“You’ll give my hair line the diversity I need to win.”
“Girl bye.”
“I mean it, Neet. You’ll just have to rock one style. That’s all. Come on now. For old times’ sake.”
But Janita looked at her friend as if she was insane. She was a serious person. Even in high school she didn’t play games. There was no way she was going to be some hair model for anybody. Including her friend. “No can do, bud. No can do.”
“Ah Nita, please. It’ll take me over the top.”
“I’m no model and never will be.”
“It’s not the same thing. All you,” Peaches began saying when they suddenly heard a scream so loud that it felt as if theireardrums would burst. “What the hell?” Peaches said as the owner, who heard the scream too, hurried out of the glass locker.
But Janita was already running toward the dressing room and pulling out her gun as she ran. When she flung open that door with her free hand, and stood in posture to shoot to kill, her heart dropped. Reecie Webster wasn’t seated in that room. She wasn’t standing in that room. She wasn’t in that room!
With her heart hammering, Janita quickly ran to the only door that was inside that VIP dressing room. It was a door that led to a private bathroom. But no one was in that room either, and the tiny window was closed. She hurried up to it, but it was locked!
And that was when she saw it. What she thought when she did her original sweep was a freestanding vanity sink had what looked like sawdust on the floor around it. She hurried to it, but saw nothing. But as soon as she began to shake the vanity, it moved. And when it moved, she pushed it and saw what looked like a hammered-out hole as tall and wide as the vanity itself. Her heart dropped through her shoe.
“Lord no, Lord no, Lord no,” she inwardly cried in panic as she hunched down and forced her body into the narrow hole that was big enough to get a body through. She crawled through the hole until it led her outside, in the alleyway.
She was yelling into her wristwatch as soon as she got out. “We got a breach, Von! We got a breach!”
When she looked to her left in that alley, she saw nothing. When she looked to her right, she saw the door of a van slamming shut. A glimpse of Mrs. Webster’s fur coat could be seen as that door slammed closed.
“It’s a van!” she shouted in her wristwatch as she began running toward that van. “They’ve got Mrs. Webster in a dark-blue van, Von, on the right side of the boutique. Come now. It’s a blue van!”
But by the time she ran up to that van, it had already sped away. She aimed and shot at the tires, even though Mrs. Webster was onboard. But she calculated that even if that van crashed, it would be a better outcome for Mrs. Webster than allowing them to take her to a second location.
But the van moved too fast and her aim wasn’t good enough. She didn’t hit any of the tires.
By the time Von drove up, the van was turning a corner. Janita jumped inside and they took off.
“Oh God, Nita. Are you telling me we lost her?We lost Mrs. Webster?!”
Janita couldn’t believe it either as they sped to the end of Sunset Drive, turned the same left that van had turned, and sped down the street looking for it.
But not only did theynotsee that blue van anywhere, they didn’t see any blue van whatsoever! Von kept driving. Kept turning corner after corner after corner. But nothing. It was gone. And the wife of the richest man in Tennessee was gone with it.On their watch.
They looked at each other. They were doomed.
CHAPTER TEN
The elevator doors opened into the lobby of the huge WEBSTER, INC headquarters building in downtown Brackenridge and William Webster, along with his second-oldest son Matthew “Matty” Webster, walked off of the elevator and hurried toward the exit. Matty was a tall man like his father, but he could barely keep up with the older man as they walked swiftly past the hundreds of executives and secretaries and other frontline workers that made up the most successful corporation in town.
Some of those frontline workers though, the ones that hung around the reception desk whenever they were on break, always had something to say whenever a Webster was in the lobby.
“I still don’t believe that white man had all them black children,” said one of the two white clerks standing at the reception desk.
The receptionist, who was black, looked at the clerk. “Why would you say something like that, MaryAnn?”
“Because it’s true. Look at his son.”
“Which one?” the receptionist asked. “They all fine.”
“The one right there,” MaryAnn said, nodding toward Matty. “He looks black.”
“Black and fine,” said the second clerk, a younger white girl, and she and the receptionist laughed.
