CHAPTER 30
Selah was sitting on the sofa with her face buried in her hands when Barron, Suge, and Peaches walked in the door. She raised her head slowly and the intense pain and misery was so evident on her face that they immediately rushed over to her with concern in their eyes.
“Mama what’s wrong?” Barron got to her first and he sat down beside her and cradled her slender form in his arms. “I’m home now,” he soothed her. “You can stop worrying. Peaches and Suge came and got me and everything is okay.”
“No,” Selah shook her head slowly. Her voice sounded like it was coming up out of a cold, wet grave. “Everything is not okay. Mink has been kidnapped. Somebody is holding her for ransom.”
“Oh, gawd no!” Peaches flailed his toned arms dramatically and then clutched his chest and crumpled down to his knees. “Miiiink!!!” He rushed over and hugged Selah around her ankles and pressed his face down into her lap. “Somebody got hold of my Miiiink!!! I raised her up from a small child! I taught her everything she knows! Miiiink!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Suge crossed the room in three strides and blasted on Peaches, yanking him out of Selah’s lap. “Run that by me again, Selah?” he said, cocking his hand behind his ear like he knew for damn sure he hadn’t heard what he thought he heard. “What the hell did you just say about Mink?”
“I said,” Selah said weakly, swallowing hard against her grief and pain, “She’s been kidnapped. Somebody snatched her and they won’t let her go. I got a call from a man who says he’s holding her hostage. He said he’s going to kill her if we don’t pay him over three million dollars.”
Barron groaned. “What the hell is this? Kidnap a Dominion Week?”
“Oh my gawd!” Peaches shrieked again. Tears ran down his face and his neon-pink bra strap slid off his broad shoulder. “Whoever he is, pay him, Selah! Pay his ass! Pay him any amount of money he wants! Hell, y’all are rich! We gotta do whatever it takes to get Mink back!”
“Did he say anything else?” Suge demanded. “Did he tell you where he was holding her, or where he wanted us to drop off the money?”
“Yeah!” Peaches piped in. “Did he say anything to give you an idea of who he might be?”
Selah’s eyes lit up as she nodded her head vigorously.
“He said he was going to call back with more information about where to deliver the money, but I can tell you this: he was from New York!” she said emphatically. “That much I know for sure. That bastard had a New York City accent, and he sounded evil as all hell!”
The mansion was in an uproar.
Peaches had called Bunni downstairs to tell her the bad news, and she came storming from her room mad as fuck at Selah and screaming at the top of her lungs.
“See I told you! I fuckin’ told you! I knew it! I knew some shady shit was up! My left titty wasn’t itchin’ for nothing, goddammit!”
“I’m sorry!” Selah said tearfully as she grabbed at Bunni’s hand. “You were right, Bunni. I should have listened to you. I just couldn’t imagine something like this happening twice in a row!”
“Yo, how the fuck did this happen?” Suge demanded of no one in particular. “First Barron, and now Mink! What fuckin’ slime holes are these animals crawling out of?”
“I don’t know,” Selah said, “but I swear this family is cursed! Generationally!”
“Cursed, hell,” Peaches said with a smirk. “Somebody got some ‘mo’ on y’all asses!”
“Hell, naw,” Suge shook his head. “The only m-o this here shit is about is m-o-n-e-y goddammit!”
He turned to Bunni. “Yo, Mink is your homegirl. When’s the last time you seen her?”
“Right after we came home from shopping,” Bunni said. “We both went upstairs to take naps, but when I got up Mink was ghost. I kept tryna call her ass to see where she was, but she never answered. About an hour later my titty started itching like a mug, and that’s when I knew something wasn’t right. I came down here and tried to tell Selah that something off-brand was going down, but she fronted me off like I was crazy or something.”
Suge grilled her. “So what the hell you saying, Bunni?” he barked, clearly agitated like a muthafucka. You tryna tell us that you and Mink are thicker than grits, but she dipped out on you without saying shit? Did y’all have an argument or something? A lil cat fight? Who the hell do you think she went to see?”
“Why you barking on me? What the fuck do I have to hide?” Bunni blurted out. Suge was acting like he was coming for her on some sideways shit! “Yeah, me and Mink is thick, and the only time she ever dips off like that is to go see yo—whoever the hell got her nose open, I guess.”
Bunni glared at Suge with the nigga I wish you would look in her eye. She had damn near slipped up just now and blurted some shit out, but she caught herself just in time.
Suge busted the move and backed off a little bit. Now wasn’t the time to mess around and let it slip out that him and Mink were mashing it up.
“Barron,” Suge turned to his nephew. “Wassup, man? I know you just got outta some real deep shit yourself, but maybe that scheming chick GiGi is behind this thing too. Can you think of anything she might have said or done that could have been directed at Mink? Do you remember anything at all that might help us out? Anything at all?”
Barron had been sitting beside Selah pretty quietly but now the raw pleading in his uncle’s voice made him drop his head down into his hands.
“FUCK!” he muttered bitterly. “I can’t believe this shit! How fucking stupid could I be?” He knew it. He just fucking knew it! The New York accent, all that shit he talked about Mink . . . it all came flooding back. He had even seen that muthafucka! He had seen him!
“Lil Bump,” Suge said quietly as he loomed above him. “You know something we don’t know? You got something that you wanna tell us, nephew? Mink is in trouble, goddammit. Spit that shit out!”
The room got hot as shit. Peaches, Selah, and Bunni were all staring at Barron intently. Bracing themselves for whatever he had to say.
“I think I know who took her,” Barron finally admitted as he looked up into Suge’s hardened eyes. “I think it’s that slimy son-of-bitch Gutta. From Harlem.”
“GUTTA?” Bunni shrieked at the top of her lungs. “Aw, hell no! Not Gutta! Not that psychopathic criminal-minded murdering mothafucking Gutta!”
“Oh, gawd!” Peaches moaned and sank down to his knees again.
A look of pure terror was in Bunni’s eyes as she turned to Selah and gripped her by her shoulders. “How the fuck did he find us? Oh God, Mama Selah! We gotta find Mink! We gotta get her away from him because if we don’t that cray-cray nigga is gonna kill her!”
“Wait a damn minute, hold up,” Suge shut Bunni up and turned back to Barron with a wave of fury rolling off him. “Who the hell is Gutta and how do you know him?”
“I met him in New York,” Barron admitted and lowered his eyes. He could feel the disappointment coming out of everybody’s pores, and he didn’t blame them one bit because he was disappointed in himself. “I hired him to do a job for me before I knew that Mink was really my sister. I thought she was trying to con the family out of Sable’s fortune. So I gave Gutta some cash to get rid of her. I told him to tie a concrete block around her ankles and throw her in the river.”
The air was immediately sucked out of the room.
Suge bucked. “Muthafucka you paid somebody to kill Mink?”
Bunni covered her mouth with both hands and gagged. Peaches rushed over and wrapped his sister in his arms as her body shook with sobs. Selah leaned over closer to Barron and slapped the shit out of him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Selah spit through clenched teeth with fire shooting from her eyes. “What kind of fucking idiot are you? Mink is your sister, Barron. She’s my daughter and your sister!”
“Let me get my ass outta here,” Bunni spit, throwing a foul look and some real nasty shade at Barron as she broke free from Peaches and stomped toward the door. “Before I bust a cap in this fool’s ass! My girl is out there getting her skull cracked by public psycho number one, and this slimy mothafucka probably helped set it up!”
Selah let loose with the tongue and hit Barron with a barrage of foul language too, going hard in his ass. Suge held up one hand to check her, and when that didn’t work he crossed the room to restrain her.
“Calm down, Selah. There’ll be time for all that later,” he said quietly. “Right now we need less questions and more answers.”
Yeah, answers. He would swing his hammer and put the wrath of fury down on his nephew’s ass later on, but right now he needed Barron because Mink’s life was hanging in the balance.
“Bump,” Suge said quietly. “Who the fuck is Gutta and where can I find him?”
Barron shook his head. “I don’t know how to reach him, but I did see him recently.”
Suge moved in close. “Oh yeah? When and where?”
“It was a couple of weeks ago. I saw him with—he was here at the mansion. At one of our cookouts. He walked up on me with some real crazy attitude and threatened me a little bit. I fronted him off and he . . . he left.”
This time it was Selah who had to leave the room.
“I can’t even believe what the hell I’m hearing!” she muttered under her breath as she grabbed her cell phone and headed from the room, her face a mask of bitterness and disgust.
“Where are you going?” Suge demanded.
“I don’t know but I’m getting the hell up out of here before I mess around and have to knock this damn fool over his head with something!”
Suge whirled around to Barron with a blazing fire shooting from his eyes. “What the fuck was that nigga doing in this house?” he barked as he reached down and snatched his nephew up by the collar. He lifted Barron in the air and slammed him up against a wall, pinning him with his grip. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell somebody? Why didn’t you let somebody know that a nigga you paid to kill Mink was right here in this fucking house?”
“I-I-I,” Barron stammered, helpless and about to shit his drawers. He glimpsed Suge’s inner beast peeking out and knew this was the last muthafucka on the face of the earth whose bad side he wanted to walk on. But there was no excuse he could think of that would be good enough to satisfy his uncle. Or his mother, or Bunni, or even his father, who was sure to go off as soon as he found out Mink was gone again.
A security guard who was making his rounds poked his head in the living room when he saw Suge raging with Barron still in the air all yoked the fuck up.
“Is everything okay in here, sir?” the guard asked.
“Get the fuck outta here!” Suge blasted on him. “Get gone, muthafucka!”
Without another word the guard walked off. Everybody knew Suge was a deadly muthafucka about his business, and nobody wanted any parts with him. Suge turned his attention back to Barron, who was hung up on the wall looking guilty in the face.
“Yo, let me down, Uncle Suge,” Barron gasped. He wasn’t begging and he wasn’t pleading, but he was asking. “C’mon, now. We have to talk about this shit rationally so we can figure out what to do, so c’mon, man. Let me down.”
Slowly, Suge released his grip and allowed Barron to slide down the wall until his feet hit the floor. Suge’s face was twisted in a mass of murderous rage, and Barron was damn glad they were family because otherwise he wasn’t sure he would have survived this shit.
“Who the fuck took Mink and where the fuck can I find him?”
Barron sighed. “I don’t know, Unc,” he said truthfully. “All I remember is that big nigga Gutta being in my face—talking all types of ill shit and trying to flex on me. He walked up on me outta nowhere and knocked my plate out of my hand and I acted like I didn’t know him. I wasn’t scared of that nigga, but I knew that I had gotten down with him on the grimy tip in the past, and I didn’t wanna cause a scene and risk everybody finding out what I’d done. So I kinda played it off and honestly, I didn’t even think about him anymore.”
By now Suge damn near had smoke blowing out of his nose. He wanted to straight up rip Barron’s face off for being so goddamn stupid!
But he couldn’t.
He couldn’t afford to. He was the fixer. He was the family problem solver and he had to do whatever the fuck it took to keep the family together and get his Mink back.
“Stay your ass here and take care of your mother,” Suge barked as he released his grip on Barron and headed toward the stairs. “Make sure Selah stays by that phone at all times, and if they call back, stall them. Tell Bunni to sit her ass still and keep her mouth closed. And make sure nobody says shit to Viceroy, at least for right now. If anything else pops off call me right away.”
“But what about the money that fool is asking for?” Barron asked. “Should I get in touch with our accountants and arrange for some cash to be bagged up and delivered when they call?”
“Hell fuckin’ no,” Suge said as he stormed upstairs to get his gat so he could jump in his monster truck packin’ big heat. “We ain’t paying that muthafucka shit. Niggas like him don’t deserve no payoff. That bitch-ass muthafucka won’t be getting a dime from this family because that nigga ain’t gonna live long enough to spend it.”