Eyeballing the downed white man, Monique put her hands on her hips and grinned. Salida was gonna be so happy. Opportunities like this didn’t just pop up in your life everyday. She giggled. Sometimes shit was just
for
you. It just fell in your lap like a gift from your guardian sugar daddy.
Her eyes scanned the room as she devised her plan. A large pair of tweezers lay on the desk. Stepping around the white man, Monique stuck out her toe and nudged his plump nut sack. There were so many silver pins sticking outta that thing that it looked like a tomato-red pincushion.
She shook her head. Nooni was way too fuckin’ soft. Monique woulda jammed those pins in his balls and had those silver hairs plucked and yanked in no time flat.
Chuckling out loud, Monique turned her back on the drunk, snoring john and strutted on out the door.
$$$$$
The knock Monique put on her room door was way more frantic and panicked than Nooni’s had been.
“Open the goddamn door!” she whispered harshly, and the moment Nooni did, Monique bum-rushed inside and headed straight to the bathroom.
“Get a towel!” she barked at Nooni. “Wipe off everything you mighta touched!”
Nooni’s eyes were two big scared O’s.
“W-w-what happened in t-t-there?” she stammered.
“Hurry up!” Monique snapped. She moved like a tornado as she wiped down the telephone, the remote control, and the switches and knobs on all the lamps. “Put your shoes on,” she told Nooni, who had wiped off the arms of the chairs, and had gone into the bathroom to wipe off the hot and cold water taps. “We gotta get the fuck outta here, girl. We gotta get outta here fast.”
Nooni looked so scared that Monique almost felt sorry for her dumb ass.
“Is he okay?” the frightened girl asked. Her eyes pleaded with Monique for the answer to be yes. “What happened?”
Monique stopped and grilled her. Hard.
“You know what the fuck happened in there, Nooni!” Monique lied sternly, even though she really wanted to laugh. Salida said she wanted Nooni roped up like a cow? Well her young ass wouldn’t be tryna run back home or anywhere else after this!
“Bitch, you killed a
white
man! You hit him in the head and murked his ass, that’s what happened! That mothafuckin’ trick is
dead.
”
CHAPTER 19
“You’re not gonna get in trouble, Taleah,” Trey reassured the crying teenager who was sitting on the white leather sofa in his office. They were at the Crossover Community Center that Trey had founded to help local kids and athletes learn job skills and stay off the city streets.
The building was one of those 1930’s single-story warehouses that had hundreds of very small windows along every side. The roof of the building was also constructed of thick glass, with thousands of small panes on the ceiling that let the light in and gave it an open, roomy feel.
Princess, the thirteen-year-old pregnant girl Trey mentored, had disappeared into thin air. Trey had put in some calls to his local business partners and sent a crew out on the streets to search for her.
The scared young girl sitting in front of him had been the last person to see her, but Taleah was too shook to tell him what she knew. She was afraid somebody on the streets might find out she had snitched on a dope dealer, and come looking for her to get some payback.
“Nobody is gonna find out anything about you,” Trey told her. “And I can promise you that. C’mon, Taleah. Just tell us who Princess bought the dope from and where she went to get high.”
“But I don’t know the dude’s name, Trey! I swear to God I don’t. All I know is she asked me to give her a walk to the corner store up on Lenox so she could buy some skins. We was almost there when she saw a dude slanging on the corner. They walked over to the building together and she copped from him. That’s it. I don’t know where she went after that. She told me to go ahead and said she was gonna catch up with me later, so I left.”
“Did you see which way she went?” Mr. Howell, Princess’ eighty-two-year-old grandfather asked in a small, scared voice. “Baby, do you remember what street she was on when you last saw her?”
Tears ran down Taleah’s face. The poor girl was so shook she was trembling.
“Please, Trey.” Her nose was red as she pleaded with him. “I just don’t wanna get my name in nothing, you know what I mean? Them dudes out there are crazy, and if they find out I told you something they gonna come after me and my little brother too.”
“Yo, Taleah, listen.” Trey kneeled down in front of the girl and held both of her slender shoulders in his large hands. “I would
never
put you in any danger. And that’s word. Now, Princess is nine-months pregnant and ain’t nobody seen her in almost two days. She could be in some real trouble and she might just need our help. You were damn solid to tell her grandfather y’all had been smoking weed together, but now you gotta tell it all, baby girl. Mr. Howell is an old man, and he can’t handle all this stress. So I need you to tell me what street Princess copped on, and which way she was heading when you left her. Tell me, Taleah. Whatever you know you gotta tell me.”
Taleah took a deep breath and swallowed hard.
“I’m telling you the truth, Trey. I really don’t know the dude’s name. I just know he was tall and skinny, and he had cornrows going back in his hair. But I did…” she swallowed hard again. “I did see the building Princess went in. And if you come with me up on Lenox Avenue, I’ll show you.”
$$$$$
Trey helped Mr. Howell climb into his whip. The old man was so thin and feeble that his bones poked through the oversized shirt he wore and his belt damn near looped his thin waist twice.
“I just don’t understand it,” he kept shaking his gray-haired head. “She was doing so good, you know. She was off that stuff and doing good while she was hanging around up here with you. But as soon as she stopped showing up she started running the street again. You know she’s my little princess, Antonio.”
His thin voice was full of grief. “I was disappointed when she came home pregnant, but I accepted it as the Lord’s will. Princess and that baby she’s carrying are the last of my bloodline. They the only things I got left in this world.”
Trey waited patiently until the elderly man got himself strapped in. His gnarled hands shook as he tried to guide the seatbelt’s latch over to the lock, but somehow he got it done.
“I know, Mr. Howell.” Trey said as he climbed in on the driver’s side of the car. He had grown up next door to the Howell family and hung out a lot with Freda, Princess’ mother. Freda had gotten shot in a drive-by years ago while she was pregnant, and although she died, Princess survived. Mr. Howell had been raising the girl by himself until a local pimp got her pregnant and tricked her out on dope.
“Don’t worry,” Trey told him. “I got some good eyes out there on the streets looking for your granddaughter, Mr. Howell. She’s out there somewhere, and we’re gonna find her.”
Trey was pulling away from the curb when he felt his cell phone vibrate on his waist. He snatched it off the clip and pressed it to his ear.
“Yeah, whassup?”
It was his manz, Rain. He operated an icee stand near 116th Street, and he was calling with some real bad news.
“Yo, man. You know my oldest son’s mother works up on the baby ward at Harlem Hospital, man. I was asking around like you said, and she told me an ambulance brought a young pregnant girl in unconscious earlier today. The doctors operated on her but they couldn’t save her. The baby is alive, but the mother OD’d. I think this young chick might be the girl you lookin’ for, man. I think this might be her.”
Trey went ice-cold inside.
It felt like history was repeating itself.
He drove past the corner where Taleah said she had last saw Princess, and noted the building the girl pointed out. It was a well-known drug den, and Trey had gone up in there to pull out smoked-up kids quite a few times over the years.
Wordlessly, he dropped Taleah off at home, and then he drove down Malcolm X Blvd and took Mr. Howell inside Harlem Hospital. Two hours later, Trey held the weeping old man in his arms as they left the dank, impersonal morgue.
Thirteen-year-old Princess Howell’s body had been waiting in a freezer drawer to be identified. And while her underweight baby boy was upstairs in the NICU brain damaged from drugs and a lack of oxygen, the sight of the dead teen, barely old enough to be anybody’s mother, had rocked both Trey and her devastated grandfather deep down in their souls.
“I’m sorry, Mister H.” Trey let the old man press his bony face against his chest as he cried like a baby. Every life lost to drugs was another painful nick in the center of Trey’s heart. “I’m so fuckin’ sorry!” he said.
And he was. But what Trey didn’t tell the elderly man as he held him in his arms, was that he was mad as hell now, and he was on a mission too.
CHAPTER 20
Nooni was a nervous fuckin’ wreck.
She knew she was a murderer, and she kept peeking at the front door like the cops were gonna bust in and arrest her at any minute. Her hands were icy cold and her heart pounded in her chest as she wandered around the G-Spot looking lost and turned out.
To make things worse, Monique had overheard Greco asking her for his cell phone back, and that chick had wilded out on her like crazy.
“You tryna
call
some fuckin’ body, Nooni? Huh? Huh?” Monique slapped her upside her head and punched her in the eye. “Here I am tryna hide you and protect you, and you poppin’ your lil dumb ass head up to get picked off!”
Monique had put her hands around Nooni’s throat and dug her nails in deep as she squeezed the air outta her. “I ain’t going to jail for you, Nooni. I shoulda just called the cops when you killed that dude, but since I didn’t they can come after my ass behind that shit too, and I ain’t going to jail!”
She had pressed her fingers hard against Nooni’s windpipe, and when Nooni squirmed and tried to fight her off, Monique had come straight outta the projects and beat her down to the ground.
“Yo, what’s up with that chick?” Ace asked Salida. He was busy tryna think of how to pinch off a few ends so his cousin Rabb could pay for Izzy’s and Zero’s funerals, and Salida was busy chattering in his ear about the next week’s entertainment line up. They watched Nooni drag herself from the XXX cinema room and shuffle toward the staff bathrooms.
Ace shook his head. Something wasn’t right. Nooni used to be a stunning and sexy young
mamacita,
and now she was dragging her ass around like a dried up little old lady.
Salida smiled inside. Unlike Ace, she knew exactly why Nooni was all shook up, and she knew exactly what to do to get the young girl to calm down and relax a little bit too. So, later that night, Salida went and found Nooni sitting alone near a pool table.
“Come with me,” she said, and took Nooni by the hand. The girl’s fingers were ice-cold and Salida was pleased by how much they trembled.
She led Nooni upstairs and unlocked the door to the cut-room using the key on her wristband. They walked past all the jugs and containers, and other drug-making paraphernalia, and into the small office.
“Sit down,” Salida told her.
Nooni did, but she kept her eyes on the floor.
“Something is wrong with you,” Salida spoke like she was a trained mental health professional, and after all those years in the nut house she had sat through enough counseling sessions to know exactly what tone to take. Her voice was calm and soothing, yet cool with authority.