The Banks Sisters 3 Read online

  “Don’t tell that nigga none of our business,” Tallhya reminded her. “You hear me?”

  Simone stopped short of the glass balcony door and looked Tallhya smack dead in the face. “Don’t disrespect me like that, Tallhya. I’ve never told him any of our family secrets, and I never will. Ever!” She rolled her eyes. “Just have my cut right when I get done smoking.” She gave Tallhya the finger before shutting the balcony door behind her.

  Tallhya eyed Rydah.

  “You know that bitch don’t get an equal third, right?”

  Rydah laughed. “You crazy.”

  “Nah. I’m dead-ass fucking serious.” Tallhya explained why. “First, she’s not the boss of this job. That would be me. She did very little, and she stole all my money last time.”

  Rydah got serious. “So what are you proposing?” she asked. “And are you taking into account how that is going to make Simone feel?”

  “Since she’s our sister, by default we going to look out for her. I love Simone. She’s my blood, and I would never let her be fucked up.” Tallhya thought about a number. “Three hundred thousand. That’s enough for her to live off, and she will be happy with that.”

  Rydah asked, “Are you sure?” This was the first she’d heard about Simone stealing money from Tallhya. Curious, she asked, “What about us? How do we split the rest?”

  “Down the middle,” Tallhya assured her.

  “What about Wolfe? We have to look out for Wolfe,” Rydah said, getting straight down to business.

  “I’m going to give him his hundred fifty K back, plus a healthy bonus for having our back.”

  Rydah thought about it. “That sounds fair.”

  Simone was on the balcony talking to Chase with a face covered in smiles. Rydah crossed her arms, studying Simone’s body language.

  She asked Tallhya, “How much you trust her?”

  “I trust her,” Tallhya said, “but not with my money . . . or her judgment when it comes to my mental state. I know for a fact that she would never rat on us, but still, that shit she did to me . . .” Tallhya had yet to fully forgive Simone for putting her in a crazy house and spending her money, leaving her with nothing. And she wasn’t sure if she ever would. It didn’t matter that Simone had a good reason for spending the money. “I love her, but I’m sorry, I just ain’t over it.”

  Simone stubbed the cigarette out and pulled open the balcony door. “Congrats, baby. I’m so happy for you, and we’re going to celebrate big time. My sister and I are going to take you out. We’re all super elated for you! Love you much. And I’ll see you soon.”

  Simone disconnected the call and walked over to Rydah’s bar, fanning herself. Though she was cool as a cucumber talking to Chase, she was starting to panic.

  “Vodka! Bitches, I need vodka!”

  Rydah and Tallhya exchanged glances, not knowing what to think.

  Tallhya said, “You’re not supposed to be drinking.”

  “Or smoking, for that matter,” Rydah added.

  “It’s not about what I’m ‘not supposed’ to do, but what I need.”

  “You don’t need no drink,” Tallhya said.

  “Or to smoke, either,” Rydah added with her arms crossed, looking at her sister. “Especially not smoking. You just beat cancer.”

  “Look, if you have a problem, you can talk to us about it. Drinking won’t make it go away,” Tallhya said.

  Simone ignored her sisters nagging, continuing to scan the labels on the countless liquor bottles on and underneath the bar. “Where in the hell is the vodka? And Rydah, I thought you didn’t drink like that. So how come you got every fucking top shelf liquor in the store?”

  “What’s going on, Simone?”

  Simone inhaled and then blew out the used air. “I got both good news and bad news all in the same call.”

  Tallhya tried to keep it positive. “Give us the good first.”

  “I’m going to be able to spend more time with you. A lot more. Because Chase and I are moving to Miami.”

  This didn’t make sense. Tallhya said, “Chase can’t up and leave his job on the police force.”

  Simone found and poured that drink. She took a shot straight to the head and then poured another. “Chase just got a call from the Attorney General of the United States. He got a promotion. The promotion comes with a huge raise and a relocation to . . . guess where? Miami. They want him to put a task force together to solve city’s top unsolved bank robberies. Starting with this armored truck heist.”

  Rydah poured a drink of her own. “Get the fuck outta here.”

  “Say that shit one more time.” Tallhya couldn’t believe what she just heard. “This nigga seems to be drawn to us like bees to sugar.”

  Simone agreed. “I know. He’s boarding his flight now. They are flying him in on a military jet so that he can get started right away before any of the evidence gets cold. I’m going to meet him at the airport.”

  Rydah went back over to the table, sorting, stacking, and putting the money away.

  “Well, we wanted to talk to you about your cut.” Tallhya said.

  “Whatever y’all decided to give me is cool with me. I don’t expect a third of it. Plus, I know I owe you, sis,” Simone said to Tallhya.

  “You right. But I got you. I ain’t going to do you like you did me.”

  “Whatever you give, I’m going to have you hold on to it for me . . . for now, please. I can’t go around him or stay in the hotel with him with a duffel bag of cash,” Simone said, looking off into space. “This shit feels too close for comfort. It’s like history is repeating itself.”

  Simone reflected on how she met Chase in the first place. It was her first day working at the bank, which was the first job she’d ever had in her life. That job was at a bank that got robbed on that very day. Although she had nothing to do with the robbery, initially the police looked at her as a suspect.

  Chase was the lead detective on the case, and after it was all said and done, she ended up being the leading lady in his life. After Simone, Bunny, Tallhya, and Ginger started robbing banks, he was investigating those too, and he suspected the sisters. However, in the end, he told Simone that he loved her so much that if they did have something to do with it, he would let it go. He told her to just never do it again.

  Rydah sat beside her sister, comforting her. “It’s not history repeating itself,” she said. “Because it’s nothing to investigate. And no one in this room is ever going to rob anything again. We are set for life. That’s it, that’s all.”

  “I need a Valium,” Simone said. “I know one of y’all post traumatic, psychotic bitches gotta have one. Valium or Xanax—something.”

  “We got you,” Tallhya said. “Don’t worry. We Banks, right?”

  “A’ight. Let me pull myself together. I’ll take a shower and do my makeup. I want to look halfway decent when I get to the airport to meet Chase.”

  “Okay, sis. Everything will be okay,” Rydah assured her sister, and Tallhya joined in for a group hug, which was interrupted by Tallhya’s phone ringing.

  “Hello.” She paused. “This is she. How can I help you?”

  Tallhya listened. “Why sure . . . yes . . . oh my goodness. Thank you so much!” Tallhya’s smile could’ve lit up the entire North Pole.

  When Tallhya got off the phone, Rydah said, “Damn, girl, do share the good news.”

  “Dr. Snatch’s office called and said they had a cancellation. They can fit me in on Tuesday for the surgery. Bitchessssss . . .” She did a pirouette on the floor. “I’m about to be a skinny bitch.”

  Simone and Rydah laughed as Tallhya pranced around the house, singing.

  “Tell Chase to tell them people at his job, right out the gate, that his sister-in-law needs a get-out-of-jail-free card for walking around buck naked on South Beach.” Tallhya was hyped up. “I might not ever put on clothes again. My everyday outfit is going to be a skimpy bikini.”

  They laughed.

  Their laughter w
as interrupted by Tallhya’s phone again. “I swear, if these people are calling me to cancel, I’m going to snap and just go ballistic.” But when she looked down at the phone, she saw that the call wasn’t from the doctor’s office.

  She answered, “Hey, brother-in-law.”

  “Just calling to make good on my word,” he said. “You still interested in having your way with these nothing-ass motherfuckers or not?”

  “You already know how I feel, brother-in-law.”

  “Then I’m going to send you the address. Ask Rydah for the directions.”

  “A’ight. I will be there soon.” Tallhya hung up the phone. “This day can’t get any better than this.”

  “What now?” Simone asked.

  Tallhya didn’t want to tell Simone what she was about to go do, so she changed the subject. “Don’t you have to get dressed and get ready to get to the airport? And you shouldn’t take that Xanax and drive.”

  “Especially after drinking vodka and smoking. You need no Valium,” Rydah added.

  “Blah, blah, blah. But whatever, I hear y’all. Rydah, can you drop me off?”

  Under her breath, Tallhya asked Rydah, “What’s the deal with the address? Wolfe told me to ask you to explain.”

  “He has a code that he uses. Whenever he texts you the address, switch the first and the last numbers with one another. If the police see the address, it won’t match the real one.”

  “Gotcha.” She nodded. “That’s smart.”

  “You know Wolfe got everything covered and will always stay a few steps ahead of the game,” Rydah reminded her sister.

  “A’ight, sisters. I gotta go handle my business,” Tallhya said, lifting up her shirt in front of the mirror, putting on her waist shaper. She tried to rush getting all the hooks latched together.

  “That contraption is going to kill you before you can even get on Dr. Snatch’s table,” Simone said, watching her sister squeeze and snap herself in the girdle.

  “I’ve been telling her, but it falls on deaf ears. You know she treats that thing like it’s an American Express card. She isn’t going to ever leave home without it,” Rydah said.

  “I can honestly say that she lost a lot of weight since she been here with you, and Miami is doing her good.”

  “Between the eating better, diet pills, and the damn waist shaper, she be working it out,” Rydah had to agree.

  “I hear you bitches talking about me like I ain’t here. But I’m about to be out.”

  Tallhya headed for the door and slipped on her shoes. Before she bounced, she said, “There’s one thing that I know. We’ve all been through the fire. We argue. We fight. But it doesn’t change the fact that when everyone is gone—Momma, Daddy, Granny, man, friends, and foes—at the end of the day all we got is each other. No matter what.”

  “No matter what!”

  “No matter what!”

  Chapter 35

  Hurricane Wilma

  Coral Gables

  Wolfe had purchased the four-bedroom home during a down cycle of the real estate market eight years ago. It was a corner lot, built on a dead end, tree-lined street. The main thing that attracted Wolfe to the property, besides the foreclosure price, was the soundproof, semi-underground storm bunker. This was something extremely rare for Miami, but the prior owners had the 1,000-square foot, fully functional bunker built after the category 4 hurricane that pimp-smacked the coast in 2005. The natural disaster, which was labeled Hurricane Wilma, racked up $16.4 billion in damages, mostly throughout Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

  Wolfe used the house as a fictitious rental property to justify a small portion of his untaxable income. He could give two fucks if anyone ever really rented the property. It was only one of thirty such spots. In fact, this particular location had intentionally never really been occupied.

  The storm bunker was the perfect place to take care of business that he wanted to go undetected, such as enhanced interrogations in search of sensitive information.

  Wolfe caged both Abe and Prince down alongside Buffy in the soundproof bunker, each in their own fabricated, reinforced dog kennels. He’d already killed the two other partners. Disposing of their bodies was easy. Florida is occupied by an estimated 1.25 million alligators, and Wolfe knew just where to find a family of hungry gators that appreciated good fast food delivery from time to time.

  Wolfe sat at his desk, eating a piece of red velvet cake as he watched the surveillance footage, which seemed to have him quite entertained when the gators ate into the two accomplices.

  “Damn, another one bites the dust,” Wolfe said, making sure the destruction of his prisoners’ friends were in surround sound, so that Buffy, Abe, and Prince could hear their partners in crime scream their last cries, begging for their lives.

  After witnessing firsthand what Wolfe was capable of, it didn’t take long for Abe to sing like a young Frankie Beverly before the rumored throat cancer. But Wolfe was taken aback by the lyrics of the song.

  Wolfe took another bite of his cake and got up from the desk. He dug into an old tool bag and came out with a pair of oversized needle-nose pliers. Abe’s eyes stretched to double their normal size when Wolfe reached toward his family jewels. His face was already leaking from the brutal beating Wolfe had administered with a bat.

  Abe stammered, “I’m t–telling the t–truth.”

  Wolfe busted the pliers to bite down on Abe’s left testicle. The coiled muscle ruptured under the pressure. Abe passed out from the pain.

  When he recovered, Wolfe said, “There’s one remaining, for now. If I find out that you’re lying, you won’t have any.”

  Sweating golf balls at the mere thought of losing another testicle, Abe said, “It was Jaffey! I swear on my son’s life. Jaffey set it all up.”

  Wolfe, silently still holding the bloody pliers, gave Abe a hard stare as if to say, “Keep going.”

  Abe quickly obliged. “Jaffey paid us twenty thousand to carjack Rydah. We were supposed to hold her for ransom, and then smoke her after you paid the bread. When Rydah got away from the nigga I sent, Jaffey nearly had a heart attack. I swear.”

  Jaffey? That country, pimp-costume-wearing motherfucker played me for a chump, Wolfe thought. But why? All Wolfe had ever done for Jaffey was bankroll him the dough to stay afloat.

  Then he reflected on the conversation he’d had with Rydah the other night, when he was trying to convince her that it was Buffy who’d set her up, answering his own question: People are motivated by jealousy and money.

  The plot never changes, only the people.

  Chapter 36

  Surprise

  Sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, Tallhya glanced at the dials of her new Rolex. It was 10:25. The watch was a gift from Rydah; she’d bought one for both sisters. Being that Rydah had spent very little of the money that they’d inherited from Me-Ma, the gifts were a legitimate purchase.

  But where the hell was Rydah? Tallhya wondered. She was supposed to have met her there twenty-five minutes ago. It wasn’t like Rydah to not be on time. She was the most prompt person Tallhya knew. In order to keep her mind from running wild with speculation, Tallhya focused on the “Before and After” pictures that the receptionist had given her on the iPad.

  The doctor was late as well.

  Tallhya was getting impatient. Surprisingly, the weekend had flown by. She was at the lab at 9 a.m. sharp, getting her blood work done. Now she was waiting to see the doctor for her pre-op. If everything was okay, God willing, the doctor would schedule the tummy tuck and liposuction procedure for the next day. She prayed that all of the blood work come back correct. Tallhya wanted nothing to get in the way of her new beginning.

  “Natallhya Banks.” It was the receptionist.

  Tallhya jumped up, quickly making her way to the open door that separated the waiting room from the main part of the clinic.

  A waiting nurse flashed a smile. “My name is Kendra.” Tallhya followed her down the hall to a room. Ins
ide, the nurse took her vitals, blood pressure, and pulse. Then, after asking a few questions, Nurse Kendra informed Tallhya that Dr. Snatch was running late. “But I’m going to let you chat with Dr. McNeil to at least give you an idea of what to expect. That’ll be one thing out of the way. I know firsthand you must have a lot anxiety and questions.”

  Tallhya thought that she sounded very professional and sympathetic. “Actually,” she said, “I just want to get the whole thing over and done with, so that I can heal.”

  “I was the same way with my first surgery,” the nurse said. “I was also filled with a mixture of anxiety and excitement all at the same time.”

  Tallhya gave Nurse Kendra a hard once over. She was tall and lean, with not an ounce of fat on her toned body. “If you don’t mind me asking,” Tallhya inquired, “how many surgeries have you had?”

  “Oh, honey, let’s just say that I’m an old pro at it.”

  She may be a pro, Tallhya thought, but nothing about Nurse Kendra seemed old. “Would you mind telling me some of the things that you’ve had done? I’m just curious. You look so fit.”

  “Let’s see . . .” said Nurse Kendra. She started counting the procedures off on her fingers. “I’ve had the tummy tuck, lipo on my back and thighs, a butt lift, breast implants, breast lift, rhino surgery, cheek sculpture, Botox, and probably a few other things I forgot to name.”

  “Wow.” Tallhya was amazed. “Well, you look damn good,” she said. This bitch looked like she had the best body that money could buy, and her face was beautiful as well. Judging by the Florida State class ring she wore, nurse Kendra was probably somewhere in her late forties, and she looked like a retired runway model.

  Tallhya asked, “Who was your doctor?”

  Tallhya beamed from ear to ear when she heard nurse Kendra say, “Dr. Snatch and Dr. McNeil are the only people in the world that I would ever let do a procedure on me.”

  “Then I’m glad I made the choice to come here.”

  “Trust me, sweetie, you are in good hands. And I’m not just saying that because I work here,” she assured Tallhya. “These guys are the absolute best.”