Dirty Rotten Liar (21 page)

She called Suge.

 

Bunni stared at me like I had a tampon up my nose.

“Five hundred grand? You went and told that bitch to kiss your ass over five hundred grand?
Trick!
You musta bumped your head and scrambled your damn brains,” she said, flouncing past me in a black g-string with her naked titties just a' jiggling. She bent over and mooned the shit outta me as she rubbed scented lotion all over her feet, calves, and legs.

“Girl you know damn well you ain't Sable! And soon as them damn DNA test come back ere'body else is gonna know it too!
Shoooot
.” Bunni stood back up and put her hand on her naked hip. “You better hop ya ass on that half a mil like a crab on a coochie hair, Mink. 'Cause once them test results come back you won't be getting
shit
.”

“Nah, Bunni.” I shook my head as she grilled me with mad heat. “I don't believe Dy-Nasty and I don't
trust
her skank ass neither! That chick is foul, boo. I can't just let her do Mama Selah like that and get away with it!”

Bunni broke. “These
ain't your people
, Mink! You must be forgetting why we brought our black asses down here in the first damn place,” she turned around and busted on me over her shoulder. “Remember, we came to rob these fools! Not to rescue they asses!”

“I'on't care.” I folded my arms and doubled down. “It ain't just about what we came here to do no more, Bunni! I'm not about to just sit here and let Dy-Nasty fuck Mama Selah up like that!”

“
Mama
Selah?” Bunni screeched. “C'mon, now, homey! Be for real! Just the other day you was around here whining and bitching about how Selah be all the time treating Dy-Nasty better than she treats you! Make up ya damn mind, girl. You been slippin' for a minute now, ya know. Sliding right off ya game! I want my rowdy con-mami Mink LaRue back! Matter fact, you need to call that bitch Tasha Pierce and get her up in here real quick!”

Bunni stomped past lookin' at me like I was some kinda body snatcher who had come up outta a moon pod.

“I don't know who the hail you is, over here occupying my best friend's brain, but your shit is way too watery to be the gaming-ass Mink LaRue I know!”

I just stood there fumin'. Bunni could talk that yang if she wanted to, but it still wasn't gonna stop me from doing what I had to do. She had one thing right, though. I wasn't Tasha Pierce no more, and I wasn't the same trifling Mink LaRue that had bust up in this joint on the Fourth of July! And I wasn't
about
to let Dy-Nasty shit all over Mama Selah neither, so for once in my life I was gonna have to buck up and tell the goddamn
truth
!

“You makin' a mistake,” Bunni warned me as she rubbed her left titty and grilled me with the evil eye. “You's about to make a real big mistake, Mizz LaRue. I can feel it. Word.”

I shrugged like whatever. Bunni had a radar built into her titty, and most of the time she was right on point with her shit.

But this time I seriously doubted it.

S
uge Dominion walked out of the Western Union office whistling a real sweet tune. In his hand he carried a copy of a sent money receipt that had been processed a few weeks earlier. It was in the amount of two thousand dollars and had been sent by Dy-Nasty Jenkins to a Patricia Jenkins in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Getting his hands on that receipt had taken a little bit of work, but a nigga like Suge Dominion lived for that type of thrill every single day. Nothing made his nuts tingle more than going head up against some tough competition, and with the kind of money, power, and clout he carried, Suge bet on himself to come out on top every single time.

And today had been no exception. He was chuckling like a muthafucka as he climbed in his monster truck and tossed the piece of paper on his dashboard. The hefty white woman at the Western Union counter had damn near nutted in her middle-aged drawers when he threw his smooth Mandingo swag down on her and convinced her to search through her records for a particular transaction.

And when she found what he was looking for and Suge slid her a crisp stack of hundred-dollar bills totaling five large, Big Mama had blushed like she was ready to climb up a pole and strip outta her granny drawers for him.

Suge thought about the phone call he'd gotten from his sister-in-law. He had never heard Selah sound so nervous and upset before, and there were a couple details in the story she had laid on him that he was gonna have to take with him all the way to his grave.

True, his first loyalty was always gonna be to his brother Viceroy, but Suge put in work for the entire Dominion family, and Dy-Nasty had definitely become a family problem.

“I shoulda took her ass out a long time ago,” he had muttered under his breath when Selah told him how Dy-Nasty was trying to shake her down. He glanced down at the Western Union receipt in his hands. Some people were just too fuckin' greedy to be suckin' up air. And Dy-Nasty and her raggedy-ass mama were two of them.

 

We were sitting up in Barron's plush corner office surrounded by finery, and for once in my life I wasn't turned on by the fact that all eyes was on me.

I had called Suge and told him I needed to have a convo with him and Barron at the same time, and he had picked me up and we drove over to Dominion Oil headquarters and went straight upstairs to Barron's dope-ass office.

His spot was damn near unreal. Like something you would see on a television show. I had been wide open on Suge's bangin' executive suite, but he wasn't lying when he said his office didn't have nothing on Barron's!

I had expected to catch a shitty vibe from Barron right off the bat, but as my ass cheeks sank into his buttery-soft leather sofa, he sat behind his desk with an expression on his mug that even my cunning ass couldn't quite get a read on.

Uncle Suge had a curious glint in his eyes, like he was interested in finding out what all this back-alley bullshit was about, but Mister Bump looked like I had rolled up in his space to shake him down.

“Look, Barron, I asked Uncle Suge to hook up this lil emergency meeting because I got something that I really need to tell y'all.”

With my eyes glued to the floor, I took a deep breath and did something that was straight up against my nature. I sacrificed myself for somebody else and let the
truth
hang out.

“I was lying when I told y'all I had to go back to New York because my boss got shot.”

“Come again?” Barron said, and he said that shit real slick-like too. “You was what?”

“I was lying,” I muttered, and then I took another deep breath.

“My boss didn't get shot. Matter fact, I don't even have no damn boss. I went back home because my mama was dying.” I shrugged a little bit. “And then she died.”

Barron smirked like he had seen this shit coming a mile away. “Yo, hold up. You told us your mother died a long time ago, remember?”

“I
said
I lied, damn!” I sucked my teeth. “She was alive that whole time, but now she's dead.”

“So, wait,” Barron said, shaking his head. “Who is this ‘mama' you talking about, Mink? Is this Jude Jackson, the woman you told us kidnapped you?”

At first I nodded yes, but then I shook my head no real quick.

“Well see, yeah, Jude kinda kidnapped me, but she kinda adopted me too. She took me from my birth mother. Or my birth mother prolly gave me to her. But hell if I even know who that chick really is. Or was.”

Barron leaned back in his chair and busted on me with a look that said,
Lies, lies, and more dirty rotten lies!

Suge was giving me the funky face too so I knew I was gonna have to start all over and this time come correct.

“Look,” I said, staring both of them dead in their eyes and hoping they could tell that for once I wasn't bullshittin'. “Here's the real scoop. Me and Dy-Nasty are twins. All right? We're
twins
.”

Barron sat up with his eyes bucked. “So you lied about that shit too, huh? You told us you didn't even know that girl!”

“I
don't
know her ass!” I protested. “I mean, yeah, I think me and her are sisters and all that, but I don't
know
her. I never even laid eyes on that scraggly trick until you dragged her funky ass down here to mess my shit up!”

“Well if you don't know her then what makes you think y'all are sisters?”

“Okay, I ain't got the whole scoop, but from what I was told me and her was born right here in Texas, and then some kinda way my mama Jude adopted me and took me with her to New York.” I shrugged at Barron. “And I guess y'all adopted Dy-Nasty and brought her out here to the mansion. She was the one you was babysitting outside that drugstore in New York that day. Not me.”

Barron pounced all over me like the lawyer he was. “So you've just admitted that you're not Sable, and therefore you're not entitled to any financial assets from the Dominion family trust, correct?”

I shrugged.

“I ain't saying I don't want that money, but Dy-Nasty is Sable. I'm just me. Mink LaRue.”

Suge looked relieved as fuck that me and him wasn't family, but Barron was still shaking his head and saying
hold the hell up
.

“So all this time you knew who Dy-Nasty was? You took a hundred grand from us and went through all that DNA testing when all that time you
knew
she was really Sable?”

I shook my head real fast. “Uh-uh! No I
didn't
! Nope! I already told you I didn't know shit about her, Barron! When I got that money I didn't even know her gutter ass was alive!”

“So where the hell is all this coming from, Mink?” Suge's deep voice was cool and calm but I could tell he was dead serious. “Why you coming clean with all of this shit now?”

I swallowed real hard. There was no way in fuck I could tell them the real reason I was fessin' up! Yeah, I was a shiesty money-grubber and I could run me one helluva con game, but I wasn't about to bust Mama Selah out and put her lil illegal swerve match with Rodney Ruddman on blast!

I thought about the way her face had looked when she saw Dy-Nasty wearing her old engagement ring. Mama Selah had been sweating in her bra over that shit! There was no way in fuck she coulda explained to her husband how his worst fuckin' enemy in the world had gotten hold of her ring!

“Um, to tell you the truth the only reason I'm telling y'all now is because Dy-Nasty is tryna talk me into getting down with her on a real grimy scheme about some nasty pictures she said she found on the Internet,” I lied as I grilled Barron.

“For real, that broad is tryna twist y'all pockets up for a million hot ones. She's willing to tear me off half, if I get down with her, but if y'all mofos don't give up the loot she's gonna take her rabbit-ass straight to Houston and drop a big load of stank shit in Viceroy's ear.”

Barron shot Uncle Suge a shook look and I smirked inside because now that nigga knew that
I
knew about his dick-sucking pictures too!

“And you can best believe,” I said eyeballing Barron from his lips to his crotch, Dy-Nasty has some real sucky shit to drop in Viceroy's ear! On
everybody
!”

Barron looked cool as hell as he tried to front me off. “Don't be so stupid, Mink. Dy-Nasty's just talking shit. She ain't for real. I don't think she's got a drop of dirt on anybody. Especially me.”

“Oh, she's for real, baby. You better watch your back, dude. It's either lay that cheese on her or put it in writing that she's really Sable so she can get her a nice slice of the Dominion pie.”

Barron grunted. “But just now you said Dy-Nasty is willing to give you half the money if you go along with her little scam, right?”

I nodded.

“So why don't you?”

“Why don't I what?”

“Why don't you just go along with her? Because if we declare her to be Sable, then you're ass out and you can't press a dime out of us. But if Dy-Nasty blackmails us for a million, then you just might walk away with half. What's up with that, Mink? Why in the hell are you
really
telling us all this?”

I thought about Mama Selah again. Bunni was right. Mama Selah had acted real shitty toward me over Dy-Nasty and her mess, and by all rights I coulda busted on her and hauled booty back to New York City with a nice lil gwap in my bank account and forgot all about her sometimey ass. But I wasn't no snitch. I had never dropped a dime on a pizo in my whole life, and I damn sure wasn't about to start droppin' none now.

“Your family's been through enough hell,” I said, shrugging. “And I just don't wanna see nobody else get hurt.”

Uncle Suge frowned. “So, what? You're just gonna slide the W over to Dy-Nasty's column and break out, huh? What? You and Bunni gonna head back to New York now?”

My heart fell and I dropped my gaze to the floor.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I guess that's the plan.”

“Cool!” Barron said, quick-fast and happy. He jumped up from his chair. “Run to the house and pack your shit up real quick and I'll buy both of y'all lying asses a one-way-ticket outta here.”

T
he doorbell rang just as Selah was approaching the spiral staircase in the Dominion mansion. Pausing with her foot on the top step, she glanced over her shoulder, and then turned around and headed toward the front of the house.

For the past few days her mind had been grinding on one single track. Viceroy's doctors were talking about releasing him from the hospital, and the last thing she wanted was for her husband to walk back into his house and get cold-cocked by all the drama that had been going down while he was gone.

Especially when it came down to her engagement ring. There was no doubt in Selah's Brooklyn mind that Dy-Nasty would stick that ring right up under Viceroy's nose if she didn't get the two million in cash that she was asking for. And there was also no doubt that Viceroy would recognize the ring that he had bought her as soon as he scrambled up his first real hunk of change and started rolling with the big boys. He had been damn proud of himself for bringing in the kind of cash it took to slide a piece of jewelry like that on Selah's finger, and he had been mad as hell when she lost it too.

Hell no, Selah thought as she hurried toward the front door. There was no way in the world that she could let Viceroy find out where her ring had been for all these years. That fool would probably flip out and go on a killing spree and stab her all up in her throat!

Her assistant, Albert, was just closing the front door when Selah reached the parlor. He smiled as he turned toward her holding two large envelopes in his hand.

“That was the courier, Mrs. Dominion,” he said, holding the envelopes out to her. “These came for you.”

Selah accepted the packets from him and stared down at them. Her heart began to pound as she quickly scanned the addresses. Both envelopes were addressed to her, but one had come from Cross Type Laboratory, and the return address on the other said Central Dallas Testing Center.

Her hands shook as she thanked Albert and then quickly turned away. She felt flushed and her feet were unsteady in her five-thousand-dollar Loeffler Randall shoes as she hurried up the mansion steps and into the privacy of her master bedroom suite.

Closing the door firmly behind her and turning the lock, Selah forced herself to neatly peel the perforated edge of the courier envelope back and retrieve the set of documents inside. Her eyes skimmed over the page, landing first on Mink's name and then on the summary of results that had been compiled by the lab.

She stared at what was written there, and then the papers slipped from her fingers as Selah tore into the other envelope. Her breath got caught up in her throat as her eyes crawled over the DNA results that had been compiled from Dy-Nasty's blood samples.

“Oh fuckin'
shit
!” she whispered as she read all the way down to the summary on the bottom line. Her eyes skimmed up to Dy-Nasty's name again, and then they skimmed back down to the results.

Selah didn't want to believe it. She just couldn't fuckin'
believe
it!

The sheets of paper fluttered from her fingers and landed on the floor right beside Mink's test results, and Selah couldn't help it when her knees gave out on her and she sank down to the floor too.

 

“I don't know about this,” Barron said as he paced the floor in Suge's expansive corner office. “Something about this shit don't smell right, man. Something just don't smell right.”

Suge was sitting with his boots propped up on his huge desk as he toked on a three-hundred-dollar cigar. He stared at his nephew and then narrowed his eyes as the trail of smoke rose in the air.

“What's not to buy, Bump? Seems to me like the lil girl was just trying to come straight with us. She's got a thing for Selah and she don't wanna see her get hurt no more.”

Barron shook his head like he still wasn't feeling it.

“A'ight, check this out,” Suge told him. He swung his big feet down to the floor and sat up straight in his chair. “Remember that quick little trip I took up north a minute ago?”

Barron nodded.

“Well when I got there I hooked up with a few of my dudes from around the way. We put a sniffer out on some old fraud cases on Dy-Nasty and her
mother
. In
Philly
.”

“Her
mother
?” Barron frowned.

Suge tipped his cigar and nodded. “Hell yeah. Dy-Nasty and her moms was in a city bus accident when Dy-Nasty was about two. Her moms hooked up with some slick-talking ambulance chasers and they pulled a fast one on the city. They sued them fuckers from one end of Philadelphia to the other, and once they got that first fat settlement check their asses got hooked and went on an accident spree after that.”

“You went all the way to Philly just to find that out?”

“Hell naw,” Suge said quietly and toked on his stogie as he thought about his little murderous trip to the projects where he'd had to knock a ghetto bird on her ass. “I already told you I went to Philly to dig through some trash.”

He pictured the switchblade that crazy Pat Jenkins had pulled on him, and how her wild ass had tried to stab him and fight him like a man.

“The thing is, I ended up bagging that trash up and dumping it too.” He flicked the ash off the burning tip of his cigar and into a thick marble ashtray and shrugged.

Barron shrugged too. “So?”

“So a while back I gave Dy-Nasty a ride to Western Union so she could wire somebody some money. I went back up there and got the name off the receipt, but something Mink said today kinda fucked with me.”

“Just spit that shit out, man! What was it?”

“Mink said her mother's name was Jude Jackson, right? Well, the bag of trash I stuffed in a Philly Dumpster had a name on it too, and so did that receipt I got from Western Union. It was Pat Jenkins.”

Barron leaned forward in his chair and peered at his uncle.

“And Jenkins is Dy-Nasty's last name. Not Mink's.”

“Damn right,” Suge said. “And if Dy-Nasty was in Philly pulling ganks with that scheming bitch Pat when she was just two years old, then where the hell was Mink?”

A cold grin spread over Barron's dark, handsome face as he finally got it.

“Mink was right here in good old Texas. Hanging out with me and Dane. Running around chillin', and answering to the name of Sable.”

 

Barron stood over Selah fanning her with a small stack of paper as she lay on her bead-embroidered chaise lounge with a look of distress pinching her face. He had come home from work to find his mother stretched out on the sofa with an empty flask of vodka wedged between her thighs, and judging by the fumes coming off of her she had spent the afternoon chugging down the whole damn thing.

“Calm down, Mama,” he told her as he tried to cool her off. Tiny dots of sweat had formed on her nose and her upper lip. “Just take a few deep breaths and try to calm down.”

“Calm down? Did you read that shit?” Selah demanded, pointing at the DNA results that Barron was fanning her with. She snatched them from his hand and shook them in his face.

“You told me those damn labs were clean! You said you checked them out yourself!”

“I
did
, Mama. I checked them. Both of them. You know I did. The results are right, and it's pretty easy to explain. Here,” Barron said as he pulled out his phone and hit a number on speed dial. He waited until the line rang on the other end, and then he pushed the phone into his mother's hands. “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

Selah sat up straight when she recognized the voice. It was Suge.

“Yes,” she said as she listened to her brother-in-law's specific instructions. “Yes, of course. Uh-huh.” Suddenly she frowned. “Wait, are you saying they're . . . are you sure about that?” She sighed real hard and then nodded. “Well, if that's the only way to get some peace then I guess . . .” Selah listened carefully and then nodded again. “Okay, I'm in. Yep, I understand. Absolutely. I'll do it. I'll get on it right away.”

She clicked off the call and passed Barron his phone back. And then she reached for her own phone and called her personal stock broker and instructed him to place a large trade from her private bank account and deposit the proceeds into an account that had just been recently opened.

“Two million dollars, Mrs. Dominion?” her broker confirmed. “Did I hear you correctly? You want to liquidate two million dollars' worth of assets and deposit them into a third-party debit account?”

“Yes, George,” Selah said calmly, as if she wasn't the least bit drunk. She got up and walked over to her desk and selected a bright red Magic Marker from a stack and held it in her hand. “You heard me right. That's exactly what I want you to do.”