This story was submitted to Reedsy.com as an entry for short story contest "#189: Remastered, Retold". This entry is based on the prompt: "Write a story inspired by this quote from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”
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Silas King cruised like a shark through a pulsing sea of bodies. One of the Glitter Bomb’s female bartenders had flagged a creep spiking women’s drinks and as the nightclub’s cooler, it was his job to eliminate the wolf among the drunken, clueless sheep.
“Muscular kid,” Trish had shouted into his ear over the throbbing bass. “Tight silk shirt. White chinos. Brown leather slip-ons. GTO on his left bicep.”
GTO was juking in the center of the teeming dancefloor with a blond in a pink, one-shoulder mini dress. Bare arms swaying overhead, she was lost in the music and ground her ass against his crotch while hands rode her hips. The huge tattoo on the man’s bicep was unmistably unique and Silas moved in from in behind. He twisted GTO's arm behind his back with one hand, grabbed his waistband with the other, and hauled him off the dancefloor. Blondie never missed a beat.
Outside, the night was cold compared to the club’s close, sweaty heat. An empty Green & Yellow cab waited at the curb and Silas threw him against the side. The cabbie, smoking a cigarette against the rear fender, went on with his crossword puzzle.
“Fucking asshole!” GTO shouted, launching a right hook. Every creep Silas ever bounced led with a hook. He dipped and delivered a sharp strike to GTO’s solar plexus and caught him as he sagged forward.
“Where’s this one going, Si?” the cabbie asked, opening the trunk.
Silas fished out GTO’s wallet. Inside were a thick wad of $20s and four more roofies in blister tabs. Silas heaved GTO into the trunk and the cabbie slammed the lid.
“How far will $300 take him, Everett?” Silas asked, handing over the wallet and bills.
“Way out past Osterton,” the cabbie grinned
“Have a nice drive then."
The cabbie waved, climbed behind the wheel, and drove off in a cloud of exhaust.
Silas’ phone chirped in his jacket pocket as he climbed the steps up to the club’s main doors. He checked the caller ID and answered.
“Hey, boss.”
“Where the fuck are you?” Someone shouted in the background. “Shut up! I said, sit down. I’m taking care of this.”
Silas frowned.
“Everything okay, boss?”
“Sorry. Where are you?”
“Outside the Bomb. What’s going on?”
“Get your ass over to the Sebastian Hotel. Suite 2010. I have a job for you.”
“What kind of job?”
“Just get over here. Now.”
The Sebastian Hotel was one of Liberty City’s premier hotels and had been since it opened its doors in 1902. It was a huge, white limestone pile in the theater district. Silas pulled his car past the taxi stand, handed his keys to the valet, and pushed through the heavy revolving door. At that time of night, the immense marbled lobby was all but deserted, and there was no trouble getting an elevator.
Suite 2010 was at the end of a long, white hall. Silas knocked on door and waited. A brusque, impatient voice spoke through the door.
“What?”
“It’s me.”
A sliver of Inigo Cardoso’s face appeared in a crack of the door. It opened wider and Inigo waved Silas inside. The cool foyer, tiled in creamy marble, was quiet as a church. Behind Inigo was the kitchen with a huge island under matt black lamps suspended from the twelve-foot ceiling. An enormous flower arrangement occupied the center of the island.
Inigo was pale and his blue eyes looked everywhere but at Silas. His hand kept smoothing the back of his head and beads of sweat glittered in his dark hairline. His $1200 suit couldn’t mask his frayed nerves. He’d never seen Inigo like that.
“What’s going on, boss?” he asked.
“I got a job for you. It’s not like your regular jobs. You can’t ask any questions.”
“Must be some job.” Silas already didn’t like the situation.
“There’s been an accident. One of my girls got a little too deep into the champagne and started dancing on a coffee table. She slipped and cracked her skull on the corner.” Inigo cleared his throat. “Hard.”
“Why you calling me? If she’s got a concussion, she needs an ambulance.”
“She’s dead.”
Silas’ heart sank as he realized what Inigo wanted him to do.
“There’s no one else to do this?” he asked.
“Sure there is, but I called you because I know I can rely on you. I can rely on you, right?”
The spin Inigo put on the word right made it less of a question and more of a command.
“I can’t do this, boss. I run your drugs, I run your guns, but disposing of a body...I get caught and I’m fucked. It’s back to Farfield.”
“We are all fucked if this thing gets out.”
Silas rubbed his face.
“Fine, show me the mess,” he said, regretting the words as they left his mouth.
Inigo led the way through the kitchen. On the way, something hard crunched under Silas’ shoe and he picked it up.
“What’s that?” Inigo asked.
Silas had stepped on a thumbnail-sized shard of glass. He held it up to the light. It was ever so slightly curved and pale, smoky green.
“The party got wild in here,” he said. “Looks like it’s from a wine bottle or something.”
“Whatever. It’s not important. We got business ahead of us.”
Silas left the piece of glass on the island and followed Inigo into the living room.
The suite was open concept and immense, easily three times the size of Silas’ apartment, and furnished with modern leather furniture. At the very end, on a raised dais behind a smoked glass wall was the bedroom.
The suite was high class, but abused and disheveled, like a hooker after a hard night of work. What Silas could see of the bed was almost completely stripped. In the living room, a satiny red dress lay in a puddle on the floor near the fireplace next to a man’s tie and a pale blue shirt. A black lace bra and matching thong dangled carelessly off the back of a mustard yellow arm chair which had been jostled out of place.
A well-tanned man in a white terry robe sat on the edge of the yellow leather sofa and snorted a long line of coke off a silver hand mirror. He grimaced, wiped his nose, and the terry robe fell open between his knees. Silas saw he wasn’t wearing any briefs.
“This your boy?” he asked, regarding Inigo and Silas with a glassy-eyed leer.
“Shut up,” Inigo said.
“Watch your tone with me,” he said.
“I said shut up. And close your fucking robe.”
Dunn glanced down, wrapped himself up, and flopped down onto the sofa.
“That sad sack is Elliott Dunn, the actor,” said Inigo. “When he’s in town he calls me up and I get him a nice place to hang, some party favours, some girls. He also likes to run his mouth at people who know how to hurt him. Badly.” Dunn withered under the heat of Inigo’s glare. He picked up a glass half full of liquor, swallowed it, and waved his arm vaguely at the center of the room.
“There’s the girl,” he said. “Better get a move on. I told Hoskins you’d meet him with a package at three and it’s almost quarter after two now.”
Silas knelt down beside a pale blue bed sheet draped over a woman-shaped lump on the floor. A spray of straight black hair extended beyond the top of the sheet. His eyes trailed along her inert form, from her shoulder to the valley of her waist then up the slope of her hip and back down the long plain of her leg. A pair of slender feet, decorated with pink toenails freshly painted, peeked out the bottom of the sheet. His eyes rested on a tiny tattoo on the top of her right foot. He drew back the sheet just an inch and peered closer. A trio of tiny blue butterflies. He closed his eyes and his heart cracked down the middle.
“Oh, Mei...” he whispered.
“What did you call her?” asked Inigo.
“Mei,” said Silas, unable to take his eyes from her pale face.
“Her name is Natalie.”
“Mei s her Chinese name. Natalie’s just her Western name.”
Gently, as if afraid of waking her, he pulled the sheet away from her face. Her eyes were open and empty and stared at a point on the wall behind Silas. Her lips were parted, as if she had drawn a breath and was about to tell him a secret. Dunn snickered from the sofa and Silas glared at him.
“You think this is funny?” Silas asked.
“He was into her,” Dunn said. “Look at his face.”
Silas got to his feet. "Shut the fuck up,” he said.
Inigo threw a warning glance at the actor and edged closer, wary of what was unfolding, but Dunn could no longer control his giggling.
“Yeah, he was into her big time,” he said. “Your boy was sneaking a taste of the goods!”
Silas clenched and unclenched his fists. He said to Inigo, “You better get your boy to shut up before I hurt him.”
“Oooh! What are you going to do?” Dunn asked.
“You can’t begin to imagine.” Silas’ voice shook with the effort it took to control himself. “I already bounced one creep tonight. What’s another?”
Inigo put himself between Dunn and Silas.
“Calm down,” he said. “None of this is helping.”
“She wasn’t drunk, Inigo. That piece of shit is lying.” Silas brushed past Inigo and hauled Dunn to his feet by the front of the robe. “Explain to me what the fuck happened here. What did you do to her?”
Inigo wedged himself between the two men once again and backed Silas up a few paces.
“Why are you so jacked up right now? Were you seeing Natalie? Mei?”
Silas considered denying it—Inigo didn’t like it when his employees dated each other because it divided loyalties—but there was no point keeping the secret any longer. He wiped his eyes and nodded.
“For about a year, when she started waitressing at the Bomb,” he said. “She didn’t tell me she was hooking for you. I swear to God. How could she have the time for it, for guys like him? She was working at the Bomb and going to fucking culinary school, for Christ’s sake. ”
Silas’ mind spun like a Tilt-a-Whirl as he gazed down on her still body and tried to recall if there had been signs he had missed. He had been with her the night before in her studio apartment. They were on her beat up couch sipping grape juice out of plastic cups because wine made her nauseous and they were the only clean dishes left.
“Rent keeps going up, Si,” she said. “And forget about food. Jesus! I can’t go back home, not to my fucking father. After the last time, I promised myself I would never let him hit me again. I’ll do whatever it takes to stay away from that asshole. You have to understand that, Si. Whatever it takes.”
“You’ll figure something out, Mei. You’re a smart girl. Smarter than me, that’s for fucking sure.”
She smiled and leaned across to kiss him. Silas remembered the warmth of her hand on his cheek and the taste of grape juice on her tongue. Had she already started hooking then? Had she been trying to warn him, in case her secret ever came out?
Secrets. Silas couldn’t bring himself to be angry at Mei because she wasn’t the only one keeping a secret. She didn’t know about his time in prison or about the errands he ran for Inigo Cardoso. In her eyes, Silas King was the Glitter Bomb’s cooler, just a big dumb bouncer.
Mei’s drive and ambition had made Silas want to be better, and his heart ached now to find her this way. In prison, he’d done a lot of reading and something from Dante called back to him: In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Mei had found her straight way, but had still gotten lost in the dark wood. He wondered what that meant for a dope like him. He cleared the stone from his throat and wiped his eyes.
“She wasn’t drunk,” he said. “If that’s Dunn’s story, then he’s a liar. Mei didn’t drink.”
“Si, people do things against character. I mean, she came to me about this arrangement for God’s sake. Getting drunk isn't that farfetched for her.”
“She can’t drink,” he said. “Her stomach can’t break down the alcohol. Booze makes her turn tomato red, makes her sick. One glass and she has to lie down.”
“Asian flush. That’s true?”
Silas raised his hand. “On my mother. I would never lie to you, not after everything you’ve done for me.”
Inigo’s face hardened and he turned on Dunn.
“Care to rebut?” he asked.
Dunn’s eyes were like saucers in his tanned face.
“I’m telling you, she was fucking loaded on Dom and dancing on that end table when she fell. I tried to get her down.”
“You told me she was on the coffee table.”
“Yeah, the coffee table. I’m messed up, man!”
“That coffee table?” Silas asked. “It's covered in food and coke and empty bottles. A cockroach couldn’t dance on table.”
Dunn’s jaw worked his mouth as he tried to adapt his story. Inigo’s hand disappeared under the back of his jacket and reappeared with a Colt automatic.
“You’re gonna tell me the truth, you fucking dog,” Inigo said, eerily calm.
Silas tended to Mei as Inigo interrogated Dunn. He had to know what happened her. He brushed the hair away from her face then cradled her head and turned it up to face him. Gathering her hair from the floor, his fingers brushed the soft depression in her skull where it was fractured. His stomach turned but he kept probing gently. The hair near the fracture was sticky. Blood, he thought and kept probing until his fingertips encountered something hard and sharp entangled in the mess. He worked it free and held it up to the light.
“Glass,” he said. It was black with dried blood.
Inigo paused his interrogation. “What did you say?”
Silas dropped the piece of glass into a half full champagne flute, swirled it around, then poured it out into the palm of his hand. He wiped away the remaining blood and stared at the green shard in his palm. He crossed the suite to the kitchen and picked up the piece of glass he’d left on the island.
“They’re the same, boss. Exactly the same.”
In the stainless steel garbage can under the sink, Silas found the broken neck and torn label of a bottle of Dom Perignon Moët & Chandon and, 1961. Beneath that, he found the heavy bottom that had sheared off the bottle. He picked it out of the debris and held it up to the light. Smears of blood darkened the edges where they had split Mei’s skin, broken bone.
“Dunn killed her,” Silas said.
“What?!” the actor squawked. “No no no no!!”
Silas crossed the suite and showed Inigo what he’d found.
“I found this piece in her hair and this piece in the trash.” Silas pushed the pieces around with his fingertip until they fit. Inigo cursed under his breath and Dunn squirmed on the sofa.
“What happened here, Dunn?” Silas asked. “Did you try something on her she didn’t like? Did you get a little rough with her when she said no? Did she fight back? Try to escape? Did she threaten to call the cops, Dunn?”
Dunn shot off the sofa, the robe flying behind him like a cape. Silas straight-armed him square in the chest and the actor floated horizontal in the air until gravity took hold and slammed him into the floor. His skull bounced off the tile and his eyes rolled independently of each other. Silas squatted next to him.
“If she got out of her, she could blow up your life,” he said. “Who did that dirty whore think she was dealing with? You had to stop her. You had to keep her quiet, so you clubbed her in the back of the head with a bottle of Dom Perignon.”
“You killed her,” Inigo said.
Dunn writhed on the floor.
“Please...!” he begged. “Please! I can’t go to jail...”
Inigo hauled Dunn to his feet.
“Relax, you’re not going to jail,” he said. “The cops are never going to find out what happened here.”
“Thank you!” Dunn started to cry. “Thank you!”
“Now get dressed. You’ve got a couple graves to dig.”
On the drive back to the city, the trees of Fletcher’s Woods slid past Silas’ headlights like ghosts. It was almost dawn, and the heavy crowns of those ancient trees closed the sky over the highway. Silas focused on the twisting, curving road as it wove through the forest, but his mind kept returning to the shadows lapping among the trees. What had witnessed their grim work? What had they disturbed?
“We gotta clean up that suite,” he said just to break the heavy silence.
“No, you go home,” Inigo said. “I know people who can arrange a cleaning crew. I’ll call them. You’ve done your part, brother. Go on home, take a hot shower, and get some sleep.”
Silas drove straight through a crossroads and Inigo twisted in the passenger seat to look back at the way they’d come.
“I think you missed the turn,” he said.
“Nah, we’re fine. All these crossroads look the same.”
Silas’ dry eyes wanted to close, and his aching back wanted the comfort of his bed, but he doubted sleep would come easily. He doubted it would ever come to him again.
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© Kevin M. Coleman, 2023
Photo credit Jr Korpa from Unsplash