“Where’s my brother?” I asked him as he loaded our bags into the ride.
“At work,” G answered for him, and the way he said it shut me right the hell up.
But shut up didn’t mean backed up. Back at the apartment, G told me to unpack his stuff while him and Gino made a run down to the Spot. Gino gave me a look on his way out the door, but I didn’t even acknowledge it. G could beat my ass all day long, if he wanted to. I was still gonna find a way to get Jimmy out of that damn Spot, and even though she wasn’t supposed to talk to me no more, I knew just the person who could help me.
Chapter Eighteen
A
s soon as G and Gino were gone I jumped in the shower, then got dressed real quick and caught the first train heading to Harlem. I stood outside looking up at Dicey’s window and getting a crook in my neck for ten long minutes, but my girl didn’t answer the bell and she didn’t look out the nosey Susan either.
Aggravated, I slammed my hand against the whole panel of bells, and finally somebody buzzed me in. I didn’t even bother to hold my breath going up those pissy stairs. I hit them by threes and was on the second floor before my feet had touched the floor good.
The television was turned up loud and Dicey’s door was sitting open, and for some reason something gripped me.
“Hey,” I hollered toward the doorway, trying to sound cheery even though my mouth was dry. “Damn, Dice. You must think you down South or somewhere, chilling up in here with your door wide open.”
She was sitting in her leopard-skin chair, and from where I was standing I could see both the TV and the back of her head. One of her hands was dangling over the armrest of the chair but she didn’t even turn around to see who I was.
“Dicey,” I said, walking into the apartment. I saw a pack of strawberry Twizzlers sitting on an end table and slid two out the pack. “Don’t you know how to close your door? This is Harlem, baby! Your ass laying up here sleeping while niggers downstairs scheming on moving all your shit out on a U-Haul.”
I was sticking the Twizzlers in my mouth when I smelled it. Blood. It had been a long time, but some things you just never forget.
“Dicey?”
I peered around that big old chair and my stomach lurched like a roller coaster. I dropped down to my knees and stuck my fist into my mouth to keep from screaming, biting down hard on my knuckles as the tears rushed from my eyes.
Blood was everywhere. Dripping from her mouth, covering her shirt, soaking into the carpet on the floor. “Dicey!” I whispered, terror damn near paralyzing me as I stretched my hands out toward her.
All of a sudden I was right back in that pissy bed with cold air blowing through the room and the smell of gunpowder and shit choking me. No, not Dicey.
I wanted to shake her, to call 911, to grab something and press it up to her neck and mouth to stop the bleeding, but a part of me also noted the glazed look in her eyes, the bruises all over her yellow face, and the way her left hand was clutched stiff and bloody against her chest.
“Oh my God,” I moaned, hugging her limp body. I pulled her toward me, pressing her face into my stomach, crying and holding her cold stiff hand as I rocked her back and forth. I didn’t give a damn about the blood that was soaking into my clothes, I just wanted my girlfriend back.
WHY? WHY? WHY?
I cried. Dicey didn’t have no enemies! everybody loved her! She was cool with everybody and their grandmomma! My mind just couldn’t comprehend it. The house didn’t look robbed, and I just couldn’t seen anybody having this much beef with Dicey.
All I could do was stand there crying and holding her and rocking her back and forth, and it took me a minute to realize that Dicey was clutching something in her hand. Something soft, and somehow still warm. I uncurled her fingers and stared, my eyes bugging almost out of my head when I realized just what it was she was holding.
It was her tongue.
I
was way past scared. My life was on the line, and there was only one person I could turn to. I closed the door to Dicey’s apartment and locked it. I was scared to be up in there with a dead body, but I was scared to leave, too. I needed to get across town, but my clothes and hands and even my shoes were covered in blood, and I knew I wouldn’t get far on the streets looking like I’d just butchered somebody’s whole family.
I was shaking and shivering, and had to force myself to walk into Dicey’s bathroom, tears coming out my eyes the whole time. I wanted to block the reality of this situation from my mind as I turned on the water in the shower and stripped out of my clothes, but I wasn’t that damn stupid. My girl was dead in the front room with her tongue cut the fuck out and this shit had G written all over it. He hadn’t done it himself, of course. He was too smooth for that. But he’d ordered it done, and that was the same thing in my book.
I needed to think. Needed to come up with a plan, and I forced myself to forget the image of Dicey’s dead eyes and the bloody stump of her tongue, and think about Jimmy and how I could scheme up a way to be free of G so that both of us could survive.
I let the hot water rinse my tears away as I scrubbed myself down and put my mind on survival mode. My hands were trembling as I soaped myself over and over, trying to get the smell of Dicey’s blood out of my nose, and by the time I got out of that shower I knew just what I had to do.
I rummaged through Dicey’s closet and dresser drawers until I found something that didn’t swallow me. I pulled on a pair of flat leather Timberland mules I found near her bed and threw a belt around the waist of the size-sixteen sundress I’d found with the $180 price tag still on it.
Homeboy shopping network,
I thought, remembering all the crazy times I’d had with my friend. I knew damn well Dicey hadn’t paid no yard and change for no damn dress. I wanted to start crying again, so I hurried up and grabbed a plastic shopping bag and stuffed my bloody clothes and shoes in it and left the apartment.
I stood in the doorway and gave one last glance at the sister who had proven she was totally down for me and Jimmy, and had died for us in the process.
Dicey was gone, but Jimmy was still alive. I had to focus my energy on him.
T
hirty minutes later I was standing on Rita’s stoop. I’d snuck on the train and cried all the way to my stop. I didn’t care about how people were looking at me neither. There was nothing I could do to stop the tears from falling.
“Damn, Juicy,” Rita said, opening the door to let me in. She was eating a sandwich but wrapped it in a napkin when she saw the look on my face. “What?” she asked, leading me in the back of the house to her bedroom. “That motherfucker hit you again? Huh? What?”
I shook my head miserably. “Dicey,” I whimpered. “Dead.”
Rita was on it.
“Oh, shit, no. G got her?”
I nodded. “It had to be him. Everybody else loved her.”
“How she die?”
The vision of Dicey’s slit throat and that lump of tongue in her hand sent me running into Rita’s bathroom.
Rita came in behind me holding out a towel for my face, and when I was through she took me into her bedroom and made me lay down under the covers.
“It’s my fault, Rita. It’s my fuckin fault! If she hadn’t tried to look out and put me down on what was going on with Jimmy, she would still be here. G blames her for hipping me to my brother, and that’s why she’s dead!”
“You gotta get the fuck away from him, Juicy. Everybody knows how coldblooded G’s ass is. You gotta get away.”
I nodded. Rita was right. Me and Jimmy had to go. But we weren’t leaving empty-handed.
“Rita.” I sat up in the bed and stared into her eyes. “I think I got a plan that might work out for both of us, if you willing to help me.”
“Girl, if it means you say fuck that motherfucker before he puts you six feet under, I’m down. Just tell me what I gotta do.”
“I need you to do what you do best, girlfriend. Do what you do best.”
32-6-14-41.
Those numbers had been burned into my memory, and later that night while G and Gino were still at the Spot, me and Rita went to the apartment and we took down that big-ass mirrored panel in my bedroom and hit G’s safe. I was fully expecting to find a chunk of cash inside, but I also knew G had to have at least two shitloads of money stashed away in a bank. He always carried a lot of green on him, but it was chump change compared to the amount of yardage that rolled through the Spot and all of his other businesses around Harlem. G was a businessman above and beyond anything else. The majority of his money had to be earning interest in somebody’s bank.
The plan was for Rita to read over every piece of paper that might be in that safe, and I would help her write down the names of G’s banks and all of his account numbers. Then Rita could tap that ass through the computer lines. Get my name added to G’s accounts so I could walk into those financial institutions, spank G, then walk out with almost all of his money.
And then me and Gino and Jimmy could split. To where, I didn’t know yet. But it would have to be far. Real far. Someplace where even G couldn’t find us. Of course I planned to tear Rita off a lovely chunk of change for her help, but the majority of it would belong to me, Jimmy, and maybe Gino. With what G had to be pulling in, I’d be able to afford us all a new future.
Rita was pumped, too. “Don’t worry, Juicy,” she told me. “We gonna do that motherfucker just like he’s been doing you.”
At first I was worried that G mighta had some kind of camera planted in the bedroom that was recording everything that went down, but then I tossed that shit outta my mind. He was too paranoid to let somebody roll a tape in his private room. They might find out that unless the great King of Harlem was bumping him some booty, he was a two-minute man who couldn’t fuck his way from the bed over to the bathroom.
32-6-14-41.
Rita and I went to work, and within a few minutes we were staring inside of G’s safe. “Oh shit,” Rita said, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
I counted out five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. That was it. Five thousand sorry-ass dollars, and no goddamn cents. There was also a black binder inside, and a few pictures of the woman who I knew was Gino’s mother. In one of the pictures the woman was sitting on G’s lap and holding a baby. The baby was Gino, there was no doubt about it, and even though they were all smiling at the camera I could tell the woman was faking it. Her eyes looked scared as hell.
And that was it. There was nothing else inside the safe. No stocks, no bonds, no securities, no gold bars, no secret bank accounts, no Swiss bank accounts, nothing else. Nothing else except a key. In a small brown envelope.
A tiny gold key with the words
RENO SUPREME
engraved on it.
RENO
on the top, and
SUPREME
directly underneath it.
The key didn’t look familiar to me, so I left it there right next to the cash. But I took the binder. Me and Rita were gonna take that bad boy right down to Kinko’s and make a copy of every single page. Let G fuck with me or my brother. I had the names and contact information for every single one of his front men and his drug connects. I could put his ass and all of theirs so far under the jail they’d need a backhoe to get them out.
“This is it?” Rita asked. She looked almost as disappointed as I felt.
I shrugged. “I guess so. Fuck! I thought there’d be more money and bank statements and stuff. You know, account numbers and records you could tap into.”
Rita looked across the room. “What about the computer?”
I shook my head. G had that shit locked up tight. “You gotta know the password just to turn it on. G is the only one who knows it, so he’s the only one who uses it.”
“Did he ever tell you to stay away from it?”
“Girl, yeah. There’s another computer in Jimmy’s room that G brought for us to use. He told me to stay my black ass away from his because he changes the password every time he signs on.”
Rita’s eyes looked all funny. “Is that right?” she said, already on her way over to the desk. “We gone see about that shit.”
Rita worked on G’s computer for over two hours. I kept running back and forth between the window and the front door, scared Pacho or ace or one of G’s other flunkies was gonna come in and catch us. I was paranoid and spooked by every little sound I heard. When the phone rang it scared me so bad I caught an instant headache.
“Hey girl.” Gino’s easy voice met my ears through the line. “Shit is smooth over here, so we coming home early. We’re on our way back. You want us to bring you anything?”
I felt happy that Gino was thinking about me, but I was even happier for the heads-up. I hurried up and told Rita to get her bony black Puerto Rican ass up and out of G’s house.
“But I need more time,” Rita complained when I insisted she had to stop. She’d been banging on the keyboard like a crazy woman, determined to crack G’s code. “There’s something on here, Juicy. I can feel it. The answers we need are right here on this fucking computer!”
I thought about Dicey and the way she’d looked the last time I’d seen her. “Nah, Rita,” I said, pulling her up from the chair. “We gotta pick this shit up another time, my sister. Right now you gots to go.”
By the time G turned his key in the lock Rita was long gone and I was laying on the couch with a cloth over my eyes like I had a headache. I peeked out and saw G walk right past without even looking at me, but Gino nodded and smiled and I smiled back.
I mighta looked all sweet and innocent, but deep inside I was scheming like a mother trying to figure out how to do like Dicey had said and get my own damn money. G had already proven he was crazy and didn’t give a fuck about me or my brother. Now I needed to figure out how to get some of his ends, for me and for Jimmy, and if Rita could just get past that password on his computer, then nothing else in the world was gonna stand in my way.
G
ino and I had already agreed not to even try to hook up in the apartment. We walked around each other barely speaking, trying hard not to give our true feelings away. We hardly had any time alone because G wanted Gino with him wherever he went. Gino was already getting mad props and respect from niggas on the street by virtue of being G’s son, but G wanted him to learn everything about his operations so he could take over one day. Gino wasn’t really down, but he went along with the program. Once or twice we managed to sneak in a few quick kisses when G went out alone, and we found ways to touch each other on the sly when we met in the kitchen or walked past each other in the halls, but there was never enough time for me to get some real dick, and with Gino sleeping on the other side of me and G’s wall, he was getting frustrated too because of all that noise G had me making.