Natural Born Liar: The Misadventures of Mink LaRue

by Noire

  “Yo, Dre!” he hollered as his friend walked toward his car and got inside. “Dre! You just gonna leave me like that, man? Yo, we got a situation here, nigga! You was down for the ride. I ain’t going down by myself, Dre! If they get me they getting your ass too!”

  Jock watched Dre take off in his car, but just as his boy pulled out of the driveway, another ride pulled in.

  “Oh shit,” Jock muttered under his breath when he saw who it was.

  Dane jumped out of his Hummer, and Mink and Bunni were right behind him.

  “Hey Jock!” Bunni hollered like she was tipsy. “You ready to rock?” She bust out laughing and started walking toward him with Mink and Dane right behind her.

  “Nah!” Jock tried to wave them off. There was no way in fuck he could let them get close to the pool house. “Y’all go ahead inside. I gotta get something! I’ll meet you in the house in a second!”

  “What you doing, man?” Dane hollered at him from the other side of the pool. “I thought Bump told you to stay outta there at night, dude?”

  “I ... I ... I think I left something in there!” Jock hollered. “Yo, man, y’all go check on Katie for me real quick! She’s burning the shit outta something in the kitchen!”

  He ran back inside the pool house and locked the door. The sheet-covered body on the sofa seemed to take up all the space in the room, and Jock felt like he was walking through a bad dream. The last thing he wanted was for his young life to be linked with this chick’s crazy death, and he couldn’t stop the tears that slipped from his eyes as he tried to figure out what to do.

  What Jock needed right now was a clean-up man. A closer. Somebody who could make all this shit go away like it had never even happened. There was only one dude he could think of who could take care of something so fuckin’ crucial. This guy was known for wiping up a lotta messy shit in the past, and if anybody could clean up this kind of doo-doo, Jock knew this man could.

  He picked up his cell phone and made a quick call. He spoke a few words to the man on the other end of the line, and then he unlocked the door and sat on the floor and waited for his uncle Suge to arrive.

  CHAPTER 29

  When we got back from partying with his friends, Dane said he wanted me and Bunni to come check out his space. He stayed in a dope-ass apartment over the ten-car garage during the summer when he wasn’t at school and living in the dorms, and it was pimped the hell out up there.

  Bunni oohed and aahed, all impressed as he showed us around, but I played cool with it like I saw quality shit every day. Brother Dane was a pussy hound, and his crib was a bad-ass little fuck den. There were two large bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a living room, a loft, and a full-sized kitchen that was stocked with food. Papi had a stripper pole in his loft, and a sex swing hanging from the ceiling too. Pictures of half-naked chicks were everywhere and in all kinds of poses, and with all that ass tooted up everywhere I didn’t know how he could sleep at night. I busted Bunni eyeballing that stripper pole and licking her lips, and I stuck my finger into her back pocket and yanked her ass up outta there.

  Dane told us he played music at a lot of college parties, and he had all kinds of DJ equipment to show for it. Turntables, bass speakers, tweeters, bottoms, all that. He was into cuts like “Tony Montana” and “I’m on One,” and he was blasting the beat to “Maybe She Will” by Lil Wayne while he threw his own rap down over it.

  We kicked off our shoes and I climbed up on his huge loft bed. I sat cross-legged on his prime cashmere blanket and wiggled my toes. Dane went to the kitchen and came back with three cold Heinekens, and then he sparked up two blunts and passed one to me and the other one to Bunni.

  “So, whattup. Y’all missing New York yet or is Texas starting to feel like home?”

  I grinned. I was digging Dane. Outta everybody we had met so far, him and Jock had been the only two who seemed to accept my bullshit story straight off the bat.

  “Yeah, I kinda miss Harlem. You ever been there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I was there when my sister Sable—when you, I mean—was kidnapped.”

  I did a puff-puff pass and was about to change the subject, but Bunni jumped right on it.

  “So you remember the day that Sable got snatched, huh?”

  “Nah, not really. I just know I was there. I was almost five, Sable was three, and Bump was around seven or eight. He remembers it, though. That dude remembers everything. And now ... Mink is here ... right on time for Sable’s twenty-first birthday.”

  “Uh-huh.” I played it off. “And this year I’m gonna eat my birthday cake with my fam!”

  Dane laughed. “Hell yeah, and you’re gonna pocket a hundred grand too.”

  “It’s not all about the money, Dane,” I lied. “It’s about getting what’s yours in life and knowing who you are.”

  “That’s cool. But did you know about all the other money you can get from the family trust?”

  “What other money?”

  Dane shrugged. “Bump is prolly gon’ go gorilla ’cause I told you, but fuck it, if you’re Sable then you’ve got a right to know. There’s a three-hundred-grand annuity waiting for all of us if my father dies or if he can’t go back to work as head of his company.”

  “Annuity? What’s that?”

  “It’s a cash payment you get every year. Pops set it up in a trust for all his kids. It’s like life insurance, but you get an annual payment, and the government doesn’t get their hands on it and tax the shit out of it.”

  Bunni was on it even quicker than I was. “Hold up. So if your father dies all y’all muthafuckas get three hunnerd g’s every goddamn year?”

  Dane nodded. “Yeah. I mean, he set it up so that, you know, there’s a lot that goes into it and a lot you gotta do to get it, but basically, yeah. If he dies or if he’s declared incompetent to deal with his own affairs, we get it.”

  Bunni jumped up and started dancing, and I took an extra-long puff on the blunt.

  “So what do you have to do to get it?” I threw the question out there real casually, but every nerve in my body was tingling.

  “Look, my pops was a straight-up G back in the day, and when he made it big in oil he knew he was gonna have to polish up his image and reinvent his legacy, nah’mean? So he changed his ways and started living the clean life. He vowed all his children were gonna live that way too. If they wanted to get his damn money, that is.”

  “But what do you have to do?” I insisted.

  Dane laughed and looked at the blunt in his hand. “Definitely not the kinda shit I’ve been out there doing, that’s what’s up. For real though, Pops just wanted us to do all the normal stuff. Graduate from high school and go to college”—he nodded toward the spliff Bunni was rolling—“stay away from drugs, make sure we didn’t get arrested or do nothing stupid that would shine a bad light on our family name. You know. He wanted us to live right.”

  I listened to that yang, but I knew my ass was straight disqualified. I had never graduated from anywhere. I mean, I had enough credits to walk across the stage with my high school class, but them mugs had refused to let me because me and two other girls had got busted running a scheme with the booster club funds.

  And I damn sure had me a nice little arrest record. In every freakin’ borough in the city of New York! I glanced down at the blunt Dane had passed me ... stay away from the head bangaz? That shit was completely out!

  Dane threw on a cut by Reem Raw and his sound filled the room.

  Bunni grabbed Dane up in the collar and took him into the loft to show him a few of her pole tricks. I went with them, but instead of dancing I stood there watching Bunni and mentally digging around in my bag of lies. Three hundred free g’s a year would keep me and my girl both laced real lovely. Nah, I wasn’t grimy enough to get down on my knees and pray for Viceroy to check outta here, but if his banged-up ass happened to kick the bucket, I was damn sure gonna be on line with all the rest of his kids, holding out my greedy little hand.

  I le
ft Bunni chillin’ in Dane’s crib. She was demonstrating some of her hot moves on the sex swing, and it didn’t take me long to realize that three was a crowd. I went back to my suite and logged onto Facebook, and I was just about to check my inbox messages when I heard a car pull up outside my window.

  I went over and opened the curtains, then broke out in a big-ass grin when I saw who it was. Uncle Suge’s big silver truck was right out back, and I figured he had pulled up under my window so Selah and Barron wouldn’t bust him coming to see me.

  I ran in the bathroom and sloshed some Listerine around in my mouth, then checked my nose for boogers and grabbed my slim Gucci purse and wrapped the strap around my wrist.

  I tipped down the spiral staircase and dipped out the door right off the kitchen, but when I got outside Uncle Suge wasn’t parked under my window no more. His truck was right next to the pool house now, and I swore all out a snake was gonna get me as I ran across the grass to the other side of the pool.

  I could tell shit was funky before I even got all the way over there. The back passenger door of the truck was wide open, and I couldn’t believe it when Uncle Suge and Jock came outta the pool house carrying a limp white chick.

  Uncle Suge had her under her arms, and Jock was holding her right under her knees. She looked like she was toasted up, and since I was an underage drinker my damn self, I wasn’t about to throw up no shots just ’cause the liq had knocked mami out.

  “What the hell was she drinking?” I joked as I walked up on them outta the darkness. “Whatever it was, I want me some!”

  Jock jumped so bad he let go of the girl’s legs and the bottom half of her body swung down and hit the ground like she was out cold.

  “Oh, that bitch is wasted,” I giggled, but then I saw the look on their faces.

  Uncle Suge looked deadly, but Jock was scared as hell. He was sweating bullets and his eyes were real red and mad big. “Damn!” he screamed on me. “I thought I told y’all to go in the house!” He looked wild in the face. Crazy. Like a dust head who was freaking the hell out.

  “Who you screamin’ at?” My hand shot up on my hip as Harlem jumped right outta me. “I ain’t one of ya little freaky friends, baby boy! You better know it!”

  “Go back in the house, Mink,” Uncle Suge said quietly as he hoisted the girl up under her arms again. She looked like dead weight from where I was standing, and when I moved up on them a little bit and peeped in her mug, she looked straight up dead!

  “What the hell happened to her?” I had never seen a white person who looked like this before.

  “She’s straight,” Uncle Suge said. They pushed the girl into the backseat of the truck and shut the door, then Uncle Suge went around to the driver’s side and got in.

  I ran over there and stood on my toes at his window. “Is she dead?”

  “Nah. She’s gonna be all right. Go back in the house. Both of y’all. I got this.”

  Me and Jock just stood there as the truck rolled across the grass and drove off into the night.

  “What the hell happened to her?”

  Jock shrugged. “She just got carried away, Mink. A lotta people do. Can we just not talk about this? Can you just forget you even saw her?”

  “Oh, I can do whatever I wanna do,” I told him, thinking fast. “But I tell you what. If you want me to keep my mouth closed then you better watch how you talk to me and start acting like I’m ya damn sister!”

  CHAPTER 30

  It had been a wild and crazy weekend, and when the sun came up Monday morning me and Bunni were both ready to get it poppin’. We left the house at six-thirty, even though the lab didn’t open up until eight. Bunni said we needed to get there early, way before the staff arrived, and I was cool with that.

  Barron gave us a driver who couldn’t speak no English, and neither one of us could understand a lick of Spanish. He looked fresh and sharp for it to be so early in the morning, though, and I could see he took his job real serious.

  “Go all the way around.” Bunni pointed and ordered him as he pulled up in front of the two-story building. “They make the workers park in the back, and that’s where we need to be.”

  I was nervous like a mutha, but I had mad faith in my girl, though. I could always put my money on Bunni to come through with anything she set out to do, and in all these years she hadn’t let me down not one time yet.

  “Okay, you got everything you need, right?” I asked even though I had watched her pack up her scary-ass torture kit the night before.

  She nodded. “Yep, I got my dick clamp and my male chastity device, my anal drill, my spiked whip, and my steel cuffs. Chillax, Mink. I’m set. For real yo, the only thing you really need in this game is enough heart to hurt one of these freaky fools,” she said. “If you can get past pinching a nigga’s balls and slappin’ his dick around, you straight.”

  Bunni took her kit and got outta the limo. I felt like I was watching my kid go off with her lunch box on the first day of school. She never even looked back as she hurried over to the empty building and stood behind some high bushes.

  I watched outta the limo’s window for about fifteen minutes before a car pulled into the lot. Bunni had told me Kelvin Merchant was the one who opened up the clinic in the mornings, and when the doors on the old cream cheese–colored Lex with gray guts swung open, I wasn’t surprised to see a fat, yellow dumpling roll out.

  He looked just like he had looked in the picture we’d seen on the Internet. Big and bald. His shirt was hiked up in the back and his ass crack was about ten inches long. He reached back inside the car and got a briefcase, then he pulled his T-shirt down in the back and slammed the door.

  “Okaaaay,” I muttered under my breath as he waddled toward the building. The future of our hundred grand was riding on this nigga right here! If Bunni had never worked her mash game before I needed her to get it on right now!

  Dude was right up on the door when Bunni stepped outta the bushes. She leaned into him real quick like she was saying something. He froze for a quick second, and then he went ahead and stuck his key in the lock. I almost hollered as he pushed the door open and Bunni pranced inside before him. Her head was all up in the air and she high-stepped up in that bitch like she was da Queen of England!

  I was fiendish as I watched both the door and the dashboard clock. When ten minutes had passed and Bunni still hadn’t come out, I started wondering. After twenty minutes I was worrying, and ten minutes later my ass was ready to wild the fuck out. It was five minutes to eight, and according to the Web site the lab opened up at eight a.m. sharp.

  My instincts told me that something musta gone wrong up in there, or Bunni woulda been back by now. Maybe dude’s Facebook profile was a front. Maybe instead of submitting to pain, he was the psycho type who liked to dish that shit out! I pictured his big brawny ass with his meaty hands around Bunni’s throat, and I snatched off my earrings and slid my pocketknife outta my Coach bag.

  My breath caught in my throat as another car pulled into the parking lot. It was a beige Mitsubishi, and an older white lady got out and started walking real fast toward the back door.

  That was it. I was going inside, and if I had to shave some meat offa Kelvin’s big sucka ass, then I was gonna cut that nigga all the way down to the bone.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told our silent driver. I met his eyes in the rearview mirror and held up my palm like stop! “Stay right here. Don’t go nowhere, you understand?”

  I opened my door to get out, just as the door opened on the other side and Bunni jumped in.

  “Woooo hoooo! We did it! We did it! Drive around to the parking lot!” She shooed the driver and pointed her finger. “Go ’head, drive over there!”

  I slammed my door shut and looked at her to see if she was hurt. She was crackin’ the fuck up!

  “What took you so damn long?” I blasted her as the limo pulled off. She was scooched down in the seat giggling like hell, and when she sat up her clothes were on her all crooked an
d twisted.

  “That shit was fun!” She grinned and clapped her hands like a lil kid. “I wanna do it again, Mink! I wanna do that shit again!”

  “You almost got caught, Bunni! I saw a white lady bust up in the back door!”

  “I know, stupid. That’s why I busted out through the front.”

  “Your ass didn’t go in there to play, goddammit! We got big bank riding on those DNA results, remember? You was supposed to convince that fool to hook us up!”

  “Goddamn, Mink,” she said like she was done with my annoying ass. “Go sit down somewhere with all that, okay? I know what I went in there to do, and I did it. I worked,” she said looking at me like I was stupid as hell, “and then I played.”

  “So what did dude say? Is he gonna put in work for us?”

  “Oh,” Bunni smirked and waved her hand. “We got all that important shit outta the way first. I’m a professional, baby. You know it’s always about business before pleasure with me. Trust me, I left that pain slut in PAIN!”

  “Okay, okay, so you handled that bizz, so now I can go inside and let them take my DNA right?”

  “Mink! Calm the hell down! Yes, go ’head and take your ass inside. Your ass could show up with the DNA of a ninety-year-old rabbit, and your shit would still come back a perfect match for Sable Dominion.”

  “Are you sure dude is really down, Bunni?”

  “Yes! He said for me to bring you in so you could take the damn test!”

  “And what did he say after that?”

  “He didn’t say shit after that, Mink! Hell, the nigga couldn’t talk!”

  “Why not?”

  Bunni giggled. “’Cause, stupid. He had my whole ass in his mouth!”

  CHAPTER 31

  Barron stood in his father’s office holding several sheets of paper and staring at a portrait of his parents that had been taken more than a year before he was born. When Barron was growing up, Viceroy had schooled him on the ways of cunning men, and instilled in him the street instincts that had kept him afloat in an ocean full of hungry, cutthroat sharks.