Larger Than Lyfe (2 page)

Misha got dressed and was preparing to leave when a messenger rang her doorbell. Misha quickly signed for the envelope the messenger held on his clipboard and ripped it open. It was a letter from Keshari. Misha read it as quickly as she could while juggling files from her office, invitation samples for an upcoming party that she was throwing, her purse, sunglasses, BlackBerry, and keys.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Misha exclaimed, realizing what was being conveyed in Keshari’s letter to her.

Everything she held went all over the floor as she went racing frantically out to her car.

Mars was in his office when his secretary came to the door escorting a messenger delivering a package that could only be signed for by Mars Buchanan himself. Mars opened the messenger envelope and instantly recognized the pink parchment stationery inside. He closed the door to his office and sat down to carefully read Keshari’s communication to him in privacy. He hadn’t seen her in weeks, not since their break-up, and he had to admit to himself that he really, really missed her.

“Shit!” Mars exclaimed in shock, dropping the letter to the floor.

He told his secretary to cancel his schedule for the day, saying quickly that he had an emergency, as he went running for the elevator. A moment later, his Mercedes was speeding at 100 miles per hour up the 405 freeway to Keshari’s Palos Verdes home.

Mars arrived at Paradiso Drive to a scene of utter chaos. Emergency vehicles were everywhere and emergency workers contended with television news crews arriving on the scene. Mars could barely get through the pandemonium as he pulled up outside the gates at Keshari’s home. A reporter recognized him and rushed over to the car.

“Get the FUCK away from me!” Mars yelled, rolling up his window.

Sam Perkins, head of Keshari’s security team, opened the gates and Mars’s car sped inside.

“Sam, what’s going on?” Mars asked anxiously, hopping out of the car.

Sam Perkins bowed his head and Mars took off running up the drive.

Misha was standing on the lawn, emitting the most chilling scream
that Mars had ever heard, as a pair of police officers attempted to calm her. Mars went to her and she collapsed in his arms. Cold, frozen fear took hold of his heart.

“What’s happened, Misha? Come on. What happened?” Mars asked, hugging Misha and attempting to console her.

“She’s…she’s…she’s…dead!” Misha garbled through her hysterical sobbing. “She’s GONE!”

A
caravan of black, customized Suburbans coasted swiftly up Alameda Street, across Broadway, and into Long Beach’s deserted industrial section near the waterfront. It was almost 2 a.m. and virtually all of the shipping and manufacturing facilities in the area were closed down for the night, scheduled to reopen for their daily business around 6 a.m.

The caravan of expensive SUVs pulled onto the graveled lot of a white brick warehouse at the darkened end of Third Street. The driver in the first truck pressed the buzzer at the warehouse entrance. The warehouse’s tall, steel doors rolled open.
The caravan of trucks pulled smoothly inside. The doors rolled shut again behind them.

Four armed men, with the kind of muscular bulk acquired during lengthy stints in state and federal prison systems, hopped out of the front and rear vehicles and checked the warehouse’s perimeter. After confirmation that the warehouse was secure, one of the men gave a signal to the middle truck’s driver. The driver hopped out and held open the Suburban’s rear door and out stepped Keshari Mitchell, tall, brown, exotic-looking, clad in black leather Chanel, with a long, sleek, braided ponytail and striking, almond-shaped green eyes. She strode with refined confidence over to the center o
f the warehouse where her business associates awaited her, her bodyguards watching everything around them as if they were protecting the President.

“Ms. Mitchell,” Javier Sandovar said graciously, taking Keshari’s hand, “so good to see you again. Why don’t we get right down to business?”

Mario Jimenez and Oso Suarez, two of the bulky, tattooed men who’d accompanied Javier Sandovar, whipped five, large utility cases onto the table and clicked them open. Inside each of the utility cases were fifteen kilograms of 80 percent pure, Colombian cocaine. With smooth precision, Oso Suarez cut a small slit in one of the large, plastic packages of white powder. With the blade of his knife, he scooped out a small amount of the powder and dropped it into a tiny test tube. He added solution with a dropper to confirm that the product he’d brought was exactly what Keshari had come to buy. T
he mixture of the solution and white powder turned a bright blue.

“Very nice,” Keshari said, removing a gold, Cartier cigar holder and lighter from her clutch. She clipped the cigar’s end and lit it, exhaling a pungent cloud of the expensive, Cuban cigar smoke into the air. Javier smiled at her and nodded, pleased with her approval.

“Two million?” Keshari asked.

“Two million,” Javier answered.

Keshari nodded to one of the bodyguards, who pulled two large duffle bags from the rear of the middle Suburban and brought them over to the table, unzipping them to display crisp, new hundred-dollar bills bound together in ten thousand-dollar stacks. Oso Suarez carefully went through each of the duffle bags to confirm that all of the money was there. He nodded to Javier.

“Very good, then,” Javier said. “We’ll see each other again in one month. The offshore accounts will be in place. Payment is expected upon confirmation of completion of each delivery.”

“Of course.” Keshari smiled, Javier kissing her on both cheeks.

“By the way, we have been following Mr. Tresvant’s upcoming
trial,” Javier said. “Tell him that we send our regards and support. It is all most unfortunate. My family hopes that his current situation will not interfere in any way with our business relationship. Murder charges against powerful, Black men tend to draw federal attention.”

“I assure you, Javier, and I ask that you pass my assurances on to the rest of your family. All bases are covered. We look forward to Richard’s exoneration on all charges and a very prosperous futur
e between our two organizations.”

“Let us hope so.” Javier smiled.

Keshari strode over to her waiting car and slid inside while her bodyguards kept a watchful eye on Keshari’s business associates and the product that their organization had just purchased. Two of them loaded the cases of cocaine into the front and middle SUVs. The warehouse doors rolled open. Keshari’s bodyguards all loaded into the three trucks. A moment later, the caravan of black automobiles disappeared back into the early morning darkness.

P
hinnaeus Bernard III was a prominent corporate attorney in Los Angeles legal circles, but, unbeknown to most, he was becoming as dirty as it gets.

It was nearly 11 p.m. in the underground parking garage at 300 South Grand when security guards, making their final round before the next shift took over, discovered Phinnaeus Bernard’s silver Mercedes sedan, not in his reserved space, but at the bottom level of the high-rise office building’s parking structure with the driver’s side door ajar.

Sirens. Police arrived at the scene to find Phinnaeus Bernard inside his car with his brains and blood splattered all over the car’s interior. He’d been murdered execution-style, a bullet to the head and two bullets to the chest, apparently with a gun that had a silencer since there’d been no reports of gunfire. Phinnaeus’s BlackBerry was beside him on the passenger seat with a partial phone number entered as if he had been in the process of making a call. In the car’s trunk, detectives found a large file case, Phinnaeus’s laptop, and his briefcase. A substantial quantity of cocaine was
in the file case and one hundred-thousand dollars cash was inside the briefcase, along with client documents and legal pads of notes related to an upcoming trial.

Phinnaeus Bernard III had been an astute litigator who had established an illustrious career defending and winning cases for multimillion-dollar, corporate clients who, more often than not,
had some questionable corporate ethics; and Phinnaeus Bernard had died, leaving behind an extremely messy set of questions and incriminating evidence against himself that was bound to be one of the greatest scandals that his prestigious law firm had ever seen.

K
eshari could remember the events surrounding the very first man that she’d murdered as if they had happened only moments ago. It was the first and last time that she’d ever used cocaine. She’d had to. She wouldn’t have been able to do what she did if she hadn’t.

Ricky had said that the man, her target, was a threat to the organization and that his termination was required and overdue. “This is a test,” Ricky had told her, “and if you want all the way into this, you MUST pass this test.”

That night, Keshari saw death with her own eyes…for the second time in her life. The blood splattered and she’d been so close that it went all over her. She could smell the thick, metallic smell of gunfire after pulling the trigger, and the smell still lingered so potent in her nostrils and memory despite all the years that had passed. She snapped her mind out of it. She hated when the hit that she’d personally carried out, the first of three murders that she’d committed with her own hands, popped into her mind out of nowhere and dominated her thoughts.