Smooth Operator (22 page)

“Because it’s other shit that we need to deal with.”

“Like what?”

“Like how everything around me is just falling apart?”

“Tell me.” She cupped his face.

He massaged her waist. “I need to leave.”

“Leave?” That wasn’t the response she expected.

“I’m coming back.” He grabbed her wrists and she immediately snatched her hands back.

“Where are you going?” she asked in more of a panic than she intended.

“To California, only for a few days.”

“Business?” Her heart thundered in her chest.

“You could say that.” He stroked his box beard.

“Don’t play semantics with me.”

“Listen,” he sighed, “I need to go and see Payton.”

“Your wife?” She swallowed hard as if she’d forgotten that he had one. She hopped off the bed and wrapped her terry cloth robe around her.

“Yes.”

Arri wanted to flip, but why? Weren’t moments like this all a part of fucking somebody else’s husband? “It’s cool,” she said, her mind telling her to break off their relationship but her heart telling her to chill.

“I’m coming back, Arri, and I’ll only be gone for a few days, a week at the most.”

“It’s okay,” she said, doing her best to keep visions of him fucking Payton from taking over her eyesight.

“I’m not going out there to play perfect husband,” he said.

“And you’re not going to get divorced either, so let’s stop this conversation while we’re ahead,” she said as her stomach started to feel queasy. “Otherwise, you might come back, and I’ll be gone.” She walked swiftly to the bathroom to shower.

“Arri.” Lyfe knocked on the door as she turned on the shower. “Let me come in. Arri.” He pushed against the door and walked in. He watched the water cascade over her perfect body.

“I love you,” he said to her, as he slid into the shower behind her, “and I need you to trust me.” He took the washcloth from her hands and began rubbing it over her back. “Just trust me, Arri, please. I need to know that you believe me when I tell you I
love you.” He turned her around and looked at her deeply, and she could tell there was more to his leaving than he was saying. “I need to come back with you still here.”

Arri knew she was treading into territories her heart didn’t need to be in. She needed to let it go, let this go, let him go, but she couldn’t, especially when she knew she would be right here waiting for him, and his dinner would be ready, his bath would be drawn, and her pussy would be wet, just the way he liked it. “I’ll be here,” she said as they started to kiss and make love under the shower all over again.

P
ayton had planned death many times, written many eulogies, and said many, many words of reflection, but never in all of the ten years that she’d been a black widow—only taking small sips of time between each marriage to snare her next prey—had she ever envisioned herself attending her own burial.

Yet, here she was. At the gates of hell: naked, scorching hot, drowning in buckets of sweat, seeing only black with snapshots of fire in the distance. A place where she didn’t have reservations for another fifty, sixty years, yet she’d arrived early, clearly unexpected, and on the verge of bustin’ this motherfucker wide open.

And she was certain this was death … it had to be … otherwise how could she explain sitting here like a zombie, frozen in time, replaying the exact moment when twenty million dollars went missing from her account; and even worse, she had no idea who’d moved it, given that they signed in under her name and used her password. She knew damn well that she didn’t do it. She wondered if it was Quinton, but if she wasn’t mistaken, at the time of the transaction he was here, eating her pussy … or so she thought.

To think that when she married Lyfe she considered herself retired, but now that most of her money had done a magic trick
and disappeared. Her personal and business accounts had a dollar and fifty cents between them.

She’d arrived in hell early, and she had yet to truly enjoy the fruits of her labor. Her first couple of husbands were target practice—small-business owners with only a few millions—case studies until she mastered the ins and outs of what killed quickly and couldn’t be detected. After two bouts of target practice she’d been ready for upgrading: a fifty-year-old multimillionaire French politician, Jacques Pierre, with no heirs, who thought her brown, sexy skin was exotic and he had to have it.

So she married him. Over a span of three years she traveled the world with him and chose her next prey, Carlton Anderson, CEO and owner of Anderson Global. She’d picked the day she needed Jacques dead, because she’d heard rumors that Carlton was courting another woman, and Payton’s mother insisted that she hurry and get to him before she missed the mark. So instead of killing Jacques with a poison that worked slowly she got straight to the point and strangled him.

He loved to be tied up, whipped, and walked around in a collar. He loved to suck on the heels of her shoes and he would cum from her walking on his chest in five-inch stilettos. But most of all, what he loved more than anything was having a noose around his neck and her choking him until he was unconscious.

So she granted him his last wish and when she was sure he was dead, she kissed him on the forehead and called the police frantically. She told them what had happened and they quickly covered up the murder; there was no way France wanted to be embarrassed by a freaky politician, so they closed the case, citing the cause of death as heart failure.

Shortly after Jacques’s murder she was back on the grind: Los Angeles, California. She’d had stellar plastic surgery and chose the name Payton.

Payton was sophisticated, and intelligent, and it didn’t take
her long to become reacquainted with Carlton. She attended Anderson Global’s annual New Year’s Eve event, and six months after their initial meeting, they were married.

Payton introduced him to the wonderful sex life of erotic asphyxiation and when it came time for him to depart the earth, it was easy to strangle him and get away with it as a sad case of wild sex gone wrong.

Shortly after this is when the fuck-up, the trip-up, and the slow ride to hell began—she met Lyfe and took a chance. She couldn’t help it—the first time she saw him she knew what all the girls in high school raved about; she knew what it was to have the giggles for no reason, to have untamed butterflies float in your belly. She knew what it was to have a man because you had to have him—not because you had to have his bank account.

But it was all a mistake.

She should’ve seen Lyfe and not seen him at the same time. She should’ve kept her appointment with the plastic surgeon and gone on to become Chelsea Davis, instead of Mrs. Lyfe Carrington; there was no purpose to it, no reason. It was stupid, and now here she sat completely out of control.

“We’re going to fix this.” Quinton squatted before Payton, as she sat on the edge of her bed, the single stream of moonlight bathing her back as it inched its way into her master suite.

“How?” she said, holding her cigarette between her fingertips, the burning tip slowly making its way to become one with the butt.

“Because we may not know where the money is at this very moment, but Lyfe’s ass hasn’t gone any fuckin’ place!” He stood up and began pacing before her.

“We don’t know if Lyfe is behind it.” Her cigarette ashes flaked to the floor.

“Who else would do some shit like that to you? Huh?”

“You have access to that account too, Quinton.”

“I wouldn’t do anything like that to you, and besides, you know where I was.”

“There’s been more than one transaction. One last night and one today, Quinton. More than twenty million moved from the company’s account.” She started to tell him about the money missing from her personal account and about the money she’d been washing in Lyfe’s name, but she quickly changed her mind. “I need to know where my goddamn money is!”

“Well, then you need to look at Lyfe.”

“He’s never gone into the accounts. I never gave him access; he would have to have hacked …” She paused “No, he wouldn’t do that to me.”

“I don’t put a damn thing past that niggah,” Quinton spat. “When’s the last time you heard from Lyfe? Has he come back home to see you, to make love to you? Hell, after all, you are his wife. Has he been consulting you about anything? No, he’s been over in New York, pumping his chest and shit. He was never doing an audit; he was trying to figure out ways to swindle you out of your money.” Quinton wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “And now he’s sitting back, laughing and shit, plotting and planning to run off with that whore he’s fucking—on top of your money—while we sit here, too scared to make a move. You need to pump a bullet in his chest, that’s what you need to do.”

Payton looked at Quinton and without blinking she said, “Why don’t you do it?”

Quinton hesitated and Payton knew instantly that he was a weak link. The weakest link that she’d ever come across in her years of grifting. It was beyond her how she’d involved this motherfucker in helping her pilfer a damn thing.

It was a joke, really, a test of his weak rubber-band will, a last-ditch effort to see if she should spare his life.

Sweat lined Quinton’s brow and he said, “I think he would get the message a lot clearer if you were to do it.”

He was such a queen.

“I know what’ll make you feel better.” He smiled at her and began to kiss her along the side of her neck. Payton wasn’t in the mood, really, but she needed something to help her release her stress, so she lay back and allowed Quinton to undress her.

Payton hated how the clock steadily ticked and invaded her ears as she rode Quinton’s dick. Thoughts of how Lyfe had made a total fool out of her ramped through her mind. She’d risked everything to remain in California with him, and what did he do for her in return? Nothing, zilch. But then again, scratch that, because he did give her one thing: he gave her his ass to kiss.

She hated to admit it, but maybe Quinton and her mother were right: the nerve of this motherfucker to really think that he had a right to not only run the East Coast branch of her company, but that he didn’t have to speak to her in the process. She’d had enough.

Payton slid two of her fingers between Quinton’s lips and squeezed her velvetly walls around the head of his dick. She knew by the way his eyes rolled to the top of his head that he was off in another world.

“Fuck!” he screamed, as she continued to ride him. “Break the head!” he hollered out. “Break that motherfucker off!” he howled, as he came like a thunderstorm inside her.

Payton kissed him and Quinton rolled on top of Payton, and as he slid down her belly, he whispered, “I would kill for you, baby.”

Hours later and between the blinding rays of the West Coast sun, Payton lay in her king-size bed and the smell of cigar smoke slithered beneath her bedroom door. She blinked and sniffed, and sniffed and blinked, and then she inadvertently did it again. Her heart ran a marathon in its chamber. She eased a deep sigh out the side of her mouth and shook her head. She didn’t smell
anything … at least she prayed like hell she didn’t … because that would mean Lyfe was somewhere in the house, while Quinton lay in her bed.

Shit.

She sat up and looked toward the door; it was cracked but the only thing she could see was the gold corner of her Picasso painting.

Untangling the sheets from between her thighs she eased to the edge of the bed. Quinton grabbed her hand. “Where are you going?” His eyes peeled open. “Come back to bed.”

She snatched away. “I think Lyfe is here.”

“What?” Quinton immediately sat up at military attention. “I knew we should’ve run away while he was in New York. Fuck,” he said, tight-lipped.

Payton’s eyes scanned the room. Why was Lyfe here? Why? When he hadn’t been back to California in months? When she hadn’t even heard from him? And why would he show up after millions of dollars had been moved from her accounts. Unless he was behind everything.

“I gotta get the fuck outta here,” Quinton said nervously, as sweat formed on his brow.

Payton wrinkled her nose, “Would you,” she said calmly, “shut … the … fuck … up? Is that possible? If Lyfe had seen you, do you think you would be waking up, huh?”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is very much the point.” She rose from the bed. “And the truth of the matter is we don’t know if he’s here or not.” Payton slid her feet into her mink-covered stiletto slippers, tied her silk robe around her waist, and walked toward the door. She looked back at Quinton. “Lock it,” she said as she closed the door behind her and proceeded down the corridor, following the smell of cigar smoke.

Once she reached Lyfe’s home office she pushed the door in slightly, causing the hinges to creak. As the door slowly became
ajar, she could clearly see sitting on Lyfe’s desk a glass ashtray holding a burning Cuban cigar, and rising from it was a ghostly screen of silver smoke.

Payton’s heart dropped to the bottom of her feet and she started to panic. Her chest heaved and she did her best to calm herself down.
Think … think … think … Where the fuck is he?
She looked around his office in fast-forward motion, but there was nothing … not a footprint, not even a piece of paper out of place. Her eyes continued to scan the room.

The safe.

She walked swiftly to her office, checked the safe beneath her desk, and it was empty. All of her papers, all offshore account information—gone. He’d been here and he’d fucked her in the process. Quinton was right. This motherfuckin’ Lyfe was robbing her blind—and judging by the evidence he left, he wanted her to know it without question.

Payton backed out of her office until the back of her head hit what felt like a brick wall. “Ahh!” She jumped and turned around, only to look into Gretchen’s face.

“Mrs. Carrington,” Gretchen said apologetically, “I’m so sorry. I was just coming to clean your office.”

“Was he here?” Payton asked in a panic. “Is he here?”

“Who, ma’am?”

“Lyfe!” Payton screamed, “Mr. Carrington!”

Gretchen jumped. “No, ma’am, the team and I have cleaned the whole house, except in here, and I haven’t seen him.”