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.

And then I was set. Gino locked the front door as we left the apartment, and we went downstairs and got into the black Benz in silence.

“You okay?” he looked over at me and asked. Gino’s voice was soft and he reached out and touched my cold cheek with one hand. “You hungry? You wanna get something to eat first?”

I shook my head. “Rita’s,” I said. “I need to stop at Rita’s house.”

He swung me by there and didn’t even ask why I needed to see her at that time of night. Outside Rita’s apartment, I stood on the stoop and banged until she opened the door.

“I gotta make a run, Rita,” I said, passing her both of my bags. “Hold these someplace safe for me until I get back, okay?”

She took the bags without asking what was inside.

“What’s up, Juicy?” she said, shivering. “Where you goin?”

I shook my head. “Looking for Jimmy. Gino is taking me so I’ll be all right.”

Minutes later me and Gino were on the road. As we drove down the highway I thought about the last time I had taken a ride for G. As scared as I was then, I was even more afraid now because I didn’t know if I was gonna find my brother dead or alive at the end of the journey.

Still, it was cold outside so Gino had the heat blasting and the car was rocking me like a baby. Scared or not, I fell asleep about two exits after we got on the Garden State and when I woke up again I saw the bright lights of Atlantic City in front of us.

“You aaight? Feeling better?” Gino asked when he saw that I was up.

Hell no, I wanted to say. But instead I just shook my head and kept looking ahead so he couldn’t spot the tears trying to fall out my eyes.

G had given Gino a list of three places he wanted him to go to. The first place was a first-floor room in a small hotel off the main strip, and the second place was an Italian seafood restaurant that was so crowded I just knew the whole damn Mafia was up in there.

Jimmy wasn’t at either place, but people at both spots claimed they’d seen him a few days earlier when he came to make his pickup. I just couldn’t believe that my brother would sky up with G’s cheddar, but according to everybody we talked to, he damn sure had G’s dollars on him when he disappeared.

The snow was really coming down now, much harder in New Jersey than it had been in New York. Gino had the windshield wipers going at the max, and we could only drive about twenty-five miles an hour because the roads were so bad. Traffic was backed way up and it took us a whole hour to get to the third stop, even though it was less than twenty miles from the Italian restaurant. G had told Gino to check at this lady’s house who was the last person Jimmy was supposed to see before heading back home. She lived in an apartment complex that was small, and since the snow plows hadn’t even cleared the main roads I was scared we’d drive into the complex, get stuck, and not be able to drive back out.

It was late and I was gonna stay in the car while Gino got out to knock, but then I got scared of being left alone and jumped out and ran through the icy snow and up the stairs behind him.

“No, baby,” the little old woman said when she answered the door and Gino asked if Jimmy was there. I was surprised to hear the door unlock just seconds after we hit the porch, and thought maybe she should try looking out her peephole before she opened the door for strange people standing on her porch. “He was by here a couple of days ago, but I ain’t seen him since.”