JACKIE
The Aurthurson Hotel burned a harsh silver under the glaring moon. Although it was gigantic in its own rights, it was dwarfed by the corporate skyscrapers around it. What they had in height, the hotel had in width.
Dante parked the car in the parking lot and shut off the engine. He let out a long, tortured breath. Jackie examined him in the quiet darkness. He slumped into the seat and stared back at her.'Your grand plan is to sit here all night? Or are we ever going to go in?' She asked, humorously. He snorted. 'Real talk? I wish we would. It's peaceful out here. It's almost never peaceful in New York.'They stared at each other in the dim, contained silence of the car. It was the first time since the raid a semblance of calm had returned to him. He was composed again, the Dante she was accustomed to. Jackie knew caged rage intimately. In part, because she was Big Jack's daughter. In part, because she had felt it for herself. After theDANTEJackie's phone beeped to life on the nightstand in the dark of the room, bathing the wall in white light, and for the third time, Dante ignored it. That night, the moon was a phosphorescent thing, and it poured into the room through the windows, spilling onto the floors. Over Jackie's shoulder, Dante watched it creep further into the room as the night drew on. The clock on the nightstand read 3 A.M in ominous red letters bright enough to betray the pistol Dante had laid next to it. But it seemed like nothing more than a few hours had passed since they had sex. The room smelled strongly of semen, fabric softener and—this close to her—cheap shampoo.Time stood still whenever Dante was with Jackie. He knew quite well that reality awaited him outside the doors of the hotel, outside of her arms, but while he was with her, his many troubles shrunk and the world ceased trying to swallow him whole, flesh and bone included.Even in the gloom, he
JACKIEDante drove as though he meant to frighten her, in that peculiar fashion that she had seen people do in movies sometimes, when they meant to frighten their passengers into silence or verbosity. But he did not ask any more information of her, or her continued silence, which would have been unlikely. This left her to wonder what his endgame was. Was his plan to orchestrate an accident? To kill them both? He was intense, she granted him that. But he never appealed to her as suicidal.'Dante, what are you doing?' She asked tentatively.He kept his eyes on the road, never blinking. 'Is it not obvious?''You can stop the car. Stop the car, let's talk. It doesn't have to be this way.' She said. Now he looked at her. The rage that had returned had now dimmed in his eyes. Instead, there was only exhaustion. Soul-swallowing exhaustion.'You know,' he told her, 'you were the one person in this world that I believed I could grow to trust. Really trust. The one person. And then you just h
PROLOGUE When Jackie kissed him, she felt something. This is not to say that all those other times with men who had somehow just caught her eye, Jackie had not felt anything at all. She had felt a lot, in truth. The first time with Andrew, a beautiful man with hair the colour of lacquered gold whom she had met attending a student conference, she had felt only warm. Nothing else. She felt warm when he slipped inside of her underneath the covers. They rocked each others bodies, back and forth, swinging like a sweet pendulum made of limbs and flesh, gasping, clawing at each other's skin, but not seeing each other, because the lights had been turned off. Andrew was that sort of man, the sort that turned off the lights before he undid a woman's clothes. He had a sad politeness about him that could almost be mistaken for sweetness if you did not recognize it for what it was. There, in that air-conditioned room, under the hotel's pristine sheets, Jackie had felt only warm, like all the o
Chapter OneBIG JACK When the last shipment came in, Jack Maeto, was at the stash house, waiting. He was in his work clothes: a limp pair of black overalls, a yellow scarf tied loosely round his neck, knotted at his nape, old work boots at his feet. Besides the ring he received as a gift from his wife at the altar, Big Jack wore no jewelry. Even though she was long gone and it was lusterless silver, near tarnishing, it was adornment enough for him. It would always be. A man whose notoriety had earned him the moniker, Big Jack, he was as the name suggested. Thickset, thick arms, thick voice. All around him, workers in similar apparel swarmed, moving boxes to the far end of the room, trying to make space for the new shipment. It came, and the store's single door was dragged aside to accommodate the van, its tires screeching its displeasure as it went. The truck rolled in. Big Jack knew all his drivers by name. He had to, considering the fragile nature of his shipment. You did not hand
Chapter TwoDANTEIt was snowing when the phone rang the first time, and Dante was at the corner store buying groceries for the night. They had come early this year, the snowflakes, suddenly filling the sky and blocking out the sun, thin tufts of white drifting downwards like brown leaves from trees in autumn, like locks from God's scalp. Only this morning, children played at the basketball court, scuffing knees and bruising elbows, jumping several feet in the air to dunk worn-out basketballs in the even more worn net. It was still warm outside. Not enough to warrant sun-dresses and bare thighs, but not frigid enough to make people encase themselves in coats or carry parasols with them, hurrying as they went, looking like frozen burritos. The cold had crept up on them, on the entire New York, out of nowhere.At the store, Dante's fingers were freezing. He had forgotten his mittens at home. He pulled the coat tight around his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets for warmth.
Chapter ThreeJACKIE It was nearing dusk and Big Jack had not made it to yet another graduation. The fact that she had expected his absence did not make it hurt any less, and the fact that his absence could still hurt her made Jackie realize she had not changed. She was the same after all these years. She was still the same girl she was when she was ten years old, a pinning braces-wearing girl, waiting for her father to make it home in time for Christmas. Jackie sat on one of the seats at the convocation auditorium long after everyone else had left, savouring the quietness. The note of finality it had. She was still swaddled in her graduation gown, wide like a caftan. The tassel of her hat hung before her, swishing in the evening wind. The air in San Diego was like the air inside a kitchen: crisp and warm, still tepid at the start of December. The snow often came quite late in San Diego. But unlike Big Jack, at least it came. When it began to get darker, the sky obfuscating from
Chapter 4JACKIE It was the afternoon after graduation night that Jackie finally saw the numerous calls on her phone. They were all from her father. On her phone, she had saved his name as Big Jack, the moniker everyone knew him by. It was amusing sometimes, how the name made him sound impressive and colossal, but it was she, a six year old with eyes like white oil and lips like cramped petals, who started calling him that. Suddenly, everyone they knew took up the name, and it stuck. If she was Little Jack, then he was Big Jack. It made sense at the time.Her mouth tasted of vileness when she awoke. It was bright outside, a watery, egg-yolk sun hovering above, its light spilling through the shutters weakly. Her eyes were still swimming from all the liquor she had drank the night before when she saw them, the missed calls lighting her phone. She had picked the device to check what the time was. Jackie made to toss the phone back onto the mattress before she noticed the notifications.
Chapter FiveDANTE The pale, ash skinned man lying on the gurney before Dante was not his father, was not Raymond Bianchi. This man had hazel eyes that were wide open, ugly feet, and a small chest. He must have been in an accident the way his body was broken, the way the bones in his feet were shattered like a China doll's. One of his ankles was twisted, and his arms were scratched badly, his fingers bloody, as though he had been clawing at something. Perhaps, the something which had inevitably lead to his death. In the greenish brown of his eyes, there was crimson, and by the expression of wide-eyed shock that they held, by the peeling back of his lips, you could tell that his death had been sudden, that it had surprised even him.Dante did not care for the man, did not care to find out how he had died. The body that he was there to identify had a face like his, a face that he had seen crinkle with a smile a few days ago, a face that he had seen repeatedly all his life. He was at a