Chapter Twenty Eight - Gabrielle

It was stuffy in the tiny cinderblock tomb and Raven didn’t deal well with confinement. She lay on the harsh metal bed and closed her eyes to escape to a better place in her head. How ironic that she was imprisoned by the man that she had once vowed to kill and she wondered now if she had been wrong not to keep that vow.

Her mind drifted to her beautiful older sister and a tiny smile found her lips. Five years older than Raven, Gabrielle was already a top fashion model by Raven’s sixteenth birthday in 1974. She had been in Paris for a photo shoot so Raven and her parents were surprised when she showed up at Raven’s sweet sixteen party in a brand new BMW 2002.

“Nice car.” Raven said as she hugged her sister.

“You like it?”

“I love it. It’s totally cool.”

Good thing, since it’s yours. Happy birthday little sis.” Gabrielle said as she held out the keys.

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No way!” Raven shouted.

“Way!”

“You can’t afford to give me this.”

“Actually, I can.” Gabrielle replied. “You cannot imagine how much money I get for a shoot.”

When the party ended, Raven and Gabrielle went for a long drive. They talked and laughed and neither had a care in the world. Raven jumped with glee when they passed a magazine stand and they found Gabrielle’s picture on the cover of Glamour.

Gabrielle stayed only a couple of days before she left for a shoot in the Caymans. After the Cayman shoot, it was back to Paris where Gabrielle met a young man with a mysterious underworld air about him. She had no idea what he did for a living but she was pretty sure it was illegal and, to be honest, she found his dark gangster world fascinating.

It wasn’t long before the two of them were inseparable, living life in the fast lane with the help of the white powder that was so fashionable at the time.

Her beau was a small time coke dealer with big time aspirations by the name of Leonard Azeri. It would be a couple more years yet before Azeri would start going by Leonardo in an attempt to appear more exotic. Azeri had grown up in the streets of New York but was learning to speak and act like a real blue blood. His practiced aristocratic demeanor fooled some people but the old money usually saw through his act. Not that they cared; his coke was the best in town.

If Gabrielle had been naïve about her boyfriends’ occupation in the beginning, it wasn’t long before she was fully aware and fully immersed in the life. They ran with the Jet Set, a fast crowd of good-timing idle rich; beautiful people with too much time and too much money and too little substance.

Perhaps she’d burst on the scene a little too quickly, gone from obscurity to fame and fortune too fast, and she lacked the maturity and perspective to deal with it. It was all too easy for an impressionable young girl like Gabrielle to get caught up in the scene.
For all of her charm, for all of her personality and intelligence and her big heart, Gabrielle still fell for the white powder as big and as hard and as fast as anyone ever has. It was astonishing to see how quickly a beautiful young girl can go from good-time party girl to nosebleeds on her satin gown to sticking a needle in her arm.

Leonard kept her supplied for as long as she was pretty, looked good on his arm and could satisfy his sexual appetite. When the coke took its toll on her looks and her personality, he put her out on the street to fend for herself, penniless and strung out. She boomeranged back, begging for coke and making a scene, so he had his goons take care of her.

A month before Raven graduated from High School, her parents got a desperate call from Gabrielle. She was strung out and sobbing and begged her parents to wire her some money, which they quickly did, on the promise that she call again as soon as she received it. In the meanwhile, they would make arrangements for her to enter a rehab clinic close to her in Paris. A few hours later they confirmed that the money had been picked up but they never heard from Gabrielle again.

They contacted a private investigator to find Gabrielle. Her father made plans to fly to Paris to assist the investigator but her mother was so distraught that he was hesitant to leave her. Raven convinced them to let her go instead. When other kids in her graduating class were getting drunk and celebrating their passage into the next phase of their lives, Raven was boarding a plane for Charles de Gaulle airport.

She was met at the airport by the investigator and he told her that he thought Gabrielle had been located. He had taken her picture to the Jane Doe section of the Paris morgue and believed that a young, unidentified girl with a bullet in her brain was Gabrielle. Her body had been found in a dumpster in a part of town dominated by run down warehouses.


Raven made the ID. Though the skinny, greasy haired corps bore little resemblance to her glamorous sister, Raven knew her too well to be fooled. She made the agonizing call home to her parents and then accompanied the body on the long journey back to Kauai.

Raven had already made plans to attend the University of Hawaii in Honolulu but had yet to decide on a major. Now she knew that she would major in Criminology and become an agent for the recently formed DEA. She would see to it that the kinds of people who used up beautiful young girls and left them dead in dumpsters would get what they deserved.

Upon graduation in 1980, she put the BMW that Gabrielle had given her into storage, and she joined the DEA as a deep cover agent, supposedly a Dental Hygienist in the Army. For the next 12 years she chased drug lords all over Central and South America. She had a stellar career in the DEA, was instrumental in some of the largest busts in history, participated in many fire-fights and learned how it felt to have the blood of another human on her hands.

In 1990, she participated in a bust gone bad in Bogotá and found herself face to face with a 12 year old who had a gun pointed at her head. She fired first to save her own life. That night she made a solemn vow to herself and the Universe that she would never shed a drop of human blood again, not for any reason.

She had joined the DEA to avenge her sister’s death and to save others from the same fate as Gabrielle. What a naïve little fallacy that had been. The system was corrupt; the Government was using the War on Drugs as an excuse to wage war on the civil rights of Americans, while the CIA was running the same drugs that the DEA was supposed to be stopping, to finance their secret wars.

In addition to all of that she began to believe that she had failed to consider the question of personal responsibility. All the drug busts in the world could stop neither the supply nor the demand. No one had forced Gabrielle to do what she had done. There were those who enabled her but no one had made her do it.

She had come to the slow realization that it would be impossible to stop the supply so long as there was a demand. The real question, she realized, was what caused so many people to seek their happiness and satisfaction in chemistry?

Raven had had a gutful of the DEA, of the Federal Government and of the angry vengeance that had consumed her for a dozen years. It was time to let go of the anger and bitterness that had driven her for so long.

The next day she requested a desk job and was reassigned to a regional office in San Antonio. Once there, she rented a small shop space and spent her nights and weekends and vacation time procuring the exotic woods and making the “Olsson Originals” that would soon make her famous.


She had seen too much for a beautiful, 33 year old artist and she put all of the anger, all of the passion and all of the heartbreak that she had seen into her work. She’d always known that she had inherited her mother’s artistic talent but had chosen not to paint because she wanted to find her own path. Now, in this new medium of wood and kilns and tools, she had found the outlet for her artistic expression and her social conscience.

Now here she sat, locked in this little tomb on Leonard Azeri’s property. During her time with the DEA she had investigated her sister’s murder and had come to believe that Azeri was behind it. When she came to the realization that she could not make a case that would hold up in court, she had vowed to kill him.

Before she could act on that vow, the incident with the 12 year old had happened and she made a new vow that there would be no more bloodshed in her life. Now she wondered which of these competing vows she would keep.