POW! POW!
January was the one taking the bullets.
One bullet, two bullets, three bullets…
Screaming stampeding pandemonium prevented Noble or Tiger getting to January as the painting fell from her hands, her body dropping against the board table with her trying to hold on as the bullet wounds bled gushed harder than the five gallon Arrowhead water bottle behind her.
With the fourth shot, she fell to the floor and immediately began to fly.
Strong Love
January’s heartbeat refused to stop.
Though it was Buck Knuckle-Joy holding her hand in the emergency room; in her mouth was the taste of African sweet rain and in the hallway, unable to get past the security guards Buck had hired to keep him out, was the love and will of Adam Crown. He’d flown to California in his private jet and was now in a state of continuous prayer; the intensity of his adrenaline virtually willing the woman he loved to remain in the world to be with him.
Yards away, on a television monitor perched atop the waiting area wall, Tiger Holden and his boyfriend E-Joe Bradford watched as Pismo Beach news anchors ticked off the latest details: “Our very own Warm Leatherette heiress, January Knuckle-Joy, survived what detectives are calling the second attempt in three weeks to take the woman’s life. Police say Mrs. Knuckle-Joy was shot four times while attending a welcome back gathering at the offices of her famed resort—luckily, because of a first attempt on her life in Spain, officials say Mrs. Knuckle-Joy was wearing a bullet proof vest and only suffered the wounds of one of the bullets.”
And a few yards from Tiger, stood a virtual breakdown.
“I had nothing to do with this,” Noble Sinatra insisted, but Daisy’s face was gaunt and stricken. She didn’t believe him and never would again in life.
“Daisy, don’t shut me out like this.”
“I told you what would happen if you tried to kill January—and now it’s over, Noble. I have to go to the police with what I know.”
“You can’t,” he raged, incredulously. “You love me and you can’t. Look at the T.V. screen; January was wearing a bullet proof vest, she’s going to be O.K. You can’t leave me—I left my wife for you Dao Ming! You’re my every thing!”
“The wedding at Mardi Gras is off, Noble.”
“No, damn it, no!”
But the heartbroken Chinese beauty tore away from the desperation in his grip, determined to do just as she’d promised. The love she felt for him so deeply was not strong enough to overcome the ugliness of what she believed he was responsible for.
And before that night was over—he would end up giving her a real reason to hate him forever.
“You two-faced bitch,” Noble raged from a crying red face as she left him standing there in the emergency room to consult with the police. “How can you just throw me away like I’m nothing?”
Meanwhile—as detectives in a secret hospital meeting room adjacent to the Critical Care Unit told May Day Foster that they believed her daughter was being targeted by either the Sinatra family or competing board interests in Silicone Valley and Santa Barbara—May Day shook her head.
“It’s somebody black,” she insisted. And the reason she gave had to do with the racist phone messages that to the contrary were making police think that it couldn’t possibly be a black suspect. A disguised voice ranting: “What’s the difference between a nigger and a bag of shit?” wasn’t fooling May Day Foster.
She told detectives that in her mind, either Buck Knuckle-Joy or the Crown family were the ones behind trying to kill January. The motives on Buck were clear, but in accusing the Crowns, mightily respected civil rights icons who had been receiving the same threatening phone messages as May Day, she had to explain issues of class and long-denied color wars.
“You guys see Adam Crown as just another black man, but he’s not. He’s a rich boy from a society of people who race cars, play golf and tennis and vacation with other upper class blacks at Woods Hole on Martha’s Vineyard every year. His mama always wanted him to marry what she considers the cream of the crop, but he did the unthinkable. He fell in love with both my daughters—twin black girls who were born and raised in one of the roughest ghetto areas in America. And to a family like the Crowns—it’s a disgrace.”
“But they’re being threatened with these messages, too!”
“Well, like I said—it could be that thug ass boxer husband of hers, Buck. But in my gut, I believe it’s the Crowns. I don’t know why I think that, but I do.”
Suddenly, a nurse entered the room. “Miss Foster—your daughter’s calling for you.”
And when May Day went to January’s side where Buck was holding her hand and looking as though he wanted to slit her throat, a very weak January said, “Mama, please—make them bring me the man I love. Make them bring me Adam.”
“You just scandalous,” Buck kept saying under his breath, furiously, “A scandalous ass bitch.”
~*~
Ling Mae had just finished pole dancing with a vibrato so naked and lustful, it was impossible to believe she was still a virgin—but she was.
Energized by the high she got from the men’s worship in the Clinton Library, she unlocked the door of the bungalow she shared with her sister and let herself without cutting on the light.
Immediately—she felt his presence.
“Mr. Sinatra? Noble?”
Even without cutting on the lights, she knew who it was. She knew from the scent of his skin and the full black wavy shape of his lustrous Italian hair. Most of all, though, she knew by the body language of this ruggedly masculine man she’d secretly watched as he fucked her sister so many times.
Ling Mae turned on the lights, immediately noticing that he was drunk out of his mind.
“She’s a fucking traitor,” he slurred, indignantly.
“Mr. Sinatra, you’d better sit down—you’ve had too much to drink.”
“But you…you’re nothing like her.”
“Sit down and have some cold water while I call Daisy.”
Noble grabbed the girl’s skinny arms, brutally twisting them together as he shouted, “There’s no reason to call that bitch—she’s nothing but an ungrateful rotten…”
“Stop it, you’re hurting me!”
“You’re hurting? Well it’s not as much as I’m hurting.” Crazed and teary-eyed, he started kissing Ling’s mouth and telling her, “You don’t have to keep dancing, Ling. I can make you happy.”
“No, please…you’re drunk Mr. Sinatra.”
“I know you want me baby. Come on—take me from Dao Ming. Let’s show that bitch how wrong it is to shit on a good man’s heart.”
Ling Mae was in over her head. This wasn’t how she’d always dreamt it would be with a man like Noble Sinatra. Despite her many sex fantasies, she didn’t want to be with him. But he made her.
~*~
House of Crowns Estate, Georgia
“Faster pussycat…” Queenie Crown cheered from the doorway of the maid’s quarters.
Consumed by freakiness, Bliss Carrington Crown wasn’t about to let Mother Queenie down. She opened her legs wider, struggling as always to accommodate the big Viagra-enhanced pounding of her husband’s father, Otis Crown, as she made sure to moan and coo as sexily as she could for the older black woman’s listening ears.
What had originally started as a scheme to produce a Crown heir to pass off as Adam’s had now gone much deeper. Otis and Bliss had moved Queenie to the maid’s quarters that adjoined the master bedroom suite and were now a couple.
No one in the world knew about it other than the three of them, but it was an arrangement that Queenie enjoyed, because it dealt her the humiliation that she preferred receiving from sex. Only problem was—tonight it would end.
Knowing that his wife would be against it, Otis hadn’t warned Queenie about the men in white coats with gloved hands were marching up the grand staircase of the Crown mansion’s east wing to take Bliss away.
&n
bsp; “You like watching daddy fuck this fine piece of sugar?” Otis called to his wife over his shoulder. Posing and performing, he humped the much younger woman into gratuitous spasms of ecstasy—constantly turning Queenie on by reiterating “look at me get this white pussy that you wish you had.”
The men wearing surgical masks kicked open the doors!
Queenie screamed—Bliss screamed!
Otis, however, didn’t react. He just held Bliss down and kept on fucking as the men stood there watching.
“So you like writing books, ha?”
Bliss Crown turned white as a sheet as she looked into Otis’s hawk-dangerous eyes.
“By accident,” Otis chuckled, “You handed me the wrong diskette while we were taping my new Jell-O pudding pop commercial the other day.”
Bliss began shaking her head, reaching for a way to deny the diskette containing the book “American Crown; Family of Sin” was hers, but she couldn’t deny it. Since Bliss was already a bestselling author, Otis had insisted that NICE FOODS hire Bliss to write the Daddy Otis Jell-O television commercials, which entailed coming up with cute ad-libs and on the spot rewrites. During one of those rushed rewrites, Bliss had accidentally popped out the wrong disk and handed it straight to Otis.
“Hey Queenie,” Otis shouted with a Cheshire cat’s grin on his face as his wife stood confused in the doorway. “This bitch has been writing a book about what a scandalous, color-struck, dysfunctional family we are. She’s even got three whole chapters about our late night fuck parties and how you like to watch, because you wish you could be a white woman.”
“Daddy Otis let me explain,” Bliss began to beg with tears running from her blue eyes. “I wasn’t going to publish it!”
Too bad for Bliss, she hadn’t shown it to her agent or editor yet.
Otis ignored Bliss, his face on Queenie as he said laughing, “Can you imagine how many millions this bitch would make as a Crown family insider exposing every wart and skeleton we’ve got in our closet? Can you imagine how other black families would react—finding out that we’re nothing like the average black family?”
Instant malice filled Queenie’s eyes at just the thought that Bliss could expose the Crowns in front of other black families. Now she understood why the strange men were there.
“Bitch referred to me as a two-cent Bill Cosby wannabe. She even wrote that my public image as Black America’s father figure is a fraud and a joke!”
Bliss started to say something, but Otis slapped her across the face hard and spit in her face. January Knuckle-Joy had already escaped with her life. The Crowns couldn’t risk letting someone as dangerous as Bliss do the same.
“You brought this on yourself Bliss!” Queenie shouted as Otis nodded for the men in surgical masks, white coats and gloves to take the kicking and screaming woman away.
~*~
Ling Mae was so devastated that she couldn’t respond.
“Ling, are you inside?”
Having told the police everything she knew about Noble Sinatra’s dealings with Tony Scarfist, Daisy had just come upon the entrance of her bungalow and saw that her door was wide open in the middle of the night with the lights turned off. She kept calling, “Ling?”
Finally, Daisy’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could see that her sister was propped up against the wall of the hallway, trembling naked and crying.
“Ling Mae!” Daisy shouted as she cut on the lights and ran to her sister’s side. It was rape, she knew immediately. And because she knew that Ling had promised their mother Chen that she would always remain a virgin, she also knew that this devastate her sister far worse than most other women were affected by rape. Daisy burst into tears.
“Who did this to you!?” Daisy raged, furiously. “I’m going to kill him. I swear to god, I won’t stop until…”
Because she knew her sister was serious and could end up in prison, Ling became frightened and lied, “No one did anything, Daisy.”
“Don’t call me Daisy—call me Dao Ming! Now who was the motherfucker who did this to you? Was it Jared Presser?”
“No,” Ling cried, shaking her head. “It wasn’t Jared and I wasn’t raped, Dao Ming! Nobody raped me!”
“Stop lying!” Daisy raged as she fetched a sheet from the linen closet and draped it around Ling. She said, “There’s no use in you trying to protect him—because whoever it is; he’s going to pay.”
And just then, as though it were some act of god, a voice called to them from the doorway.
“Dao Ming? Ling Mae?”
In astonishment, the two women looked up and saw that it was their mother, Chen.
The woman they’d never been able to get to leave her room back in West Linn. It couldn’t be, they both thought. Their mother had been lost to them in a superstition; imprisoned in a room by a curse she hadn’t been able to shake believing in.
“Mother—mother, is that you?”
“It is I, girls…I have left your father’s room. I have sold the house in West Linn. I have left the prison of my beliefs.”
Rushing to touch and hold her, Daisy saw that it really was her! Though she looked much older than her years and was as frail as could possibly be—it wasn’t a dream, it was their mother in the doorway clutching a suitcase.
In unison, with tears of joys, Daisy and Ling held on for dear life, kissing and pulling Chen inside.
~*~
“I need Adam,” January insisted from her bed in the critical care unit. “Please Buck—let him come to me.”
Agony pained the boxer’s face as he held January’s hand, staring into her lovelorn eyes. May Day stood by staring at him with a pleading back-up glance.
But being the husband and his wife being in a state of post-hysteria due to the bullet-shock, Buck had the legal right to say, “No. As your husband and your legal guardian, I think what you need right now is rest.”
January slapped his hand away in disgust.
Suddenly, Detective Sanchez and several Pismo Beach police officers entered the room.
“Buck Knuckle-Joy?”
“Yeah, dude—what’s up?”
“We need to have word with you outside your wife’s room.” They had come to arrest Buck and everyone knew it. “We’d prefer to do this calmly without upsetting your wife’s condition.”
“Man, I ain’t got no reason to kill nobody.”
“That’s for your lawyer to argue,” Detective Sanchez responded. “In the mean time, come with us.”
As the police escorted Buck out, Detective Sanchez informed January and May Day, “There’s been another development as well, Mrs. Knuckle-Joy. My guys on Ocean Park boulevard arrested one of the top executives from your company—Noble Sinatra—ten minutes ago.”
January wasn’t surprised, but she was grateful that the mafia hadn’t been able to tie the hands of Pismo Beach Police.
For a fleeting moment, Detective Sanchez’s eyes latched onto May Day’s. Both had spoken before in the other room when he’d mistaken May Day for January’s sister and introduced himself as “Roman”, but neither had had time to acknowledge the intense sexual attraction they were experiencing for one another.
Now the handsome Latino Detective was demanding to claim interest by carefully letting his eyes scan over May Day’s face and body, affirmatively.
May Day forced herself not to smile; to remain poker faced in front of her daughter. January made some remark about the detective’s dance moves at the last Warm Leatherette Mardi Gras and told him that he didn’t want to miss the next one.
“Are you going to be there?” he asked May Day.
“I might…I might not.”
And that’s when January noticed it. Roman Sanchez had a crush on her mother. She thought it cute.
“By the way,” Detective Roman Sanchez finished up. “As I was coming in, there were two people waiting to see you—a black man in a racer’s uniform and an older Italian woman. Should I let eit
her of them in?”
“Oh yes,” January cooed, excitedly. “Let the black man in, that’s Adam Crown!”
Roman left, January began having May Day help to prop her up in bed a little—and then Caprice Sinatra, not Adam, walked in.
“Caprice, I’m very tired right now. The only person I want to see right now is Adam Crown!”
“Well I’m sorry to inform you that Adam Crown had to leave immediately for Georgia.”
“You’re lying!”
“No, my dear I’m not,” Caprice sighed as she walked over to the bed, preparing to settle in and make herself comfortable. “I guess you haven’t turned on the T.V. in the last half hour—there’s been a sudden death in the Crown family. Adam’s wife, Bliss, went into premature labor while she was driving on some infamous freeway in Atlanta called ‘Spaghetti Junction’ and crashed her car into a retaining wall. She’s dead.”
Both January and May Day were stricken with a speechless shock.
They didn’t believe it was an accident. Whoever was out to kill January had obviously targeted Bliss that same day. What fucked with May Day, however, was that Bliss had been carrying a Crown baby; Bliss was white; Bliss was everything the Crowns ever wanted in a daughter-in-law. There was no way the Crowns would want to get rid of Bliss. And they had been getting the crank calls just like May Day had, so this effectively shot down May Day Foster’s suspicions about the Crowns being the one after her daughter.
January thought Noble Sinatra was the backer and May Day figured it had to be Buck.
“That’s very sad,” January said as genuine tears of guilt sprang from her dark eyes. She had stolen the woman’s husband and for the first time felt really bad about it.
“Thanks for telling us,” added May Day.
“You’re welcome—but that’s not the reason I came here.”
“I can’t get your son, Noble, off the hook,” January blurted out, “If that’s what you’re here about.
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