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

And yesterday, Alexus’ four month old son, King Neal Costilla, had been kidnapped.

“I’m composing an email to the gas station manager requesting a copy of the camera footage. I’ll wire him five grand and make him sign a confidentiality agreement,” Attorney Bostic told Alexus.

“Let’s just give the kidnappers what they’re asking for,” Alexus said, gazing at the huge twenty-carat white diamond that sparkled prominently on her platinum engagement ring. “I have eight hundred and ninety million in hundred-dollar bills stashed in my vault in Matamoros, and I’m sure Papi has four or five times that stashed all throughout Mexico. All I want is my son back.”

“What I am interested in knowing is how they got your phone number.” Enrique said. “They had to have gotten it from someone close to you.”

“I don’t give a damn about any of that right now. Just find my child,” Alexus snapped. “Pay that man whatever he wants to get my son back. I want that ransom money loaded onto a Boeing 737 and headed here by sundown.”

Enrique nodded his head and left the room, pulling the door shut behind him. His absence did not worry Alexus. She had sixteen more heavily-armed bodyguards in the hallway, and all of them were trained to kill.

Alexus Costilla’s current net worth was $57.9 billion. According to Forbes, she was the third wealthiest American, right up there with Buffet and Gates. Her paternal grandmother, Vida Costilla, had been a stock market titan for many years, a multibillionaire for many more, and a Mexican drug cartel leader since her husband Segovia’s death. Due to the U.S. government’s insatiable need for “illegal” narcotics to keep their lucrative state and federal prisons filled with drug offenders, Granny Costilla had been able to secure a deal with the Central Intelligence Agency granting her full immunity from any drug-smuggling or trafficking charges. All she had to do was continue to flood the United States with tons of cocaine and heroin via her state-of-the-art drug tunnel, which ran from Matamoros, Mexico to Brownsville, Texas.

Granny Costilla had been poisoned to death back in February, and her will left her then forty-eight-billion-dollar fortune—including a television network, a chain of nineteen lavish restaurants, and a billion dollar hotel resort in Cancun—to Alexus her beautiful, young granddaughter.

Now, seven months later and nearly ten billion dollars wealthier, Alexus found herself wishing Granny Costilla had left her fortune to someone else; having this much money was nothing more than an unprecedented migraine. Especially for a teenager. “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” as P. Diddy had famously stated, was truer than people realized.

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.