AMAI #2
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.
“Victor Baptiste.”
He straightened. Still composing himself, even now. “Your father’s not with you.”
“My father’s not here tonight.” I walked toward him slowly, hands in the pockets of my jacket. “You and I are going to do this part ourselves.”
“What part is that?”
“The accounting.”
I stopped eight feet from him. That was where I wanted to be—close enough that nothing I said would need to be loud, and far enough that he understood the distance was deliberate.
“You know why you’re here,” I said.
“I’m here because someone compromised my operation. I’d like to know who.”
“You’re here because every route you had out of this city has been sitting in my hands since yesterday afternoon.
Your Metairie office has federal attention it can’t survive.
Your driver, Trey, was pulled over by the time you drove here—he doesn’t know why yet, but the search of the vehicle will take approximately four hours, and the manifest won’t hold up.
” I watched his face. “Corinne sent you the activation signal an hour before. She’s been managing your paperwork for twenty-two years, and she made a judgment call. ”
A flicker of disdain lit up his face.
“Your accounts,” I continued. “The ones in the layered corporate structure that your daughter described to me in considerable detail—those have been frozen. Not by federal authority. By someone with access to the appropriate banking relationships, which I have spent the last several days securing.” I paused.
“The accounts are frozen. The money you came to collect is behind me, as I understand it. And every exit you planned for is managed.”
He said nothing.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. “Before we get to the part where we discuss access and transfer.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Your daughter called you from the Sanctum. You told her that sacrifices are necessary during war. You hung up.” I let that sit for a moment.
“She gave me everything I needed to find you because you told her, in a single sentence, exactly what she’d been worth to you her whole life.
” I watched his jaw. “She’s alive. She’ll stay alive.
She’s leaving New Orleans tonight with the one person in this city who gave a damn whether she ate.
And you, Victor—you’re standing in a building you own, trying to breathe cold air, because you raised a daughter and treated her like inventory. ”
“She made her choices.”
“She made the choice to survive when you made it clear you wouldn’t help her do it any other way.” I took my hand out of my jacket pocket. “I want the account access. Routing numbers, confirmation codes, and the backup protocol. All of it.”
“And if I refuse?”
“You don’t leave this building. The money doesn’t leave with you either way—I want you to understand that. The only thing you’re negotiating right now is whether you do the next several hours in comfort or not.”
He looked at me with those careful, experienced eyes, and I could see him turning it over—every remaining possibility, every angle not yet exhausted.
A man who had operated for thirty years inside other people’s systems didn’t stop looking for the exit until there genuinely wasn’t one.
I respected that, in an abstract way, the way you respected a lock that made you work for it.
“The vault money,” he said. “The Landry money—”
“Rahsaan took it from you. I know. That’s a different conversation, a different settlement.” I held his gaze. “What I’m here for tonight is what belongs to you. Your money. Thirty years of it.”
A long moment passed.
Then, Victor Baptiste reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a folded card that held the account information I’d asked for, and he handed it to me.
I gave it to Priest without looking at it.
“Verify,” I said.
Priest worked for seven minutes on his phone while Victor and I stood in the cold storage facility and did not speak to each other.
The refrigeration units hummed. Outside, beyond the corrugated walls, the river moved past in the dark the way it always did—indifferent, unhurried, carrying everything south toward the gulf.
“Confirmed,” Priest said.
I looked at Victor.
“On the West Bank,” I said, “in a city you worked in for thirty years, you helped kill two of my brothers. Elias and Silas.” I kept my voice even.
“They were seventeen. They were in the wrong place because they were following in my footsteps. I’ve carried that for fifteen years.
” I paused. “You helped the man who did it, and then you kept his secret, and then you sat at my father’s table, ate his food, and shook his hand for a decade and a half. ”