Greed (2 page)

But as those cops muscled me through the crowd behind Rita and the tall DT, the truth was colder than ice.

“Rita!” I screamed again as I struggled in my handcuffs. “Rita! What’s going on?”

She had taken my suitcase from the white cop and now the DT was wheeling it behind him with my carry-on bag sitting on top.

“Stop fuckin’ playing, Rita!” I shrieked. “Why the hell am I getting arrested?”

My girl didn’t even look back. She just kept right on booking up ahead of us like she’d never seen me before. Her high heels stabbed the floor fast and furious as she hauled ass through the crowded baggage claim area and toward the exit doors. Just before she stepped outside, she glanced back at me one quick time. She didn’t say a word, but the guilty look in her eyes was enough to say it all.

As soon as we hit the sidewalk Rita and the black dude hopped into a bright red Mustang. I heard a ripping sound as one of the white cops loosened the Velcro on my neck brace and yanked it off. Flinging it in the gutter, he mushed my head down and tossed me in the back seat of the squad car that was parked right behind them.

“You ain’t gotta fuckin’ manhandle me!” I snapped.

“Be quiet, bitch,” was all he said.

I changed my tune real quick as the cops climbed in the front seat and we pulled off behind the Mustang. “Listen officers,” I attempted to explain through the bulletproof partition. “There must be some kinda mistake. This has to be a big mistake! The girl up there in that red car is my best friend,” I said. “I swear to God I’m not a money mule. I’m supposed to be helping her, that’s all. Helping her.”

They cold igged me as we followed the Mustang off the airport grounds.

What the hell is happening? I tried to find a way to rationalize this shit so it would make some sense. But as I rode handcuffed in the backseat of that squad car I realized that nothing made any sense, and that’s when I got so scared my whole body started shaking.

What the fuck was Rita doing?

Something about this just wasn’t right…I could feel it all in my bones. I had never been to jail in my life, and I could hear Grandmother in my ear promising that if I ever got arrested she would disown my little ass.

I knew two-hundred-grand wasn’t a whole lot of paper in the drug game, but it was definitely way more than you could legally transport across state lines. The fact that the money had come from G’s criminal operations made it dirty enough to put my ass straight under a jail, and that freaked me out. It wasn’t like I could lie and say I had hit the lottery back in Cali, or that I’d gotten a phat income tax refund or nothing legitimate like that.

Nah, there was only one logical reason that a nineteen-year-old black chick like me would be carrying bank the way I was carrying it.

Drugs.

And if I knew it then the cops damn sure knew it too.

I was boxed in and fuming mad, but my heart had been cut real deep too. Tears filled my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. How could Rita do some shit like this to me? She knew how bad I had been hurting! She knew what kind of heart-wrecking shit that I had gone through. She knew I had just lost my baby and my man!

That greedy fuckin’ bitch! Her phony ass had been a red-carpet actress playing a role when she came out west to see me. I thought about the way she had fed me and bathed me and comforted me… All that fake-ass sympathy! It wasn’t nothing but a ploy to get up in my pockets and get next to my doe.

Yeah, my girl had tricked me out for real. Here I was trying to help her sister out of a fucked up situation, and in return she had shit on me.

I was so, so scared. I didn’t wanna go to jail! 

As we rode through the borough of Queens, I stared out the window with tears steady falling from my eyes. I hadn’t seen or smelled New York City in about eight months, but even from the back of a police car I could tell all the flavors were still the same.

We had been zipping down the streets for only a few minutes when we made a right turn and started heading out over a body of water.

“W-w-where are y’all taking me?” I yelled to the officers on the other side of the partition.

Neither one of them answered, but I knew they had heard me. All I could do was sit in that nasty backseat with my hands cuffed behind me, just like all the other criminals who had ridden back there before me.

“For real,” I yelled again as we drove onto a long ass bridge. I frowned as we started rolling over the East River with LaGuardia airport just off to our right. “Where am I going? What damn bridge is this?”

“It’s the Francis Buono,” the cop who was driving replied. As shook as my ass was he sounded bored as hell. “You’re going the same place all the rest of the criminals go. To the Rock.”

CHAPTER 2

“Calm down, baby,” Dutchy Gaines said as he drove with one hand and tried to soothe Rita’s nerves with the other one. His baby was wildin’ out. Kicking, screaming, banging her fists on the dashboard and rocking furiously back and forth in her seat, straight going crazy.

“I knew something wasn’t right!” Rita shrieked and stomped her feet on the floorboards. “I just knew it! It was Monique and her crew! Them bitches tried to set us up! They’re the ones who snatched Nooni! They was scheming to get that money and to get Juicy too!”

“Don’t worry shawty, we got this,” Dutchy said calmly as he sped down the street making sure the squad car stayed in his rearview mirror. “We can handle this shit, baby.” He reached for the phone clip on his waist. “Just lemme make a few calls, sugar, and everythang is gonna be straight. We gonna take good care of Juicy. Your friend is gonna be okay, baby. Word.”

“But did you see the way she looked at me?” Rita wailed with her face contorted in pain. “She thinks I fuckin’ set her up! My girl is gonna hate me!”

“She’ll understand later,” Dutchy muttered. “And then she’ll be thanking you.”

Rita could only sob as her dude made contact with his peeps. He barked all kinds of instructions into his cell phone and made the risky, complex arrangements for Juicy that Rita prayed would save her friend’s life.

She was beside herself with guilt and anger. The cop car Juicy was riding in was right behind them, but Rita couldn’t bring herself to glance back. Not even through the side mirror. The expression of terror and disbelief on her friend’s face had punched her right in the heart. To have Juicy thinking she was a snake and had betrayed her was almost as bad as if she had actually done that shit for real.

This was so fucked up! Life had already handed Juicy more than one chick should have to bear. If there had been any other way to keep her girl safe Rita would have taken that path. But as it was, Monique and the dudes she was rolling with had caught her out there and blindsided her.

Rita had spotted them as she walked through the airport terminal looking for the flight arrival board so she could see where the baggage from Juicy’s flight would be unloading. At first she had walked past it, and when she realized she missed it she quickly turned around and doubled back the way she had come.

And that’s when she saw the crew from Harlem lurking on the low. Standing out in the crowd of frenzied travelers, they looked like a stalking pack of wolves on the prowl. It was Monique and three gutta-looking youngstas, and every nerve in Rita’s body told her they had been scoping her out, watching her the way a hungry snake eyeballs a big fat rat.

Rita and Monique had locked eyes for a quick second, and then Monique had ducked behind an obese white lady and tried to dip into a bookstore and hide behind a magazine rack.

Rita had frozen in her tracks. She had come up in the bowels of Harlem, and suddenly her nose was straight burning from the foul odor of street grime in the air. 

Instead of continuing in the direction of the arrival board, she had jetted toward the nearest exit and ran back to Dutchy’s whip with a quickness.

“Monique is in there!” she’d shrieked, jumping in the ride and gripping her man’s arm in terror. “That skank from the G-Spot! She’s got a crew of predator-looking niggahs with her too. I coulda sworn they were following me! Why the hell would she be tracking me way out here in Queens?”

Dutchy had frowned. “I don’t know but dig, the whole time I been sitting here waiting for you there’s been more Harlem cats sliding through here than a little bit. Them niggahs is piled up in mad whips. Check out that black beemer SUV parked about three cars back. I peeped it when we were coming in off the highway.” He peered in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “Yo, that’s the same fuckin’ car I seen parked outside your crib the other night when I was leaving, babe. That’s word.”

Rita was a college math major and had no problem adding shit up. She had a calculating brain and she studied probabilities and logic just for fun. And right now her math-mind told her that the probability of Monique, or any young gangsta, showing up at the airport looking shifty as fuck under random circumstances was almost zero. Yeah, those G-Spot bastards had been laying in the cut outside her crib, and they had followed her all the way to Queens too. Running into Monique on the street that day wasn’t just a coincidence either. That chick had been out there for a reason. She didn’t just “happen” to walk by. But the question was, why? Why would Monique be scoping her out, and then trail her to the airport to pick up the money from Juicy?

There was only one logical conclusion and Rita had already come to it. Them niggahs had snatched her sister Nooni, and what they wanted in return was plain as day. And as bad as Rita wanted to get her hands on that money and make the drop so she could get her little sister back, there was no way in hell she was gonna trade Juicy’s life for a goddamn thing!

Not even for her sister.

“They’re gunning for her,” Rita had moaned as she sat in Dutchy’s car trembling in fear. The memory of Juicy jumping out of a taxicab after breaking up outta the G-Spot popped into her mind crystal clear, and Rita shuddered with sympathy for her girl. “This shit just can’t be happening! I should’ve never let her come back to New York!”

She had turned to her man, crying and pleading in desperation. “We gotta get her outta here, Dutchy! We’ve gotta do something quick. ’Cause if they catch her they’re going to kill her.”

So, with only fifteen minutes until Juicy’s plane was scheduled to touch down on the ground, Rita and Dutchy came up with a desperate plan to save Juicy from the greedy bloodsuckers that ruled Harlem’s underworld.

“It’s gotta be this way,” Dutchy insisted. “Don’t worry, baby. I got people on the inside. Plenty of peeps. She’ll be real safe. She’s gonna have good eyes on her the whole time.”

Dutchy had big-time law enforcement connections and the plan would probably work, but it was grimy and Rita just didn’t like it. Her girl was going to freak out. She was going to be traumatized. She was going to think real bad of her.

Yeah, Dutchy reasoned with his woman as he put in call after call to members of his family who worked for various enforcement agencies all throughout the city of New York. Juicy was damn sure gonna be traumatized and all that other shit Rita was talking too. But, as Dutchy was quick to hip his girl, if they could get Juicy someplace where Monique and her crew couldn’t follow her or get their hands on her, she was also gonna stay alive.

With a heavy and reluctant heart, Rita had given in. Dutchy was right. Juicy had to go to jail.

CHAPTER 3

Juicy didn’t know it, but there were at least ten vehicles rolling behind her in straight-up criminal caravan.

“Y’all niggahs done fucked up!” Monique screamed from the passenger seat of the first car, a black SUV. “Y’all straight fucked the whole shit up!”