Trickery (20 page)

Her eyes were wide and solemn as she nodded, and Trey felt his gut clench. He had never taken
anybody
with him to put in work, especially a female he was digging on so hard, but Trey was way past thinking straight and reasoning right now. He was operating in a blind rage, and the only thing he could see stretched out in front of him was a childhood promise unfulfilled, a racketeering funeral home, and the cold certainty of death.

$$$$$

Shit was getting critical in Flex’s world.

With Maleek dead and Ace and Pluto’s bitch-asses acting flaky with the connect, it was looking like he was gonna have to blast the info he needed outta them fools. Salida’s Grand Re-Opening of the G-Spot was about to be up on them in a minute, and Flex had put in an emergency call to the white boy who was brokering his arms deal, and they had arranged to meet at a pizza shop in Harlem to finalize the details. 

This muthafucka better be ready to deliver my tools
, Flex fumed inside. It had taken a whole lotta hard  scheming, but he had finally constructed a deadly plan that would not only allow him to gain control of the G-Spot, he would also gain a major share of Harlem’s drug trade and finally take his rivals and enemies all the way down to the mat.

“Push this bitch,” Flex told his dun dun Dabu as he climbed into the passenger seat of the white Rolls Royce that sat idling in the funeral home’s parking lot.

Following orders, Dabu backed away from the building and then drove toward the parking lot’s entrance. Both men looked left and saw the FedEx truck that was parked at the curb, and then Dabu whipped the wheel to the right and pulled out into traffic.

Neither man noticed when the FedEx truck pulled out behind them and made an illegal U-turn as the driver rushed to make his next delivery. And they damn sure didn’t notice the mid-sized car as that had been parked behind it, or the tall, beastly-lookin’ dude who had jumped outta the driver’s seat and was now striding purposely through the parking lot and over toward the funeral home’s doors.

CHAPTER 26

Salida was sick as a dog, Monique realized gleefully as she watched her boss-lady vomit up blood in the sink by the bar.
Yeah! Hurl, bitch! Hurl!
I hope you puke up a whole fuckin’ lung!

Bizzie rushed his swishy-ass over and patted Salida on the shoulder, and then he pressed the back of his hand to her forehead, tryna act like he was some fuckin’ kinda night nurse.

“Ace!” Bizzie’s bitch-ass screeched at the top of his lungs. He looked like a dollar-store RuPaul but not half as cute. “Ace! Salida is
sick
! I think you better come see about her!”

Monique giggled like a mothafucka as Salida slumped over the sink making nasty sour-stomach-all-up-in-ya-throat noises.

That’s what her ass gets for eating all that cake
! Monique rejoiced as she remembered how good it had felt to take a nice long piss in the gooey pink cake batter that she’d sprinkled with a vial of Strawberry Snake.

Salida’s body heaved and trembled as her system fought off the same venom that she had been pushing into the bodies of kids all over New York City for months on end.

“I wonder was it the rat poison or the pee-pee?” Monique muttered under her breath as Salida hit her knees and pressed her cheek to the floor as she moaned and slobbered in pain.

Oh
, Monique thought.
This bitch was sick all right and she wasn’t fakin’ neither!
Anytime a prissy chick like Salida got her uppity ass on the floor in a three-thousand dollar dress then you just knew it was time to call a damn doctor!

And that’s exactly what Ace did as he rushed over and found Salida with her ass tooted up and her face on the ground. By now her body was jerking and shuddering, her nose was dripping blood, and the gut-twisting sounds coming outta her mouth were straight-up pitiful.

It won’t be much longer,
Monique thought as she peered around Ace’s fat shoulder and watched Salida wiggle like a dying cockroach. Her face was drenched in sweat and her skin looked gray and soggy.

“Oh, shit!!!” Ace shrieked as he dropped to his knees and cradled Salida’s twitching body in his arms. “Call a fuckin’ ambulance!” he bellowed. “She’s fuckin’
dying
over here! Some fuckin’ body dial nine-one-one!”

$$$$$

I couldn’t even find the words that would comfort Trey at a time like this, and something told me it would be useless to even try. The look on his face when Mrs. Washington explained to him how Maleek’s frozen body had fallen out of that casket and hit the ground was simply fuckin’ heart-breaking. I had wanted to reach out and hold him and let the womanly part of my arms bring him some type of relief, but Trey wouldn’t even look at me, and he damn sure wouldn’t answer me when I tried to talk to him.

Matter fact, he had tried to make me get out of his car right there at the Crossover Center, but I had decided on the spot that I wasn’t going no damn where. I knew a lot about grief and rage, and I knew both could make you do some crazy-ass things. So when Trey pulled out into traffic and took off speeding down the streets, I braced myself and made a commitment to stand by his side through whatever was gonna happen next. I didn’t have a clue about where he was going, or what the hell he was planning to do when he got there, but whatever went down I was gonna be his ride-or-die, and my head and my heart were both good with that.

Trey was scary-silent as we drove down the crowded streets. His foot was heavy on the gas and light on the brakes, and I could feel the rage from his soul humming in the vibrations of his whip.

I knew Harlem well, and it didn’t take me too long to figure out what direction we were heading in, but no matter what I said or how much I tried to caution Trey not to rush off into anything, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do as we pulled up behind a FedEx truck just a few feet down from the Three Brothers Funeral Home.

Just thinking about how bad Flex had scared me in that basement apartment underneath all those dead bodies had me shaking in my seat, but I didn’t have time to get too shook because as soon as Trey cut off the engine he turned to me and told me not to get outta the ride.

“Stay here, Juicy,” he said. His voice sounded cold and scary. Every bit of emotion in it was gone. “Lock the doors and don’t get out the car. You hear me?”

I nodded and held my breath as he jumped out the ride and slammed the door, and it was that cold closing sound, like a lid slamming on a casket, that brought out the absolute worst fear in me.

You know Flex is gonna kill him down there,
a little voice screamed inside my head as I watched Trey walk into the gated parking lot and head toward the side door where they brought the dead bodies in.
Go ’head. Get you one last look at him Juicy ’cause just like Gino, you ain’t never gonna see that man again.

I sat there with my whole body stiff with fear as I watched Trey slip through the doors that I knew led down those steep basement steps. I started counting the seconds that he was gone, and at some point I decided that if he didn’t come back out by the time I counted up to five hundred then I was gonna have to find a way to call his boy Rain, or maybe even call the cops to bust up in there and see what was going on.

In the midst of all the madness five hundred seconds seemed pretty reasonable to me, and I would have counted all the way up that high if I would’ve gotten the chance. But when I saw a small black hatchback pull into the funeral home’s parking lot, and a fly gangsta-sister wearing a short-short mini-skirt got out with a small pistol strapped to each of her thighs, I sat up real straight and watched her like a hawk.

And when she rested her palms lightly on her guns and switched her ghetto booty over to the funeral home doors, then I knew damn well I had to do something and I had to do it real quick.

So I did.

$$$$$

Ordinarily there would be no way in hell that Trey would let a cat sneak up and get the drop on him, but deep in the belly of the home of the dead, these were no ordinary times and this was no ordinary gangsta.

“Sup, Trey. You looking for something?” a familiar voice cooed from behind him as Trey was examining the mega locks on the outer doors of the basement fortress where the leader of the Divine Nine rested.

Trey’s hand was halfway to his waistband when the deadly click of a chambered round echoed in the small hallway.

“Uh-uh, big boy,” the chick posted up behind him warned. “Don’t reach, baby. Just gone and put ’em up in the air. You reach and I’ma have to pop you. It’s as simple as that.”

Raising his hands halfway in the air, Trey turned around slowly and faced Lil Lee. She was dressed in a sexy green mini-skirt, with white tights and a pair of green high-heels, and her pierced belly-button winked at him from under her short shirt as a string of tiny diamonds dangled from her caramel-colored navel.

“You like what you see?” she sneered and glanced down appreciatively at her stacked hips. “Want me to lift my skirt so you can bust up in a lil bit of this before we get it in?”

When Trey didn’t answer she gave a short, cruel laugh.

“Know what I should do? I oughtta make you eat my pussy before I blast your head off, Trey, you know that? I should make you lick out my ass crack and suck my fuckin’ twat, boy-o. That’s what I oughtta do.”

Lil Lee’s hand was rock steady as she raised one of her baby Brownings and aimed it at the center of Trey’s chest.

“But you don’t deserve to taste my stuff, Trey. I mean, you fine and you look like a piper who can really sling that dick, but you could never get none of this. Not even a lick. And you know why? Because you violated my blood! You snatched my daughter up and gave my baby nightmares, niggah! You fucked with my little girl’s head. Real bad. And I gots to
kill
your ass for that!”

It wasn’t the first time that Trey Jackson had stared down the barrel of a loaded gun, and the unflappable look of defiance in his eyes made that shit real clear.

“What?” Lil Lee got swole and frowned at his lack of fear. “You think your ass is bullet-proof or some shit? You think you solid enough to go head up with my gat? Then try me, muthafucka! C’mon. Try me!”

Lil Lee was ready to splatter his brains all over the wall, but suddenly the look of defiance in Trey’s eyes disappeared and the fear she had been waiting for washed over his face like a raging flash flood.

“Oh—I didn’t know y’all was—” The girl came down the last step and stopped suddenly. She was digging inside her shoulder bag for something and looked up in surprise when she saw Trey and Lil Lee.

“I told your ass to wait in the car!” Trey barked and took a bold, involuntary step forward.

“Back ya ass up!” Lil Lee said, gun-checking him hard. She glanced to her left and recognized the chick who had put the kind of fear in Trey’s eyes that she had been trying to produce with her burner.

“Damn!” she barked when she saw Juicy standing there looking stupid and clutching her Marc Jacobs bag. Lil Lee shook her head in disgust. “Juicy what the hell is you doing here? What? You came back to get with Flex or you fuckin’ this niggah now?”

Lil Lee waved her gat. “Get your stank ass up against that door,” she ordered and motioned for Juicy to go stand beside Trey. “Get the fuck over there and get real close so I can blow a hole in both of y’all muthafuckas with one goddamn bullet!”

But as Juicy tried to scramble past her and rush over to go stand by Trey, Lil Lee reached out and yoked her up with one swift, manicured hand. Keeping the business end of her burner trained on Trey, Lil Lee slid her forearm around Juicy’s neck and squeezed hard, smashing Juicy’s face into the pit of her underarm, right beside her breast.

“So this your new bitch, huh?” Lil Lee taunted Trey. Her eyes were filled with cold specks as she stared at him in contempt. “You been sloppin’ up ol’ Flex’s slimy seconds?” She laughed and choked Juicy tighter as the terrified girl gagged and stumbled forward on her feet. “Just for that, I’ma do her first and make your ass watch her bleed.”

The barrel of Lil Lee’s gun swung around and caught Juicy right in its crosshairs.

Trey stiffened. He was calculating the odds and they weren’t in his favor. If he so much as acted like he was reaching for his tool Lil Lee was gonna sink a hot one right in Juicy’s gut. Could he yank his shit out and get his shot off before Lil Lee got hers off too?

“Nah, it ain’t gonna work,” Lil Lee said, reading his mind and yoking Juicy even harder as she jammed the gun barrel deep into her stomach. “I’ll blow her fuckin’ back out before your finger can hit the trigger.”

“No!” Juicy’s terrified plea was muffled as she screamed into Lil Lee’s breast. “Please,” she moaned, and her gut-twisting cries sent Trey’s heart surging into his throat. “Don’t shoot me,” Juicy begged as Lil Lee tightened her neck grip and Juicy swayed and lost her footing and stumbled against her helplessly. “Please. I don’t wanna get shot again!”

Lil Lee laughed as Juicy struggled against her, and the sound was so cruel and diabolical that there was no doubting her deadly intentions.

She’s gonna kill her
, Trey thought as fear crawled through his gut and he reached for his burner in stark desperation.
This crazy bitch is about to pop her—

Pop!

Pop!

Two hollow gunshots rang out in rapid succession, and all three of their eyes met in a deadly, confused triangle.

The cracking sound was still bouncing off the basement walls as both of the women stared at Trey for a long, endless second. And then Juicy slowly turned her head and gazed up at Lil Lee, and Lil Lee turned slightly and gazed down at Juicy, and that’s when Trey looked down and saw the blood.

TO BE CONTINUED…