Daniel Price - Slick

His expression morphed from disbelief to abject wonder. Dare he dream?

Maxina, naturally, wasn’t as easy to sway. “That’s very ambitious, Scott. A few problems, though. First off, if this woman — this patsy of yours — admits she made it up, that’s a straight guilty plea for fraud and extortion. She could get thirty years in prison. Are you planning on mentioning this when you hire your actress? Or are you just going to let her find out the hard way?”

I shot her a crooked grin. Uh-uh. Not tonight, toots. My shields were at full capacity.

“Nobody’s going up the river. Not if we pick our actress carefully. We need someone sympathetic and telegenic. Someone with a dramatic reason to need the money. Sick mother. Sick child. Brother in dutch with loan sharks. Anything, as long as the audience understands why she lied for cash. Plus, if she comes forward on her own, if she makes the moral choice and decides she won’t slander a fellow human being for any dollar amount, forget it. She’ll come out of this with a slap on the wrist and a book deal.”

Maxina still wouldn’t budge. “You can’t say that for sure. Manipulating the media is one thing. Manipulating the legal system is quite another. I’m not saying your plan isn’t clever. It is. But when it comes to gambling with the lives of innocent people, it has to be foolproof.”

Hunta finally dropped back to the ground. “Besides, what’s to stop this woman from giving us up if the police start putting the heat on her and shit?”

“She wouldn’t even have to know we were involved,” Doug replied, with gawking awe. “As far as she’ll be concerned, there was a white conspiracy behind it.”

“Well, that’s not exactly—”

The Judge cut me off. “But what if somebody else gets to her? Somebody who offers her more money not to absolve Jeremy? I mean we’re putting a lot of power in this woman’s hands.”

“That’s why I’ll record my initial conversations with her,” I stressed. “If she goes rogue on us, we’ll simply leak a tape that exposes the plot to frame Hunta, but not the plot to absolve him. Either way, she gets outed and we’ve got our asses covered.”

Speaking of covered asses, my so-called Palm Pilot was once again capturing the moment from the warmth of my shirt pocket. The sound chip was going into my safe the second I got home.

Maxina shook her head. “I don’t like it. There are too many things that could go wrong. Even if your girl comes forward and says she lied, what’s to stop people from thinking that Jeremy’s guilty anyway? That someone paid her off or threatened her into saying it never happened?”

Hunta nodded along. “Right. Yeah. I don’t wanna be the next O.J.”

I counted off fingers to him. “Okay, one: you won’t be fleeing in any Broncos. Two: there’s much more motive to frame you, a hot young rapper, than him, a washed-up football star. And three: if Nicole Brown Simpson suddenly showed up in front of the cameras and confessed that she faked her own death to screw the Juice, I think we’d all be changing our tune about him. You agree?”

I was hot tonight. That yanked Hunta, Simba, and the Judge well onto my side. Four little, five little, six little Indians.

And then there was one. Maxina crossed her arms, locked in dissent. “Scott, if there’s one thing I learned in my many years in the field, it’s that the press always finds a way to make the black man the bad guy. It’s what they do.”

“What they do,” I countered, “is sell our eyeballs to their advertisers. Black. White. It’s all green to them. As soon as our stand-in spills the beans, the media’s one burning question will be ‘Who framed Hunta?’ It’s a fresh new angle. A hip-hop political thriller. Believe me, they’ll ride that wave as far as they can take it.”

“Uh-huh. And what if it takes them right to you?”

Touché. I didn’t have time to finish that part of the equation. I knew I’d be the one playing the cigarette-smoking man, the guy with the trenchcoat and the briefcase full of cash. And once our ringer let the cat out of the bag, there would certainly be an investigation. To make matters worse, there had to be a second voice on that insurance tape. Also yours truly.

“I won’t lie,” I said. “It’s a huge risk. But the risk is all on my part. Even if I told the truth under heat lamps, nobody would buy it. It’s just too crazy to think that Hunta hired someone to frame himself.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he muttered.

“So what would you do?” asked Big Bank.

“Get a good lawyer. Implicate the government. I don’t know. There’ll be plenty of time to work out the contingencies. The important thing is that this will work.”

Simba scratched her chin. “I don’t know, Scott. This still sounds risky. For all of us.”

Doug stood up. “Listen, I think it’s definitely worth considering. But I’d like to talk to the Judge and Maxina alone for a few minutes, if that’s all right.”

“Hold on,” snapped Hunta. “This is my life we’re messing with. When do I get my say?”

The Judge switched to paternal mode. “The final decision’s yours, Jeremy. We just need to decide if we want to recommend it to you.”

“Just hang tight,” Maxina told him. “We’ll be back.”

Maxina returned Latisha to her mother. In grim silence, she, Doug, and the Judge marched into the master bedroom and closed the door. I got the silly mental image of the three of them sharing the bathtub. There’d be room for about a cup of water.

For now it was just me and the obscenely chiseled half of the party. I sat down on a couch.

“So,” I quipped, “I think they went for it.”

Hunta toweled off and dropped down next to me. Big Bank threw him a hand-rolled cigarette and a lighter. As soon as he lit up, my nose confirmed that the tabacci was a little wacky.

“They didn’t want me in on this meeting in the first place,” he said, taking a drag. “I said fuck that. It’s my life. I got a right to hear this for myself.”

“And now that you have?”

“Now that I have, I’m glad you ain’t working for the other side,” he said with a laugh. “You one slick motherfucker.”

I grinned. “I don’t do this every day.”

“So how do you know it’ll work?” asked Simba.

“I can’t guarantee that everything will be perfect again, but I know that if we get to the cameras first, Lisa will be stopped dead in her tracks.”

Hunta nodded, impressed. “It’s a crazy plan, but I’m starting to like it.”

“Listen, I don’t want to mislead you. It won’t be a walk in the park. There’d be at least a week, maybe two, in between our woman’s accusation and her confession. During that time, you won’t like being you.”

“Why so long?”

“Because you’ve still got that Melrose cloud over you. If we play this right, our actress won’t just draw all the bad air away from Lisa, but from Annabelle too. That’ll take some time.”

“Yeah but—”

“Trust me, the more they fry you, the more crow they’ll eat when we pull the rug out from under them. It’s to your benefit.”

“Yeah but the Grammys are coming up. I don’t want this shit hanging over me at the Grammys.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you were up for one.”

“He’s not,” said Simba. “But he’s scheduled to perform a number with L-Ron. At least for now.”

He squeezed my arm, blowing thick smoke through his nostrils. “Look, man, I’ve been dreaming about doing the Grammys since I was a kid. I got family. I got friends watching. This is everything I worked for. If you can clear all this shit before then—”

“When are the Grammys again?”

“February twenty-first,” said Big Bank.