Page 56 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

What Marcus Webb also did and had been doing for years before he was doing the restaurant business, was provide clean, professional infrastructure for Rahsaan Boudreaux’s operation. Accountants. Legal services. Property fronts that moved money through enough legitimate transactions to look ordinary on paper. He wasn’t carrying product. He wasn’t pulling triggers. He was the kind of man who made himself indispensable by ensuring that the men who did carry product and pull triggers had somewhere to put the proceeds when it was done.

“What about him?” I said.

“He’s dead,” Priest said. “Found in his office tonight. The building is on Carrollton, half a mile from Xavier. His assistant found him when she came back to get her phone charger she’d left behind. She’s in hysterics. It’s on the news, Amai. Channel 4 broke it forty-five minutes ago. Channel 6 picked it up right after. Webb had a public profile—civic board, restaurant openings, the whole thing—so this isn’t the kind of hit that gets filed under criminal activity and disappears.”

I said nothing.

“You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“The reporters don’t have a connection to anything yet,” Priest said, “but they will. Because Marcus Webb is the kind of man who journalists have sources near. Somebody in his orbit is going to talk to somebody, and when they start pulling that thread and they find the other two from tonight and the body in Jefferson Parish from this morning⁠—”

“Then they’ll have a story.”

“They’ll have a pattern,” Priest said, and his voice shifted in a way that told me he’d been sitting on what came next for a while before deciding to say it. “And the pattern is going to start looking familiar to people who been watching this city a long time. Because we’re not the first operation that ever moved bodies when things went sideways, and people in this city—certain people, certain blocks, certain barbershops and stoops—they count. They always count. They been counting since this morning.”

I changed lanes without signaling. The highway thinned out ahead, a long, dark stretch before the exit I needed.

“How far up is the tally?” I asked.

“Brandon heard eleven. Teal heard fourteen. I think the actual number people are tracking is somewhere around twelve or thirteen, because some of the early ones people aren’t sure to attribute or not. But the conversation is happening. On social media. In the streets.” He stopped, then added, flat and direct, “People are scared, Amai. Not just Rahsaan’s people. Regular people who live in the neighborhoods where this is landing. They don’t know what’s happening or when it stops or who decides when it stops.”

“It stops when Rahsaan runs out of places to land.”

“And how many more people have to die before he figures that out?”

“However many it takes.”

The silence on Priest’s end was different that time. Not deliberation. Not the pause of a man choosing his words carefully. It was the silence of someone who had just heard what he expected to hear and was now deciding whether he had the energy to push back on it.

He had the energy.

“Listen to me,” Priest said. His voice dropped about half a register, the way it did when he was saying something he needed me to actually receive and not just hear. “I have been with you a long time. I have been with you through things that would have broken other men, and I have never once told you your logic was wrong when it was right. But I’m telling you right now—this is not the same as what you’ve done before, and you know it isn’t.”

“What I’ve done before wasn’t enough,” I said. “Rahsaan is still breathing. Elias and Silas aren’t.”

“That’s not—” He stopped himself. Recalibrated. “I’m not dismissing what happened to them. I’m telling you that the men who are dying right now, the ones driving the numbers up on the street tally, none of them put their hands on your brothers. They were in proximity. They serviced a network. Some of them were probably terrified every day they were in it and didn’t have a clean way out.”

“Then they should’ve found a dirty way out,” I said. “I wasn’t clean when I got out from under Winston. I did what I had to do, and I went.”

“Not everybody has the resources you had.”

“That’s not my problem to solve.”

“It’s your problem when the body count gets into the news cycle, and the federal level starts taking an interest in New Orleans again,” Priest said.

That was the first thing he’d said that I let sit a moment before responding. Because he wasn’t wrong about that. Federal attention was a specific kind of disruption—diffuse, slow-moving, and unpredictable in the way that only agencies with unlimited time and no personal stakes could be. It didn’t scare me the way some men were scared by it. But it was a variable worth accounting for.

“They don’t have a direction yet,” I said.

“Not yet. But Marcus Webb’s name circulating on television tonight gives them a direction. Because Marcus Webb had enough above-ground business to generate paperwork, and paperwork has threads, and federal agencies are very patient about following threads.”

“Then we’ll deal with that when it becomes a deal.”

“Amai.” His voice was tight. “I’m asking you directly. How many people have to die before this is enough?”

I took the exit ramp off the highway, decelerated through the curve, and came down onto the surface street running parallel to the river. The neighborhood out here was quiet at this hour—houses set back from the road, porch lights on, a dog somewhere two blocks over, making its opinion known about something.