Betrayal (12 page)

CHAPTER 12

Nooni mighta thought she was street slick, but she didn’t have nothing on Money-Making Monique. At seventeen-years-old, she was miles behind the seasoned stripper, but she admired her swagger on sight.

  Monique wiggled her delicious body over to the table where Nooni and Bubbles now sat chatting with Truth.

“Hey, cutie.”

“Sup, Mo,” Truth joked, raising his chin and wincing as he tossed down a shot-glass full of straight gin.

“Shut up,” Monique said playfully, popping her chewing gum between her back teeth. “You cute, Truth, but ain’t nobody talking to you.” She flashed Nooni and Bubbles a bright smile.

“I was talking to
her,
” she said, nodding at Nooni. “Welcome to the G-Spot, cutie. Look at your pretty eyes and all that curly hair! You’re gorgeous, honey. What’s your name?”

Nooni swallowed hard. She couldn’t believe the beautiful lady with the butter weave and bombastical body was giving her props. She was awestruck and flattered, and Bubbles had to kick her under the table to get her to answer.

“N-Nubia,” she stuttered, smiling back. “My name is Nubia, but they call me Nooni.”

Monique slid into the booth next to Bubbles and sparked up some chocolate sticky.

“So why y’all not in school?” she asked, puffing first and then passing the blunt across the table to Nooni. “All that reading and writing shit is boring as hell, ain’t it?” she added quickly, just so they knew she wasn’t tryna preach to them or chastise them for playing hookey and cutting classes.

Nooni could barely speak. She was overly impressed by Monique’s flawless brown skin, perfect false eyelashes, and three-inch diamond-studded fake nails.

Monique was sucking up the adoration with glee. She liked being admired by young girls. She liked tickling their ears and dumping dog shit in their empty heads. Salida had been right. There was more than one way to skin a cat. It was much smarter to use Rita’s little sister as their tool than it was to get mad and beat her ass. She spent the next two hours happily wooing Nooni and Bubbles, soaking their throats with liquor and filling their heads up with whimsical nonsense. The kind of dumb shit that young girls loved to hear.

“Check it out,” Monique said, feeling a little bit tipsy herself after matching Truth drink for drink. “I know y’all got school and homework and studying and all that type of bullshit going on. But are either one of y’all interested in making some extra money?”

Monique laughed inside as all four bright eyes in the two guttersnipe faces lit up.

“Yeah,” both girls said together. “Hell, yeah!”

“See,” Monique explained, lying her black ass off, “I’m a party planner. I put together erotic events for paid niggahs who got swole pockets. Can y’all young heffahs dance?”

Heads got to bobbing up and down.

“Well, we don’t do no whole lotta freaky shit or nothing like that. You know, no fucking or dick sucking is required. But you
will
have to strip. And you’ll have to shake that ass a lil bit too. You know, it ain’t nothing serious. You just wiggle outta your panties and smack the crotch under them niggah’s noses. Humph. After that, their old asses are usually straight for the rest of the night.”

“Both of these honeys got plenty of ass,” Truth laughed. “I believe they can handle that.”

Monique nodded. “True, true. Problem is, I only got one opening left. Most of our parties are way out in Philly, or sometimes down in Atlantic City. I can only fit one more girl in my whip.”

She looked from Nooni to Bubbles, then back to Nooni again.

“So who’s it gonna be?”

Monique snickered to herself as the girls damn near brawled trying to get chosen, “Me! Me! Me!”

She gazed thoughtfully up at the ceiling for a moment, and then batted her false eyelashes as she looked from girl to girl.

“Y’all both real cute. But stand up and lemme see who got the best shape.”

The young girls almost broke their necks as they scurried to get out of the booth. Standing in front of Monique, they struck pose after pose, tooting up their asses and arching their slender backs trying to make their high, young titties look even bigger.

Monique laughed.

“All right, all right. It’s gonna be hard to decide. But since I have to choose, I pick…. Hold up. Hey, Truth. You a street playa, so what you think? If you had to fuck either one of these two honeys, which one would it be?”

Truth grinned, his sexy eyes red from weed and alcohol as he peeped Monique’s shiesty game.

He licked his lips. “I’d pick her,” he said, pointing not at the girl who had slobbed his dick down in the car on the way over, but at her girlfriend, whose pretty eyes and sexy grin had promised she would do much, much more.

“Nooni,” he said with a big grin. “Yeah. I’d pick Nooni.”

CHAPTER 13

It was a windy, overcast day when Rita touched down in Los Angeles. She had never been on an airplane before, and she spent the entire flight worrying. Not about the pilot, or whether the plane was gonna stay up in the air like it was supposed to. Nah. She was worried mostly about Juicy, but also about the two younger sisters that she had left back in Harlem.

She caught a taxi from the airport to an address in a plush neighborhood where Juicy was staying. She was surprised when a white chick answered the door.

“You must be Rita,” the white lady said.

Rita nodded.

“I’m Renata. Juicy’s upstairs. Come on in.”

The crib was just as plush as the neighborhood, and Rita couldn’t help but admire what she saw. She was a Harlem girl, born and raised. She’d never been inside a house this grand before. Because of Juicy’s generosity, Rita had been able to move her sisters from the shabby tenement their father had raised them in, to a nice, spacious apartment building not too far away. Her new place was laid out, but it was nothing like this.

She followed Renata up a winding staircase. The steps were made of marble and the handrails were carved from deep, dark cherry wood. She was led to the doorway of an airy bedroom with high ceilings and two skylights, and her breath caught in her throat when she looked inside.

Rita knew life had been real hard for Juicy lately, but nothing could have prepared her for the actual sight of her girl.

Juicy was a wreck.

She had lost so much weight her collarbone stuck out like a rail from one shoulder to the other. Her cheeks were flat, and her eyes looked lost and sunken deep in her head.

But it wasn’t her physical appearance that startled Rita the most. It was the pain coming out of her friend’s soul. It overflowed from Juicy’s eyes, and Rita had never seen anything like it before.

She rushed over to the bed where Juicy sat, and they hugged and cried. Rita made soft, comforting noises as Juicy clung to her like she was drowning.

“I’m so glad you came,” Juicy said through her tears. “I couldn’t call nobody else. I couldn’t even tell nobody that Gino was dead. There was nobody else I could really trust.”

Rita rocked her friend in her arms. “I’m glad you called me, Juicy. You should have called me sooner, though. I can’t believe you waited almost two months! I would’ve jetted out here right away if I had known. You didn’t have to suffer by yourself all this time, girl. I could have been here for you.”

Juicy wiped her eyes. “I wasn’t alone. Renata made me come home with her straight from the hospital.”

Rita glanced toward the door. “Who the hell are these white people?” she asked in a dropped voice. “Why they doing all this for you?”

Juicy sighed. “They’re a group of businessmen from New York, and they’re some of the best people I’ve ever known. Gino worked for them. He got real tight with his boss’s nephew, and since we were out here by ourselves with no friends they just kinda adopted us and started treating us like family.”

“That’s real unusual for Italians,” Rita said, doubtfully. “Especially the ones I know in New York.”

“I know,” Juicy said, nodding. “But they’re good people, Rita. Like you said, it’s been almost two months and they’ve been taking care of me the whole time. The Sanveneros might be Italian, but they’re legit. They loved Gino, and he loved them back.”

“Well, I’m glad somebody out here had your back,” Rita shrugged, then nodded. “Going through all that stress by yourself would have been ten times worse.”

Juicy hadn’t been back to her crib since Gino was murdered, but she told Rita she was ready to go home so she could try to pick up the pieces she’d left behind.

“Cool, I came out here strictly for you,” Rita said. “So whatever you wanna do, wherever you wanna go, it’s all good with me. Just say the word.”

Juicy said the word, but Renata wasn’t trying to hear it.

“I have another bedroom that you can use, Rita,” she said. “You’re welcome to visit as long as you like, but Frank and I both think it’s best if Juicy continues to stay with us. We can keep her safe here. We can protect her.”

But Juicy wasn’t down with that.

She wanted to go home. Home to the bed that she and Gino had slept in every night, and home to the unfulfilled promise of what their lives would have been like together if he had lived.

Slick Sallie hugged Juicy real tight before she left, and Big Frankie gave her what looked like a pink cell phone.

“It’s a stun gun,” he told her. “Believe me, your problem has already been taken care of, but I want you to keep this near you at all times.”

Juicy nodded. “I appreciate everything you and Renata and Sal have done for me,” she told Frank as she picked up her small bag. “Y’all looked out for me and treated me better than people I’ve known my whole life. But I can’t hide out here forever. I have to figure out my next move. I’ve gotta make some decisions.”

Renata jumped in and protested a little bit more, but in the end she respected her friend’s wishes. There were tears in her eyes as she drove them to Juicy’s house. She held Juicy in her arms for a real long time before saying goodbye, and Rita could tell the white chick really had mad love for Juicy in her heart.

Settled down in Juicy’s crib, Rita had a sense of déjà vu. She remembered the night that Juicy had escaped from the G-Spot like it was yesterday. She remembered how torn-down her friend had looked when she jumped out of that taxi, raped and beaten and wearing nothing but a sheet.

Juicy looked almost as bad as that now.

Not only was she grieving for Gino and the baby boy she’d lost, she was still recovering from her surgery and barely eating enough to keep any meat on her bones.