The Cocaine Princess Part 5 (Cocaine Princess Series #5)(2)

With a despondent sigh, Alexus turned around to study Blake’s dark brown face. He was in a drug-induced slumber, his eyes flicking around urgently behind their lids. Alexus touched her fingertips to the two dimple-like gunshot scars on his left cheek. Last Christmas Eve, he’d been shot ten times across the street from his parents’ old home in Michigan City, Indiana. Two of the bullets had entered the left side of his face, shattering his jawbones and leaving twin exit wounds in his right cheek. Miraculously, he survived that shooting and Alexus prayed he would make it through this one as well.

“Where is my sister?” She asked Britney.

“Downstairs with Tasia and Cereniti. I think they’re eating breakfast with some of Blake’s friends.”

“Did you buy her a car yet?”

“No, not yet. I don’t know if you should get her one so soon. After all, you two just met yesterday and she’s been poor all her life, you know what I mean? Her social circle is full of gangbangers and hood-rats. They’d be all over her if she suddenly pulled up in a quarter-million-dollar car.”

Alexus sighed. After a moment of deep contemplation, she sided with Britney. Just two days ago, Alexus had learned of her father’s illegitimate eighteen-year-old daughter, Mercedes Costilla. Like Alexus, Mercedes was African American and Mexican, flawlessly-proportioned, and more steatopygic than Buffy the Body. Both of them had long, curly, raven hair, emerald-green eyes, and perfectly sculpted faces. They so closely resembled Nicki Minaj that the two of them could easily have landed gigs as impersonators of the Young Money Superstar.

“On another note,” Britney said, “I know you’ve been looking for a new home here in Chicago. Michael Jordan is putting his Highland Park mansion on the market for twenty-nine million. I stopped by there and checked it out the other day. It’s pretty nice, if you ask me—fifteen bedrooms, nine bathrooms, fifty-six thousand square feet. And it even has an eighteen car garage that doubles as a basketball court, so Blake and his friends can—”

“I don’t want to hear about it right now,” Alexus interrupted.

Still gazing at Blake’s serene face and listening to the incessant beep…beep…beep of his heart monitor; Alexus caressed his cheek with her finger tips, wondering if she would ever hold her son again.

*****

An hour later, Blake was jarred awake by Alexus’ elated screams. “They found him!” She vociferated, “Enrique found my Baby!”





Chapter One

April 1, 2012

The album was finished.

After months of writing verses, listening to beats, and recording songs, and after signing two more artists to Money Bagz Management, his new record company, Blake King was finally done with his highly anticipated debut album, which he’d named Bulletface, a sobriquet he’d gotten from an old girlfriend. Lounging on the long, black, leather sofa outside of the recording booth on his two-million-dollar Newell tour bus, smoking a corpulent blunt of Kush, he nodded his head to the beat of “Solid Mob,” the first track on his album.

‘It’s Bulletface…I’m sure you heard, man

Rich hood nigga, so my dress code Birdman

Shout out to Birdman, and I’m the Birdman

A thousand bricks of thirty-six, I’ll send it to yuh curb, man…’

Blake grinned at the sound of his own gruff voice. He wore a Louis Vuitton bulletproof vest over a black wife beater, baggy True Religion jeans, and a pair of Jordan sneakers. The four-carat round-cut red diamonds in his platinum necklace glistened as brilliantly as the ten-carat red diamonds in his platinum pinky rings and the small red diamonds in his platinum bracelet and Hublot watch. Due to his grueling two-hour-a-day weightlifting sessions, he was 215 pounds of solid muscle. His left-canted Bulls cap partly exposed his low cut fade, and from the waist up he was covered in tattoos, including four teardrops on the left side of his face and four more on the right.

Money Bagz Management’s five other rap artists – Terrance “Streets” King, Blake’s older brother, Donte “Young-D” Roscoe, his childhood friend, Demetrius “Lil Meach” Burns, another childhood friend of Blake’s, Nakisha “Mocha” Newsome, a sexy, dark-skinned ex-stripper, and Damario “Chucky” Burns, Lil Meach’s older (though much shorter) brother—were sitting on the sofa with Blake, vibing to their CEO’s album. Mocha was jotting down lyrics in her rhyme book. The others passed around blunts and bottles of Ciroc Vodka.

The 45-foot-long mobile palace was parked at the end of the long driveway in front of Blake and Alexus’ Highland Park mansion. They had purchased the estate for $27.9 million shortly after Blake was released from the hospital. Alexus had spent another $15 million on renovations. The overhead included five maids, three chefs, a butler, and a nanny.

“Shouldn’t we be on our way to the album release party?” Mocha asked as she glanced at her platinum Rolex watch. “It was supposed to start at noon right? Well it’s eleven thirty now.”

“I know what time it is. We’ll get there when we get there”, Blake said. He turned and stared out the large, darkly-tinted window behind him. Where the f*ck is Alexus? He thought. Her plane landed at Midway over an hour ago. What’s taking her so long to get home?

“R.I.P Trayvon Martin,” Lil Meach said, and took a fiery gulp of Ciroc. Like the other MBM rap artists, he was heavily adorned with diamonds and clothed in Louis Vuitton from head to toe. The big red-diamond-encrusted pendant hanging from his necklace read Money Bagz Management. “Fucked up how they let dude get away wit’ killin’ that li’l nigga. Ain’t no way we would’ve been treated like that. Shit, you see how hard it was for me to get that fifty-five years off my back, and that was for somethin’ I didn’t even do.”