Relapse: A Novel (22 page)

That was one thing she hated: a drunk or arrogant chump putting his hands on her. Spinning on her four-inch Jimmy Choo pumps, she snapped, “Watch where you put your—” She stopped mid-sentence. It was Corday. They had met about a year ago. He owned the club.

“How were you gon just come up in my spot and not let me know you coming or holla when you get here?” Corday was
wearing a gray Armani suit with a black silk shirt and Italian loafers.

“I was just looking for you, Corday.” It was only a partial lie, because she definitely had plans of politicking with him before she left. “I need a small favor.”

Corday raised one brow. “All you have to say is one word and I’m yours,” he said loud enough to be heard over the Trick Daddy cut the DJ was blasting over the speakers.

“You know it’s not that kind of party with me.” She playfully tapped him on the shoulder. “Besides, I’m sure you get more pussy than you know what to do with in this place.”

“That’s true,” Corday said. “But I’ll give away a hundred well-painted copies of the
Mona Lisa
for just a chance of acquiring the original.”

The man definitely has a silver tongue
, she thought. “I’m sorry,” she replied with a feigned sad expression. “I’m going to have to keep my art to myself until I find a permanent buyer, but I do have a proposition for you.”

“I’ll take what I can get. What you got on your mind?”

Beijing ran it down: She was going to need to lease some of his girls for one night. After he agreed to the terms, she told him about Dazzle. They drank a glass of Cristal over the rest of the small talk ironing out the details. “It’s so late, I have to get out of here,” she finally said. “Thanks for everything.”

“Anytime. Let me walk you to your car.”

“No, I’m good, going to give my card to a couple of people as well as say my good-byes. Plus I have to get my friend who is having such a good time, she probably won’t want to leave.”

She shook Corday’s hand, glad at what she had gotten accomplished.

When all was said and done and they were walking out of the club, Beijing had the girls she needed for the bachelor party and Dazzle had a job making a thousand dollars a week plus tips, minus her 25 percent cut.

“Girl, that place was off the meter.”

Rayna was a little tipsy as she tried to remember where she’d parked her car.

“I know that’s right,” Beijing concurred. She had closed the deal with Lamont Rowe for 100K, convinced Corday to let her get the girls at the nominal rate, and met a couple of other potential clients and contacts in the process. “I must say it was a pretty good outing.”

Rayna churped the lock on the car door while heading in its direction. Beijing was feeling satisfied by the evening’s results and looking forward to being able to relax for a while.

“You heard from Lootchee?”

“Nope,” she said nonchalantly, wishing she had.

“And who was that dude you were talking to in the well-fitting Armani suit?” Rayna was being nosy, as usual.

“Why you always up in my bizwax?” Beijing asked just as a black Range Rover sped up to them and then slammed on its brakes, bringing it to a screeching halt.

The Range Rover’s black-tinted windows stopped the girls from seeing inside until the doors flew open on both the driver’s and passenger sides.

Two men bounced out like panthers stalking an unsuspecting gazelle in the jungle of Africa. They were wearing black jeans, black T-shirts, black fitted baseball caps pulled low over their
eyes, and black Nike sneakers. Their clothes were fitting for the urban jungles of the city.

Both men were strapped with nine-millimeter semiautomatic Glocks, so it quickly became apparent they hadn’t pulled up to exchange phone numbers or offer to take the girls out for breakfast.

The driver spoke first: “Follow instructions and you won’t turn a simple message into a complicated matter.” His words were sharp, clear, precise, and to the point. “We gonna politely take the keys to that there 600, and any and all valuables you may have on your person. It’s just that simple. So, don’t make this shit too hard.”

“Fuck that shit,” Rayna began, “how we supposed to get home?”

Beijing could not believe that Rayna was willing to get shot rather than to tell York that someone had taken his new pride and joy. York loved that car more than he loved her.

“Bitch”—the passenger was talking this time—“you can give dat shit up by choice or force. Either way you gonna come up off it. And your time is running short.” There was no mistaking the malice in his words or tone.

Beijing gave her a look that said,
They ain’t playing and do what the fuck they say
. There was no point in them trying to fight back. There was no self-defense class that could help them with this. Then she put her hand in her purse to get her wallet.

“Don’t do nothing with that mitt of yours. If you lift it out of that purse wrong you won’t live to regret it.”

“I—” she stuttered. “I’m just trying to give you what you ask for.” Beijing passed her wallet over to the passenger, but all she could think of was that she wished Lootchee would have popped up and saved them.

Rayna didn’t hand hers over as quickly, and the guy snatched her handbag off her arm with so much force she thought he’d separated her shoulder from her arm. Tears were in Rayna’s eyes as she rubbed her shoulder. “I think … you broke my shoulder.”

The keys were still in her hand. The driver reached toward Rayna with his palms up. “Let me get them joints,” he said as if it were a request and not at gunpoint.

Rayna had no choice but to do what she was told.

“Tell that nigga York ’bout this,” the driver said to Rayna, after tossing the keys to his boy. Then he looked to Beijing and said, “Sorry, baby, but you got caught up at the wrong place, wrong time, with the wrong peeps.”

He gave her a look like if he’d seen her at another time, they could’ve gone out together or something. Then he jumped back in the Range and gunned the engine. His partner followed in York’s Benz.

Rayna’s heartbeat had slowed down some now that the immediate danger was over—but her anger and hate intensified. “I can’t believe this shit. All because of York and some bullshit he did. Why the fuck I gotta go through this shit? I really wish he would stop taking peoples’ money and not pay them back.”

They stood in the spot where they’d been parked just moments ago. “What you plan to do about York?” Beijing broke the silence.

Rayna thought about the question her friend had just asked carefully before she answered. She knew York was involved with a lot of shady people and even shadier scams. She’d been a part of a few of his schemes herself. “I don’t know,” she muttered, “I don’t know.”

Paris strolled into the convenience store in Columbia, South Carolina, on the arm of a trick that she had been dating for the past three months.

She noticed a lady named Lucy trying to buy some cigarettes with food stamps. Paris smiled at the lady and looked her over.

Lucy Roach had been born and raised in Columbia with four older sisters. Money was tight in their family of seven, so it was pretty customary for the Roach girls to wear one another’s hand-me-downs. By the time the tattered outfits made their way to Lucy, they were just about old worn rags. Despite being teased on a regular basis throughout her school years, Lucy made pretty good grades. After graduating, she landed a good job at a franchise bank as a teller. Before long, Lucy made branch manager.

With new clothes, a new car, and her own apartment things couldn’t have been better. Then she met a friend who told her
about this incredibly sexy new drug called crack. That was fourteen years ago, when Lucy was thirty-four. The drugs robbed her of her money, her job, her car, and her self-respect. Now at almost fifty, her body had deteriorated to skin and bones. Her skin was oily, scarred, and wrinkled, and her creaky brittle bones made her resemble Skeletor. Her vagina smelled like a twenty-four-hour Chinese fish market, and Lucy couldn’t give it away if she tried.

She noticed she had caught the eye of Paris and took the opportunity to engage her.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Lucy said. “Can I borrow a smoke from you?”

Paris looked like a hood beauty queen compared with Lucy. In fact, Paris looked better than a lot of chicks who went out to clubs and bars chasing men, and didn’t use drugs.

“I don’t smoke,” Paris said, leaning in and lowering her voice. “Cigarettes anyway.” She snickered. Paris had just made two hundred dollars off the trick and was itching to get decent. “You know where I can buy some coke, though?”

Lucy smiled. “The best in the city,” she said. “And it’s close by too.”

That first day they got high as the
Star Trek
Enterprise together. As they were taking turns sucking on the glass dick, they got to know each other somewhat better. Paris shared the details on how she’d met that particular trick. “I like fucking with him ’cause the country muthafucka kicks the Benjamins and he’s not from my area. When he sends for me, it gets me out of town away from my environment for a while, and he pays for the bus ticket. I get two hundred a pop plus travel fee.”

Lucy went on to share that she had the numbers of ten to fifteen more working married men who liked to dip out on their wives and buy sexual favors. A friendship was formed, and after that haphazard meeting Paris started visiting Lucy in the run-down
shack she stayed in at least twice a month, sometimes staying the week whenever she came to see her trick.

Paris was rocking an electric-blue miniskirt and a Bebe top that she had stolen out of the car of one of her tricks. She had a pair of thigh-high boots that matched her leather jacket, which was lying over on the chair. She had been at Lucy’s house for a few days, turning some private tricks, and she had eight hundred dollars stuffed inside her small purse to show for it.

Lucy looked Paris over. Even when she was the manager at the bank, Lucy never looked half as good. “Where are you going to all dolled-up like that?” Lucy was trying to put a leash on the jealousy that was eating at her. Paris didn’t really care ’cause hell, if she was Lucy she’d be jealous of her too.

“You know what they say?” Paris was primping in the mirror fixing her makeup and putting on her lip gloss. “If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. I gotta look the part if I want to keep these tricks lined up shelling out cash, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lucy agreed, wishing that the day was back when she could use what she had to get what she wanted.

“I got three dates lined up. And them niggas pays off like a rigged-up slot machine. I get their lever so hard in this hot wet-ass mouth of mine,” she bragged, “by the time I pull on it, bells and whistles are going off and dem niggas start spitting money out they ass.”

Lucy rolled her eyes when Paris wasn’t watching. “I know that’s right. You want me to call Lil Jon-Jon over before you set off on your mission. I seen ’im earlier down at the store and that nigga say he got some good shit, and I believe him too. I can call him if you want me to.”

Paris’s mouth watered up when Lucy mentioned coke. “Why not?” she said.

Jon-Jon showed up ten minutes after he received the call. They started with a gram. Lucy hadn’t lied—the shit was good, so good
that after about five hours they had smoked up the eight bills Paris had in the purse and owed Lil Jon-Jon five hundred more.

“That’s all the flav I had on me,” Jon-Jon said when the coke was gone. “Let me get that five you owe and I’ll go to where that came from and bring you back what you want.”

Lucy and Jon-Jon were staring at Paris. “Uhhh …” She was trying to figure out the best way to say it. “I don’t have it right this minute. But I can go get it,” she added.

“Fuck I look like to you? Sam-sausage-head? That’s one of the oldest tricks in the crackhead survival manual. Bitch, you need to get somebody to bring my paper over here.”

Paris turned to Lucy. “Tell him I’m good for it.” Then back to Jon, “I just gotta go get it. My friend don’t know I get high. He ain’t gon give it to me unless I meet ’im.”