“And how we gonna do that?” Dane asked.
“By getting us a nice pile of dirt on him too. And if he don't wanna act right then we'll just take
that
shit to the board!”
Dane shook his head. “You looking for some dirt on Mr. Clean?” He chuckled. “Good luck, Unc. I been living with B my whole life, man. That nigga is the cleanest cat I know.”
“Oh yeah? Well I found me a girl,” Uncle Suge said slickly. “A young white chick I know from Houston. She used to be mentored by the Dominion Diamonds, but she dropped outta the program when she got pregnant and then she never came back.”
“And?” Dane asked. “What's she got to do with Barron?”
“Nothing yet,” Uncle Suge said, grinning. “But she will, Nephew. She will.”
Dane shook his head. “Bump is clean, I'm telling you. That boy is squeaky clean.”
“Yeah, that nigga might drink bleach for breakfast, but Mink and Dy-Nasty done already came up with a plan of their own,” Uncle Suge said, looking at us. “Y'all ladies wanna run it down?”
Me and Dy-Nasty opened our mouths, and out slithered our identical forked tongues. We gave them all the details that we had schemed and connived and collaborated on, and our shit flowed so smooth that heads kept swinging left and right as we laid out our cross-con like it had come from one brain. We were so in sync with our hustle that before it was all over we were actually finishing each other's sentences. Our plan was so fuckin' sugary sweet that I felt cavities popping up in all my teeth. Uh-uh. Uncle Suge was right. Jock's young ass didn't need to be up in the bizz like that. His wimpy lil dro-head ass woulda straight-up collapsed in the ring tryna fuck with us heavyweights.
“I really think this could work, but we're gonna need you to get up with ya boy Kelvin Merchant again,” I told Bunni. “Tell ya little pain slut we'll pay him triple if he hooks us up this go 'round.”
“So,” Bunni said, smiling proudly at me and Dy-Nasty like we were two brilliantly beautiful geniuses. “Y'all gonna get the white chick to go on television and say Viceroy was diggin' her out when she was a sixteen-year-old honey at his little tutoring academy? She's gonna stand up in front of a camera and lie and say she had a baby by him and she's got the DNA results to prove her son is a Domino?”
“Yeah.” Uncle Suge nodded. “You got that shit right. That's exactly what she's gonna say.”
“Well, damn!” Bunni hollered. “Y'all really gonna run up hard and dry in Viceroy
and
Barron's ass-cracks like that?”
“Whoa, hold the fuck up,” Dane protested, shaking his head. Forget about Jock. From where I was sitting Dane was looking kinda weak in the chin too. “Y'all wanna throw some shit on
Pop's
name too? And y'all think Bump is gonna go for
that
?”
“Hell naw he ain't gonna go for it,” Uncle Suge said. “That's the whole point. That nigga's gonna buck. And when he does, that's when we stick his ass. Hard.
Deep
. Right in the heart. With a fuckin' ice pick.”
“Goddamn!” Bunni hollered. “You don't fuck around, do you, Uncle Suge? You sure know how to kick a muh'fucka around when he's down!”
Suge didn't blink. “Damn right. I'll stomp him out. Stomp his muthafuckin' ass
out
!”
Bunni rolled! “
Shiiit . . .
remind me not to get caught on your dirty side,
okayyy
?”
Suge winked at her and tongued his toothpick sexily in his mouth.
“I'm a gully muh'fucka, baby. This is what I do.”
CHAPTER 24
I
f all the recent craziness with Mink and Dy-Nasty wasn't enough to frazzle her nerves and bring back old memories, now there was this. Selah's heart pounded as she studied the words and the picture that had just been texted to her cell phone.
The object on the screen glittered and sparkled, and back in the day it had been worth over a million dollars. Eighteen years had passed since the last time she'd seen it, and the memory of how and where she'd lost it was still fresh in her mind. She glanced down at the wedding ring she wore on her finger now. This one was nothing compared to the one in the picture. It didn't mean half as much to her as the original one had meant, but then again she wasn't half the wife today that she was back then either.
She sighed as she replied to the text message with a few short words.
That fucker. That short, fat, gruesome troll. After all these years she could still feel his pudgy hands on her. Feel the way the sweaty sheets had been wrenched off the mattress by their pounding, desperate bodies. It was a weakness of hers, this knack powerful men had for turning her on.
He texted her back almost right away.
M
EET
M
E
. W
EDNESDAY
AT
NOON
. A
T
OUR
OLD
PLACE
. I'
LL
GIVE
IT
TO
YOU
THEN
.
Just reading the words on the screen sent shivers running down Selah's spine. She was excited and disgusted at the same time. And there was an element of shame in there too. But shame mixed with the sweet satisfaction of revenge.
I'm gonna pay him back with his worst fucking enemy.
The words she'd muttered all those years ago came back as a burning echo in her mind as she deleted the cryptic messages from her iPhone. She thought about her husband laying comatose in his hospital bed. She'd paid his ass back, all right. She had damn sure done that. And on Wednesday at twelve she'd find out exactly what that payback was going to cost her.
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“Them fools up at the college are trying to act like they don't wanna let me back in class,” Dane told us as we chilled in his little crib over the garage. Me and Bunni had gone up there looking to get lifted, but for once Dane was stone sober when he opened the door.
“Classes start in a minute and I shoulda been gone by now. Back in the dorm. But I can't even reserve a room until I get some money and they lift the charges off me.”
“When are they gonna do that?” Bunni asked.
Dane shrugged. “When they get good and fuckin' ready. I gotta go before a disciplinary board. They'll examine my case and decide if they're gonna let me back in my classes or kick me out and send everything over to the prosecutor's office. It's all up to them.”
“Can't you get one of your father's lawyers to make all that shit go away? I mean, damn. I thought all rich people had to do was flash a couple of dollars and pay somebody off when they got in trouble with the cops.”
“Yeah,” Dane said and nodded. “Sometimes it works like that, but sometimes it don't. My case is all fucked up because it went too far for too long. I got caught out there with the wrong dorm chicken and niggas got jealous and set me up. I couldn't pay nobody off because I had already blown through all my money. The only thing I got going for me now is that trust fund. I need that safe to pop open real wide so I can get what's minez and get on with the rest of my life. Word.”
“I can see why you don't wanna go to your moms and ask her for nothing, but you and Barron seem kinda close sometimes. You can't talk him into hooking you up with a couple of ends?”
He shook his head. “I don't trust B like that. If I showed him this brick I'm carrying around he might snatch it and bust me in the grill with it. I can't take no chances on him. He could post me up in front of the board and make me fight for my share of the trust fund too, and if somebody even whispered the words
sexual assault
they'd cut me off right at the nuts. I love Bump and all, but the boy is strange. My pops taught him how to squeeze the hell out of a dime, and when it comes to taking care of the family cash, he's got his foot on every penny.”
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Right now Barron had his eyes on the time as he checked his six-thousand-dollar Cartier Ballon Bleu and sped toward the local frat house. Him and his boy Animal Bates had gone to college together, and a bunch of his Omega brothers and dorm rats were throwing Animal a bash to celebrate his birthday.
Barron had agreed to show his face for a few minutes, but he damn sure wasn't in the partying mood. The board was meeting in just a few days and he was seriously on edge. Never before in the history of Dominion Oil had a single vote been the deciding factor on such an important financial decision. Barron had been wheeling and dealing and sweating the board members twenty-four-seven, and it was looking like everything was going to work out just the way he wanted it to.
He'd gotten a call from one of the oldest board members, who just happened to be one of Viceroy's closest friends. He said he was pretty close to getting the other members to agree to delay the board's vote for seven days, but he needed the request in writing. Barron had damn near jumped up and down because that meant the DNA labs would have a chance to get their reports generated, and then everybody would find out that con-mami Mink, with her fine sexy ass was a fraud and that Dy-Nasty, even though she probably
was
his long-lost sister Sable, was a stank, foul, guttersnipe criminal.
Once the DNA results were in all Barron had to do was produce those results at the board meeting and let Dy-Nasty cast her vote with his team. Twenty-four hours later he would be instated as the new CEO of Dominion Oil, and then BOOM! He'd
smizzack
the board with a copy of Dy-Nasty's arrest record that stripped her naked and showed her in all her corrupted glory, and Little Miss Hoodrat would immediately be disqualified from the trust fund.
Barron was whistling as he pulled his bone-white Maybach into a parking space in front of the frat house. From the outside the place looked like a dump. Them niggas was probably still wildin' and cutting up like they were back in college. He looked around at the other parked cars and wished he had picked something else to drive. His shit would probably be sitting up on four milk crates when he came back out.
The inside of the small, one-story house looked a lot better than the outside, and Barron started tossing back shots as soon as he got with Animal and his crew. A lot of dorm chicks had been on his dick back in college, but there was this one girl who had hated his ass and used to diss him on the regular. Epiphany James. She was there, at the party, and with her slim waist, power-butt, and long fine legs, she was even sexier than she had been in college.
But Epiphany was one of them chicks who was all cultural and shit. She wore her hair in a wild Afro and talked all that Ungawa Black Power ethnic talk, and just the sight of Barron, a star football player with his skinny white cheerleader girlfriend on his arm, used to piss her off.
“Long time no see.” Barron dropped his voice into Barry White land as he rolled up on Epiphany. “It's good to see you again.”
“Barron,” she said and nodded. Her slanted cat eyes and smooth, cocoa-colored skin sent heat flashing through his groin. “Yeah, long time no see.”
Barron noticed she didn't say it was good to see him too, but he hadn't really expected her to. Ever since Carla had left him he'd been paying closer attention to beautiful black chicks like Epiphany, and he had Pilar to thank for that. White girls didn't even do nothing for him no more.
Barron made the rounds at the party and went in the huddle with a few older Ques and their girlfriends. He drank like a fish and smoked a little weed too, but when them niggas started talking about poppin' E and smoking meth and all that kinda bullshit he backed off and drew the line.
“Look at this fool,” his boy Dopeman, a showboating wanna-be Omega bitched. “This nigga's asshole is still tight as hell!”
Bruhs laughed and Barron tried to play it off. Dopeman wasn't frat, but he had been around for a real long time, and all the young come-up bruhs idolized his ass.
“Yo, why you biting all on my nuts, Mr. Dopeman? Don't worry about what I do, nigga! Just do you!”
Barron chilled with the homeys for a few more minutes so it wouldn't look like Dopeman was running him off, and then he dipped outta the huddle and went across the room and mingled with some of his old honeys. A butt-ugly chick named Maleeka Jones was hanging around with a bunch of other friends of theirs, and one of the girls had brought some linebacker-looking transvestite with her. The dude's name was Ben, and he was chewing gum and flapping off at the mouth like he was a girl for real. All that weed had Barron cracking the fuck up at the sight of such a big dude posted up on the couch in a halter and heels, with his thick legs crossed at the knees.
“Here, nigga!” Dopeman came up behind Barron and passed him a drink over his shoulder. “What you run out for? We was just about to break out the special shit. Don't say I never gave your ass nothing, dig?”
Surrounded by a bunch of giggling women, Barron tossed his drink back real quick and took a few hits off the blueberry sticky that was being passed around. Maleeka came over and sat up under him, and as he listened to her run her mouth he tried to remember why he had never hit that shit in college. Her titties were nice and round, and she had some pretty legs on her that would feel real good wrapped around his waist.
But she's ugly,
Barron thought as Maleeka giggled and put her tiny hand on his thigh.
This bitch is ugly,
he thought again, and that was the last damn thing he thought too.
Â
Giggles.
“Is he out?”
“Yep, his ass is gone! Slumped.”
“What the hell did you give him, D?”
“I gave that nigga what he needed! Something to loosen his tight ass up!”
“Yeah, he's still the same old Barron. Stiff as hell. Always acting like he's better than everybody else.”
“His family always did have money.”
“Having money and having fun is two different things.”
“Ay, we oughtta have some fun with his ass!”
Laughter.
“Yeah, let's fuck with this fool. Put some lipstick on him. Some mascara too.”
“Ohhh, wait! Let's shave off his eyebrows! Here!”
Rummaging in the purse.
“Use my razor.”
“Hold up, I know what we can do! Switch clothes with him, Ben! Let's put him in your skirt and a push-up bra!”
“Uh, hell no! Do you know how much I paid for this skirt?”
“Not as much as this nigga got in his wallet! Switch clothes with him, fool! Once you put on his pants whatever you find in the pockets is yours.”
“Hold up, take some pictures, girl. This dude looks hilarious!”
“Yeah, take some pictures! Wait! Put your dick in his mouth first, Ben! Not all the way in, stupid! Just slap the head on his lips. Yeah.”
Giggles.
“Just like that. Good. Now take the pictures.”
Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.
“Yo, nigga! Make sure you hit me with them joints so I can post them on Facebook!”
Â
Barron was cruising. On a cloud far up in the sky. His bladder was full and he had to pee. Struggling to his feet, he staggered across the room and pulled open the door. The cool night breeze washed over his face as he leaned against a parked car and pissed all over the tire.
With his dick still hanging out, he opened the car door and climbed behind the wheel. He felt like he was inside a pinball machine full of swiping silver gates. Lights flashing, bells ringing. Just a' bouncing offa shit.
His vision blurred and he lurched hard in his seat. He hit a pinball gate. People screamed, others cheered. He was beating the shit out of the game, and he moved faster and faster through the colorful maze. Suddenly it was dark and he had to pee again. With the engine still running he flung open the car door and stepped out, then turned around and pissed directly on his front seat.
He didn't even put his meat away. Instead, a doorway loomed ahead and he made his way to it. He fumbled with the latch until it opened. Inside, he was feeling almost fine for a moment, but then he crashed into a large potted plant, stumbled to his right, and passed out again as the sofa broke his fall.
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