Page 137 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“The next day,” Hector said, turning his desperate gaze toward Priest. “We were moving through the cuts near Barataria Bay, heading toward the coastal channels. The man—Kaisen—he went down to the generator room to check the fuel transfer pumps. The woman… she got out onto the lower deck with the baby. She saw me through the wheelhouse glass.”

Hector’s voice broke. He choked on a sob before continuing.

“She ran up the iron stairs. She was crying, holding the little girl tight against her chest. She pounded on the glass. She told me her name was Truth. She told me she was kidnapped. She said her husband was Amai Landry, and that if I turned the boat around, you would give me money, you would protect my family, you would make sure nobody ever hurt me.”

Hearing her words—hearing Truth invoking my name in the middle of that nightmare—tore through me with such savage intensity that I had to grip the edge of my chair to keep from destroying the room.

She knew I was coming.

She was using my name as armor.

“What did you do?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

“I… I froze,” Hector whispered, shame burning in his eyes. “I knew your name, señor Landry. Everyone on the docks knows the Landry family. I knew if you were looking for this boat, blood was going to flood the entire city. And I knew Kaisen was crazy. The way he talked to her… he wasn’t yelling. He was smiling. He was bringing her breakfast trays, talking about how they were going to live in Texas, how they were going to raise the baby together like a real family. He looked at her like… like she was already his.”

Hector shook his head, shuddering.

“I acted like I didn’t understand English. I shook my head, pointed at the radio, and pretended I was just a dumb deckhand who only spoke Spanish. She looked at me… she looked at me like I had stabbed her in the heart. Then Kaisen came up the stairs. He led her back inside.”

“And then?” Priest asked.

“Later, we were anchored in a secluded bayou cut west of Houma, tucked behind a line of cypress trees where the channel gets narrow,” Hector said.

Hector looked up at me, his chest heaving.

“That was the night I decided to run. Kaisen had promised to drop me off at Port Bolivar near Galveston once we crossed into Texas waters. I knew that when we hit Texas, he wasn’t going to pay me and let me walk. He was going to put a bullet in the back of my head and sink my body in the Gulf so there would never be a witness.”

“How did you get off?” I asked.

“The boat has two motorized tender skiffs mounted on hydraulic davits on the stern,” Hector explained. “Small, fast aluminum boats with twenty-horsepower Yamaha outboards. At three in the morning, I lowered the port-side skiff into the water by hand. Then I fired the engine, ran it until the gas tank was dry near Plaquemines, kicked the boat into the marsh grass, and walked until I hit the highway.”

“Is the riverboat still there?” Priest demanded.

“No,” Hector said firmly. “No way. Kaisen is not stupid. The moment he woke up and saw the port skiff missing, he would know I ran. He wouldn’t stay in that bayou cut for another hour.”

“Can he drive the boat himself?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hector nodded. “He’s not a licensed master captain, but the boat has modern Garmin GPS, radar, and hydraulic steering. Any man who knows basic navigation can push that boat through the Intracoastal Waterway. And he still has the starboard tender skiff. He is not trapped, señor. He can move whenever he wants.”

Silence fell over the maintenance shed.

The only sound was the steady, rhythmic hum of the distant freight conveyor belts and the soft tapping of rain against the metal roof.

I stood up slowly. My joints popped. The physical exhaustion that had been dragging me toward the grave for thirty days was completely gone—burned away, replaced by the lethal, ice-cold clarity of an apex predator that had finally caught the scent of blood on the wind.

Kaisen was on the water.

He was piloting a two-hundred-foot, gray-epoxied, unmarked riverboat with twin Caterpillar diesels, blacked-out glass, twelve thousand gallons of fuel, and an operational range that spanned the entire Gulf Coast.

He was heading west, toward Texas. Toward Port Bolivar. Toward the isolated, labyrinthine waterways of the Intracoastal Canal, where thousands of commercial barges, shrimp boats, and private vessels moved every single day without filing flight plans or passing through highway weigh stations.

He thought the water was his sanctuary.

He thought that because I ruled the streets of New Orleans, my reach stopped where the concrete met the river.

He was wrong.

“Priest,” I said.