Crime & Counterpoint

by Daniel, M. S.

  As soon as that door shut, another opened, and Carter’s attention immediately diverted towards Shelley’s room with commendable eagerness.

  She stepped out, and her gaze flicked around the room first before settling on Carter. He might have noticed the disappointment in her eyes except he was too busy taking in her divine appearance. The satin designer gown she wore was a strapless, fuchsia confection which accentuated her slender curves and flared at the bottom skirt, giving her a divine hourglass figure. A simple tear-drop diamond hung suspended against her caramel skin from a thin gold chain. She’d pulled her long, mahogany hair back at the sides to show off the matching set of earrings and her elegant neck. Gracing her feet were silver, crystal-studded sandals that added an additional two and a half inches to her 5’7” height. She could easily pull off such a chic, bare-shouldered look with her olive skin thanks to her mixed heritage.

  Shelley stared at him expectantly, the rose of her dress magnifying her large brown eyes. Her tinted lips curved in an amused smile as she awaited Carter’s assessment.

  A slow grin broke out across his classic features, and he came towards her, awe and appreciation written in his gaze. “Beautiful doesn’t even do you justice.”

  She beamed genuinely then.

  “God, I’m afraid to even touch you.”

  “Then I’ll touch you,” she said, reaching up to fix his tie though it didn’t need it.

  He groaned pleasurably. “Don’t say that to any other guy. They’ll take it the wrong way.”

  She tilted her head and assumed an innocent expression. “What way?”

  He just smirked. His hands gripped her smooth arms, sliding up them, following her shoulders’ contours. “I’ve, uh, been wanting to ask you something. Officially,” he said, drawing her close. He fished inside his pocket and came out with the same glittering ring.

  Her face lit with uncertainty though she knew what daddy wanted.

  “You don’t have to give me an answer right now if you don’t want to.” He slipped the ring on her fourth finger. “But I thought it might help your image today.”

  She smiled again but less brilliantly, shoving aside thoughts of Zach. “Okay,” she said softly.

  “Okay, you’ll think about it? Or…” he asked, brows elevated.

  “I’ll marry you,” she said, forcing herself to look happy.

  He grinned fully like she’d made his life. Lifting her face, he slanted his mouth across hers, expressing his thankfulness.

  Shelley tried not to compare, not to think of Zach. But she couldn’t stop remembering the sweet torture of being in his embrace. The passionate release she’d felt as she kissed Zach in return came back to her. These thoughts warmed her and took her away from the moment, carrying her to a fairytale where she could have her soul’s desire.

  But Carter’s hand pressed into her spine, playing a note that was off-key. And her blissful hunger died. She realized where she was, with whom she was, and she wrenched her heart back into that secret chest of dreams. Oh my God. Had she really just agreed to marry this man?

  After they parted, Carter was the only one looking like a drugged fool. “You’ve gotten really good. Been practicing?” he teased.

  Her only response was to smile weakly.

  “This might be a little presumptuous,” he said, touching her exquisite, “but I got a room at the Plaza for us. In case you said yes.”

  She attempted to look as upset as possible. “Oh no. I’m expected at the club,” she said gently.

  A fissure of irritation broke through his smile. But he kept his response patient and understanding. “Well, that’s alright. But hey, you won’t have to for much longer.”

  She frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “You let me and Zach worry about that.”

  The very mention of his name caused her to feel sick. As Carter helped her into her coat, the diamond on her left hand became an iron anchor. And suddenly, she wanted to run.

  35

  The ceremony within the centuries’ old spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral had gone by relatively fast, but the reception taking place at none other than the Plaza Hotel dragged on.

  Admittedly, the Grand Ballroom was a spectacular, palatial experience – a place of New York legend. Two opulent chandeliers hung from the twenty-five foot coved ceilings featuring a delicate bas relief. The walls were gilded in sparkling white and gold. Neo-Classical Grecian columns majestically held up the North and East balconies with curved ornamental railings and arched openings. But Zach had long gotten over his fascination with the magic of the space and its scent of rich, mystical history that its recent restoration couldn’t mask.

  He felt trapped, though on the outside, he looked for the most part as if he belonged in this crème de la crème crowd. Since arriving, he’d been earning the unwanted attention of dozens of hungry women. For Carrie’s sake, he’d been courteous thus far, but three hours was pushing it. And at this point, he was willing to take a bullet to get out.

  Hundreds of voices droned like a hive full of mad hornets. Champagne glasses clinked, adding a pitchy and grating dimension to the mix. And an assortment of whining children and crying babies amplified his steadily vamping migraine. There were both a live jazz orchestra and a DJ on the stage. Zach didn’t mind the orchestra so much, but the DJ must’ve had a death wish. If he played “YMCA” one more time, Zach had plans to take his Colt and dispatch those damn turntables to hell.

  Currently, the orchestra was in the middle of a lush number that reeked of wedding-cliché familiarity. The betuxed bandleader crooned in his Michael Bublé tenor, making Zach cringe.

  “Someday, when I’m awfully low… And the world is cold… I will feel a glow just thinking of you… And the way you look tonight…”

  He tried not to listen to the lyrics, but they were amplified all around him, and he couldn’t escape. The exits were clear on the opposite side of the extensive ballroom, and a turbulent sea of three hundred, teetering-on-the-edge-of-sobriety guests filled the gap. He threw back his shot of whiskey, remembering bitterly what, or rather who, was keeping him here.

  The girl.

  “You’re lovely with your smile so warm… And your touch so soft…”

  She was slow-dancing with daddy at present, just one of many other couples. The diamond on her left hand was back. She was officially Carter’s. In this sparkling, soft-lit setting with the flourishing, dreamlike music and love-drunk atmosphere, watching her smile and laugh and look so damn beautiful stung him powerfully.

  “There is nothing for me but to love you… Just the way you look tonight…”

  “Another?” the sympathetic hotel bartender asked.

  Zach ripped his gaze from Shelley and set the shot glass back down with a nod. But even alcohol wasn’t working. Plandome Manor must have existed in a different plane, some bizarre and yet wonderful reality where he could actually find it in himself to be happy. Even as a kid, that had been the case.

  Taking his whiskey, he threw back the two ounces like it was water. Burned like fire, but when he lowered the shot glass, she was still there.

  Unconsciously, he touched the knot of his ice blue silk tie as his throat clogged up. Forcing himself to look away, he found Carter coming towards him, his mouth sloped at that ‘I know you’re miserable’ angle. In his hands, he held two beers in frosty glasses which he must have gotten from the other bar set-up on the far side of the ballroom next to the country’s worth of professionally wrapped presents.

  “Hey,” Carter said. “Having fun? You know there’s like a hundred women dying to dance with you.”

  Zach exhaled slowly and pushed his empty glass towards the ‘tender – more please.

  But Carter put one of the beers down in front of him, stopping the whiskey from being poured. “Here, try this. Features dried mission figs, spiced cinnamon, vanilla, and some bright wheat-citrus tang.”

  Zach stabbed Carter with a razor glare. “What the hell’s wrong with y
ou?”

  Carter’s grin drooped. “It’s alcohol. Just drink.”

  Reluctantly, Zach did, not even bothering to taste it. The song came to a smooth, crackling end. He turned in time to see Henri and Shelley headed for Carter as applause erupted across the hall. He didn’t want to be around when they reached their destination. “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Just out.” Zach knew Carter wanted more of an explanation, but he couldn’t provide one. As he cut through the crowd, he saw the way Shelley smiled at Carter. It killed. Catching Henri’s eye, he read his silent message.

  One predator to another.

  Zach’s fists balled as pain and fury filled him. Henri Mitchel knew exactly what he was doing in getting him to be Shelley’s undisclosed bodyguard. A man who had no feelings for her wouldn’t risk life and limb. And after all was said and done, it wouldn’t be Zach who got to take her home and make love to her. It would be Carter. Established, steady, Columbia-grad Carter Richards.

  With bleak defiance, Zach looked away, a futile attempt to hide his pain. He spotted his grandmother who smiled at him encouragingly. He didn’t even have the spirit left to smile back. At once, her face changed – loving but pitying now. She knew. Oh boy, did she know.

  As he headed through one set of glass-inlaid double doors, the noise of the reception faded. Letting the door clatter shut, he took a releasing breath in the relative quietude. In the long, silent foyer faintly thumping with the muffled bass of the music, he felt his demons settle and the ache ease.

  He took a deep breath and then slouched his large frame into a chair against the creamy wall. As he sat there, trying to shut down his thoughts, he felt his phone vibrate against his chest.

  The caller ID read ‘unknown’, but he answered anyway, sure of whom it was.

  “Yes?”

  “Room 1121,” the thick accent said. “Take the elevator. Now.”

  36

  The Grand Ballroom Foyer had access to two specially-installed gold-plated elevators. Zach caught the doors of the lift on the right just as they were closing, angling his broad shoulders through them. He cast a halfway apologetic smirk to the three Caucasian men in heavy coats inside, all of whom assessed him with genteel hostility at first.

  He quickly eyed the panel and saw that eleven was lit. Funny. That’s where he was going too. The gleaming doors locked them all in.

  Elevator music was such a trivial banality. The current song was some inane, smooth jazz arrangement of “Christmas Time is Here”.

  Mirrors plated the walls, and through them, he saw one of the men whisper to the other. The dark secret carried to the one who stood directly behind Zach.

  Zach’s skin tightened. The third man slipped his hand into the coat he wore and left it there. Zach didn’t want to give him the chance to pull whatever he had. The first one had a phone and made a call, speaking quietly in a Slavic tongue. Zach only gleaned one word: ‘detective’.

  Not good. He had his off-duty weapon, but he wasn’t about to use it in such tight quarters.

  The digital notification over the door displayed a red six. Close enough.

  He dug his hands into his pockets and made a show of searching for his wallet. “Damn,” he muttered. “Must’ve left my room key downstairs.” He shook his head in self-deprecation and reached forward to press the lobby button but instead slammed the ‘emergency stop’. The lights flickered, the cage rattled. And he braced himself.

  The second man grabbed Zach by the shoulder and shoved his back against the cold wall. The impact caused bullet-hole pain to swell through him. He put up his guard, blocking his face, clenching his gut, steeling himself for each blow. They hit him hard, sparing nothing. He clenched his fists ‘til his knuckles were white, grunting as he held his breath.

  Things began to grow hazy. The pain seemed to wash out, replaced by a familiar burning in his lungs as he depleted his oxygen. But he didn’t dare breathe yet.

  They drove their fists into him repeatedly, and all the while he kept his face covered.

  When they’d plateaued complacency, he breathed suddenly. Noisy air funneled through his flared nostrils, expanding his chest and energizing him. With speed, he brought his knee up hard into one man’s groin and then followed it with a blow to his jaw, which sent his attacker back into the opposite wall. The second man didn’t see Zach’s fist until it was already planted in his pock-marked cheek.

  Zach used the handicap, waist-high metal bar as leverage to launch both feet into the man’s chest, kicking him with such force that he hit the same wall as his comrade and cracked the mirror, passing into oblivion.

  But the sight of the glass web caused him to blanch, and the blood drained from his face. He saw his reflection in obscene fragments. And inside each, there was a hundred different yet similar memories. Instances of time that he could never erase. Each one hit him with the power that none of these men could wield.

  And suddenly, he wasn’t thirty in an elevator at all…

  Whack!

  His head whipped to the right.

  Pain seeped in to his cognizance, and he came out of the liquid haze to an explosion of lights.

  Anger broke out of its well-insulated cage. Eyes lighting up like a ball of fire against a midnight blue sky, he crushed one man’s jaw with an upper cut and then slammed his fist like a sledgehammer into his face. The man slumped to the reflective, glossy floor, nose broken but alive.

  Deep crimson poured from his nostrils, dribbling over thin, cruel lips and pooling in his partially-open mouth, turning his teeth the color of raw meat.

  The last man standing withdrew a compact pistol and squeezed the trigger. The sound rolled like thunder around them, amplifying and deafening. But Zach’s heightened perception saw the bullet before it even left the gun. He ducked, whipped around, and nearly broke the man’s extended arm.

  The bullet ricocheted off the elevator doors. Zach saw the black ice impact the mirrored glass; the wall splintered into another spider web. His striking reflection fractured into sadistic, grotesque pieces.

  Lowering his center of gravity, Zach threw his full weight against the stocky man, pinning him to the broken wall and locking the gun arm in his vice grip. Though a south paw, his right hand sent deathly punches into the man’s head – like a one-speed machine. Fast, hard, accurate.

  After a moment, Zach couldn’t see anything. He was throwing punches but at whom or for what he didn’t even remember. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t even business. It was just him pushing, wanting, needing to hit.

  His teeth clicked, his jaw vibrated. His face had an expressionless rage masquerading the last vestiges of decency which kept him from becoming black. But his conscience had become a buck, staring at the brights of an oncoming vehicle; locked up, frozen, not knowing at what it was looking.

  He breathed hard. His upper body remained rigid, legs spread shoulder width apart, fist contacting flesh, bone, muscle, drawing blood. Beating the unconscious man into nothingness.

  Finally, it was the gun clattering to the floor that killed the blinding lights.

  And he ceased.

  37

  Zach came to himself at once, blinking like he’d been asleep with his eyes open. His chest heaved, and his hand felt like smoking lead. He blanched when he saw the unrecognizable face in front of him. Not his own. But that of the man now covered and smeared in red. It was all over him. Running down his face, streaming out of his ears too. Concussion.

  Zach’s heart crashed like a mountain falling into the sea. He’d done this. The evidence was all over his right hand, warm and oozing between his fingers.

  He swallowed and checked the destroyed man for a pulse. He was alive. They all were, amazingly enough.

  Zach’s breathing slowed and his pulse returned to resting, faster than expected. And now, he was worried about who the second man had called.

  Zach worked quickly. He used the men’s belts to strap them to the handicap bar. Then,
he checked over his appearance in the mirror and saw blood had splattered his white shirt and silk tie.

  Hands glistening with scarlet, he carefully took out his phone and called Carter. He didn’t answer. After that, as much as he hated to, he dialed Shelley. Her honeyed voice stabbed him.

  “Hello?”

  “I need to talk to Carter.”

  “This isn’t a good time. He’s speaking with the state Attorney General.”

  “Tell him I need help,” he said.

  “What did you do now?”

  He bit off a retort, staring at the thousand ugly pieces of himself in that broken mirror. “I’ll be waiting on the sixth floor.” He hung up before she could reply.

  Though itching to get out, he had to know if these men had a room key on them. He searched each of their pockets, glancing at ID’s, taking pics with his cell; he was sure he’d seen their names on the list of Kazanov’s known associates – they were Brother’s Circle. And then at last, he came up with a plastic card in a sleeve marked 1121.

  Quickly, he pried open the elevator doors, calculating that he was only a few feet below the sixth floor. The second set of doors were a little hard to manage and blood oozed out of lacerations in his knuckles as he did so. But after a quick peek down the empty passageway, checking for the butler, he got them open enough to maneuver himself through the opening.

  The doors clamped shut as he stepped down. He straightened and stilled his trembling, pulsating hands.

  With a brisk step, he made it past the elevators and snagged a small white towel from a housekeeping cart stationed in front of an open room. Continuing down the corridor, he wiped at the blood and saw that his appendages didn’t look too bad though they throbbed terribly. He dropped the soiled towel in a trash receptacle and punched through the metal stairwell door. He figured he had about two minutes before Carter came looking for him.

  Entering the only working elevator, Carter hit number six and tried not to think about what could possibly have gone wrong. He’d been in such a good mood ‘til now.