Chapter 7
*Two Days Earlier*
Enrico was totally at a loss for what to do. He exhausted all of his leads after only a day or so of looking, and at this point, was just pretending to do so and hoping David would forget about it.
No such luck.
“This is your mess to clean up, Enrico.”
“You compromised the operation, Enrico.”
“Gotta stop thinking with your dick, Enrico.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Enrico had gotten really good at tuning him out and instead running through Nicki Minaj’s verse in Monster in his head whenever he was getting reamed out. Still, he needed to figure something out because now his job was being threatened. Sure, he could go find other work with one of his cousins or something, but he had been looking forward to a summer not spent doing manual labor and sweating his balls off. Plus, chicks dug the bowtie, and he had gotten a ridiculous amount of action since taking this job.
It was respectable, unlike most construction jobs he’d worked. Ironically, he didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Somehow, he’d ended up getting them dirty in a whole new way. Whatever was on that memory card, it was serious shit. If David had hair, Enrico thought it would probably be falling out at this point.
He’d been particularly agitated when Enrico had seen him earlier that day and said that he had to leave the premises to meet with his contacts about the progress. Enrico was supposed to hold things down, as the actual general manager was out on vacation that week. This meant he had the keys to the castle… or, Diamond Palace, rather.
Sometime in the middle of his shift, a balloon vendor came in with a delivery for a Quinceañera later that day; only, the party itself was scheduled for two days later.
David had instructed Enrico only to call him for emergencies, and while this might have qualified as one, he wanted to try and sort it out himself first, and risk upsetting his boss further, and potentially losing his job over this. He wouldn’t have put it past David to implode entirely after the way he’d been acting before he left.
Once he used his special set of GM keys to access David’s office, he was able to look everything up and contact the parents of the soon-to-be fifteen-year-old birthday girl. It turned out that they were the ones who made the error and would, therefore, eat the cost.
It was only after the vendor was gone that Enrico realized he’d left the spare balloons in the office for him to deal with.
With an eye roll and scoff, Enrico looked around for a pair of scissors to make the job go faster. Maybe he would even suck some helium and record some voice texts to his little cousin; she always loved that. The memory of the times he’d done that before brought a warm smile to his face.
The smile, however, began to fade, as Enrico spotted another memory card stuck in the card reader on David’s desk. He’d never seen that card reader before, though he’d been in this office many times. It was also typical that David would ream him out for being careless when he’d not only left the thing unguarded but actually plugged in. Enrico was the only one with a key to the room, but still, it wasn’t as though David had entrusted him out of anything other than desperation.
He shouldn’t look. He really shouldn’t.
Grabbing a bunch of the lavender and pink mylar balloons, with Monica written on them in fancy cursive, he dragged them over and sat down at the desk. Locating the scissors and quickly popping a few of them so he could say that was all he was doing if anyone came in, he navigated to the desktop and clicked on the card.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at exactly. A spreadsheet with names, which all looked to be female. Details like age, height, weight, ethnicity. His forehead scrunched upon noting they were all of Hispanic origin, with ages ranging from six to twenty-eight. His hand spilled on the mouse, revealing a column of the spreadsheet he hadn’t seen.
It was a list of prices.
“What the fuck?”
Quickly, he closed out of the spreadsheet and went to look at the other files. One was labeled “photos” with the same date range as the spreadsheet had in its title. The sickening feeling in Enrico’s stomach had already been building, but when the first photo he opened was of a little girl in a holding cell, he immediately turned and vomited into David’s trash can.
𓂃🖊
Enrico did not sleep that night. He’d taken out most of his fury on Monica’s balloons before jamming them, overflowing, into David’s trash can and throwing the whole thing into the catering hall dumpster. Then, he’d passed the keys on to the most trustworthy staff member and left.
Unsure what to do or where to go, he ended up driving around aimlessly for a while, trying to wrap his head around the incredibly fucked up discovery he’d just made. He’d never known exactly what he’d been helping with, but David had made it sound like it had to do with drugs. Drugs, he was used to. He knew five drug dealers himself; he’d grown up with them. He wasn’t there to judge; it was live and let live… but this? This was a whole other level. Evil.
Every time he thought about it, he felt bile rise in his throat.
Eventually, he ended up at a police station. However, telling the front desk sergeant that he had “discovered some fucked up shit” was not exactly the fastest way to get in the door, and he was pretty sure his bowtie/white button-down combo was making him seem more deranged than respectable, for a change. They’d made him wait for an extremely long time in their lobby and, eventually, told him he could come back to speak to a detective in the morning.
And so, there he was. Back in that lobby, having been eaten up from the inside out all night long. Horror and guilt in equal measure, from the part he’d been playing in this, and the consequences he’d likely face as a result.
He didn’t care. If he could take down David’s operation, he would suffer whatever consequences were necessary.
“You work at Diamond Palace?” a female voice said. He looked up to see a tall blonde in a black suit that screamed no nonsense.
“Ye- yeah,” he said, then cleared his throat after his voice had come out gravelly.
The woman looked at him as if she knew. Knew exactly what he’d just found out. She must know, too, or else there’s no way he would even be meeting her.
“I’m Detective Gladstone,” she said, holding out a hand, which he took. Her grip strength surprised him, and he was sure he’d read her correctly purely based on her style choices. “Right this way,” she added with a flick of her head. He followed in the wake of her heels echoing loudly through the halls of the precinct.
“Man, the last time I was at one of these places, I was goin’ to a different kinda room,” he said with what would have been good humor had he not been so exhausted.
Without missing a beat, and while motioning for him to sit, Detective Gladstone said, “Three stints in juvie, two for theft, the other for possession with intent to sell. Locked up twice since then, once for disorderly conduct in a bar and another for indecent exposure in Thompson Park. Also, your driving record is a masterclass in breaking the law just enough not to get your license revoked, and I have rarely seen someone with that many parkway toll violations get an EZ-pass, man.”
Enrico’s mouth hung open. Detective Gladstone simply smiled and sat.
“Now, please tell me you brought me hard evidence of what those scumbags are doing, and I will happily absolve you of guilt for any part you played in it before knowing what you were doing.”
His heart sank. Between the balloons and the vomiting, and the need to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible, it had not occurred to him to take the memory card with him.
“But,” he said, perking up with an idea, “Aren’t you gonna raid the place? I’m telling you the evidence is there, so can’t you go in and get it?”
“I can’t get a warrant without hard evidence, or I would have raided the place already. All I have right now is speculation, an anonymous tip, and of course, you,” she said with a heavy sigh. “Why don’t you start at the beginning so I can get everything on record, at least, and then we can talk about how you can help us with the next steps?”
𓂃🖊
Thankfully, David’s vomit-filled trash can, which had been seen by other staff, had garnered him a credible excuse for having left early that day and not returned the next. Food poisoning —not from food at the hall— had been his reason, and with the corroboration of his fellow staff, David had bought it.
It was now the day of Monica’s Quinceañera, and Enrico felt his nausea return momentarily when the same balloon vendor with identical pink and lavender balloons pulled up outside the hall.
Feeling like he might, in fact, vomit, he quickly asked a fellow staff member to switch jobs with him. For big parties like this, a small team needed to be in the back working on the dessert hour from early in the day. It was a bit less action (no tips slipped into his pocket by drunk old women in exchange for an ass grab), but it was quiet work and would give him more time to ready himself for what he needed to do.
He was scooping raspberry sorbet for the adult intermezzo glasses, which would then be topped with champagne when he heard an argument outside a back window.
Placing down his scooper, and looking around to check no one was watching, he crept over to the window and stuck two gloved fingers between the blinds. His eyes widened instantly.
He had looked out just in time to see David get punched in the gut, bringing him to his knees. Three huge guys stood around him, speaking in low tones.
David’s voice was a high-pitched whine when he responded, which carried easily through the window glass.
“Please, I just need more time, I’ll find the missing card! Please don’t hurt my wife. Just let her go; she has nothing to do with this!”
“You ain’t gonna have a wife pretty soon unless you tell us who took it.”
“I told you, I don’t know! It must have been someone posing as a guest! Maybe the cops know more than you—”
Enrico gritted his teeth and winced as a large black boot drove right into David’s gut. Gently pulling his fingers back to release the blinds, Enrico took a deep breath and steeled himself. It was now or never. He had to get that evidence.
One of his fellow dessert team members walked in and asked where he was going.
“My stomach again. Sorry,” he said, passing the sorbet scooper to her and exiting the room.
He didn’t have keys this time, but something told him he wouldn’t need them. Adrenaline and intuition were driving him, and he felt as though he was being moved by forces outside of himself as he entered David’s office, rifled around in the top drawer, and found the card reader, with a card inserted. Working as quickly as possible, not bothering to wipe away the sweat beading down his forehead, he plugged the reader in and clicked on the disk image, just to make sure it hadn’t been wiped.
Success.
He ripped it out, then replaced the reader back in the drawer, but not before locating another —probably empty— card and slotting it in. He also grabbed another random card in the drawer, in case he got caught and needed a decoy. Feeling proud that he’d thought of that little move, he closed the drawer with a smirk, then slipped out of the office, and off to the bathroom. Once inside, he hid the correct card as best he could, still keeping it with him, and went back to work.
David had left, which he had expected, and the GM had taken over. When it was finally time for a dessert presentation, Enrico was the one in charge of making sure that each of the tables would be brought out in the correct order. The tables themselves were curved and on wheels, so that when the time came, they could be wheeled theatrically out onto the dance floor and assembled in a circle, with a staff member manning each station.
There was a chocolate fondue table, with a tall fountain, another with an array of cupcakes and donuts, another with pastries and coffee, and another with every type of cookie imaginable, as well as little glasses of various milks. Finally, the station he would be manning was the pièce de résistance, the bananas foster table. As it was being pushed out, he would ignite the alcohol in the pan, causing a tower of flames to fly into the air and a rush of oohs and aahs from the crowd.
Only, just before it was time to start rolling the table out, he realized that he hadn’t brought the already flambéd bananas to the station.
“Shit, the bananas! I’ll be right back!” he shouted to his crew, who responded with shrieks of horror at realizing they might miss their entrance cue.
Enrico hauled ass to the kitchen where he’d left the dessert, needing to quickly cut through the hallway nearest the ballroom. The lights had been turned off in preparation for their entrance, as they never wanted guests to see what was coming until it was being wheeled out.
This would be his last task of the night, as he planned to leave after the dessert hour. He didn’t care about the job; he could lose it, but Monica was counting on him, and he knew it would all fall apart if he wasn’t there to manage it.
He very nearly made it, too, but on his way back, platter of bananas in hand, the small amount of light leaking into the hallway seemed to disappear suddenly.
And that was the last thing Enrico saw before he was no longer able to see at all.
😭😭😭
I put off writing this all week, even though/because I knew what it would entail. I hope you enjoyed the POV shift, it was the only way I felt I could tell this part! Back to Maxine and Miles next chapter, and some Gladstone/Brooks as well.
Hugs! thank you for reading!