust and old weather, the loading dock overgrown at the edges, and the lot poorly lit. The lock on the main gate was new. That was the tell. Eleven years of pending demolition, and someone was still changing the locks.

I arrived at two in the morning with four men—not my full crew, not a show of force. The objective wasn’t to announce myself. The objective was to be there when Victor arrived and to control every element of the space before he walked into it.

We went through the side access, which Yaya had described from memory with the precise recall of a woman who had spent her whole life paying attention to exits. Inside, the building was cold—genuinely cold, the industrial refrigeration units still functional on a dedicated power line that didn’t appear on the public utility records. The main floor was large and open, the kind of space designed for pallets and machinery, the overhead lighting on motion sensors. I disabled the sensors and left three men at different positions while I moved to the far end of the building where the loading dock faced the river road.

We waited two hours and forty minutes.

The vehicle came without headlights. That told me Victor had been here before at night, knew the approach well enough to navigate it in the dark. A black car, older model, plates I already knew were registered to an LLC that didn’t exist in any state I’d checked. The driver’s door opened, and a man got out—compact, careful, moving with the deliberateness of someone who had assessed the area from the road before pulling in.

He was alone. That surprised me for a moment. Victor Baptiste—sixty-one years old, architect of a thirty-year fortune, a man who had worked with people who killed children and then gone home and eaten dinner—had come to collect his escape money by himself. No guards. No escort.

Because that was how much he trusted everyone.

He used a key to open the side door of the facility, and the motion sensors he expected to disable weren’t where he’d left them. The lights didn’t come on. He paused. I heard him breathing in the dark, recalibrating. The breathing of a man deciding between the voice that said go back and the hunger that said the money is here.

The hunger always won with men like Victor.

“Lights,” I said.

The overheads came on in sections—not all at once, which would have felt dramatic. In sections, slowly, the way a room fills with the specific quality of light you can’t escape.

Victor stood in the middle of the floor with his hand still on the door.

He looked at me across the empty space of the building, and he had the specific, experienced eyes of a man who had been in dangerous rooms before. Not surprised. Recalculating. I watched him scan the corners, find Priest, find the other positions, understand the geometry of it.

“Amai Landry,” he said.