Natural Born Liar: The Misadventures of Mink LaRue by Noire Page A

locked up in Texas where they deep-fry niggas and drizzle gravy over them for lunch, okay? We’re just gonna dip in, work ’em over until we get ’em nice and soft, then wait for my birthday to roll around so we can cash that fat check. You got it?”
    Bunni nodded.
    “Good!” I squealed. “Leggo!”
     
    It was blazing hot in Dallas when we landed at the airport. We’d gone on a mini shopping spree in an airport store, and I had twenty-two dollars left to my name and Bunni had forty. We got our brand-new designer bags off the merry-go-round thingie, then jumped in a yellow cab and gave the driver the address to Selah Dominion’s mansion.
    “What if them rich fools don’t wanna let us stay with them?” Bunni asked. Neither one of us had ever been so far away from New York before and she sounded kinda shaky.
    “Oh, they gonna let us stay!” I said. “If they wanna get their daughter back they better let us stay.”
    On the real, between me and Bunni we barely had enough money to pay the damn cab driver, and we could forget about tryna get a hotel room over a holiday weekend. But one way or another our asses was getting up in that house!
    As we drove away from the airport I checked out the sights. From what I could see Dallas was nothing like New York. Instead of skyscrapers and congested highways and people scattering around like roaches everywhere, the landscape was flat, the traffic was pretty light, and it was too damn hot for anybody to be walking around any damn where.
    I sat back and tried to look at every little thing we passed.
    “What kinda crazy shit is this?” Bunni laughed as we rode down the highway and passed some big houses that were on huge patches of farmland. She started rapping. “Horses in da front yard, llamas in the back! Cowboys on da porch drinkin’ gin like that!”
    I was actually digging all the differences between here and home. I had always been a dreamer, and when I was little I had fantasized about visiting all kinds of places from London to Liberia. I used to steal luxury real estate magazines from vendors and cut out pictures of the super-mansions I wanted to live in one day and all the luxury cars I wanted to drive, then tape them on the wall next to my bed.
    I had done that kinda stuff for years, and I knew rich when I saw it, but I hadn’t seen a damn thing to get me ready for the sprawling estate the cabbie drove onto or the mega-mansion that sat at the end of the long, circular driveway.
    “What the fuck !” Bunni was wide open on that shit. Two Bentleys and a flashy Rolls Royce sat in the wide driveway under a huge brick awning, and a black Mercedes Benz, a slammin’ Lamborghini race car, and a bone-white 2012 Maybach were parked right in front of the house.
    I elbowed her real hard. “Get it together, Bunni! I done told you! Don’t get up in there cursing all loud or smacking your damn food, and whatever you do, please don’t get to twisting them nasty pieces of toilet tissue up your nose the way you do when you get sleepy. Pull yourself together and let’s act like we’re about something, okay? There’s money to get up in this bitch so let’s go get it!”
    But Bunni wasn’t the only one wide open. I had never in my life seen black people living like this before. We had picked the right day to bust up on them too, because the estate was sho nuff jumping as they prepped for their big Fourth of July cookout. Waiters and workmen were everywhere. An old black man was bent over shining the rims on the Maybach, and another old dude was polishing up the brass fixtures on the front door.
    We tossed the cab driver forty bucks even though the meter said we owed him forty-two, and me and Bunni were barely outta the taxi when a tall, killer-looking security guard in a hot black suit came at us real hard.
    “Wrong address,” he told the cab driver as he tried to shoo our asses back inside. “This is private property. Go back out and take a left on the main road. You