Natural Born Liar: The Misadventures of Mink LaRue (18 page)

BOOK: Natural Born Liar: The Misadventures of Mink LaRue
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CHAPTER 31
 
B
arron 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.
He would never admit it, but his father’s health and the problems at Dominion Oil weren’t the only things messing with his head. He’d been having some real fucked up dreams about Mink almost every night, and they were so damn real that his dick was getting hard and his body was actually responding like she was right there in his bed, and even when he was wide-awake, he just couldn’t get that gorgeous face or that bomb-ass figure of hers off his mind.
And if Mink was on
his
mind and he didn’t even like the bitch, then Barron knew damn well there were countless other men who stared at her banging, tantalizing hips and felt the exact same way. One of the first things he did after they came back from seeing Viceroy in Houston was go to Craigslist and look up escort services under New York City’s sex ads. It had taken him a couple of minutes, but eventually he’d come across the kind of Web site he was searching for.
There were all kinds of pictures of Mink plastered up. She was dressed like a sexy little slut and showcasing that hot stripper’s body as she advertised her quick-sheet services as hot naked massages.
Barron looked down at the papers in his hand. He had printed them off the Web site, and they were his written proof that the natural-born liar who was trying to slide her hand into the Dominions’ trust fund was just another gold digger looking to score some easy cash.
He had done a little bit more searching, and nothing he found on this chick came as a surprise. Mink was pure trash. She had crawled up out of some New York City gutter looking to take advantage of Selah in her time of grief, and it fucked Barron up that a poser like her had managed to get past their front door, let alone eat off his father’s table and sleep under his roof.
Barron had also scanned the sex ads on Web sites for other areas of New York City to see what he could dig up on Mink. Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. This chick had been running game in every borough of the city. This was the exact type of scandalous shit that Viceroy had been worried about. The Dominions had an image to protect, and even if Mink did somehow turn out to be Sable, as much dirt as she had done, her grimy ass wouldn’t be getting a penny out of the family trust fund.
Barron couldn’t wait to snatch the cover off her little hustle and show his mother what he’d found. Mink was about to be exposed, and with a dick-bricking body like hers Barron hoped she could sell enough pussy to get back to New York City real quick, because her free, fun-filled Texas vacation was about to be over.
 
It was supposed to be a family vacation, but her husband had gone to work every day since they arrived, and once again the kids were going stir-crazy from being trapped inside the hotel room. She’d gotten them dressed and called down to the front desk for a taxi, and when it showed up she piled her babies inside and rode downtown to the small office her husband maintained in New York City.
She had expected to see a beautiful, familiar face when they got off the creaky elevator in the drafty building in the Financial District, but the receptionist’s desk was abandoned. Her seven-year-old was anxious to see his father, but by now the two babies had fallen fast asleep. They walked through the empty waiting room and started down the narrow, carpeted hallway to her husband’s office.
The door was open a crack. She pushed against it gently and then froze, struggling to understand the sight that greeted them.
The girl was naked and on her knees. Her beautiful skin glowed with youth, and her light brown hair cascaded down her back. Her figure was slender, yet shapely, and she had almost the exact same ass as the woman who stood there watching her.
Her husband was standing near his desk. His silk underwear and pinstriped trousers were on the floor around his feet, and the 9 mm he always carried with him was strapped to his left ankle.
She watched quietly as he held on to his desk with one hand and palmed the head of the girl who was sucking his dick with the other.
“Yeah,” he panted and pounded his hips as the nineteen-year-old girl stroked him with both hands and jutted her neck back and forth on his shaft. Her lips smacked wetly as she slurped and sucked and tried to cram every inch of him down her throat.
Her husband responded by throwing his head back in pleasure. His handsome mouth went slack as he muttered thickly, “Suck it, baby. That’s right. Suck it. Suck it all the way down to the bone.”
It was her seven-year-old son who made their presence known.
“Daddy?”
The frantic thrusting slowed at first, then ground to a stop as her husband patted the top of the girl’s head and pulled himself from her dripping mouth.
“Selah. Baby ... ,” he whispered as he called her name.
The young girl jumped to her feet leaving her lover’s shrinking dick exposed. Her lips were wet and swollen. A glistening trail of cum dribbled down her chin, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand.
“I’m so sorry ... ” The beautiful young girl who the woman had loved and sacrificed for stood shaking with shame as she covered her mouth with one hand and reached out for her older sister with the other. “It didn’t mean anything. I swear. I was just trying to help, that’s all. He needed it. He needed it.”
The woman gathered her children and fled without saying a word. She rode back downstairs on the squeaky elevator and headed straight to the nearest liquor store. Dazed, she wandered the streets of Manhattan until she came upon a park, and while her two younger children played on the slide, she opened her bottle and tried to wash those horrible images of her husband’s dick sliding in and out of her sister’s mouth from her mind.
It took her an hour to drain the bottle, and she was in pretty bad shape when she stood up and summoned her children. Her vision blurred as she pushed her baby’s stroller across the busy city streets. She staggered and got swept along in the crowd as they walked, her heart hardening and becoming vengeful. The betrayal hurt even worse than the cheating, she realized, and she was going to pay Viceroy back one day, she promised herself. Pay him back with his worst fucking enemy.
The well-dressed woman was totally plastered when she stumbled into a Duane Reade store leaving her three small children waiting outside. She was only in there for a couple of minutes. Two, maybe three. But that was long enough. Because when she came back out again, one of her children was gone.
 
“But what does any of this matter?” Selah asked. Her hand shook as she sipped a martini, and she looked tired and distraught. Barron had walked in on her while she was taking a nap on the sofa in the study. She had been gripped in the clutches of a familiar nightmare, and right away she’d gone over to the bar to fix herself a stiff drink.
Selah took a brief glance at the provocative sex ads her son had printed out, then shrugged her shoulders and took another sip of her drink. “I’m sorry, Barron. Identity theft is going on everywhere these days, and even if it really is Mink in these pictures, I don’t care about any of it. I just don’t think it matters.”
“Damn right it matters, Ma!” Barron was shocked. “You know the terms of the trust fund better than I do. Look at those pictures! This chick probably has a rap sheet longer than a red carpet. I bet there isn’t one dirty corner in the entire city of New York that this broad hasn’t worked. She’s a stripper, Ma. And a so-called “escort” if you dig what I’m saying. She’s a con artist and a pickpocket too!”
“But what does her lifestyle matter if she’s your
sister
, Barron? Anything that girl has done, and anything she may have had to become just to
survive
out there on those streets, it was my fault and not hers! If I hadn’t lost Sable ... if she had grown up safe and protected right here with us, she would have lived a different life! None of this shit would be an issue because she would have had opportunities to make better decisions, Barron! It just doesn’t
matter
!”
Selah put her drink down and stood up. She walked over to her oldest son and put her head on his arm.
“I love you, Barron. I love you from the bottom of my heart, and I’m so sorry about what happened that day. Not just about what happened to Sable, but about what happened to you too. But I have to tell you, if Mink really is my daughter ... if she is your sister, then nothing you’ve shown me will mean a damn thing. We’re still going to love her, we’ll still respect her, and most of all, we’ll
accept
her. Okay, baby? Okay?”
Barron looked at Selah for a long time, then nodded. He loved his mother and he would do almost anything to keep a smile on her face. But Selah was blinded, and he wasn’t feeling her on this one. Mink was a fraud. That chick had a whole bunch of grime on her, and even if she did turn out to be Sable, when it came to the Dominion fortune Barron was going to make sure she stayed her shiesty ass on the outside looking in.
CHAPTER 32
 
I
had been all up in everybody else’s grill, but I hadn’t really gotten a chance to see what stank Miss Fallon’s trip was. I’d left my DNA at the lab, and then me and Bunni had come back to the mansion to celebrate with a few drinks by the pool. Bunni messed around and chugged down one too many peach Cîrocs, so I left her out there sleepin’ it off and went to check my little play-sister out.
Fallon was a beautiful young chick, but I could tell she had issues. The girl was just stupid strange. Ever since we came back from Houston she’d been walking around with the somebody-took-a-shit-on-me look plastered to her mug.
I wandered around the mansion like I was casing the joint until I came up on a door that had a big
KEEP OUT
sign taped to it. Loud music was playing on the other side, some type of rock shit, and since I already knew where Jock’s room was I took this one to be Fallon’s.
I hollered her name again and nigga-knocked on the door. “Hey, Fallon! Open the door girl. You in there?”
She opened the door a crack and I swear to God she looked like one of those crazy people on 42nd Street who stand on the corner tryna convince everybody that the world was about to end.
“What’s wrong?” I blurted out. I already knew she didn’t like my ass, but she looked so busted the question just came flyin’ outta my mouth. She didn’t look a damn thing like the fly little beauty queen who had tooted up her ass for me to kiss on the first day I met her. Instead, she was wearing a white one-piece shirt dress that looked real off-brand and dingy, and her hair was looking right ratchet. “Damn girl,” I said tryna peek past her and into her room, “you good up in here?”
“Yeah, I’m cool,” she said standing in the door crack like she wasn’t about to open it no wider. “What do you want?”
“I came to check you out,” I said and ignored the twisted look on her face. “I wanna come in for a few.”
She let me in, but her room gave me the creeps from the gate. It was painted in rectangular sections of dull gray, purple, and black, and there were all kinds of Goth symbols and pictures of tombstones, vampires, and werewolves stuck up on every wall.
“Damn!” I said before I could catch myself. “What the hell is all this shit about? You must be one of those
Vampire Diaries
fans, or you on some real
Twilight
shit. All this scariness don’t give you nightmares when you close your eyes at night?”
Her expression never changed.
“What you tryna say?”
I waved my arms around like,
Look at all this shit!
“You know, the dark stuff. That other-world scene. The kinda drama that goes down in all those headless-monster horror movies.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you don’t like what I’m into then you don’t have to come up in my room. Besides, it’s not like this all the time. I paint and redecorate a lot.”
“But you do beauty pageants and all that kinda stuff, right? I woulda thought you’d have a whole bunch of trophies and tiaras and stuff like that laying around. You know, some real fly, girly-girl shit.”
She gave me a bored little shrug and shook her head. “I don’t compete in pageants anymore. I put all that kinda stuff in the storage shed out back.”
Her bedroom was really huge, and she had it set up like a little apartment. Her king-sized bed was even nicer than the ones me and Bunni had in our guest rooms. It had a gorgeous canopy rack up top, and some thick, ugly black curtains were draped over the bed that woulda gave me nightmares for real. There was a marble counter with a sink, a small refrigerator, and a microwave over in the corner, a bomb sitting area with a big-screen TV mounted to the wall, and a big silver disco ball hung from the ceiling right over the metallic leather couch.
I sat down, and she walked over to her iPod and killed the rock music, then picked up the remote and clicked on the TV. She acted like I wasn’t even there as she started flipping through the channels, so I busted open a big bag of Funyuns that were on her coffee table and went at ’em.
“So what’s good, little sister?” I said and crunched on the crispy-salty onion rings. “How they do it in your world?”
She cut her eyes at me and smirked. “Not like they do it in yours.”
I probed her. “Lemme guess. You got man trouble, right? Your lil boyfriend actin’ bogus or something?”
“Please. Don’t come up in here playing the big-sister role, okay? I been doing just fine all these years without one.”
“Why?” I straight up challenged that ass. “’Cause you had Pilar as your sister? You ain’t gotta worry, Fallon. I didn’t come here to change nothing around or to make no waves. You been the baby girl in this family for your whole life, and trust me, I’m not tryna steal your shine.”
She laughed. “Nah, you’re just trying to steal a little money, right? If you can get your hands on some of Sable’s cash, then everything’ll be straight, huh?”
I was gonna have some problems with this grown-ass lil chick. I could tell Pilar was all up in her head just as deep as she was in Barron’s, and it was gonna be real hard to run game on Fallon and get her on my side.
“You’re a real nice-looking girl, Fallon,” I said, buttering her up because I was pretty sure she got that compliment damn-near every day. “You got a lotta female friends?”
“Uh-
uh
. Hell no,” she said, shaking her head real quick. “Are you crazy?”
I laughed. “Me neither! I ain’t never rolled with a bunch of girls. For some reason a lot of chicks just don’t be feelin’ me like that.” And that was the truth. Sometimes females took one look at me and started hatin’ for no reason at all. The way we did each other was just crazy like that.
She nodded. “Even some of my friends who I thought were cool are turning out to be undercover haters,” she admitted. Then she folded one leg under her butt and asked me, “What’s it like to live in New York? I mean, I’ve seen it on television and all that, but what’s it like to walk down the streets?”
“You’ve never been to New York?” I was surprised. In my mind everybody in the whole world was up on New York.
“No.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been allowed to go. Sable got kidnapped there remember? After that, my mother got all paranoid. When I was born she swore I would never step foot in that city. And I haven’t.”
I nodded and checked myself. I don’t know how the hell I kept forgetting that these people had really lost the person I was pretending to be.
“Well, New York is live,” I told her. “I mean, I was raised in the projects and it can get real grimy in some areas, but overall, the City That Never Sleeps is always alive and full of action. It’s hot.”
“You must feel so free there. I mean, everybody is different but it’s okay to be different in New York, isn’t it?”
I cracked up. “Baby, different ain’t the word. We got some real freaks walking around on our streets. There are nutcases all over the city, and no matter how strange and kooky somebody is, a New Yorker has always seen somebody worse. Don’t a damn thing surprise us.”
Fallon sighed. “But people are accepted in New York, right? Everybody gets to be whoever they really are, don’t they?”
I had to think about that one. “I wouldn’t say all that, but for the most part people are tolerated up to a point. It’s like,‘go ’head and do ya thing, just don’t do it over here on me.’ That’s the kinda attitude a New Yorker rolls with. Fuck around, lay around. Don’t start none, won’t be none. You know what I mean?”
Fallon nodded. “I think so. But I’m gonna go see for myself as soon as I turn eighteen.”
I started to say something stupid like,
Even though your mother told you not to go?
But then I caught myself. I had never paid no mind to a damn thing that came outta my mother’s mouth. If she told me not to do something I took my little fast ass out there and did it twice. Sometimes I did it three times in a row. Shit, Mizz Mink wasn’t qualified to be advising a chick like Fallon on
nothing.
I didn’t stay too long in her room, and she seemed kinda relieved when I stood up and said I was about to go. I was walking out when a picture sitting on a little table caught my eye. I reached out to pick it up, but Fallon beat me to it and slammed it face-down.

Ohhhh
! Whattup with that? I can’t see your picture?”
“For what? You don’t know anybody in it.”
“It looked like a cool picture.” I played her. “I just wanted to see it.”
She handed it to me real slow, and as soon as I looked at it I knew how she was rollin’. It was a picture of Fallon and her stud boo. This broad looked way older than eighteen. Hell, she looked damn-near my mama’s age. She had a shaved head and tats all up and down her flabby arms, and she was nibbling on Fallon’s ear like she was a dude for real.
“So this your man, huh?”
If she was expecting me to be shocked shitless she was outta luck. I saw so much of this on a daily in New York that it didn’t press me out at all.
“Yeah, that’s Fredericka. Freddie. My best friend.”
“Y’all look happy, so why you didn’t want me to see her?” I could tell by the way she sighed that I was in there with her. We were talking about something that
she
wanted to talk about, and she’d let her little defenses down.
“Well, we ain’t really as happy as we look. I mean, we love each other, but we’re just into different things.”
“Different things like what?”
“Well, Freddie’s into the club scene, and I’m basically not. She likes all the fancy cars and the jewelry and all that, and I don’t really care about all that. I’m really big on drawing, and all Freddie wants me to do is dance.”
My ears got big. “Dance? Dance how? Dance where?”
She muttered under her breath, “At the strip club.” She shocked the shit outta me. That mess came outta her mouth so low that for a second I thought I was hearing things.
“Come again? You said Freddie wants you to dance in strip clubs?” I couldn’t believe this shit!
“Yeah”—she nodded real quick—“but only for private sessions. She doesn’t want me to do it for the money. She just likes to watch.”
Aw, hell. Freddie had some freak in her bald-headed ass! I was a strip club connoisseur, and I knew exactly what time it was. Freddie was the type who liked threesomes. She got off on watching Fallon strip for dudes, then she jumped in the mix so the two of them could put Fallon in a sandwich and take turns eating her young ass.
“Look Fallon,” I said, and I really, really,
really
tried hard to just say what I had to say without coming across like I was preachin’ to her. “Stripping ain’t the worst thing you can do, but it ain’t no legitimate grind neither. Your family gives you everything you need so it’s not like you gotta hump the pole so you can eat and pay your bills. Freddie might be a female, but she’s strollin’ you the same way a dude would. If watching chicks strip is her thing, then let her buy some chips and rent herself a pole freak. You shouldn’t be letting no man
or
no stud trick you off like that.”
She waved all that noise away. “It’s not that serious, Mink. I only do it every now and then, and it’s not like we have sex every single time.”
“Cool,” I said as I headed out the door. I recognized the “don’t tell me shit” look in her eyes. I used to give it to my moms on the regular.
“Do you, baby girl. But Freddie-boo needs to get her own damn grind, and whenever y’all get together to do whatever it is y’all do, I hope you make sure everybody in the room is wrapped up extra-tight.”
It was real late that night when I saw Fallon again. I had just got outta the shower and slipped on a white satin nightgown that Peaches had boosted for me when somebody knocked on my door.
I opened it up and was surprised to see Fallon standing there in the same raggedy dress she had on earlier.
“It was cool of you to come to my room today,” she said, and the left side of her face almost cracked a little smile. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not stupid, Mink, and that I do have plans for my life.”
“Cool, little sistah,” I told her. “That’s what’s up girl. Having plans for your future is real smart.”
I touched her on the shoulder as she turned to leave, and then I walked her all the way back to her room.

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