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Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Eight: Big Jack
BIG JACKAt the flora shop, Big Jack bought a wide bouquet of chrysanthemums—they were Elle's favourite; all things flora were. The inside of the shop smelt like plants and crumbly earth and Big Jack had never felt closer to his wife than in a place that felt like this.He was not leaving the city for good, he told himself. He would probably die here, he told himself, never too far from the bright lights that were New York. To leave this stretch of land would be, for him, to cease to exist. And when he went to the flora shop for a bouquet of chrysanthemums, he assured himself that they were not a parting gift. Goodbyes did not always have to be creatures of permanence.Few shops were open during periods of festivity, especially at this time of the year. Those that were were often in a hurry to close for the day. Most people had families and wanted to be with them when the New Year rolled in. Must be nice, thought Big Jack. Must be nice to have a family, whole, waiting for you to retur
Dante's Fire Chapter Forty Nine: Andre
ANDRE Mole.Snitch.Informant.Tattletale.Turncoat.There were many names for the thing Andre had become. Many, many names. Snitch was the one that resonated most in these streets. It was the one that hounded him wherever he went.It was a whisper in his ear. It was the running of water from the shower. It was the crunch of his tyres on the driveway gravel. Snitch, snitch, snitch. Sometimes it was Trent's voice; other times, he could swear that when he heard the word and turned around, for an instant, a split second, he caught sight of Molly, hair like dirty straw, one eye gone. He was trailing ghosts now. But Molly's ghost was easiest to accommodate. Time had made it easier to carry the weight of her passing, and when she skirted at the periphery of his mind, he did not recoil. Instead he looked out for her. When he caught glimpses in the rearview mirror, he parked the car. When he saw her in the shopping mall's mirror, he checked. These sightings were what drove him, what kept him
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty: Jackie
JACKIE Neil was shady after her father left town. He would not pick her calls, would not show up to any meeting that she proposed. Jackie had the distinct feeling her father had something to do with his newfound reticence. She had rented a car, and even though she could easily have afforded a car with the funds at her disposal, buying a car seemed too lavish a thing to do. Living as she had in school, basically out of a suitcase, working at a bar on weekends, just so she would not have to rely in her father's money, she had grown accustomed to being economical.It was one of the things Joaquin disliked the most about her. He lamented her attitude quite often. 'Why have all that fucking money if you are not going to use it, huh?''It is blood money. Isn't mine.' She would always tell him. And Joaquin would always shake his head in disbelief. Now even those memories were tainted. She drove the rental to her former house, which they had once thought of as theirs. Where her mother died
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty One: Jackie
JACKIE ‘You think she will pull through?’ A man's voice asked. This was years before, five to be precise. Jackie was at the top of the stairs. She was seated on the floor just outside her mother's room, slouched against the steel handrail, close enough to hear her mother call for her if she needed her. The nurse was there, but Jackie had gotten into the habit of staying close by, never straying too far. She had been listening to a Valerie June song on her walkman, with headphones, and the thrum of the guitar and the drum beats had swallowed up all the sound in the world. When Big Jack and Raymond Bianchi walked into the house, she saw them come from above, but in the place of footsteps and the click of the door opening and closing, there was thin silence and heavy music. She slid the headphones down and all the sounds of reality came rushing back. Raymond was the one speaking, asking if 'she' would survive. Jackie knew who he was referring to: the woman in the room that she sat faci
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Two: Dante
DANTEThe sign above his club was neon-lit in the night and its name Ambience glowed blue in the dark, true to its meaning. Ambience was packed to bursting. Folks had begun to return from their Christmas breaks and after a long stretch of chumminess, most people—people who had been locked up with their gregarious kids and aging parents, people who had spent the ‘holiday’ catering to the whims and wishes of others—wanted out desperately. The average New Yorker with an existing social life went to the nightclub to unwind, and without even trying to brag, Dante could comfortably say that Ambience was one of the top clubs in the borough.The music was lusty, ear-splitting like the crowd liked it. People danced, which mostly involved grinding against each others thighs and crotches and jumping, hair billowing away from humid skin, sticking to face and nape, and the party lights danced with them, throwing an array of blues and violets on the walls and the lustrous floor. A bevy of ladies hu
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Three: Dante
down. DANTEBy downstairs Natasha did not mean the ground floor of Ambience. As all other buildings of Ambience' calibre—enormous, designed for business purposes—there was a connecting door to a backroom*. It was this backroom* that had become the mafia's temporary storehouse. New consignment was always arriving at Ambience. New wine, new glasses, new people. Hiding the fact that a truckload of narcotics entered the building every now and then was not to hard a task to achieve.Natasha led the way there, and pushed the steel door open. It banged closed behind Dante after he had walked through it. A few men were gathered in the back. Imani was there too, but she towered above them and so was not easily mistaken for one. They were gathered around two people who had been blindfolded and bound. A Black man and a Latino woman. The woman was hysterically; the man was telling her to be quiet through gritted teeth, and if not for the upheaval* the club was making, Dante was fairly certain tha
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Four: Dante
DANTE The world outside the tinted glass windows of the jeep was blue, deep blue, just like the glass. It had been raining snow for days on end. Drizzling, to be precise. The snowflakes floated down daintily sometimes; some other times it was a steady descent of white, almost like showers in spring. Imani drove quickly, but meticulously. She weaved carefully through the streets of Brooklyn, waiting for the red lights to turn amber and the amber lifts to go green. She could almost have been mistaken for an upstanding citizen of society, if you did not bother to look closely enough. And most people did not, too busy were they, amove, rushing to school, to jobs or appointments, to their parents or their children. But if they did look, they would have seen the yellow, black-sripped bandana slung across her neck, and, immediately, they would have averted their eyes. RWD's black and gold colours were legend in the boroughs of New York, especially Brooklyn. They did not need to fly the col
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Five: Andre
ANDRE Nick Noah wanted to meet at a strip club. He no longer wanted to do business at the summit of a skyscraper, he told Dante over the phone. Andre was amused. That was the thing with people who had wielded power. They tried to pull weight everywhere they went, tried to always stay in control.This club was called Pose, and it was at the upper eastside of the city. He drove to the address he had been given, and when he came within sight of the building, he saw that it was made of hard, red and square bricks that seem to pop out of the wall. A neon light sign made of cursive letters spelt the strip clubs name. It glowed with seductive red light. There were very few people in sight, as it was broad daylight. Afternoon reddeding into twilight. Before the establishment stood a small man and a woman in skimpy underwear. She was so curvy that she spilled out of the scraps of fabrics that attempted to hold her together, her areolas a pinkish red, gleaming with body oil. They looked like a
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