Page 9 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Then you know some of them probably don’t have a clue where he is right now.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“How does it not matter if the whole point is finding him?”

“The point isn’t finding him.”

I said it slow enough that the room seemed to get quieter around it.

“I don’t need Curtis to know where Rahsaan sleeps tonight. I need Rahsaan to know by tomorrow that everyone who’s ever made hiding easier for him is disappearing. That’s a message no phone call or middleman can deliver as clean as a body count.”

Priest stared at the board.

“That’s not war,” he said finally. “That’s annihilation.”

“Call it whatever helps you sleep tonight.” I picked up my coffee, found it cold, and drank it anyway. “I’m not asking you to enjoy it. I’m asking you to run it with me.”

He was quiet for a beat longer, then nodded once, sharp, and reached for a legal pad to start breaking the list into teams.

We split it four ways.

Teal took the East Bank properties—Marguerite’s funeral home, the daycare in Gentilly, and a storage unit registered to a shell company that traced back through three layers of paperwork to Rahsaan’s cousin.

Brandon took the barber on Claiborne and the two mechanics, men who worked with their hands and would understand exactly what was happening the second they saw who’d walked through the door.

DeShawn got the lawyer downtown, a soft target who’d fold the second real pressure touched him, and the task of freezing whatever accounts we could trace before anyone had a chance to move money.

I kept Curtis Odom for myself.

“Rules of engagement,” Priest said, writing at the top of his own pad. “Anybody who fights, we handle it. Anybody who runs, surveillance follows instead of chasing. Anybody who talks, we take the information.”

He looked up.

“And after they talk?”

“That depends on why their name is on the board.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

That was different from what he’d expected me to say, but it was the truth.

A name earned attention.

What happened after that depended on what I found.

“Alright,” he said. “Then let’s get to work.”

I strolled out and got in my truck.

It was only right that I’d be the one who started this shit off.

Curtis Odom’s tire shop sat on a stretch of Tulane Avenue that had seen better decades. A low cinderblock building with two bays and a faded Goodyear sign that had probably been there since before Curtis owned the place.

I went alone, which wasn’t strategy so much as necessity. There were things a man needed to do with his own hands if he wanted his own name attached cleanly to what came after, and I wanted this one to be mine specifically.

The bell over the door rang thin and tinny when I walked in.

Curtis was under a Buick on a creeper, and he slid out the second he heard the sound, wiping grease-stained hands on a rag that had given up being useful a long time ago. He was maybe fifty, gray coming in at his temples, the kind of man who’d built something small and honest with his hands and never expected it to intersect with anything bigger than an oil change.