by Noire
Them damn tears were long gone. Salida looked like somebody in that bathroom had picked her pocket, fucked her man, and slapped the shit outta one of her kids.
“Get the hell outta my way,” Salida hissed, and elbowed past Monique. She stormed into the living room, grabbed her suitcases and her purse, and fifteen seconds later she was banging into shit as she tried to get out the front door.
No this crazy heffah didn’t just throw me a ‘bow in my own damn house, Monique thought as she caught the heavy door before it slammed. She watched as Salida took off down the hallway and toward the elevators.
“Where you going, Mizz Salida?” Monique called out. “You going back to Brooklyn?”
“No, dummy,” Salida said sarcastically. “I’m going to Queens.”
“Well, do you need a ride? Queens is kinda far.”
Salida acted like she didn’t hear her. She sat her suitcases upright and pounded the elevator call button about fifty times straight.
Monique tried again. “Mizz Salida, I can wake Pluto up so he can ride with you downstairs. You want me to call you a cab?”
“I ain’t taking no damn cab.”
“Then Pluto can drive you. Or Ace.”
No answer.
Monique stood and watched from her doorway until the elevator arrived. She started to tell her it cost a lot of money to catch a taxi back to Brooklyn, but then she said fuck it. That trick had an envelope stuffed full of duckets in her bag. She coulda caught herself a hundred cabs.
Monique waited until Salida had gotten on the elevator, and as soon as it closed she slammed her door and locked it. Taking the money out of her panties, she dashed into the kitchen to get on her computer. And while Pluto snored in the next room, Monique spent the next hour and a half on the Internet searching for florists in the Los Angeles area and writing down their phone numbers.
Businesses were just beginning to open on the West Coast when Monique started making her calls. She was damn near at the bottom of her long list before she struck gold, but when she did finally hit it, she hit it right outta the mothafuckin’ park!
“Thank you so much!” she gushed to the clerk at Inez Florist. “Wedding planning can be so nerve-wrecking! My assistant usually handles these matters but she had a death in the family and had to leave town. The bride is severely allergic to daffodils, and I just wanted to make sure that none were ordered for her. So what time did you say the delivery for Juicy Stanfield was scheduled for? Nine o’clock this Saturday morning? So, if today is Thursday then that’s the day after tomorrow, right? Perfect! And what location would that be? Oh, Crown Baptist Church? Right again! Would you happen to know that street address offhand? 1914 Cynthia Avenue? Got it. Thanks so much, darling. Have a great day!” Tossing the phone across the room, Monique darted into her bedroom to shake Pluto awake.
“Get the fuck up!” she yelled, tugging him by a hunk of fat that hung from his upper arm. “Wake up, Pluto! C’mon, baby, sit up. I got something to tell you!” She punched him real hard, and then smacked both of his plump cheeks until they jiggled. A glob of spit flew from his lip and landed on her arm. She wiped it in his hair before smacking him again.
“Wake the fuck up, Pluto! Wake up now! I know where Juicy is, goddammit! Gino too! I know where them mothafuckas is hiding at, Pluto, so wake your big ass up and get Ace on the phone so I can tell y’all!”
CHAPTER 14
Ace was absolutely sure that the way he wanted to proceed was the best way to go, but Pluto swore all out that he was the one who had the better plan. They knew they had to get their hands on Gino in order to find out where G’s money was, but the issue of where to snatch him, and how to go about it, was still up in the air.
“Yo, we can handle this shit on our own,” Pluto said with mad confidence.
“Nah, man,” Ace insisted, waving his boy off. “Me and you can’t do it. Yeah, we can fly out there and be waiting to go hard once they asses get got, but if they spot us they gonna buck us. Gino ain’t stupid, yo. His eyes are rotating man. He’s looking over his shoulder, between his legs, and under both his fuckin’ nuts. I’m telling you. It’s gotta be somebody they don’t know, yo.”
“Nah, I really think me and you can handle this, slime! The wedding is on Saturday and we can fly out tonight. One of us can go in the church and get at ’em, and the other one can wait outside. If they see us then they just fuckin’ see us! Our tools just gotta be aimed on blast.” Pluto growled and remembered the sight of G with half his chest blown away. “Matter fact, my hammer’s gonna be the last goddamn thing either one of them muh’fuckas ever see!”
“Niggah is you crazy?” Ace barked. “Why the fuck we gone kill ’em for? You think Gino and Juicy are just walking around with all G’s paper stuffed in they pockets? They got that shit stashed outta sight somewhere! It’s hid, niggah! We gotta make Gino tell us where the money is, fam! We need that muh’fucka to stay alive for a minute ’cause dead men tell no tales!”
“Well, if me and you ain’t gone do it then we gotta fly some Harlem soldiers out there to handle it real quick,” Pluto insisted. “Some warriors we know and trust.”
“Hell no!” Ace refused. “I know some cats out that way that can handle it better. My cousin has a good crew. They’ll be putting in work on their own turf. In their own hood. That’s how it should go.”
Monique stayed out of it.
She chilled in the corner and pretended to file her fingernails and let the goonies try to figure it out. She had done her part by giving them the date of Juicy and Gino’s wedding and the address to the church. As long as they moved fast she didn’t really care how they handled their bizz. Who went in, who stayed out, who got popped, and who got dropped…She was cool with whatever, just as long as they found out what they needed to know and then brought the cheddar - and Juicy - on home to mama.
CHAPTER 15
Although Grandmother had kept me and Jimmy on our knees when we were growing up, I still wasn’t all that religious. And Gino wasn’t religious neither. I would’ve been cool with going down to the Justice of the Peace to get married, but Gino wasn’t having it. It wasn’t like we knew enough people out in Cali to draw a big crowd or nothing, but the guys from The Organization liked to celebrate and socialize, and they looked for any old excuse to throw a party.
Renata had acted a pure fool for my wedding dinner. The Crown Baptist Church had a very large and beautiful banquet room that they rented out to the community, and Renata had catered food from almost every gourmet restaurant in the city.
The hall was decorated in our wedding theme, which was a gathering of different cultures. There were colorful little flags from a lot of different countries hanging everywhere, and the centerpieces were done up in flags that represented all the members of our wedding party.
Tomorrow, Gino would be wearing a white tux with a Kente-print bow-tie to represent the continent of Africa, and his best man and two groomsmen were wearing black tuxes with bow-ties that repped the countries they came from. Frank’s bow-tie had red, green, and white stripes like the Italian flag, Jason’s tie was red with little golden-yellow stars because his family was from China, and Slick Sallie’s bow-tie was bright green and had a bunch of smiling leprechauns all over it as a tribute to his Irish father. It was odd for a wedding, but it was what Gino wanted and I really didn’t object.
After all that shit DarQuese had talked about the food, you should have seen her aunts, uncles, and cousins getting their grit on. They were killing the buffet stations that Renata had arranged by tasty themes.
There was a table for fruits and desserts, one for soul food, and one stacked with lobster, shrimp, and Alaskan King crab legs. There were also tables loaded with Mexican food, an assortment of Italian dishes, Chinese food, pasta, and a real big table overflowing with barbeque ribs.
I was glad to see a server posted up at each station because folks were trying to fix stupid to-go plates. All the guests seemed to be real impressed. Everybody kept
saying that if the food was this good at the wedding dinner, then they couldn’t wait until tomorrow to see what the reception menu was going to be like.
Everything was going perfectly until a little situation jumped off outside in the parking lot that pissed me off. I couldn’t believe folks were clowning and trying to turn my classy catered dinner party into a straight-up hood classic.
It turned out that somebody had been smoking weed in the bathroom. The church lady who had rented us the building came over and told me she had smelled marijuana as she was walking down the hall. When she went into a bathroom to investigate, she busted a bunch of young girls puffing dutches and sniffing blow, and she chased them all outside.
Cynthia and Renata both insisted on coming with me to check it out, and when I opened the front door and peeked outside I saw a bunch of people having their own little party in the parking lot.
It was about five or six of Quese’s little guttersnipe teenage cousins. They had some music pumping, and their grown asses were out there smoking, drinking, and letting some young thugs feel all over their behinds. I got real mad when I saw who was with them.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I hollered at a dude who was busy getting down on a barbequed rib.
It was Pit. He was sitting on the hood of a car and chewing on our catered food. I couldn’t believe he had rolled up with his crew to crash my wedding dinner, and I automatically got mad with DarQuese because she had to be the one who had told him where we would be.
Pit peeped me staring at him from the doorway and licked his lips, then stuck up his middle finger.
“Yo, tell ya fuckin’ man he’s gonna get sat down!” he yelled, trying to impress the young girls who were now laughing and sitting all over my dinner guests’ cars. “Y’all muh’fuckas about to take a honeymoon to hell!” he said. “For real, darling. You better enjoy ya little party tonight, Juice, because trust me, the honeymoon is about to be a nightmare!” Then that fool opened his mouth and laughed long and hard. Real hysterical like.
“Um…sorry, but none of them were invited so they’re not our guests,” I told the church lady calmly as I ignored Pit’s childish ass and closed the door. Cynthia was from the hood, but I was embarrassed that Renata had witnessed all that. I didn’t want her to think me and Gino were all about hanging out with trifling drug dealers and under-age cokeheads.
The incident almost put a cloud over my night, but I fought it off. Forget about it, I told myself, because overall the night was going really smooth. What Pit and his friends did outside was outside. Inside, a whole banquet room full of people were laughing and grubbing, and having a real good time together. Black, Italian, Puerto Rican, it didn’t matter. Tonight the world belonged to me and Gino, and that meant tonight the world was good and right.
$$$$$
That is, until Gino got all suspicious and messed everything up. I still hadn’t told him I was pregnant but I don’t know how he didn’t guess it. My stomach was still real flat, but I was sleeping a whole lot, I had to run and pee every thirty minutes, and even though I’d heard about women who lost their appetite when they were pregnant, the exact opposite seemed to be going down with me.
I had never been crazy over food, but for the past few weeks I had been munching like a mutha. I mean I was putting it down at all hours of the day and night. Food didn’t make me sick. Not eating is what got my stomach all tossed up.
One of Quese’s cousins had just fixed me a big fat-man plate that was overflowing with a little bit of something from every food station. I was sitting at the bridal table with Cynt and Teenie and stuffing my face hard when Cynt put her hand on my arm.
“Juicy, you and Gino be real careful when y’all leave here tonight, okay?” Cynt said quietly. “I caught Quese crying at the shop earlier today. Pit’s been going at her ass.”
I stopped eating. “Pit went at Quese because of me and Gino?”
“You’re her girl, Juicy,” Cynt said with a shrug. “Pit is territorial, just like a dog. Quese is the one who brought y’all around on his turf.”
“He’s a fuckin’ bully,” I said, remembering the aggressive way he had approached me from the gate. Pit didn’t care that I was his girl’s friend. He would have eaten my pussy right in Quese’s shop if I had let him.
“Look, Pit is the one who started all that drama with Gino when he talked shit about my engagement ring,” I told Cynt. “How did he think he could step to me like that and my man wasn’t gonna raise up on him?”
Cynthia shrugged again. “I went to school with Pit when we was little, Juicy, and even as a second grader he was an evil-ass bastard. You know how cruel kids can be. They mean and they don’t give a fuck about nobody’s feelings. Well, if somebody even looked like they was teasing Pit back then, or even made like they was laughing at him because he was short, that dude got swole and got them back. A brick upside the head when you wasn’t looking. A poke in the leg with a real sharp pencil. The book bag hanging off your back suddenly set on fire…somebody always had to pay whenever Pit got clowned.”
“That’s not my fault,” I said, picking up my fork. “Quese needs to smash him like a bug, then walk away and leave him alone.”
I had just dug into my plate again when the doors swung open and I saw Gino walk in with Slick Sallie.
“Excuse me, ladies,” Gino said to Cynt and Teenie as Sallie walked off into the crowd. “I need to holla at Juicy in private real quick.” Cynt and Teenie got up, and Gino sat down beside me and nodded at my packed plate.
“The whole hallway smells like sticky out there,” he said quietly. “You straight?”
His voice was calm and his words had love in them, but Gino couldn’t fool me. I knew exactly what he was thinking and what he was trying to say, and it was way more than I could handle at that point.
“What?” I paused with a sweet-and-sour shrimp halfway to my mouth and got defensive. “I don’t see you clocking nobody else’s fuckin’ plate.”
He backed off. “Never mind, Juicy. I didn’t mean nothing. Just forget it.”
I wasn’t buying that. He did mean something. He had smelled that Cush and come running to see if the scent was coming off of me. And since I was sitting around surrounded by food and stuffing my face, he had jumped right to the conclusion that I must have smoked some sticky and gotten the munchies.
I got pissed off because I had already given him my word that I wasn’t smoking anymore, and I felt that should’ve been good enough. But then again, I had also told him I’d never fucked with nobody else but him and his father, yet some stray niggah had claimed to know what I tasted like right up in his face.
Gino hadn’t gotten over that, and neither had I. Even though the baller from Philly had walked it back and denied it, I knew it still bothered Gino and he still wondered. It bothered me too. That was the only lie I had ever told my man and I felt real bad about it.
But I was still mad. “Just so you know, some of DarQuese’s cousins got caught smoking blunts in the bathroom,” I told him. “It wasn’t me!”
I didn’t tell Gino that Pit was outside in the parking lot eating our food and getting lifted with them young chicks. Pit was probably the one who had brought them the weed and the blow too. But I wasn’t mad enough to tell Gino that.
“I didn’t accuse you of nothing, Juicy,” he said.
“But you don’t really trust me, do you?” I asked, my voice getting small and tight. “I know you trust me some, but not all the way, right?”
“Hey, baby,” Gino put his hand over mine and assured me. “That’s not true. I do trust you.”
I sighed. No he didn’t. Not the way I trusted him. “You wanna know why I’ve been eating so much and acting this way lately?” I asked him. Forget the surprise announcement. This wasn’t the way I had planned it, but if I was going to be Gino’s wife then I really needed him to trust me all the way without any barriers.
Truthfully, sometimes I didn’t believe I was good enough for Gino. He
had traveled a lot and lived other places. He was educated and sophisticated, and had class and swagger. I was just his father’s ex-chicken from 136th Street. But if we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, then I needed him to know without a doubt that he could trust my word on everything. That he could count on me not to take any more drugs, or see any other men, or put our child in any kind of danger whatsoever.
“The reason I’ve been acting all crazy is because–”
“Sshhh…” Gino said, leaning forward to kiss me quiet. “I trust you, Juicy-Mo,” he said. He pressed his lips to mine again. “I swear to God, I do. You ain’t gotta explain nothing to me, girl. I trust you. It’s you and me against the world, baby. Just us two.”
I took a deep breath and made myself chill as he pulled me close and kissed the sweet-and-sour sauce from my lips. The only thing I wanted in this world was to be Gino’s wife and to have his baby. In less than twenty-four hours me and my man would take that ultimate walk down the aisle, and everything would be all good. Yes, I told myself as Gino embraced me in his arms. In less than twenty-four hours the rest of our lives would be set, and every last one of our dreams would come true.
CHAPTER 16
The sun was shining brightly above the church parking lot where two stylish white limousines idled in wait. The young drivers were clean-shaven and professionally dressed, and they appeared to be busily wiping specks of road dust from their glistening chrome rims.
Around them, wedding guests streamed steadily into the church, smiling happily and chattering non-stop. The women were dressed in vibrant colors and large fashionable hats, and the men wore tailored suits and rented tuxedos.
“I gotta take a piss,” said the taller of the two drivers. He was known as Zero on the streets of Los Angeles because of the number of witnesses he was known to leave behind at the scene of a crime. He glanced around slyly, then pulled out his gat and chambered a round in the head.