Larger Than Lyfe Read Free

She could smell the thick, metallic smell of gunfire after pulling the trigger, and the smell still lingered so potent in her nostrils and memory despite all the years that had passed. She snapped her mind out of it. She hated when the hit that she’d personally carried out, the first of three murders that she’d committed with her own hands, popped into her mind out of nowhere and dominated her thoughts.
    Keshari parked her Range Rover in the public parking structure at Vignes Street, crossed over to Men’s Central Jail, and went inside. She stored her purse in one of the lockers in the lobby. She was subjected to metal detectors by sheriff’s officers. She was required to show identification and sign in. Then she was escorted to the visitation room to await the inmate she’d come to see.
    She looked around her at the fluorescent-lighted, windowless surroundings with its metal tables bolted to the floor. Televisions were bolted high up on the wall on either end of the large room. Although she’d never seen any of the cell blocks, Keshari could imagine the suffocating frustration of the inmates locked away in this place. She had no criminal record, not even a misdemeanor offense, and she had Richard Tresvant, largely, to thank for that, but, in her line of work, she knew that she had been pressing the full extent of her luck for a long time and, eventually, that luck would run out.

    Richard “Ricky” Tresvant was escorted into the visitation room from the segregated housing unit. Ricky was thirty-eight years old, six feet three inches tall, with long, lean, muscular legs and enviable six-pack abs rippling underneath his orange, inmate-issue uniform. His intense, brown eyes sparkled with extreme intelligence, charisma and danger, even after weeks of confinement in a jail cell. He was equal parts “sex symbol” and “menace to society” and it was this mesmerizing combination of attributes that had attracted Keshari to him when she was only fifteen years old.A whole host of factors kept her locked under his Svengali-like spell fifteen years later.
    Ricky was preparing to go to trial for a high-profile murder that he was adamant he did not commit. His “dream team” of attorneys was working around the clock and calling in favors everywhere to ensure that he was exonerated once the trial commenced.
    Keshari rose from the table at the rear of the room as Richard approached. She smiled and kissed his lips before the two of them sat down. The sheriff’s officer who’d escorted Ricky to the visitation room joined the other officers at the room’s control station. Keshari and Ricky were left in virtual privacy. Keshari smiled at him reassuringly. As powerful as he was and as effortless as itusually was for him to separate himself from his emotions, the fact that there was a large possibility that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars must have been starting to weigh on him mentally.
    “How are you?” Keshari asked.
    “How do you think I’m doing, Keshari? I’m about to go crazy in this shithole. Every day that I wake up here is like a fuckin’ nightmare that keeps rewinding. When I find out who set me up…”
    Ricky’s eyes darkened. Keshari reached across the table and stroked his face, unable to squeeze his hands because they were cuffed behind him.

    Richard Tresvant had painstakingly schooled Keshari to become the woman she now was. From the tenets of fashion, fine jewelry, cars, real estate, food and wine, art, architecture, right down to how to fire a gun, Ricky Tresvant could confidently claim responsibility. No matter how the world perceived him and the dangerous path he’d chosen in life, Ricky was clearly a genius. While he hadn’t spent a day in school beyond high school, he was constantly reading, “constantly expanding his intellectual repertoire,” he said, and getting very rich through high-stakes criminal activity that he rolled into completely legal enterprises.
    Ricky had put