A Gangster and a Gentleman

by Kiki Swinson

  “You got it, Boss.”

  Elijah remained standing as he listened to Teardrop walk toward the door. After it clicked closed, Mafia Don offered him a seat.

  “Sit. Sit down.” He gestured toward the empty chair in front of his desk.

  He strolled forward like he was about to take him up on his offer.

  “Tell me the details. I want to know what happened.” Mafia Don climbed back to his feet and went toward the bar. “How did Midnight find her? When did this happen? How did you get away?” He plucked up a bottle of Hennessy and poured himself a drink. “You want one?” He finally glanced over his shoulder and spotted the gun capped with a silencer that Elijah had leveled on him.

  “What the fuck?”

  Before Mafia Don could ask another fuckin’ question, Eli fired.

  The bullets spun the don around, causing him to drop the Hennessy bottle. Stunned, his boss glanced down at the hole in his chest and then glanced back up at the man he raised like a son. “Why?”

  “Is that a real question?” Eli asked, sliding his free hand into his pocket. Hell. Why not take his time with this muthafucka?

  “Midnight,” the don concluded, disgust curling his lips. “He got to you, didn’t he? He told you some bullshit that got your head all spun around, didn’t he?” Mafia Don shook his head. “After all these years . . . this is how you repay me? Where’s your loyalty?”

  “I could ask you the same for when you ordered the blackout on my family.”

  Mafia Don opened his mouth.

  “Think before you start shoveling more bullshit my way. This gun has a hairline trigger. It could go off at any time.” To prove his point, Eli fired two more shots that nailed the don in his other shoulder and then right kneecap.

  His former boss toppled to the floor.

  Calmly, Eli strolled forward until he was about a foot away and then squatted down with his weapon still ready to rocka-bye this old nigga to sleep. “Tell me why. Don’t I deserve that much?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about,” Mafia Don bluffed.

  Elijah read the man’s face and saw that his lips said one thing while his eyes said another. “All these fuckin’ years, you played me for a fool. Had me looking up to you when you’re the one who took everything from me.” His finger started to move on the trigger again.

  “Wait. Wait.” Mafia Don lifted his bloody hand, asking for a time-out.

  Eli allowed him to chug in a ragged breath so he could think of another lie.

  “I don’t know what that snake told you,” he spat, blood leaking from the corners of his mouth, “but you gotta know that Midnight’s playin’ you. This is the only way he can break our bond. He needs you to take me out. You’re one of the few who can get close to me. Don’t fall for this shit. I’m beggin’ you.”

  The lies floated around the room a few seconds before Eli spoke again. “The only one who has been playing me is you. Now all that shit is over. There’s gonna be a new king ruling these streets, but it’s not going to be Midnight. I chopped his ass up pretty good with his own toy. It was nice, but a gentleman like me prefers bullets, nah what I mean?”

  “Please,” Mafia Don whined. “Just tell me what you want. I can give you anything. Just name it.”

  “I already got what I want from you. And after this, I’m out. Time to make a fresh start out on the West Coast.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I don’t have any more love for this street shit. Figure I’ll head out to Hollywood, write a script or some shit.”

  “You’re crazy,” the don said.

  “Maybe. But you’re about to be a dead muthafucka.”

  The office door swung open and Teardrop strolled in. “Hey, Boss, you’re not going to believe—”

  “T, shoot this muthafucka!”

  Teardrop took in the scene and went for his gat, but the back of his head exploded before the gun cleared his waist.

  “What the fuck?” Mafia Don barked with anguish.

  A steady tattoo of heels hit the hardwood floor before Blake entered the room.

  Mafia Don’s eyes widened to the size of silver dollars.

  “Blake?”

  “Hello, Daddy.” She waved her .38 at him. “I would love to say that you’re looking well, but actually you kind of look like shit.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “It’s fairly simple,” Eli cut in. “My wife and I figured that in order to start our new life together, we first needed to make sure that you or anyone tryna to get at you don’t endanger our lives.”

  “Your wife?”

  Blake flashed her large Harry Winston rock. “Newlyweds.”

  As understanding dawned, Mafia Don’s face purpled.

  “Anyway, Daddy dearest, the way we see it, as long as you’re alive, our lives will always be in jeopardy because of some street politics. And since Eli has a score to settle with you and I pretty much loathe the ground you walk on, this is the obvious solution for us to ride off into the sunset.” She cocked her head. “You do want me to be happy, don’t you, Daddy?”

  Mafia Don bumped his gums, but no words came out.

  “That’s what I thought. I’m happy that you understand.” Blake strolled up next to her husband as he stood.

  Finally, the don found his voice. “You’re not going to get away with this. My crew is going to come after you with everything they got.”

  “No, they won’t,” Elijah corrected. “Not after I tell them that you are the snitch they all think you are. You were responsible for the feds locking up Whitlock, Bell, and Graham. Nobody loves or respects a snitch.”

  Mafia Don took his case to his daughter. “Baby girl. Sweetheart. I know that we’ve had our differences, but I’m your father. We share the same blood.”

  “Which makes your sacrifice for my happiness all the more special,” Blake said with a saccharin sweetness. She looked to Elijah as she slid her hand over his so that they both had their hands on the gun. “Shall we?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They glanced down at the sniffling drug lord and together pulled the trigger.

  Sexy Little Liar:

  The Misadventures of Mink LaRue

  by Noire

  She seduced Texas’s richest oil family out of a fortune. But

  now petty thief and ex-stripper Mink LaRue has a rival for

  the ultimate temptation . . .

  In stores November 2012

  1

  New York City was my shit! Our plane had just landed at JFK, and after lying our way through a crazy misadventure down in D-Town, me and Bunni Baines, my partner-in-grime, were hyped as hell to be back in the Big Apple.

  We had dipped outta Manhattan with nothing up our sleeves except mad dreams and devious schemes, and after working our grind and flipping the state of Texas upside down, we were rolling back in town with more dough than we had ever baked before.

  “Taxi!” My best friend hollered as a bellman wheeled our luggage outta the crowded terminal. Bunni was posted up in a bright pink cat-suit and a matching pair of silver-buckle gladiator sandals. I was rocking a platinum white Glama-Glo wig with big orange streaks down the bangs, and an orange and white tank top tucked into a skimpy white tennis skirt that barely covered my apple ass.

  For two hood-bound Harlem girls, me and Bunni had crazy suitcases everywhere, and every last one of them was stuffed with mad jewelry and the hottest designer gear that money could buy.

  I had recently become an official member of the Dominion oil family of Texas, and using my new status as the once-missing and now-found oil heiress Sable Dominion, me and Bunni had hit the rich folks’ mall in Dallas and killed every store in sight. I mean we ransacked that joint like a pair of greedy cat burglars, oohing and aahing as we touched and admired and scooped up damn near everything we liked. We shopped like fiends for hours, and we didn’t come up for air until we were broke-down tired and every corn on our toes was crackin’. />
  “Now see there, Mink.” Bunni rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth as she struck a funky pose on the sidewalk outside the baggage terminal. Bunni had a real stank shape and she always dressed to show that shit. Almost every dude who zipped into the terminal stole a quick peek at her round titties and bouncy ass as he passed by. “I knew we shoulda called a limo to meet us. We got mad ends now, baby. How we gonna look pulling up around the way in some beat-up yellow cab?”

  Bunni had it right. Image was everything in our hood, and I was damn sure tryna elevate mine. I was not the same con-mami Mink LaRue from the ’jects who had skied up outta New York just a few weeks ago. After chilling in a huge Texas mansion and ballin’ around town in half-a-million-dollar whips, I had the head and it was sho’nuff big too.

  “Don’t worry,” I told Bunni. “We gotta roll with it for right now,” I said and grabbed her arm as I pulled her toward a waiting cab. “But this is gonna be our last time slumming around the city in a whooptie, okay? We’s paid now, mami! Our pockets are swoll! As soon as we hit Harlem, I’ma lease us a limo and a driver too, bet?”

  We climbed our booties in the back of the cab and left the driver and the bellman standing outside tryna figure out how to cram all our stuff in the trunk. It seemed like just yesterday that me and Bunni had climbed in a cab at the Dallas International Airport and headed toward the Dominion Estate where we were on a mission to pull off the biggest con caper of our lives.

  It had all started when Bunni walked into the Food Land up the block from her crib and saw my picture on the back of a carton of milk. The National Center for Missing Children had just kicked off a new campaign aimed at solving some of their biggest cold cases, and a three-year-old girl named Sable Dominion—a rich little oil heiress who had been kidnapped from a midtown drugstore—was one of their featured kids.

  Bunni had taken one look at Sable’s age-progressed photo and swore all out that the rich chick was me. She said me and Sable looked so much alike that my own mama wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. And she was right. I was a dead ringer for the missing little girl, and we even had the same birthday too.

  We did a few Google searches and damn near flipped out when we found out that not only was Miss Sable about to come into a hundred grand inheritance on her twenty-first birthday, but if Bunni pretended like she’d found me, she could get a crack at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward money that the Dominions were offering for any information that led to Sable’s return.

  Well, desperate times called for a sho’nuff desperate hustle, and me and Bunni almost burnt the house down tryna cook up a scheme to get our hands on that Dominion dough. We were broke as hell and we needed that loot. Not only was Bunni and her brother Peaches about to get booted outta their tenement apartment, but a throwed-off drug dealer named Punchie Collins was tryna kill me for ganking him outta some ends, and I had a shitload of court-ordered fines to pay up real quick, or else a warrant was gonna be issued for my arrest.

  And if that wasn’t enough to light a firecracker under my ass, my gangsta boo Gutta was finishing a lil bid upstate and he was about to be back on the streets in a minute, and I do mean on the streets too. See, when Gutta went to jail, he left me sitting on his stash of twenty-five g’s and told me not to touch that shit. He was planning on using that money to rebuild his drug empire as soon as he hit the bricks. But a cheese-chasing rat like me just couldn’t help nibbling. A grand here, five grand there, shoes, wigs, chronic, Krug, jewels, and parties. . . shiiit . . . me and Bunni had burned through Gutta’s cash so fast that before his bid was even halfway over, his laid-out crib was a wrap and so was all his paper.

  So I had been stuck between nothing and nothing, and pulling off a hustle to steal Sable’s hundred grand was my last crapshoot, my final shot at street redemption. Me and Bunni had used every flimflam in the book to convince those super-rich black folks in Dallas that I was really the kidnapped daughter that they had lost so long ago.We’d busted up at their estate in the middle of their Fourth of July barbeque, and you can trust and believe that we popped off an explosion up in that joint!

  Those Texas folks didn’t know what to do with me as I laid my slick Harlem flow on their asses. In no time at all I had Sable’s mother, Selah, eating outta the palm of my hand, and my fine-ass play-uncle Suge Dominion had done a damn good job of eating out the rest of me!

  Bunni had played her role like a champ too. She’d scammed her way up on a freaky pain slut named Kelvin Merchant who worked at the DNA lab, and in return for whipping his ass and pinching his balls, Kelvin had hooked us up with a fake DNA report that guaranteed me a slice of the Dominion family pie.

  With the DNA results on the table, I had rolled outta Dallas with a hundred grand in my bank account, and Bunni made out like a street bandit with twenty-five large in reward money for all her hard work too. All in all, it was the biggest hustle of our guttersnipe lives, and we were amped up and feelin’ ourselves for pulling off a gank so lovely. All I had to do now was pay my fines to the city of New York, tear off some ends to crazy Punchie Collins, and stash twenty-five grand in Gutta’s safe to keep that fool from slumping me when he came home from jail.

  After that, life was gonna be one big freaky-ass party, and as long as I handled my bizz, I could get as wild and loose as I wanted to! Hell yeah. My blood surged with hood excitement as our taxi pulled up outside of Bunni’s building and the hater-bitches on the front stoop got to peeping all in the windows. Handle ya bizz, Miss Mink LaRue! That’s all a paid hood chick like me had to do!

  In stores now

  Someone Bad and Something Blue

  By Miranda Parker

  Beautiful, brainy, and tough-as-nails, single mom and bail

  recovery agent turned sleuth Angel Crawford has a lot

  on her plate. But between crime-solving and kindergarten

  carpool, it’s all in a day’s work . . .

  1

  Friday, 8:00 a.m.

  Greyhound Bus Terminal, Atlanta, Georgia

  Just as I was about to cuff Misty Wetherington for ditching DUI court for the fifth time so she could hit the slots at Harrah’s casino with her book club buddies, my phone buzzed. I looked down. It was my calendar app, reminding me that I had to be at Bella’s school in ninety minutes.

  “Crap, I forgot.” I sighed.

  My daughter, Bella, had asked if I could join her at Sugar Hill Elementary School today for Doughnuts for Dads. It was a PTA event to celebrate fathers, more like a back-door way to get men into the classroom without them feeling awkward. However, Bella’s best friend Lacy’s mom came to the last one, and according to my friends at the Sugar Hill Church Ladies’ Brunch, no one seemed to mind.

  And . . . today was Bella’s seventh birthday. I had to be there.

  However, I was a little under an hour’s drive from the school. If I could punch it without getting a speeding ticket, I would make it in time. The only problem was I didn’t know what to do with Misty.

  With the exhaustively long lines at the City of Atlanta’s traffic court, who knew how long it would take to process her? I wondered as I looked down at her bleached, moppy hair.

  She was still on the parking lot ground, face to the gritty, piss-stained pavement while I straddled her back. My handcuffs dangled in my hands.

  “Misty, you have been caught on a particularly good day for you. . . .”

  I placed the cuffs on the ground near her face so she could see them. I waited until she turned her head in the cuff’s direction before I continued.

  “Look. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and I need to be with her. We both know that what I’ll make for hauling your butt to jail is about the cost of two tickets to the Atlanta Aquarium, the Coke Museum, and one night’s stay in the Georgian Terrace. So here’s my proposition. Today, I let you go. I’ll have Big Tiger finesse the city into giving you another FTA hearing, but on one condition: You fork over the money you were about to spend at the casino. I can surprise my girl with a kid-
cation in Atlanta. What do you say?”

  Big Tiger was the bail bondsman who kept me under contract. He introduced me to bail recovery and taught me the tools of the trade.

  “And if I don’t?” she grunted.

  “How confident are you that the city of Atlanta will grant you a new FTA hearing after five no-shows without some help from Big Tiger? How confident are you that some other bail recovery agent isn’t lurking behind any of these cars out here, waiting for the chance to take you from me? And uh . . . where are your gambling buddies when you need them?”

  Her gaze searched the parking lot. “Did they leave?”

  “Darling, they are the ones who turned you in. Now those are friends to keep. I can be your friend, too. Just say the magic words.”

  She sighed. “The money’s in my front pocket, Angel.”

  “Bingo.” I hopped off her and flipped her over.

  She reluctantly pulled the money out. I stretched out my palm until she placed the money into my hand. Misty was carrying $500.

  I placed the money in my back pocket and smiled. “Happy birthday to Bella.”

  Friday, 10:10 a.m.

  Sugar Hill Elementary School, Sugar Hill, Georgia

  Sugar Hill Elementary School was unusually packed when I pulled into the parking lot. “I can’t believe this many men are here to eat doughnuts,” I said to myself as I sped up the boardwalk to the school’s entrance.

  When I walked into the foyer, Dale Baker, the president of our homeowners’ association, waved me down and mouthed, Good morning. I waved back and continued toward the front office. Inside, I spotted the parents’ sign-in sheet, pulled a pen out of the flowerpot penholder, and signed my name.

  The front office manager, whose name I could never remember because the constant scowl on her face reminded me of the taste of a bitter honeysuckle, pulled her glasses down her nose and shook her head at me. I called her Mrs. Bitter behind her back.