I was way past scared. My life was on the line, and there was only one person I could turn to. I closed the door to Dicey’s apartment and locked it. I was scared to be up in there with a dead body, but I was scared to leave, too. I needed to get across town, but my clothes and hands and even my shoes were covered in blood, and I knew I wouldn’t get far on the streets looking like I’d just butchered somebody’s whole family.
I was shaking and shivering, and had to force myself to walk into Dicey’s bathroom, tears coming out my eyes the whole time. I wanted to block the reality of this situation from my mind as I turned on the water in the shower and stripped out of my clothes, but I wasn’t that damn stupid. My girl was dead in the front room with her tongue cut the fuck out and this shit had G written all over it. He hadn’t done it himself, of course. He was too smooth for that. But he’d ordered it done, and that was the same thing in my book.
I needed to think. Needed to come up with a plan, and I forced myself to forget the image of Dicey’s dead eyes and the bloody stump of her tongue, and think about Jimmy and how I could scheme up a way to be free of G so that both of us could survive.
I let the hot water rinse my tears away as I scrubbed myself down and put my mind on survival mode. My hands were trembling as I soaped myself over and over, trying to get the smell of Dicey’s blood out of my nose, and by the time I got out of that shower I knew just what I had to do.
I rummaged through Dicey’s closet and dresser drawers until I found something that didn’t swallow me. I pulled on a pair of flat leather Timberland mules I found near her bed and threw a belt around the waist of the size-sixteen sundress I’d found with the $180 price tag still on it. Homeboy shopping network, I thought, remembering all the crazy times I’d had with my friend. I knew damn well Dicey hadn’t paid no yard and change for no damn dress. I wanted to start crying again, so I hurried up and grabbed a plastic shopping bag and stuffed my bloody clothes and shoes in it and left the apartment.
I stood in the doorway and gave one last glance at the sister who had proven she was totally down for me and Jimmy, and had died for us in the process.
Dicey was gone, but Jimmy was still alive. I had to focus my energy on him.
Thirty minutes later I was standing on Rita’s stoop. I’d snuck on the train and cried all the way to my stop. I didn’t care about how people were looking at me neither. There was nothing I could do to stop the tears from falling.
“Damn, Juicy,” Rita said, opening the door to let me in. She was eating a sandwich but wrapped it in a napkin when she saw the look on my face. “What?” she asked, leading me in the back of the house to her bedroom. “That motherfucker hit you again? Huh? What?”
I shook my head miserably. “Dicey,” I whimpered. “Dead.”
Rita was on it.
“Oh, shit, no. G got her?”
I nodded. “It had to be him. Everybody else loved her.”
“How she die?”
The vision of Dicey’s slit throat and that lump of tongue in her hand sent me running into Rita’s bathroom.
Rita came in behind me holding out a towel for my face, and when I was through she took me into her bedroom and made me lay down under the covers.
“It’s my fault, Rita. It’s my fuckin fault! If she hadn’t tried to look out and put me down on what was going on with Jimmy, she would still be here. G blames her for hipping me to my brother, and that’s why she’s dead!”
“You gotta get the fuck away from him, Juicy. Everybody knows how coldblooded G’s ass is. You gotta get away.”
I nodded. Rita was right. Me and Jimmy had to go. But we weren’t leaving empty-handed.
“Rita.” I sat up in the bed and stared into her eyes. “I think I got a plan that might work out for both of us, if you willing to help me.”
“Girl, if it means you say fuck that motherfucker before he puts you six feet under, I’m down. Just tell me what I gotta do.”
“I need you to do what you do best, girlfriend. Do what you do best.”
32-6-14-41.
Those numbers had been burned into my memory, and later that night while G and Gino were still at the Spot, me and Rita went to the apartment and we took down that big-ass mirrored panel in my bedroom and hit G’s safe. I was fully expecting to find a chunk of cash inside, but I also knew G had to have at least two shitloads of money stashed away in a bank. He always carried a lot of green on him, but it was chump change compared to the amount of yardage that rolled through the Spot and all of his other businesses around Harlem. G was a businessman above and beyond anything else. The majority of his money had to be earning interest in somebody’s bank.
The plan was for Rita to read over every piece of paper that might be in that safe, and I would help her write down the names of G’s banks and all of his account numbers. Then Rita could tap that ass through the computer lines. Get my name added to G’s accounts so I could walk into those financial institutions, spank G, then walk out with almost all of his money. And then me and Gino and Jimmy could split. To where, I didn’t know yet. But it would have to be far. Real far. Someplace where even G couldn’t find us. Of course I planned to tear Rita off a lovely chunk of change for her help, but the majority of it would belong to me, Jimmy, and maybe Gino. With what G had to be pulling in, I’d be able to afford us all a new future.
Rita was pumped, too. “Don’t worry, Juicy,” she told me. “We gonna do that motherfucker just like he’s been doing you.”
At first I was worried that G mighta had some kind of camera planted in the bedroom that was recording everything that went down, but then I tossed that shit outta my mind. He was too paranoid to let somebody roll a tape in his private room. They might find out that unless the great King of Harlem was bumping him some booty, he was a two-minute man who couldn’t fuck his way from the bed over to the bathroom.
32-6-14-41.
Rita and I went to work, and within a few minutes we were staring inside of G’s safe. “Oh shit,” Rita said, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
I counted out five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. That was it. Five thousand sorry-ass dollars, and no goddamn cents. There was also a black binder inside, and a few pictures of the woman who I knew was Gino’s mother. In one of the pictures the woman was sitting on G’s lap and holding a baby. The baby was Gino, there was no doubt about it, and even though they were all smiling at the camera I could tell the woman was faking it. Her eyes looked scared as hell.
And that was it. There was nothing else inside the safe. No stocks, no bonds, no securities, no gold bars, no secret bank accounts, no Swiss bank accounts, nothing else. Nothing else except a key. In a small brown envelope. A tiny gold key with the words RENO SUPREME engraved on it. RENO on the top, and SUPREME directly underneath it.
The key didn’t look familiar to me, so I left it there right next to the cash. But I took the binder. Me and Rita were gonna take that bad boy right down to Kinko’s and make a copy of every single page. Let G fuck with me or my brother. I had the names and contact information for every single one of his front men and his drug connects. I could put his ass and all of theirs so far under the jail they’d need a backhoe to get them out.
“This is it?” Rita asked. She looked almost as disappointed as I felt.
I shrugged. “I guess so. Fuck! I thought there’d be more money and bank statements and stuff. You know, account numbers and records you could tap into.”
Rita looked across the room. “What about the computer?”
I shook my head. G had that shit locked up tight. “You gotta know the password just to turn it on. G is the only one who knows it, so he’s the only one who uses it.”