Free Pride by Noire Page B

came to food he wasn’t shy about giving up the compliments.
    Thirty minutes later Ace was pushing G’s custom-designed Mercedes north toward Canada. He was in a bad mood and he hadn’t been sleeping right since getting that letter from the sanitarium. He’d been up the last few nights steaming over all the shit that had happened over the past six months. He’d gone back and forth between feeling like a weak bitch for losing all the doe his niggah G had stashed away, and being pissed off at the thought of Gino and Juicy laid up on some tropical fuckin’ island living large and spending that shit.
    Ace had been one of the closest people in the world to G. Not as close as Moonie, nah he couldn’t front and say that, but he had definitely come in second place on G’s trusted capo list.
    Him, Moonie, Pluto, and G had been a four-man crew when all that cash got stashed in a mausoleum out in Woodlawn Cemetery after Juicy’s grandmother died. In fact, he had helped G haul the old lady’s dead body outta the coffin and stuff her into the trunk of his whip. Later that night, he’d ridden with G and Pacho out to the landfill and tossed the dead bitch off on top of a mound of rotting trash.
    But Harlem had exploded in a fireball after G got shot, and Ace and Pluto had both gotten knocked in a flash. The cops had raided Pluto’s crib and caught him with his pants down, but Ace had gotten done even worse. He’d gotten busted going to check on his sick Grandma. And when the bullets started flying, it had been Grandma who ended up slumped over in her rocker with a metal slug through her forehead.
    Hot rage ran through Ace as he thought about how he’d had to cool it on Rikers for a month before his lawyer finally got him out. But by that time it was too late. He had rushed over to his boss’s crib straight outta lock up and busted opened the wall safe. He had known there wasn’t gonna be a whole lotta doe in G’s home stash, but he had expected to find some decent pocket change. Most of all, he had expected to find a very special key, and when that shit wasn’t there, he had rushed out to Woodlawn Cemetery and used a sledgehammer to break into a crypt. Ace had known he was fucked by the weight of the metal drawer when he pulled it out. It was too light to hold a body, and it was damn sure too light to hold over half a million dollars in cold hard cash.
    He shook with rage as he remembered staring up at the ceiling in the mausoleum. He’d flung a vase of dead flowers against the wall, then snatched up a folding chair and started swinging it like a bat. He’d cursed and screamed and beat the shit outta the walls and the floor until there was no more strength left in him.
    There was no question in Ace’s mind about who had pulled a grand larceny on G’s hard earned stash. If he coulda gotten hold of Gino’s dirty ass he would have snapped his fuckin’ neck. But Gino had dipped. That marked niggah had grabbed Juicy and fled the city just like a little bitch.
    I shoulda popped him when I had a chance, Ace thought bitterly. Right before his murder, G had given Ace an order to take Gino to the airport and put him on a plane. And when Ace had asked his boss what he should do if Gino bucked and didn’t wanna go, G’s eyes had been colder than ice when he’d said, “Then kill him.”
    “And that’s what I shoulda did,” Ace said out loud. If he had sunk a hot one in Gino when he had him in his sights, the money woulda still been sitting in the crypt when he got outta jail, and him and Pluto would be rolling in it right now. “Yeah,” Ace muttered under his breath, his voice thick with rage and regret. “That’s exactly what the fuck I shoulda did.”

CHAPTER 11
     
     
    Pulling up to the Canadian checkpoint, Monique eyeballed her reflection in the rearview mirror. Not only did she look cooler than ice, she looked young, sexy, and absolutely stunning. The line of cars waiting to cross the border had been mad long,