Page 55 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Red beans.”

Another pause, shorter this time. I could hear her trying not to smile through the phone. She didn’t say anything else about it, and she didn’t ask why I’d gone without telling her, and I didn’t explain. Neither of us needed to.

“You coming home?” she asked.

“On my way.”

“Okay,” she said. Just okay, quiet and easy, like that was all it needed to be.

It was.

I had about forty minutes of dark highway between me and Truth.

The truck was quiet. That particular quiet you get when you’re deep in thought about your day. I finally extracted myself down to just the road and the engine and pushed aside whatever my head tried to do with the silence.

I couldn’t let what Kaisen had going on consume me. I didn’t hate my brother; he just had to stay the fuck out of my business.

I turned the radio on low—WWOZ running a late set of brass band—and let it sit in the background while I got on the highway and opened the throttle up to seventy. The city spread out wide on both sides this time of night, all that orange sodium light and the smell of the river even through the sealed windows, and I was thinking about Marguerite Fontaine’s hands shaking on her mug when Priest called.

The console lit up. I answered on the second ring.

“You need to pull over,” Priest said.

“I’m driving.”

“Then slow down, because you need to hear this, and I don’t want you crashing into something on the ten.”

I didn’t slow down. “Talk.”

“Jefferson Parish,” he said. “Body found behind a gas station off the Westbank Expressway around nine this evening. Name hasn’t released yet, but Brandon already clocked it. Forty-two years old, ran a money service—check cashing, wire transfers, the kind of place that doesn’t ask about sources. He moved funds for three of Rahsaan’s distribution cells for the last two years.”

“I know who he was.”

“He had a wife and two daughters, Amai.”

“I know that too.”

Priest let a beat pass that wasn’t comfortable silence. He was deciding whether to press me or not.

He continued.

“New Orleans East. Two more, found in a parking lot off Read Boulevard about an hour after the Jefferson Parish call. Both of them worked for the same logistics contractor who processed Rahsaan’s legitimate-looking shipments through the port. Young—twenty-four, twenty-six. The twenty-four-year-old had been with that company fourteen months.”

“He knew what the company was doing.”

“He was twenty-four, Amai.”

“Priest.” I kept my voice even. “Men start making choices at sixteen in this city. I made mine. You made yours. Twenty-four isn’t a child.”

He didn’t argue that, which meant he’d already run through it himself and knew the argument didn’t fully land. But he wasn’t done.

“There’s more,” he said. “And this is the one that’s going to give you a problem.”

“Then say it.”

“Marcus Webb.”

The name sat in the air for a moment. I knew Marcus Webb. Not well—we didn’t run in the same social territory—but enough. He owned three restaurant properties in Mid-City and a commercial real estate portfolio that had nothing visibly wrong with it. He donated to the Seventh Ward Community Foundation. His name appeared in the business section of the Times-Picayune every eighteen months or so in the way that names appear when someone is cultivating a reputation as a legitimate businessman building something real.