I was frozen by the time I made it to the building that Flex worked from. I wasn’t even on the porch good when he pulled open the door and came outside.
“Girl, what you doing out here by yourself this time of night?”
“H-hey Flex,” I said, shivering and going through the door as he stepped back and held it open. Inside the lobby wasn’t much warmer than it was outside. About half of the windows were busted out, and the other half were boarded over.
“What you doing down here, Juicy? Looking all frozen. Don’t you know it’s too damn cold to try to look fine tonight?” There were about six men hanging out in the hall, lookouts whose job it was to make sure that 5-0 didn’t rush in and catch nobody holding any product.
“Jimmy,” I said, following Flex into the stairwell so we could talk in private. “I’m looking for Jimmy. He made a run for G yesterday and was supposed to be back this afternoon. He didn’t show up yet, and I thought maybe he was down here with you.”
Flex shook his head. “Nah. He ain’t here. He did roll through yesterday, though, and I tried to get him to stay here with me, but that niggah loves him some G, so he stepped.”
I leaned against the hand railing. “Why would you want him to stay with you? What’s up with that?”
Flex reached out and took my hands. He had on some thick black gloves with fur sticking all out of them and he pulled them off his hands and put them on mine, warming me up. “Juicy. If anybody in the world should know what time it is with me, you and Jimmy should know. I told you a long time ago. I’ma be rich, girl. I’ma be holding all the stops one of these days, and I want you and Jimmy both to be down with me.”
“Boy, you crazy-”
“Didn’t I tell your grandmother I was gonna snatch you up and set you up for life? She believed me, so why the fuck don’t you?”
“Flex!” I damn near shouted. “This ain’t about you and me! This is about my brother, all right? This is about finding out where the fuck Jimmy is!”
He didn’t say nothing for a minute. Then that little bucktooth niggah snatched his gloves off my hands and put them back on his. My fingers missed that warm fur. “You fine, Juicy, but you stupid. You and Jimmy both. A niggah wanna put y’all down, and y’all don’t even know which line you should be standing on.”
“Boy, what the hell are you talking about?”
Flex looked sad and mad. “Nothing, Juicy.” He opened the door and pushed me back out of the stairwell. “Your brother ain’t here, but if he shows up again I’ll let him know you looking for him. Jimmy my niggah and I love him, but I can’t make his eyes see what his mind can’t believe is there.”
I followed Flex back out into the night, and as crazy as he was he still had the decency to help me catch a cab going uptown.
“You coulda been Mrs. Boykin,” Flex said, opening the cab’s door for me. “Tell this cabby to go on about his business and stay here with me, and you still can.”
I jumped into that cab so fast I broke the heel off my shoe. “Later, Fletcher,” I said, waiting for him to close the door. “I’ll check you later.”
When I got back to the Spot Jimmy still hadn’t showed up, even though I had been praying he’d be there when I walked inside, and I had already rehearsed how I was gonna curse his ass out for making me worry so much.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and he didn’t show up then either. I called his cell phone every thirty minutes and I almost wore a hole in the floor pacing, I was so scared of what might have happened to him.
I couldn’t eat anything because my nerves were too bad, and my head was banging from grinding my teeth together all night. I was searching through the medicine cabinet for a Tylenol when G called for me to come out the bathroom.
I went into the living room where he was watching a movie with Gino.
“Yeah?”
G stood up. “I want you to take a ride with Gino. Jimmy still ain’t showed up with my shit, and I want y’all to go to Atlantic City and check out a few places for me.”
I glanced at Gino, who just looked at me and shrugged.
“G, I don’t know nothing about Atlantic City. If I knew where to start looking for Jimmy down there I would have been down there already.”
“I’ma tell y’all where to look, Juicy, damn! Gino’s gonna be running things. Only reason you going is to make Jimmy come on back and face up to what he did like a man.”
“Why do you keep saying that, G? You know Jimmy ain’t done nothing wrong! He could be laying up hurt somewhere or even dead, and all you can think is that he might have crossed you?”
“Wise the fuck up, Juicy. Your brother broke out with my money. He didn’t give a fuck about me, and he didn’t give a fuck about you neither, or he would have took you with him.”
I kept shaking my head. “G, you wrong. You know Jimmy wouldn’t do nothing foul like that.”
G ignored me. “Gone, Gino. Y’all get ready to go. Pacho is gonna take us all down to the Spot. The Benz is there, and it’s already gassed up. You can get the keys from Moonie, then take it and hit all the places I told you about. Find Jimmy and bring him back up here to me. Don’t hurt him, but make sure that niggah is back in Harlem before the night is over.”
“I need to make a few stops,” I told Gino as he pushed the fly Benz through Harlem. The weather was changing, getting real nasty. We’d left G at the Spot, and I told Gino to swing me back to the apartment on Central Park West so I could change out of the suede designer dress I was wearing and into something more comfortable for the ride to Atlantic City. It had started to snow again, real hard, and after I put on a pair of jeans and some warm Timbs, I made sure I grabbed a wool hat and some gloves, too.
But that’s not all I grabbed.
My stomach was jumping from fear. I didn’t trust G as far as I could smell his ass, and no matter how many times Gino told me everything was gonna be okay, I had a bad feeling about everything. About G, about taking this ride into Atlantic City, and especially about Jimmy.
If shit got crazy and I had to help my brother, I needed to be prepared. First I went into my bedroom and locked the door. I trusted Gino, but the less shit I had to explain, the better. I took down the mirrored panel off the wall again and opened G’s safe. The same stuff was still in there as the last time. I took the brick of money and separated it in two stacks, sliding half of it into a MGM bag and leaving the other half in the safe.
I was about to slam the door closed when I caught a glimpse of the brown envelope, the one that held the small gold key. I shook the key out of the envelope then slipped it onto my key ring right next to the ones that opened the downstairs door and the front door of the apartment.
I threw the envelope back inside, not even bothering to put it back in the exact same spot like I had done before. G didn’t go in his safe every day, but all he would have to see was half his money gone to know that somebody had been in there dipping, and of course the most likely suspect would be me.
Deep inside I had a feeling that I had just crossed the point of no return with Granite McKay. Nothing in my life was gonna be the same anymore, and as coldblooded as G was it scared me more to be ass-out and unable to take care of Jimmy than it did to steal G’s money and risk him finding out. Yeah, if he knew I’d had the heart to go in his safe he would kill me, but just sitting around waiting for him to get rid of me was like suicide.
After closing the safe and putting the mirrored panel back, I grabbed a bag that I had used for my dance clothes, and then I opened my closet and found my school bag. I took the Juicy Journal, the copies I had made of G’s black binder, and the folded sheet of paper that had my grandmother’s gravesite information on it, and put them all in my dance bag and pulled the string closed. Feeling paranoid about G’s money, I made sure the latch was closed on the MGM bag, but then at the last minute I opened it up again and stuck my key ring into the inside pocket, pausing just long enough for one last look at the picture of me, Jimmy, and Grandmother that was sealed in hard plastic and dangling from the ring.