Dirty Rotten Liar Read online

  She relaxed in an armchair and took her cell phone out of her purse and got to punching in some numbers. She knew her husband, and she knew what he liked. No matter how far they’d crawled away from the ghetto or how much money they had stacked over the years, there were certain things about Viceroy that would never change. He still got his hair cut by Harvey, the slick-talking Houston barber who’d been edging him up since he was a kid.

  Selah called Harvey real quick and told him she was going to send a car to pick him up so he could come to the hospital and give Viceroy a nice trim, and then she arranged to have a professional manicurist brought over from an exclusive Houston spa to give her husband a much-needed hot eyebrow wax and a professional shave.

  An hour and a half later, Viceroy’s fingernails had been cut and cleaned up, and his feet had been soaked, buffed, oiled, and massaged. A shopping service had delivered a bag filled with a rich man’s luxury items. It contained his favorite cologne and all of his expensive personal hygiene items, along with copies of every top business magazine in the country.

  Selah put in a few more calls and had several pairs of satin pajamas and smoking jackets sent to Viceroy’s private room, and while he was downstairs in therapy the plain cotton hospital sheets had been switched out with a brand-new set that had two-thousand-count Egyptian fibers.

  Selah was mentally exhausted when a nurse poked her head in the waiting room and said the doctors wanted to talk to her. She was led to a small conference room where Viceroy’s doctors were waiting for her.

  “How was your visit with your husband?” the internist wanted to know.

  Selah shook her head in disbelief. “It was amazing. Simply amazing. You guys are miracle workers. You brought Viceroy back from the grave!”

  “Well,” the neurologist cautioned, “Mr. Dominion has come a long way but he’s not completely out of the woods yet. The brain is a very delicate organ and it can take quite a long time to heal. I advise you and your family to take it slow and be very patient as your husband recovers. Try not to bombard him with complex issues or overtire him with anything that might pose a challenge to his memory or his emotions.”

  The doctor placed his hand on Selah’s arm and lowered his voice. “I would also strongly advise you against placing any heavy demands on Mr. Dominion right now, such as leading a global enterprise like Dominion Oil. Give him time. It’s likely that his cognitive functioning will return to normal rather quickly, but his emotional centers were badly damaged, and that kind of healing may take a little longer.”

  The worried look on Selah’s face prompted the doctor to go into reassurance mode.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Dominion. Your husband is a very strong-willed man and his prognosis is excellent. We’ve conducted an extensive battery of tests on him, and after being conscious for just twenty-four short hours, he’s already alert and showing signs of a strong personality. Any residual effects from his brain injury will probably be short-term, and given enough time your husband could very well make a remarkable recovery. But don’t be surprised if his mood swings erratically or if he’s easily confused and forgets things. Brain trauma can have a really tough effect on a patient’s emotions.”

  Selah’s head was spinning as she was taken back to the waiting area to wait for Barron and Dane to arrive. And when they finally showed up she cautioned them and gave them the same run-down that the doctors had given her, and then she kissed and hugged them and escorted them down the long hallway to their father’s bedside.

  Selah couldn’t help feeling some kind of way inside. She was a realist from the streets of Brooklyn, and she knew her marriage wasn’t going to catch a brand-new spark just because Viceroy had come back from the dead. But for the sake of her kids Selah was glad her husband was back in the world, and no matter how low she had been creeping while he was knocked out, deep in her heart she was happy that Viceroy had pulled through too.

  But all those happy feelings went flying right out the window as soon as the three of them stepped inside his hospital room.

  Viceroy was sitting up in a plush leather recliner that had been brought down from the hospital’s executive suite. A copy of Forbes magazine was open on his lap, and the stock pages from the New York Times were folded up neatly at his feet.

  “Ay, tell me something,” he barked, ignoring Selah and grilling his sons with ice chips in his eyes as they approached his bed. “Which one of y’all is the fuckin’ idiot and which one is the goddamn fool?”

  Selah’s smile hit the floor as she froze in her tracks.

  Barron and Dane shot each other a quick, puzzled glance and then Barron automatically stepped up to the plate.

  “It’s good to see you too, Pop! Hey, we missed you, man!”

  “Oh yeah?” Viceroy looked like a snake on a hunt as he nodded. “Well I missed you too. Matter fact, I missed you so much I checked up on your asses! Lemme ask y’all something.” He leaned forward in his chair like a predator who was about to pounce. “Did anything go down while I was knocked out that y’all wanna tell me about?”

  Barron glanced at Selah, then frowned and shook his head.

  “Nope. No, sir. Not that I can think of, Pops. Everything’s been pretty chill, actually.”

  Viceroy leaned forward even more. “You sure about that? I mean, nobody got fucked up, ain’t nobody pregnant, nobody’s on drugs or in jail?”

  “Nah, everybody’s pretty stable, Pops. Why? Everything is good with you, right?”

  “Hell naw, everything ain’t good!” Viceroy exploded as he sat up straighter and tossed his magazine to the floor. “Matter fact, shit is wrong as all hell when I gotta find out from somebody outside my family that my own sons”—he spit, and then turned his icy gaze on Selah—“and my own damn wife, are out there trying to steal my fuckin’ company away from me!”

  Selah backpedaled from the killer heat burning in her husband’s eyes as Barron held up his hands and tried to calm shit down.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up, now! Nobody tried to steal nothing from you, Pops!” Barron glanced at Selah and Dane with a look of pure-dee panic on his face. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you got some bad info, man. Some real bad info!”

  Viceroy might have looked weak and frail, but the ghetto streets were still running deep in his blood, and underneath his tailored smoking pajamas his nuts were just as big and hairy as they had always been.

  “Bad info? You call this here shit bad info?” he said, glaring at Barron as he held a sheet of paper in the air. “I just got faxed a copy of the minutes from the board meeting that you called last week!”

  Barron’s eyes got big as shit.

  “Boy”—Viceroy was so pissed off that his hands shook and spit flew outta his mouth—“you called my fuckin’ officers together so they could vote me outta my position and knock me off my fuckin’ block?”

  Barron shook his head real fast.

  “You think you doggish enough to snatch a bone away from me, Barron? You think you hard enough to go head-up against a hustler like me and try to put your paws on something that’s mine?”

  Barron felt a chill run down his spine. “No, Pops! No!”

  “You mean hell naw!” Viceroy barked from between his clenched teeth. “I’ma tell you right now, you don’t even wanna think that shit, Lil Bump! I bite pups like you for lunch, baby boy! Trust what I’m saying. You don’t even wanna try it!”

  The raging anger that was radiating off his father was so hot and out of the blue that Barron was having a hard time catching his breath.

  “Yo, nobody tried to take nothing from you, Pop!” he insisted. “We worked our asses off trying to do everything the way we thought you would have wanted us to do it!”

  “And how the hell did y’all do that? By sitting around in a goddamn Holy Roller circle praying for my black ass to die?”

  Barron raised his hands slightly in the air.

  “Hold up. Now calm down, Pops—”

  “Fool, is you crazy
?” Viceroy exploded, and tried to come up out of his chair. “Don’t you tell me to calm the fuck down, Bump! You wanna tell me something?” he demanded as he reached behind his back and grabbed a small stack of papers from the cushions of his chair. He held them up high in the air. “Then tell me what the hell you was gonna do with this?”

  “I . . . I . . . I . . . ,” Barron gasped and stuttered like a little kid when he recognized the copies of Mink and Dy-Nasty’s test results from Exclusively DNA.

  “Since when do you hide shit from me,” Viceroy blasted, “especially when it comes down to my family and my fuckin’ money?”

  Barron’s eyes got big as hell.

  “We wasn’t tryna hide nothing from you, Pop! I swear to God we wasn’t! You was knocked out, man! I was gonna run the whole thing down to you right off the bat but the doctors said not to put too much on your plate at one time!”

  Viceroy’s eyes got narrow as he cupped his hand behind his ear and wigged out on his son. “Excuse me? What was that? You didn’t wanna put too much on my plate? Fuck them doctors! Who the fuck are you trying to handle, Barron? Don’t you know I’m from the hood, son? I came up out there in them goddamn gutters! Didn’t nobody give me nothing! I hustled for mine in the trenches! Scrapped for it, fought for it, and scrambled for it! Don’t you know a nigga like me been grubbin’ off a big plate all my life?”

  Barron threw up his hands and stood there with his mouth wide open. He glanced at his mother for help but Selah couldn’t call it either. She was stunned by the words that were rolling out of her husband’s mouth. He sounded gritty as hell. Just like he used to sound thirty years ago. Like he had never left the streets of Houston and was still living the thug life in the projects and scratching his way out of the crab barrel just to survive.

  Even the look on Viceroy’s face was pure hood. It was like that bump on his head had reverted him right back to the old hooligan he used to be, and that smooth, polished front he had worn to keep up his high-class image was now a wrap. No, Selah hadn’t heard her man get down this gutter in a very long time, and he had never, ever, blasted on their sons like this before.

  Never.

  But Viceroy was still burning on fire as he clenched his lips and grilled all three of them at the same time.

  “See, I know what I gotta do now,” he muttered, his eyes darting from one of them to the other. “Yeah, I know exactly what the hell I gotta do! I’m about to switch up my will and restructure that trust fund! I’m about to kick all y’all out from under my nuts! Y’all fools damn-near ran my business into a black hole while I was laying up in here. Goddamn profits are way down and expenses are way up!”

  Viceroy glanced down at the DNA results he still clenched in his fist.

  “And this right here.” He shook the papers in the air again. “This bullshit right here? Man, I spent thirty fuckin’ years keeping my hands clean and my shoes shined! And the minute I close my eyes y’all let these two . . . cash cows get up in my house and shit all over my good name!”

  “Daddy, I swear,” Barron pleaded. “All I was tryna do was figure out which one of them was really Sable,” he explained. “We knew one of them was lying but we didn’t know which one!”

  “Fool! Both of them are lying!” Viceroy exploded, and then he keeled over and grabbed his temples and squeezed his eyes closed as he clutched his head between his trembling palms.

  “Pops!” Barron shrieked, and jetted to his father’s chair. But Dane had already beat him to the spot, and all Barron could do was stand there and watch as Dane eased their frail father into a sitting position and wiped a few furious flecks of drool from his lips.

  Selah grabbed a glass of cold water from the nightstand and tried to get him to drink some, but Viceroy shook his head and shoved it away.

  “Let’s get one thing straight right now dammit,” he said, going hard again as he caught his breath. His sunken eyes swept over his wife and sons in a rage. “Both of these goddamn scam artists are frauds! Both of their asses! There is no DNA match for Sable out there because Sable is dead!”

  Selah shrieked and clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “She’s dead, dammit! She is DEAD!”

  “B-b-but those are the original DNA results,” Barron insisted, pointing at Mink’s and Dy-Nasty’s papers, which were still clutched in his father’s hand. “Both of them came back a match for Sable so we made ’em both take the test again and—”

  “You’s a goddamn idiot!” Viceroy spit. “Do you know how many pieces of that paper money can buy? I can get a DNA test to say any damn thing I want it to say!” Viceroy stared Barron down and there was no hiding the hood contempt that was in his eyes. “I’m disappointed in you, son. I’m damned disappointed ’cause I know I schooled you better than that!”

  “But, Pops—”

  “They suckered you, Barron! They ran a scheme on you and you folded under the pressure, son! You let them two trifling gold diggers grab hold of your nuts and twist you up! But I know one thing. By the time I get outta this hospital you better have both of them greedy bitches outta my goddamn house or I’ma—”

  “Viceroy!” Selah barked. “That’s enough, goddammit! What the hell is wrong with you? Bitches? You wanna call me a bitch? Do you wanna call Fallon one? Hell no! And those girls aren’t bitches either! Now, one of them is Sable. Our daughter. Our baby! And I don’t give a damn what you say, I’m not gonna stop until I find out which one it is!”

  The look Viceroy gave Selah should have knocked her to her knees.

  But instead it brought the Brooklyn out of her and pissed her the fuck off.

  “Muthafucka . . . ,” Selah spat with her jaw clenched tight. “Who the hell are you looking at like that? Yeah, you heard what I said, and I damn sure didn’t stutter! I’m gonna find Sable. I’m gonna find my child! And if you hadn’t been out there fucking around with that jailbait piece of ass then we probably wouldn’t have lost her in the first damn place!”

  Barron and Dane turned toward their mother with a stunned look of complete shock on their faces. Selah had never gone off on Viceroy in front of them. Never. They were used to seeing her cry and beat herself up over Sable all the time, but they had never, ever, heard her put the blame on their father before. But Selah wasn’t bullshitting. All traces of her lady-like cool had disappeared, and the hard streets of Brooklyn glinted in her eyes.

  Looking like a shamefaced old dog, Viceroy held up his hand and pulled back on some of that beef he was spitting.

  “Uh-uh, Selah,” he told her. “Don’t even go there. This ain’t the time and it damn sure ain’t the place. Let’s leave the past in the past, a’ight? I’m tryna deal with what’s going on right now and find out why the hell Barron let those two slum bunnies take him for a ride! No son of mine could be that damn stupid. No damn son of mine!”

  His words cut across the room and slashed Barron like a knife, and Selah felt her son jerk like his nuts had been sliced off.

  “Oh, is that right?” Selah stepped forward and put her hands on her hips and asked her husband coldly. “Well, I thought no damn sister of mine could be that stupid either.” She smirked. “But after that little head-on-heels party y’all fuckers had going on in your office the day Sable was kidnapped, I guess I was wrong. Remember?”

  Selah locked eyes with Viceroy and dared him to get brand-new. She’d tear a hole in his damn throat, fuckin’ with her Barron like that! Shit, bumped damn head or not, it was time for this fool to get shut down!

  Viceroy’s lips trembled like he wanted to spray off at the mouth again, but Selah eyeballed him a warning and dared him to pounce. She would fuck him straight up!

  After a second or two she saw the fight go out of his eyes and she pulled back a little bit too. Oh, it was still going to go down between them, but Selah knew Viceroy was right, and with their sons standing there looking shell-shocked this was neither the time nor the place.

  Besides, she knew exactly how nasty Viceroy could be and how deep
his sharp tongue could cut. And no matter what those damn doctors had said, she wasn’t about to blame everything on his head injury either, because underneath all that smooth, glossy shine her husband wore when he was in public, Viceroy was a cutthroat, ruthless snake right down to his ghetto bones! Hell, you didn’t steal a profitable oil company out of the back pocket of your best friend and swindle your way into a billion dollars and not have some hoodlum in you!

  When it was time for them to leave, Viceroy waited until Barron and Dane were almost out the door and then he called Selah back.

  “Hey baby,” he said softly, and waved her over to his chair.

  Selah stared at him cautiously. She didn’t know what bag her husband was about to come out of, but the doctors had warned that his moods might swing, and besides, the look in his eyes had changed. They looked calm and serious. Sensuous and intense.

  Selah took the hand he had extended her and let herself be pulled close to his chair.

  “Look, I’m sorry, baby,” Viceroy said, gazing up at her with an apology in his eyes. He reached for her waist and pulled her down into his lap. “I don’t know what got into me. I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”

  “V-Viceroy,” Selah stuttered as her fluffy ass sank down into his groin. He was so skinny she could feel his thigh-bones poking through his flesh. “It’s okay, dear,” she said, shifting her weight so that she was turned halfway toward him. She stared into his dark, handsome face and reached up and ran her hand over his smooth, freshly-shaved jawline.

  “You’ve been through a lot, Viceroy,” she soothed him. “It’s all right. The doctors warned us that it was going to take a little time for things to go back to normal. Let’s just take everything slowly, okay?”

  Viceroy nodded and Selah saw something else creep into his eyes.

  “I think some things are already back to normal,” he whispered thickly.

  His hands slid down her shoulders and gripped her hips and he thrust his pelvis upward in an obscene humping motion.

  Selah stiffened.