Pride (13 page)

Yawning and pretending like she couldn’t sleep, Monique walked through the living room in a pair of yellow bikini panties and a matching t-shirt and went into the kitchen. She took a box of instant hot cocoa out the cabinet and turned around and held it up so Salida could see it.

“Want some?”

Salida nodded, and Monique spent the next five minutes microwaving two big cups full of hot chocolate until they were steaming.

After adding milk and sugar to the mix, she carried both mugs over to the couch where Salida sat and put them on the table. Then she plopped down on the purple blanket where her houseguest was still rocking back and forth and went to work.

“It must be real hard being back in New York after being gone for so long. Everything probably looks real strange to you. I bet you missed a lot of people too. Especially your son.”

Monique picked up her mug from the table and held it carefully. Salida was rocking so damn hard she was scared she might make her spill the hot liquid all over herself.

“He was around here not too long ago, you know,” Monique said slyly. “Me and him used to hang out a lot.”

“Gino?” Salida stopped rocking. “You talking about my boy?”

Monique nodded and sipped. “Yeah. He’s a grown-ass man now, though. He’s even taller than G was, and swole up too. Real smart dude. G woulda had him running things in Harlem by now if it wasn’t for that bitch Juicy.”

“Juicy?” Salida sniffed. She snatched a cigarette from the open pack on the table and lit it.

Monique shrugged. “Hell yeah. Juicy. She’s just some low-down young bird from 136th Street. Your sisters didn’t tell you about her? She’s the chick who got between G and Gino. She had ’em tearing at each other’s throats all out in the streets and shit. Them two was real tight before Juicy came along and ruined everything. You shoulda seen how close they used to be. Gino loved his father, and G was always bragging on his son.”

Salida kept smoking, but now tears were in her eyes. “But how could G turn his back on our baby like that?” she moaned, her face crumpling with pain. “What happened to the two of them?”

“Like I said….” Monique got ready to spin a long tale, “That young bitch Juicy came along and ripped them apart. Some kinda way she caught G slippin’. She got in real deep with him and got him open. Man, Juicy had G tricking up all his money on her and her brother, and leaving Gino out of everything! I guess Gino musta started feeling real lost and left out behind that shit. He told G he was gonna have to choose between his son and his bitch. Juicy probably saw her dollars turning into cents, because the next thing everybody knew she started banging Gino! After that, the father-son relationship was definitely over. From what I heard, Juicy’s brother is the one who murdered G. I think the cops was looking for Juicy to see if she had anything to do with it, but her and Gino ran off somewhere together.”

Monique spent the next twenty minutes dropping funky loads of bullshit into Salida’s ear. She told her all kinds of dirty, scandalous lies about Juicy, making up shocking incidents of greed and manipulation as she went along. She really sold that shit, too. She invented devastating tales of betrayal between Gino and G. She painted a picture of Juicy that was so ugly and evil that by the time she finished yapping Salida’s eyes were red from crying and her lips were tight with rage.

“So,” Monique finally concluded. She had the mother in Salida on boil, and she could actually feel the steam coming off the older woman. “Nobody knows where Gino and Juicy ran off to. Ain’t nobody been able to find them. But from what people say, Juicy ain’t never gonna let Gino come back to Harlem. You probably ain’t
never
gonna get your son back, Mizz Salida. That’s word.
Never
.”

Hearing that, Salida cried out like she had been punched. She snatched Monique’s cigarettes from the table and took the last one out of the pack.

“Oh, my poor Gino,” she said pounding the tip of the cigarette on the table before sparking it up and puffing on it real hard. “My baby boy is lost to me!” she wailed, her eyes running like a faucet. “G was supposed to take care of him! How could he let a piece of tail tear them apart?”

I got her crazy ass going!
Monique cheered inside. Now all she had to do was find a way to get some of that cash outta Salida’s pocketbook and her work would be done.

Her chance came at about ten o’clock that morning. Her and Salida had stayed up talking for hours, and Monique had just gone back to her room and dozed off good when she heard the bathroom door slam shut. She jumped out of bed and peered down the hall before tiptoeing past the fish tank.

The living room was empty, and the sound of water running in the bathroom sink met her ears. Quicker than shit, she dashed across the room and over to Salida’s big-ass pocketbook and rifled through the bag.

There was all kinds of shit in there! An open bag of onion and garlic potato chips, some red nail polish, a wad of balled up tissue, a pack of purple Violet candy, and…a fat-ass envelope stuffed with doe.

The sound of the flushing toilet made Monique jump. She slid a chunk of hundred-dollar bills outta the cash-fat envelope and pushed them down inside the crotch of her panties. Her naked titties jiggled under her t-shirt as she darted back toward her bedroom. She was right by the fish tank when the bathroom door opened and Salida stepped out.

“Good morning, Mizz Salida,” Monique whirled around and said brightly, but the look on the older woman’s face stopped her in her tracks. Salida’s eyebrows were furrowed, her nostrils flared, and her lips were pressed into a hard, vicious line.
This chick is bent
, Monique thought.
Straight bent
. “What’s the matter?” she asked, and for once she was seriously concerned.

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.