by Noire
I danced and I cried. G told me to take off my panties right there in front of Gino, and to slip two fingers into my pussy. I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? I knew he would’ve beat me half to death, and maybe Gino, too, if I didn’t obey him, so I pulled those panties off and put my hand between my legs.
“Damn, G.” Gino stood up and started walking away. “Chill, dawg. How you treating your lady? This your woman, man.”
G just laughed at his back. “You damn right. This my woman.”
Gino slammed the door behind him and I was left standing on that table with my thong in my hand. I knew the drill, so I wasn’t surprised at all by what G told me to do. Minutes later I was on my knees, kneeling on that cold marble table with my ass up in the air. G had wrapped my panties around my head and rammed his dick up my ass. “Pillow-biting bitch! Take this dick up your dookey chute, slut! Give Daddy some of that chocolate pudding!” He rode me from behind and choked me with those panties until I thought I would pass out, but never once did I cry out or scream for help. Gino had already seen me violated worse than a dog, and there was no way I wanted him to see me being dicked down like this.
Later that night, I crawled into that tub and soaked myself in water so hot I should have got first-degree burns. G had brutalized me in the past, but never had he showed me out in public, and I realized that if G could let another man, even his son, see my naked ass in his presence, then his feelings for me had taken a serious turn. There was no telling what he had planned for me next, but between Jimmy working the cut room and selling drugs, and me sexing Gino on the regular, either I was gonna take G out, or he was definitely gonna kill me.
I was so scared of my thoughts that I wanted to put my head under the soapy bathwater and just stay like that forever. As bad as G had hurt me, he was my comfort zone and he took care of me and Jimmy. I’d never been on my own before, and I was scared of us ending up on the streets.
A few minutes later I heard G on the phone. He was going back and forth about times and connecting flights, so I knew he talking to someone at the airline.
I grabbed a washcloth and acted like I was soaping myself when he bammed on the door and stuck his head inside. “Get the fuck out, Juicy,” he told me. “So I can wash my dick. We leaving here tonight at nine, so pack your shit and get ready to roll.”
Our vacation was over.
The trip home from Hawaii took much longer than the one going there had taken. G wouldn’t even look at me, let alone speak to me, and Gino got so mad when he saw the bruises on my face and the marks my panties had made around my neck, I thought he was gonna mess around and get us found out.
“Naw, Juicy,” he said when G was at the counter settling our hotel bill. It was all I could do not to throw myself all over him, to hold his hands and press myself into his strong chest, but I knew better. “That punk motherfucker did my mother the same way.”
“Sshhhh.” I put my finger to my lip, knowing G was probably listening with one ear. “I’m all right,” I whispered, hoping to calm his ass down even though he could see the welts on my face, arms, and legs, and my back felt like a horse had stomped me.
I could see the rage in Gino’s eyes, and for the first time I felt bad about stepping between a father and his son. Yeah, G wasn’t shit when it came to handling his business with a woman, but that didn’t mean I had the right to bring drama between him and his son.
We were quiet all the way to the airport. G had called for a limo to pick us up at the hotel and we rode in that shit like we were going to a funeral. I tried not to look at Gino too often because every time I did, it looked like he was grilling G. He had already got funky and called himself messing with G’s head when he climbed in the back of the whip.
“Damn, Juicy,” he said, shaking his head. “Look like you fell off that table last night. If I didn’t know no better I’d say those were fist prints on your face, but wouldn’t no real man beat his woman like that, so it musta been that table that got a hold of you.” Then he turned and stared at G, who stared right the fuck back at him.
It didn’t matter how comfortable the seats were on the plane. I was so sore it was torture to stay on my ass in one spot all that time. Every few hours I had to get up and stretch my body, then walk to the rear bathroom and back before I could sit back down. I managed to hide my face with a pair of shades and a Donna Karan cap pulled down low over my forehead, but it still felt like everyone could see my red and purple welts and I thought they all knew that my ass had gotten kicked.
I was happy as hell when we landed in New York. City air had never smelled so good, but since I was still at the top of G’s shit list, I could barely enjoy it. Pacho picked us up at the airport and I was disappointed to see that Jimmy wasn’t with him.
“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
As 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 gi
rlfriend 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.
Thirty 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 sta
tements 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.”