by Noire
“You know why we’re here,” the older cop said. He stared at me intently, like the shooter’s name was about to appear on my forehead.
“Tell us everything you remember about what happened before you and your boyfriend were shot.”
My fiancé! I wanted to scream. Gino wasn’t just my boyfriend! He had been about to wife me. He was gonna be my husband.
“It was real hectic,” I whispered, remembering how excited everybody had been for us. “I was downstairs in my dressing room, and Gino—” my voice caught in my throat, “Gino was supposed to be in his dressing room too.”
“So you two were alone?” the younger dude asked, as he scribbled on a small white pad. “It was just a few minutes before your wedding, and there was no one else in the dressing room with you guys?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “My bridesmaids had already gone upstairs to get lined up. My maid of honor had just stepped out to check on something, and I was in there by myself. Praying. Until Gino knocked on the door.”
“And then what happened?”
I tried to shrug my shoulders but even that slight movement hurt like hell.
“Nothing happened,” I lied, remembering how Gino’s lips had felt on my thighs, and how his hands had been all up my dress and between my legs as he tried to lick me out.
“We were just standing around talking, and the next thing I knew the door banged open and then Gino jumped all over me. He covered me up. He was holding me close to him when I felt his body jerk, and then my stomach got real hot and we both went down to the floor.” A tear slipped from my eye. “I guess that’s when we got shot.”
“Did you see anyone?” The older cop was still staring at me hard. “Can you identify the person who shot you?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I told him as my mind whirled fast on rewind and I recalled all the drama that had gone down over the past couple of weeks. “I didn’t see anybody. But I know who it was.”
“So who was it?”
I didn’t even hesitate.
“It was this dude named Pit. He’s a midget gangsta from Compton. Either he shot us, or he got one of his boys to do it. But it was my homegirl who set us up.”
Just thinking about DarQuese cut my heart like glass. In just six short months I had really trusted Quese. Loved her and trusted her just like a sister, and in return she had betrayed me.
“Friend who?” the cop asked.
“DarQuese Middleton.” I spit that two-faced, long-legged scheming bitch’s name off my tongue. “My so-called maid of honor.”
$$$$$
I was exhausted again by the time they finished grilling me. They wanted to know everything, and I wanted them to know everything too. I didn’t hold anything back. They told me a cop had been posted outside my door ever since they brought me in, and that I was safe and could speak to them freely because L.A.’s finest was there to protect me.
I almost laughed behind that one. I’d seen the way G used to buy and pay for cops in New York all the time, so I knew all that protection talk was a joke. But I didn’t care. I told them all about how Pit had been riding me. How him and Gino had scrapped when Pit tried to shit all over my engagement ring.
“Where’s the ring now? In patient property?” the older cop asked, lifting my hand. “You were probably unconscious when they brought you in, so you might not remember. I can check your inventory sheet.”
I shook my head.
“Whoever shot us took my ring,” I told them. “Me and Gino were on the floor when somebody said ‘give up your ring’ and then snatched it off my finger. I think I passed out right after that.”
“You said you didn’t see anyone, but did you recognize the voice? Would you be able to identify it if you heard it again?”
I shook my head once more. It hurt like hell to move but I fought the pain.
“I doubt it. Gino was heavy on top of me and everything was happening so fast. It seemed like the voice was coming from miles away.”
Before the detectives left I gave them the address to DarQuese’s beauty shop, and told them Pit owned an urban clothing store right across the street. In fact, I told them everything I thought might help them. Forget all that ‘stop snitchin’ nonsense. That was for honor between thieves. Me and Gino were innocents. It was nothing except greed and envy that had made Pit come at our throats. And for him to just gun us down like two stray dogs, and almost kill our baby too?
All that bitter grief was too much for my heart to hold. I lay there twitching. Crying and twitching. Tears just ran from my eyes like water. I tried to say a few more prayers for Gino but my words seemed empty. Like I was only begging and praying because I was in trouble and needed help. I wondered if God was even paying me any attention, or if this was the wrath of the Lord that Grandmother used to speak of when she was whipping my ass for being sneaky and grown.
My whole body felt like it was on fire. I trailed my fingers lightly across my stomach, and moaned at the swelling and throbbing soreness. I thought about Gino, laying somewhere in this same hospital, yet out of my reach and so far away.
The white female doctor, the one who had been standing over me the first time I woke up, came to see me a lot. Her name was Doctor Atgrove, and she seemed to have a lot of sympathy for me. “I can’t tell you a whole lot right now,” she’d said just a day or so earlier, “but there is some concern about Gino’s spinal cord. The bullet shattered two vertebrae in his lower lumbar, and even if he survives his soft tissue injuries there’s a possibility that he could be paralyzed from the waist down. But we won’t know much of anything unless he comes out of his coma.”
I refused to even hear that. I didn’t even care about the possibility that he might be paralyzed. I just wanted Gino to live. I wanted my man to hold me in his arms again. To be with me. To flow through life with me. If he ended up paralyzed it wouldn’t mean a damned thing to me. I just needed Gino to fight and fight hard.
I needed my man to stay alive.
CHAPTER 3
Monique was getting her gushy on. While the dog was away the alley cat was damn sure out to play. She leaned over the buff, high-yellow young dude whose dick she was riding, and licked his pink nipple until it stiffened under her tongue.
Monique grinned. She was a maneater. She craved meat. Young, hard, muscled-up meat. She glanced down at the big-boned tyke as they fucked. He was Pluto’s nephew. A young’un. A light-bright redbone too. He was no more than eighteen, and that’s just how she liked ’em. She kept a crew of come-up niggahs just like him on a string, using them to pull all kinds of devious capers that she concocted when she was being sneaky and slick.
Technically, the young crew worked for Ace and Pluto, slanging rock and banging heads out on the streets. But Monique had found a way to stimulate their fragile egos and manipulate their juvenile, impressionable minds. She simply gave their young asses for free what hundreds of grown men were required to pay top dollar for.
“Oooh, goddamn!” the boy muttered below her as she bucked around on his juiced-up dick. It had been a minute since she’d had anything so long and stiff up in her, and all them dildos and other stage props she used in her freak ’em routines didn’t hardly count.
She pressed her titties to the young boy’s chest and smashed them up. He slid his hands up from her bodacious ass and hugged her tight in his arms as he pumped his dick up inside her and expanded her inner walls. He crossed his arms behind her and hugged her shoulders.
They rocked it like that for a few seconds, but then Monique broke free and reared back again. This wasn’t nothing but a fuck, and she needed his young ass to know it. All that hugging shit was too damned tender. It was nice, but it was still tender.
“Fuck me from the back,” Monique demanded as she dislodged herself from the young hood and got on her hands and knees. Who the fuck did he think he was hugging on? Didn’t this fool know she was his Uncle Pluto’s bitch?
And speaking of Pluto, Monique wondered why th
e fuck he hadn’t called her yet. By now him and Ace shoulda snatched all the feathers outta those two stupid-ass lovebirds in California! Getting married! Tryna be all extra. They was already fucking. Why the hell did they need to get married just to do more of that?
She couldn’t wait until Ace and Pluto got back to New York with G’s money. She got off just thinking about the stacks of crisp cash that they were gonna steal back from Gino.
And Juicy.
Monique giggled as she gyrated. Juicy’s stupid ass was gonna get sliced up. Monique had instructed Ace and Pluto to bring that run-through trick back to Harlem right along with the doe. There was an extra-sharp razor blade and a real pissy mattress waiting downstairs in the Dungeon, and Juicy’s name was written on both of them.
Monique gasped as dude slid his wet dick deeply up in her. This was just how a young dude was supposed to fuck, she thought with approval. He’d been banging her for the past thirty minutes, and aside from the sweat running in rivers from their bodies, he didn’t seem tired and he was still holding on to his nut.
The bed rocked beneath them and Monique moaned as her nipples scraped against the sheets. She pressed her chin to her chest, then stuck out her tongue and licked her third, most sensitive nipple.
Taking her hint, the corner boy reached beneath her and rubbed her stomach, then brought his hands up to weigh her full breasts. He twisted her nipples and Monique went wild. He moved his hands back down until they cupped her round hips, then he slapped her bouncy ass and sent a thrill shooting all the way up to her little titty.
“Do that again!” she bossed him, tooting that na-na up to meet his frantic thrusts. She reached between her legs and squeezed her dripping clit, then arched her back and sighed with pleasure.
“Yeah,” she muttered as he inserted his thumb deep into her ass and fucked both her holes. He ain’t half-bad for a young’un, Monique mused as his other hand cracked like a whip on her ass cheek and he spanked-fucked her toward another nut. “Do that shit again!” she demanded. “And again and again and again…”
$$$$$
While Monique was busy getting fucked, her man Pluto was ready to fuck somebody up. Instead of buying a truck and driving back to the East Coast loaded down with cash like they’d planned, Pluto and Ace had been forced to catch a red-eye flight and sky up outta L.A. with a quickness.
The temperature had gotten real hot on the streets after Gino and Juicy got popped. Some crazy shit jumped off with the Mob that had even the most seasoned hardbodies looking for a safe hole to crawl into.
“I told you,” Pluto said for the hundredth time since they’d jetted to the airport and hopped on the first plane smoking back east. They had just touched down at LaGuardia Airport, and the thought of going back to Harlem and telling Monique they had failed to complete their mission was giving Pluto some serious heartburn.
“We shoulda used our own squad,” he fussed. “We coulda flown Swish or Domni or one of them other level-headed soldiers out to Cali, and no shit like this woulda went down.”
Ace looked at his longtime boy like he was a two-year-old idiot.
“How many times I gotta tell you it wasn’t us? That wasn’t our shit, man! Zero didn’t get nowhere near Juicy and Gino in that church! He told you that. Even Izz believed him. That niggah Zero is a patient, but he ain’t stupid.
“Besides,” Ace shrugged as they walked from the airport terminal to the parking lot. “You saw how shaky shit got out there on them L.A. corners. Even the Crips and the Bloods went into hiding.”
“That’s because them Cali niggahs fucked shit up!”
“Yo,” Ace exploded with frustration. “It wasn’t us! Rabb already explained that shit, niggah! How many times you gotta be told the same damn thing?”
Ace’s cousin Rabbit had been real nervous when they swung by his crib to tell him his manz had fucked up their job.
“Word, my niggahs didn’t fuck it up,” Rabb had insisted. The thick-necked, brawny killer had snatched Ace and Pluto off his porch before they could ring the doorbell, and they had sat dumbfounded in his darkened living room as he peered out through his closed venetian blinds like a scared little bitch.
“Somebody beat my dudes to it, that’s what happened,” Rabbit told them. “Word on the block is that ya boy Gino made some enemies around here. He caught the attention of a click outta Compton. They prolly the ones who put him down.”
Ace had bucked. “So what? Y’all niggahs suckin’ Compton dick now? Them niggahs got you peeping out ya window and holding ya nuts now?”
Rabb had frowned and shook his head. “Nah, fuck them sherm-ass Compton niggahs,” he said quietly. “Don’t nobody give a fuck about that set. It’s them white boys everybody is checking for right now. Them mafia niggahs. I heard they out there stalking dudes. Them fools is on the prowl.”
“Over what?”
“Not over what. Over who. They looking for ya boy’s shooter, man. And when they find him they gonna lay him and his whole posse down. Ya boy Gino was they niggah. He was protected. Wasn’t nobody supposed to touch him.”
Ace and Pluto had given each other a smirked-out New York look. Neither one of them believed that bullshit. G had always been in deep and smoove with several Mob families, and Gino wasn’t big enough to spark their interest or their protection. It just didn’t make no sense.
Nah, this wasn’t that type of crime, Pluto concluded as they walked around the airport parking lot searching for their whip. If the boyz they hired didn’t do it, then the local click that was gunning for Gino prolly did. Yeah. The bullet that hit Gino had some Cali niggah’s fingerprints all over it. He was almost sure of it.
CHAPTER 4
Mad as hell didn’t even describe what Monique was when Ace and Pluto came back to New York by airplane. The plan had been for them to leave their whip at the airport and fly out to the West Coast. Once they got their hands on the cash, they were supposed to buy a truck and transport G’s money back home.
But a quick call to Pluto verified that once again, all Monique’s dreams had been slain. Them niggahs had just flown in on a plane to LaGuardia, and Monique knew there was no way in fuck they had rolled outta L.A. carrying more than half a million dollars in their check-on luggage.
And that meant they had failed.
Monique was past mad. She was furious. She shoulda known better than to send two stupid men to do a smart woman’s job! Them bumbling-ass niggahs had gone all the way to California just to come home empty-handed. And not only didn’t they get the money, they didn’t get that bitch Juicy neither.
The death-look on Pluto’s face should have been enough to check her tongue when he walked in the front door, but Monique was too far gone to value her life.
“What do you mean somebody shot him?” she demanded when Pluto told her Gino had taken a hot one.
“Just what I said. That niggah got popped. He’s in the hospital. They got po-po posted on him and ere’thang.”
Monique’s eyes narrowed. “And what about Juicy?”
Pluto shrugged as he took off his shoes and wiggled his cheesy toes around in the air.
“She’s in the same hospital. She got hit too.”
Monique couldn’t bear to believe this shit. What had she done to deserve this? Why couldn’t she get the things she wanted out of life? What kinda fucked up luck did she have?
“So, you mean to tell me that all that money…” she breathed heavily in anger. “All that fuckin’ money they stole from us…they still got it?”
Pluto didn’t answer. He picked up his shoes and started walking toward their bedroom.
But Monique wasn’t finished. Hell no, she wasn’t.
“Hold up,” she said, walking behind him. “So, you telling me that after all that work I put in, fuckin’ with that crazy-ass Salida, pumping Nae-Nae’s dumb ass for information and then calling every fuckin’ florist in L.A., …after all that fuckin’ work, you and Ace lose ya heads and shoot Gino’s ass, but neither one of y�
�all is smart enough to make him give up the cash first? Damn, Pluto! What the fuck is wrong with you? You was supposed to have this shit all planned out!”
She didn’t even see the first blow coming. Pluto had already walked past her when he swung. That big-belly niggah pirouetted on his toes like a fleet-footed ballerina.
His four fat knuckles drilled into her temple, dropping her to her knees. Monique could only clutch her head and gasp for air. The scream she wanted to let out was pushed back down her throat by Pluto’s knee as he brought it up and thrust it into her mouth. Her front teeth sank into his flesh drawing blood, and Monique shrieked and fell over backward. She lay there helplessly, knees bent, arms outstretched, and her blood-filled mouth open wide.
“Bitch, don’t you ever,” Pluto panted in rage above her. “Ever! As long as your black ass is alive and licking my balls, tell me nothing about planning shit out! I’m the master fuckin’ planner up in here. And you better not never forget it!”
There was no mistaking the killer intentions in his eyes, and Monique had enough sense to roll over real quick and cover her face.
Pluto’s next blow came down hard in the center of her back. It almost stopped her heart. But there was no sense in screaming. Wasn’t nobody gonna come save her no way.
Monique balled up and protected herself the best way she could. She understood why Pluto had to check her for getting outta pocket. And in a perverse way, she knew she deserved it too. But she had meant every damn thing she said! Them niggahs shoulda stuck to the plan!
Scurrying all over the floor, Monique took her ass-whipping like a natural woman. And the whole time Pluto was beating her, she didn’t even cry. She couldn’t. She was too busy scheming and conniving and formulating some grand, brand new plans of her own.
CHAPTER 5
I was dreaming again, but this time it wasn’t no nightmare. I was back in New York with Gino.