Gabriel - Jessie Cooke Page 0,63
I had documented it all and if anything happened to me, it would be shared with the authorities. Kasey had just died, and a week before that old woman had buried her husband of forty years...but she didn’t hesitate to ask what I wanted, and before they put poor Kasey in the ground next to her daddy that old woman had shelled out a hundred and fifty grand to me and set your aunt and uncle up in a house in Baton Rouge. I don’t know how long it took her to arrange for them to legally adopt you, but I’m guessing that didn’t take long either. She was terrified that the media was going to find out just how fucked up her family was, and she was desperate to do whatever she had to do to prevent that.”
Patrice opened her mouth to ask another question, presumably...but suddenly both of her hands went to her stomach and she stood up and said, “Bathroom?”
“First door on the right. Don’t puke on my wood floors.” Patrice raced toward the bathroom and Gabe got up to follow her. “She’ll be fine, kid,” Bernie said. “You want a beer?”
Gabe glared at the older man. He may not have killed Kasey, but he could have either prevented it, or gone to the authorities so that the people responsible would have to pay for it. Instead, he profited off it, not to mention whatever he’d gotten paid for ratting out the Jokers as well. He was living large off everyone’s blood money and Gabe would love nothing more than to drive his fist right into the center of the man’s smug face. “How do you look at yourself in the mirror?” Gabe asked him.
The big man’s body shook with a laugh. “I got no problem looking at myself or sleeping at night. You wear a kutte, right?” Gabe didn’t answer him, but he went on anyway. “You think any of the shit you do for that asshole Blackheart is any better than anything I’ve ever done? I’m opportunistic, I go where the money is. If I thought Blackheart would have paid me to keep the information I had from the Feds, I would have gone to him first. But I knew his ‘payment’ would have been my dead body in one of his swamps. I was doing a job, and I did it well for a while. I had a family of my own to take care of.”
“You have a family?” Gabe looked around the room at last. There were photos on the walls. Some of them were of a young boy and girl and some of them were of older teenagers. There was one “family” style photo in the center of it all. A blonde woman sat on a chair and Bernie stood behind her. On either side of them were the same boy and girl in all of the photos.
“That’s my wife Linda, God rest her soul, and my kids George and Jewel. They’re on their own now, doing well, I might add. I got a new grand-baby too,” he said, with a smile. Gabe continued to frown at him. The man was crazy, acting like this was some kind of social call and talking about people being blackmailed and murdered.
“Blackheart would never be okay with a young woman being murdered,” he told Bernie.
“I’m sure you’re right, especially had he known he knocked her up before she got thrown out a window.”
“You went to Maine after Patrice was born, why?”
“Follow-up.”
“So her family knew she had a baby before she came back to New Orleans?” He didn’t answer that question, but his smile was answer enough. “She recognized you somehow...”
“She got all weird when she saw me, yes. I think she finally figured out that her family was having her followed. I mean it would have been a hell of a coincidence if she had seen me in New Orleans before she left. It was a mistake, on my part, to check into that inn. Nothing came of it, though. She still turned up for her daddy’s funeral.”
“And ended up dead. You’re disgusting. You profited off that woman’s death, and you let her daughter grow up never knowing who her real parents were when you knew all along.”
He held up his palms and said, “Hey, none of that was my decision...that’s on the old woman. And of course, once she passed, the dear Lebouxes couldn’t tell their ‘daughter’ that everything had been a lie, and