Tabu, page 4
The club was kind of hard for Tippy to detest as well. The crowd was wild but peaceful. For the most part people came there to party, and they took it seriously. And the staff of sexy females and hunky males was attentive and prompt.
Tippy could feel a good time creeping into her anger.
The sudden sight of The Mistress snapped Tippy back to the here and now.
There were two good reasons to not like The Mistress: She was chocolate brown fine and she was fucking Bernie.
Tippy was lighter than the morning sun and she could not recall any decent man ever calling her beautiful. That was for a mother to do, not sex‐hungry men, and thanks to Bernie Mann, she lost out on pretty words early in her life.
Tippy gnawed on her lip so badly while watching Debbie order a glass of wine and drink from the glass that she hurt herself.
Murder, she was thinking.
An image of Shirley Mann’s terrified eyes just as she was being pushed off balance at the top of concrete steps appeared in Tippy’s mind’s eye.
She smiled at the memory of the painful fall.
And then the memory of the day before, when she killed Bernie’s brother, moved in her mind like a playback of her week’s highlights.
Which was better? She mused, Shirley’s vicious tumble or a butt-naked Myers Mann begging for his life, his body and the room reeking of the sex she and Myers had just labored through. He was a bad lay, she fumed, should have killed him the first time his hard on went south.
Debbie downed the last of her wine and left a tip under her glass. She was on the move and Tippy charged up.
Tippy darted through the party people and got outside seconds after Debbie. She found The Mistress to the side of the club’s building, crying softly.
Tippy motioned toward her SUV with the South Carolina plates and her two male friends, her murdering accomplices, got out of the Explorer. The ’97 Explorer belonged to the aunt who raised her. That aunt was the first person she killed when she decided she was coming to New York for revenge.
She brought along a pair of Southern‐style thugs she had grown up with in South Carolina. The two dirty and dingy-looking guys called themselves cousins and no one ever questioned it.
Ted was a light-skinned, not red as Tippy‐with light eyes, and was a smooth talker who could have gotten more pussy in his life if he believed in brushing his teeth once in awhile. He liked to deal with young girls and enjoyed manipulating their little minds and wrecking their maturing bodies.
Fred was a tall, lanky guy with the smarts of a hunk of chopped wood. He was tough, fearless and wise enough to always have money in his pocket although he had never held a legit job in his life. Fred loved sex as much as he loved cocaine and money. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t stick, especially if he was high.
These guys were weedheads in middle school and seasoned criminals by the time they dropped out of high school in the 11th grade.
Tippy got down with them on some of their gas station and Ma & Pa grocery store robberies, and she liked the devious and mean way they got down.
She told them the sob story of her life, her mom getting killed when she was less than two months old, and they jumped at the chance to do damage in New York City. And of course these two morons she brought with her put together a plan to rob Tippy of any money she took from the man she called her father and her mother’s killer.
It was the natural next step for them because they just didn’t know any better.
Shit, she kept saying it wasn’t about the money, so why shouldn’t they take it all, was what the cousins were thinking.
CHAPTER 7
Tippy was behind Debbie, she could have just choked her right there. Instead she spoke softly to the whore.
“That is a banging dress, girl.”
Debbie wiped her tears. “Thank you.”
“It’s sad to hear about Mrs. Mann. Did you know her?”
Debbie cut her eyes at Tippy.
“Oh, it was like that. Sorry.”
Debbie was looking in her purse for her cigarettes and lighter when Tippy’s friends came on both sides of her.
The two men were not big, but they were hurtful looking.
“I really just don’t want to talk about it, thank you.”
“I don’t give a fuck.”
Debbie lipped a Marlboro and looked to Tippy in disbelief.
“It’s time to be scared, boo.”
Debbie’s mouth formed an O. She was confused and caught off guard.
The men moved closer.
Debbie was far from being a tough girl nor was she street smart. She had never been in a fistfight in her life. All she could think was why and what was going down.
Ted took her arm forcefully. Debbie froze and surrendered, her feet gliding in the path the men took her. They lifted the back door and ordered her on her back.
“You gonna be good,” Ted said in his thick Southern accent. His smile was slick.
His cousin said, “She ain’t gonna let us fuck her.”
“Who ain’t? I’m fucking this before we do her.”
“No, please...” was all Debbie could say before Ted slammed the door shut on her.
Tippy watched her guys and the crowd, all the while nervous they would get busted by the many onlookers on a clear Harlem night. But, she marveled, this was the Big Apple. New Yorkers see shit like this daily and know better than to be an eyewitness.
Tippy wasn’t going to do Debbie that early in the game, but she was so fucking good-looking and actually crying over her man’s wife dying. That irritated Tippy and threw her off her mission.
She went back into Tabu and got back on plan. Moving through the crowd she sought out her true victim.
The first time Tippy came to Tabu she was looking for C-Mann’s girl. It took less than an hour of talking to a group of drunken gossiping women. C-Mann’s main squeeze never came to the club. She was going to be tough to snatch, Tippy thought.
Then she met Kamela Black. Kamela was a fraud, a liar who didn’t appreciate the simple life she was living. Kamela had a good paying job in lower Manhattan, a modest ranch house in the Bronx, a car and a big loving family spread across the Bronx.
No, Kamela wanted more than that.
She wanted to be more than just a fuck buddy to C-Mann. She wanted Charles Mann to be her husband. She fell in love with him the first time she came while he was deep in her. That feeling had her chasing him like a cat in heat.
Kamela spent good money in the club, but she was trouble when she got booze in her. She had caused many fights. One night in the gambling room, she spilled her drink on a card player while trying to reveal her boobs to C-Mann. The gambler knocked her to the ground.
C-Mann ordered, “Get rid of her.”
A bouncer carried her out.
The reason he kept eventually going back to hitting her was that she was very giving in bed. Her awesome dark body highlighted by a waist chain, which sparkled off her brown skin, turned C-Mann on something fierce.
Kamela saw C-Mann’s mother passing as her chance to be a supportive girlfriend.
But C-Mann already had a honey for that.
She demanded to be at the wake and the funeral. She said, “As many times as you have come in my mouth and my ass and you telling me that I can’t be there for you in your time of need, that’s bullshit.”
“Yeah, that’s it exactly.”
She showed up at the wake in a fitted black dress and a veil. Lanier carried her ass out with one hand over her mouth.
Determined, Kamela had come to Tabu with the intention of convincing C‐Mann to come home with her.
She had grand plans to soothe the hurt of losing his mother. It entailed lots of fucking, sucking and massaging.
She was rocking her mourning gear: a fitted black dress that highlighted those hips and killer Stilettos. She swayed to the bar and sat. Before she could order a drink, barmaid Michelle arrived with an amaretto sour, her drink, purchased by a man at the corner of the bar in the back.
Another man came to her and leaned into her ear.
“I want to lick those thighs, no strings attached. You act right I might just lick other things.”
Kamela frowned, “You need to stop.”
She saw he wasn’t bad looking, in a nice suit and tie.
“You need to start,” he said.
This was going to be a good night, she told herself, whether C‐Mann was wise enough to hit this or not.
Tippy watched men hawking Kamela from her booth. It was pretty sickening. Shit, wasn’t she always whining about her love for C-Mann?
Boom. There came the son out of the office and across the dance floor and between the bodies.
Tippy now watched him. He knocked back a drink and retrieved his jacket.
Kamela moved in on cue. “Oh, God, Charles. You okay?”
He pushed her hands off his shoulders.
“I gotta go.”
Tippy smiled slyly. “Where are you going? You want me to ride with you?” “Naw, I’m straight.”
He left her, shaking his head and moving toward the door.
Tippy bolted, adrenaline pushing her legs through the crowd to catch him. She reached him outside. He was lighting a cigar.
An itch of rage ran up her spine. If she hadn’t been disciplined, hadn’t worked on this plan for years, she would have scrapped it all and just killed Charles Mann right there outside the club.
Tippy stepped in front of him while he puffed the cigar. She could have shot him and walked away. The bouncers were rapping to young females and no one would have noticed. He wasn’t even alarmed by her presence.
She squashed that thought.
“Hi. Remember me?”
C-Mann blew smoke away from the thin,
unattractive, yet hippy woman. “Yeah. Tippy right?”
“Yes, you do remember me. I am so sorry about your mother.”
“Thanks.” C‐Mann looked at his watch.
“Nice,” Tippy said. “Expensive.”
C-Mann’s eyes flashed alert.
“A gift,” he replied. “I am a little busy right now. I appreciate your condolences.”
“Oh, okay. When you gonna let me holla at you?”
The way she said it, Hilary Banks talking with a street twang, sent a feeling like roaches scurrying across the back of his neck. It didn’t sound right.
Why was she trying to sound ghetto?
He searched her eyes. Was she down with Miami and them? Was she Dominican? A cop? Distrust clouded his vision from her consoling chant.
“What’s up with you and my uncle?”
“That’s dead.”
“Really?”
“Come on,” she touched his hand. “I just want to
kick it with you.”
“Yeah well, I have a six‐foot, three hundred pound girlfriend and she don’t play.” He flicked his cigar ash at her feet. He blew the last of the smoke up into thick, musky night air.
“And besides, my mother just passed, have some respect.”
He bullied by, knocking her off balance.
“To hell with your mother,” Tippy said clearly and with venom. “She died begging, like you will.”
C-Mann stopped. Had he heard her right? The thump of an R&B hit clouded his thinking. The doors opened and two fake thugs cursing at each other clouded his thinking for a second.
Fear shook Tippy’s body. Then she readied to kill him if he came with drama.
He looked back and found her sporting a sympathetic grin. No way had she said what he thought he heard.
Or had she?
Kamela stepped outside of the club and called C‐C-Mann’s cell.
“What?” he answered.
She was walking down the street, finger in one ear against the traffic noise and moving away from the noise at the door of the club. His cold demeanor inside the club had thrown her into shock. She was sure she would be pampering his hurt away that night.
“It’s me, Kamela. Are you mad at me or something?”
“No. I’m just busy.”
“I’m sorry, Charles.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not trying to bother you. I’ll do whatever, just come home with me. You can sleep. I just want to take care of you. I love you, Charles.”
“No. I got shit to do.” He hung up and cut his phone off.
Kamela saw Tippy in her simple, yet revealing, baby doll dress.
“Hey girl.”
“I can’t believe you? You know I am after that and you smiling all in his face.”
“Girl, it ain’t like that. He ain’t my type.”
“Yeah right. I saw you take his hand.”
“His mother just got killed.”
Kamela went into her Harlem loud version of telling someone off, and Tippy thought, okay, you want to be all in the Kool Aid then you taste the flavor.
“I am sorry, girl. I am tripping. Come hang out with me.”
“No, I’ve got to get up early.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
Kamela chuckled. “Yeah, uh huh. Well, no, listen.”
She began talking with her hands. “I am going home. You cool like a play sister but I am strictly dickly.”
Tippy waved her hand and the Explorer backed up to them. Two men got out and came toward the women. Light-eyed Ted tapped his gun on Kamela’s shoulder.
“Bitch,” Tippy smiled, “either you ride or die right here.”
CHAPTER 8
Miami had to report what went down when he tried to give his syndicate’s show of respects. He liked the Manns and knew his bosses were going to order him to kill the son or the father soon if they didn’t get the club soon.
He thought they should use the fact that most people assumed it had been them who had killed the wife. Use that as some kind of leverage; after all, everybody in Harlem‐thug, gangster or civilian ‐ knew the Manns weren’t wartime folks. But decision making wasn’t in his job description, so he kept his thoughts to himself, most times.
He arrived at Leggs, the strip club his bosses used as a front, and dismissed his thugs. The two think dudes went to the bar and spent money.
Miami’s bosses were two brothers, Chico and Dan-O Montenez, who had inherited their lot from their dad’s bloody reign in central Harlem. Willie Montenez was doing life times six up North when he told his sons to take Tabu from the punk family running it.
Miami had done work for the father and chose to stay loyal to the sons. Not long after the sons took over though, Miami learned that combined Chico and Dan‐O were not the man their father was, but they paid a heck of a lot better.
When he knocked on the private door, the armed bouncer let him in. Inside he found Dan-O breaking in a new girl, a fine young Latina. If the girl was sixteen she was old for her looks. Chico was behind his desk playing X-Box.
Dan-O breaking her in meant she had to give him good head before anybody else who worked there hit it.
“Get up,” he ordered the girl. She rose off her knees. “I have business to handle. But when I am done you get fucked by me and my brother, and then you start working. Go sit outside the door. And, momma, take those fucking J‐Lo clothes off. This ain’t no fucking Salsa club.”
Chico laughed, “You stupid, bro’.”
Miami laid out his report verbally. He didn’t leave anything out.
His bosses laughed.
“He’s just a kid, just lost his mother,” Miami explained. Something he never did. “If I didn’t know like I know, I would have thought we had done it too.”
Chico said, “So, you, you what? Let a man knock you off your feet in an audience?”
“It happens. I wasn’t there to fight him. If I was...”
Dan-O scoffed, “Men that work for us don’t get knocked on their asses and then ask for a pass for the motherfucker that done it.”
“C-Mann is no punk. Y’all got it twisted. Just because he don’t get down like we do don’t make him no lame.”
“We know. He knocked your ass out. Shit, you might be the punk.”
A lick of anger sprinkled thoughts of murder into Miami’s mind. Instantly, he could actually envision killing everyone in the room with his bare hands.
For a long time he would hate that he didn’t do it.
He quietly gritted his teeth and waited for the joke to die down. Then he said, “What the fuck is going on? What happened to patience? I thought you agreed that we’d let them be for a minute.”
“Fuck you mean agreed? We run this motherfucker. You get scared to shed blood now all of a sudden?”
“Don’t doubt me.”
Chico cut the subject. “Look, squash that. We tried to come correct. It’s time to go gritty. Bomb that shit hole they think is a club. They don’t want to comply. They want to help our enemies make money, bombs over Baghdad out this bitch.”
“All I am saying is there is an easy way. This is unnecessary. They are ready to buckle. The accident to the mother is our ace in the hole.”
“Motherfucker you a killer, hello?”
Dan-O stood up.
Two years ago Miami had met Rosa and her babies, his calming influence, when he was stupid and ignorant like them, he would have just killed everybody in the room and went on his way.
“That’s what you do. Ain’t nobody here asked you to figure out easy ways. We the warlords of this shit right here. Why we always telling you this?”
In Spanish Dan-O asked him if he respected the family name.
Miami answered yes in Spanish.
“What we say, that includes your punched‐in‐the‐ eye ass, we are going to do.”
Miami laughed with them. Fuck it was his attitude.
“So?” Miami asked as the joke at his expense died down. “What’s the move?”
“Kill the man’s son then, shit. He thinks we in it, well we in it now. Fuck them both and that club.”
Miami braced for the worse. Now there was a war for sure, and he was sure‐like most street wars he had survived‐it would be fueled by ignorance and greed.
CHAPTER 9
Damn what he heard from his father, C-Mann had to make moves to prevent the inevitable.
Dealing with a stupid bitch talking stupid shit made him think of his sister. And his thoughts became worry instantly.
