by Noire
Monique laughed.
“All right, all right. It’s gonna be hard to decide. But since I have to choose, I pick…. Hold up. Hey, Truth. You a street playa, so what you think? If you had to fuck either one of these two honeys, which one would it be?”
Truth grinned, his sexy eyes red from weed and alcohol as he peeped Monique’s shiesty game.
He licked his lips. “I’d pick her,” he said, pointing not at the girl who had slobbed his dick down in the car on the way over, but at her girlfriend, whose pretty eyes and sexy grin had promised she would do much, much more.
“Nooni,” he said with a big grin. “Yeah. I’d pick Nooni.”
CHAPTER 13
It was a windy, overcast day when Rita touched down in Los Angeles. She had never been on an airplane before, and she spent the entire flight worrying. Not about the pilot, or whether the plane was gonna stay up in the air like it was supposed to. Nah. She was worried mostly about Juicy, but also about the two younger sisters that she had left back in Harlem.
She caught a taxi from the airport to an address in a plush neighborhood where Juicy was staying. She was surprised when a white chick answered the door.
“You must be Rita,” the white lady said.
Rita nodded.
“I’m Renata. Juicy’s upstairs. Come on in.”
The crib was just as plush as the neighborhood, and Rita couldn’t help but admire what she saw. She was a Harlem girl, born and raised. She’d never been inside a house this grand before. Because of Juicy’s generosity, Rita had been able to move her sisters from the shabby tenement their father had raised them in, to a nice, spacious apartment building not too far away. Her new place was laid out, but it was nothing like this.
She followed Renata up a winding staircase. The steps were made of marble and the handrails were carved from deep, dark cherry wood. She was led to the doorway of an airy bedroom with high ceilings and two skylights, and her breath caught in her throat when she looked inside.
Rita knew life had been real hard for Juicy lately, but nothing could have prepared her for the actual sight of her girl.
Juicy was a wreck.
She had lost so much weight her collarbone stuck out like a rail from one shoulder to the other. Her cheeks were flat, and her eyes looked lost and sunken deep in her head.
But it wasn’t her physical appearance that startled Rita the most. It was the pain coming out of her friend’s soul. It overflowed from Juicy’s eyes, and Rita had never seen anything like it before.
She rushed over to the bed where Juicy sat, and they hugged and cried. Rita made soft, comforting noises as Juicy clung to her like she was drowning.
“I’m so glad you came,” Juicy said through her tears. “I couldn’t call nobody else. I couldn’t even tell nobody that Gino was dead. There was nobody else I could really trust.”
Rita rocked her friend in her arms. “I’m glad you called me, Juicy. You should have called me sooner, though. I can’t believe you waited almost two months! I would’ve jetted out here right away if I had known. You didn’t have to suffer by yourself all this time, girl. I could have been here for you.”
Juicy wiped her eyes. “I wasn’t alone. Renata made me come home with her straight from the hospital.”
Rita glanced toward the door. “Who the hell are these white people?” she asked in a dropped voice. “Why they doing all this for you?”
Juicy sighed. “They’re a group of businessmen from New York, and they’re some of the best people I’ve ever known. Gino worked for them. He got real tight with his boss’s nephew, and since we were out here by ourselves with no friends they just kinda adopted us and started treating us like family.”
“That’s real unusual for Italians,” Rita said, doubtfully. “Especially the ones I know in New York.”
“I know,” Juicy said, nodding. “But they’re good people, Rita. Like you said, it’s been almost two months and they’ve been taking care of me the whole time. The Sanveneros might be Italian, but they’re legit. They loved Gino, and he loved them back.”
“Well, I’m glad somebody out here had your back,” Rita shrugged, then nodded. “Going through all that stress by yourself would have been ten times worse.”
Juicy hadn’t been back to her crib since Gino was murdered, but she told Rita she was ready to go home so she could try to pick up the pieces she’d left behind.
“Cool, I came out here strictly for you,” Rita said. “So whatever you wanna do, wherever you wanna go, it’s all good with me. Just say the word.”
Juicy said the word, but Renata wasn’t trying to hear it.
“I have another bedroom that you can use, Rita,” she said. “You’re welcome to visit as long as you like, but Frank and I both think it’s best if Juicy continues to stay with us. We can keep her safe here. We can protect her.”
But Juicy wasn’t down with that.
She wanted to go home. Home to the bed that she and Gino had slept in every night, and home to the unfulfilled promise of what their lives would have been like together if he had lived.
Slick Sallie hugged Juicy real tight before she left, and Big Frankie gave her what looked like a pink cell phone.
“It’s a stun gun,” he told her. “Believe me, your problem has already been taken care of, but I want you to keep this near you at all times.”
Juicy nodded. “I appreciate everything you and Renata and Sal have done for me,” she told Frank as she picked up her small bag. “Y’all looked out for me and treated me better than people I’ve known my whole life. But I can’t hide out here forever. I have to figure out my next move. I’ve gotta make some decisions.”
Renata jumped in and protested a little bit more, but in the end she respected her friend’s wishes. There were tears in her eyes as she drove them to Juicy’s house. She held Juicy in her arms for a real long time before saying goodbye, and Rita could tell the white chick really had mad love for Juicy in her heart.
Settled down in Juicy’s crib, Rita had a sense of déjà vu. She remembered the night that Juicy had escaped from the G-Spot like it was yesterday. She remembered how torn-down her friend had looked when she jumped out of that taxi, raped and beaten and wearing nothing but a sheet.
Juicy looked almost as bad as that now.
Not only was she grieving for Gino and the baby boy she’d lost, she was still recovering from her surgery and barely eating enough to keep any meat on her bones.
“It’s gonna be alright,” Rita whispered over and over as Juicy walked around the crib whimpering and touching Gino’s things. It was all just the way he had left it. From his toothbrush on the sink, to his shoes under the bed. Gino’s spirit was definitely in that house. The essence of him was in all the stuff he had left behind, and it made Juicy break all the way down to know he wasn’t coming back.
Rita followed closely as Juicy roamed the house just crying and touching. Rita let her be, simply reaching out to catch her friend when her legs got too weak and she couldn’t stay on her feet. She had never seen anybody cry so hard or so long, and there was no way to stop the tears of sympathy from falling from her own eyes.
Juicy’s grief seemed to know no end. She told Rita that the two months since Gino’s death felt like two short hours to her heart. Hiding away at Renata’s crib hadn’t given her a proper outlet to mourn, and seeing and touching and smelling Gino’s earthly possessions made something inside her die all over again.
Rita did her best to be strong and supportive. She turned the hot water on in the shower, and helped her girl get undressed. Juicy stood there in front of her naked, and Rita winced at the sight of the stitched-up bullet wound right below her girl’s navel. It was twisted and purplish, and she could tell how bad it had hurt just by the way it looked.
“I lost my baby,” Juicy wept pitifully. She pressed her hands to her empty womb as Rita stared at her surgical scar. “I wanted that baby, Rita. I wanted him so, so, bad.”
Silently, Rita poured showe
r gel on a cloth and smoothed it over Juicy’s back, breasts, and arms. She squeezed suds all over her, then she propped Juicy up in the shower and washed her hair, angling the showerhead so she could get a good rinse. She had just gotten Juicy out of the water and was gently drying her off with a big fluffy towel when her girl began talking again.
With trembling lips, Juicy opened her mouth and told her friend everything that had happened. From the moment her and Gino left New York, until the day she watched her man get put in the ground.
Through it all, Rita just couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The lost hopes and dreams…the senselessness of it all was just heartbreaking.
“So all of this went down just because some guy was jealous and wanted to push up on you?”
Juicy shrugged her shoulders miserably.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking maybe it wasn’t just about Pit, though. Maybe it was my fault. There’s something fucked up about me, Rita. I make niggahs act crazy.”
“That’s not true, Juicy. You can’t blame yourself for what that psycho fool did.”
Juicy sniffed, her eyes and nose were both red. “But I do blame myself. There’s something about me that attracts bad energy. The way I look. How I dress. How I walk… Maybe some kind of vibe I be giving off. I can’t explain it, Rita, but it’s there. It’s like I have bad luck or something.”
Rita shushed her with a hug. “Juicy, you don’t have no control over what some fool-ass niggah decides to do! All you want is the same thing every other chick like us wants. A good education, a nice dude to chill with, some friends to hang out with, and to have a little fun. It’s not your damn fault that men like G and Pit want to control a bitch’s next breath! And it ain’t bad luck when you catch a lot of fucked up breaks in life, neither. It’s just life, Juicy. Life. Pit musta been fried in the head to do what he did. That’s probably why somebody took him out.”
Juicy wiped her eyes on her towel and sighed. “I don’t know who got to him, but I’m glad he’s gone. Renata said the cops found him hanging in his own shower. His throat was slit and somebody had chopped off his right hand.”
“Damn…”
“I know…Renata thinks somebody left Pit’s body like that to send a message. Two of his homeboys got took down too. Execution style.”
Rita shuddered. “So, what happened to his girl? Your so-called friend? The chick who was doing your hair?”
“I don’t even know,” Juicy shrugged and shook her head. “I guess she skied up. I sent Renata looking for her a few weeks ago, but she came back and said Quese’s shop was boarded up and she was nowhere to be found.”
Rita sighed. No matter which way she looked at Juicy’s situation it looked real bad for her girl. She was out on the West Coast all alone, with no real friends or family, but she couldn’t go back to New York either. Not while niggahs were still gunning for her head.
They spent the next two weeks just chilling and lounging around at Juicy’s crib. Rita cooked a bunch of different dishes, but Juicy barely ate anything. She was sad and she cried a lot. She went back and forth between feeling guilty about everything, to wanting to die so she wouldn’t have to feel anything at all.
“I begged God to take me,” Juicy confessed one night as they walked on a beach. “I asked Him to either strike me dead, or give me the courage to take myself out. And you know what, Rita?” she asked, her voice full of misery. “I’m so fucked up that God doesn’t even want me.”
There was no self-pity in Juicy’s words. Only sorrow. But instead of trying to find ways to comfort her all the time, Rita held back and let her girl just get it all out. Shit, if anybody had a right to feel sad, it was Juicy. She had suffered a whole lot to be so damn young.
“It’s gonna get better,” was all Rita could think of to say. And in her heart, she believed it. On the real, with all the crazy shit that had happened to her girl lately, it for damn sure couldn’t get no worse.
CHAPTER 14
“So what now?” Salvatore McCain asked his uncle. He’d been pacing back and forth in front of the window ever since Renata left the house with Juicy and her beautiful Hispanic girlfriend who was visiting from New York.
Frank shrugged. “Nothing changes, Sallie. We keep an eye on Juicy, and we help her out the best we can. Oh yeah,” he added. “We tell Fat Paul to set up some security around her condo. If she needs us, we’re there.”
Sallie frowned. He was still mad about being run out of New York City. The weather was a lot better in California, but his friends—and his hustle—was on the East Coast, and that was where he wanted to be.
“We’re there for how long? C’mon, Uncle Frank. It’s over! Gino’s dead, and the trash that killed him got put down for a nice long nap. We paid our debt, and now it’s over.”
Narrowing his eyes, Frank stared at his nephew. The kid was a half-Irish bum. If Sallie wasn’t his sister’s son Frank would have knocked some principles into the boy’s head.
As the leader of his family Frank wasn’t gonna tolerate having his decisions questioned by some snot-nosed little asshole. He had moved twenty-seven members of his immediate family from one coast to the other in the blink of an eye. He’d arranged new identities for everybody, and set them up with legitimate jobs and front businesses so they could re-establish their normal criminal activities. Keeping the family running smoothly was a full-time occupation, and Frank didn’t need a spoiled little shit like Sallie adding to his troubles.
“It ain’t over until I say it is,” Frank said with firm authority. “We made a deal and we’re sticking to it. That’s how The Organization does business, Salvatore. No matter how long it takes.”
“But you made a deal with a fuckin’ moolie!” Sallie shot off. He despised Blacks and his entire family knew it.
Frank’s patience was growing thin. Like most of the family’s younger soldiers Sallie was near-sighted and hotheaded. His generation, if left to their own impulsive devices, would buck the time-honored traditions and run La Cosa Nostra right back into the barren grounds of Italy where it had originated.
Of course, Sallie wasn’t a member of the ruling council, but Frank sure was. He had vivid memories of the night The Organization was tipped off to an impending federal sting. It was a full-scale, complex operation that involved several federal agencies, and within a matter of days it would have crippled and taken down his entire clan.
Most ignorants believed the mob had all but disappeared from New York City, and that’s exactly what Frank and the other members of their ruling council wanted them to think. Over the past twenty years La Cosa Nostra had adjusted and adapted to the new criminal landscape. They’d gone deep undercover while maintaining dominance in the drug trade, and the idiots who thought they were irrelevant were the same idiots whose money they gladly raked in.
So, when Frank got word that the Feds were sniffing at his door, he and the senior members of The Organization had been grateful for the advance warning. They’d gone to work hiding assets and destroying damning evidence. And as a result of their quick actions they’d not only eluded the Feds with their finances intact, they’d escaped with their lives and their freedom too.
“I’m serious,” Sallie pressed the issue. “I say fuck the moolie.”
“Look, you fuckin’ retard!” Frank exploded, snatching his nephew in the collar. “Did you forget that ‘moolie’ saved your miserable little life? Do I have to remind you about the caches of guns and the warehouse full of dope we moved? And what about all the money we hid away? If it wasn’t for that moolie we’d be spending the rest of our lives in a federal fucking pen! He looked out for us like a man. And we’re going to respect him. Like men.”
Even with the meaty fist at his throat Sallie still disagreed. “I understand all that, Uncle Frankie, but we already did our part! Our deal ended at Gino’s funeral. I say we send this guy a couple of blood oranges and then we call it even. It’s done! Juicy can look out for herself.”
Frank trembled, he
was very close to the edge.
“Our deal included Juicy,” he spit. “She’s under our protection. And she’s going to stay that way! End of discussion.”
“But what are we getting out of it?”
Frank barely controlled his temper. “That man could have been killed for what he did for us. Looking out for the girl is the least we can do. Besides,” he said, releasing Sallie and running his beefy hand through his mop of jet-black hair, “Juicy’s a nice kid and Renata likes her. She likes her a lot.”
CHAPTER 15
Nooni felt like the winning contestant on a television game show. She was finally getting over her love for Maleek, and for the past two weeks her and Bubbles had cut out of school every day to jet over to the G-Spot to hang out with Truth.
Drinking, smoking, and fucking was all they had on their minds, and it didn’t even faze Nooni when Mrs. Moreno fussed her out in Spanish for coming home way after midnight and waking up late for school every day.
Nooni knew her shit was veering off the chart, but she didn’t care. There was too much fun shit going on to worry about school or anything else. There was always a shopping trip with Monique to go on, or nice restaurants to floss at, and ballers out the ass to rub shoulders with when she went to live parties with some of the dancers at the G-Spot.
Her sister Rita had been blowing her spot up like mad, though. She left worried messages on her cell phone day and night, but as soon as Nooni saw her number on the caller ID she’d hit ignore, and then text Rita and give her some bullshit story like her phone was dying and she couldn’t find her charger.
Nooni was playing a dangerous game and she knew it, but what she didn’t know was that somebody else was playing their own little dangerous game too.
A game of cat and mouse.
She was sitting on a barstool between Monique and Bubbles when Truth walked over from the DJ booth where he’d been jamming.