A Trace of Revenge

by Lyle Howard

  Standing an impressive six and a half feet tall in his hand-crafted Italian loafers, Nick Coltello was a piranha in an angelfish’s clothing. Although Coltello himself would be the first to admit he had been dealt a runt hand when it came to his looks, he never lacked the two qualities it took to interest his concept of the ideal woman: money and power. He had no doubt that it was these two features that had made him so irresistible to his wife, Mary; but then, life had a whimsical way of balancing the scales. Married for nearly ten years, he had never been faithful to her for more than ten days at a stretch (including his honeymoon).

  Clean shaven, and with his jet-black hair tied back in a small ponytail, this living scarecrow was the walking embodiment of the club that his New Jersey family had established. Coltello governed his underworld empire from his lushly-appointed office suite at the rear of The Three Aces. Some of his opulent conveniences included a full bathroom with a shower, and a walk-in closet containing a complete wardrobe of imported European suits, shirts, and neckwear. Then there was his most valued amenity: a garish bedroom hideaway that sported mirrors covering every square inch of available wall or ceiling space. To say that Nicky the Knife never lacked for any of his creature comforts would be putting it mildly. As a precaution, and because he was not particularly known for his passive demeanor, Coltello had also had the outer walls of the suite double-insulated with soundproofing to keep some of the more disillusioning aspects of his business within the confines of his private domain.

  Appearance was Nicky the Knife’s calling card, and he was a master at plying his trade. To his adoring community, he was a dapper enigma, who unselfishly bought up overgrown, weed-infested tracts of land and converted them into neighborhood parks where inner-city children could have a secure environment in which to play. He was a gangly savior, who single-handedly subsidized these safe havens where kids of all ages and backgrounds could participate in organized sports and learn that there was more to life than just street gangs and drive-by shootings. That was how the public perceived Nicholas Coltello. But the public was dead wrong.

  It was customary for Nicky the Knife to his hold daily council between five and seven o’clock in his office in the back of the club. No one knew how or when this tradition had started; it was just the way it had always been. After the day’s business had been handled, Coltello would sit behind his desk and wait for his Lieutenants to arrive. Sometimes he would uncork a bottle of imported Chianti and listen attentively to what his underlings had to report. Other times, such as today, the Knife was too agitated to enjoy what he considered one of life’s simple pleasures.

  Estefan Padron, an oafish-looking brute with short-cropped black hair, tramped into Coltello’s elegant office on this evening to find the lanky kingpin pacing around the room, trying to decide the appropriate place to hang a few new pictures of his wife and himself, taken at yet another charity function. Padron, who was one of the few people who could stand nose to nose with his boss, cheerfully offered to help.

  Coltello slipped a couple of threepenny nails between his lips and held one of the pictures against one of the walls to judge the right placement. “What? You don’t think I can hang a couple of freaking pictures all by myself?” He grunted, in his crude Jersey accent.

  Padron managed a fractured smile, which coordinated well with his boxed-in nose. “Of course not, Nick.”

  “You think that I need to hire a carpenter to hang a frame?” Coltello asked, the unpolished inflection of his words making him sound even more menacing.

  Padron, who revealed the only slightest trace of his Cuban ancestry through his accent, grew increasingly jittery with each passing moment. “I...I didn’t say that, Boss. I just offered to help.”

  “Well, that’s what you were thinking, am I right?”

  Tipping the scales at a hefty three hundred twenty pounds, Padron was not a person that was easily intimidated by anyone, but Nicky the Knife scared the shit out of him. Whenever Nick got into one of these psychotic moods, there was only one thing to do...clear out!

  “Maybe I should come back later, Boss?” The burly henchman stammered.

  Coltello was getting more and more annoyed with his picture arrangement dilemma.

  Padron took a few steps back. “I mean, when you’re not so busy?”

  Nick shook his head, disgusted at not finding just the right spot for the photos. “Park your ass in one of those chairs, Jumbo. We need to talk.”

  Padron took a seat in front of the desk and watched uneasily as his employer began to stride around the office, brandishing the claw hammer in one hand, the nails clenched tightly in his other.

  The big man tried but failed valiantly to cross his legs, but they were the size of tree trunks and just as flexible. “So, what’s so important that we need to talk in private, Nick?”

  Coltello stretched his neck to one side until he heard a comforting “crack” of the vertebrae. All this tension was wreaking havoc on his alignment. “Being alone with me bothers you?”

  Padron’s fingernails dug deep into the arms of the black leather chair. “Well... yeah...I mean...you’ve got the other guys waiting outside watching the dancing boobies, when we usually all meet together. I do something wrong, Boss?”

  Nick toyed with the hammer in his hand. The weight felt just about right. “How long we known each other, Estefan?”

  The big man looked up at the ceiling. “Jeez, I don’t know...ten years maybe?”

  Nicky The Knife shrugged indifferently. “Yeah, that’s just about how long I got it figured for too.”

  Padron continued to stare up at the acoustic tiles above his head, trying to be more precise, but he wasn’t very sharp when it came to adding and subtracting. “Maybe it could be eleven.”

  Coltello exhaled onto a garish diamond ring that dressed up one of the fingers holding the nails, and then rubbed the stone against his lapel to polish it. “And I been good to you for all that time haven’t I?”

  Padron’s fleshy jowls flapped like a turkey’s wattle as he nodded in agreement. “Definitely, Boss...definitely. You have been good to my family and me! Why just the other night Teresa and I were…”

  Coltello shot Padron an armor-piercing glare. “I’m not done talking.”

  Padron waved one of his fingers in front of his mouth as if to warn himself to keep quiet.

  “You know that over the years, whenever I’ve had a delicate matter that needed to be dealt with, I’ve always counted on you.”

  Padron’s chest puffed up proudly. “Because you can count on me to always do the job right the first time, Boss!”

  Coltello examined the pronged end of the hammer by holding it up and twisting it in his hand. “And you’ve never second-guessed any of my orders...”

  Padron shook his head. “Never, Boss! Not even once!”

  “And you’ve always been on the up and up with me...”

  The big man squirmed in the chair and placed his hand over his heart. “Always, Boss!”

  “So last week when I asked you to handle that Guatemalan punk who thought he could deal his rocks on my streets, you took care of him, right?”

  Padron gazed up at the clock hanging on the wall behind Coltello’s desk. Only five minutes had passed since he had first entered the office, but this unexpected interrogation was making it seem like a lifetime. “What’s left of him is planted in the concrete field, Boss! Just like I always do!”

  Coltello could feel his anger boiling up inside of him. “So tell me, how the hell did you find the kid?”

  “You know, Boss...the usual way...one of our guys on the street told me where his crib was.”

  Taking up a position behind Padron’s chair, Nicky the Knife rolled his eyes. Crib...he hated that ghetto slang bullshit!

  “So you did it in his house...” Coltello confirmed, making sure to emphasize the word he preferred.

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” Padron giggled, “right there in his living room while he was watching a Seinfeld rerun.”

  Coltello undid the rubber band that was holding his ponytail together. His hair fell limply to his shoulders. “Messy?”

  Padron could still visualize himself pulling the trigger, and then, the scattered flecks of batting as they floated to the ground, passing lazily through a shaft of sunlight that had suddenly appeared in the back of the couch. The memory was so vivid he could still almost feel the sensation of walking around to the front of the couch and seeing the Guatemalan impaled on that same brilliant spike of light. He just stood there, transfixed by the repulsively surreal sight, marveling at how the shimmering spear protruded from the bloody opening in the dead guy’s chest. “Well, I don’t think anybody’s gonna be entertaining on that sofa ‘till they get it reupholstered!” the big man chortled.

  “And then you searched the place and found his stuff?”

  “Sure did, Boss! I handed over nearly five kilos of it to Jimmy D. on Friday afternoon!”

  Nicky’s right hand noticeably tightened around the handle of the tool. “And the money?”

  The single black eyebrow that stretched above Padron’s eyes began to twitch involuntarily. “Money?”

  Where his complexion would typically flush with indignation at the mere thought of an employee’s duplicity, now Coltello’s face had grown red as a match tip, and nearly twice as combustible. “Am I suddenly not talking English here?” he snarled, with his voice intensifying. “Did I fucking stutter you pezzo de mirda? The Cash! Dinero! Lira! Which one of these terms do I gotta use, to help you better understand a three-word question?”

  “I don’t know what money you’re talking about, Boss!”

  Nicky The Knife tapped the head of the hammer against the back of Padron’s skull. “Two hundred and thirty large, you fat prick! That’s what I’m talking about!”

  Padron lifted his bulk out of the chair and held up his hands defensively. “I...I don’t know nothing about no two hundred-thirty grand, Boss,” he stammered. “I sw... swear to you!”

  Even though Coltello looked anorexic compared to the barrel-chested killer, the claw hammer tended to equalize the weight advantage. Nick grabbed Padron by the necktie and pulled his petrified eyes inches from his own. Spittle flew from the corner of Coltello’s mouth as he foamed like a rabid mongrel in Padron’s face. “Are you gonna stand here and lie right to my face, you overstuffed bag of shit?”

  If strong bladders hadn’t run in his family, Estefan Padron would have peed in his pants. “I...I...”

  Coltello swung the hammer with all of his might, burying the prongs deep into Padron’s forehead. The big man collapsed to his knees, his vacant eyes rolling up as if staring at the prongs protruding just above them. Over and over again, Coltello mercilessly pounded the hardened claws into soft flesh and brittle bone and then ripped them back out. The big man’s body flailed as his brain short-circuited. Continuing headlong into the muddled realm of derangement, Nicky the Knife would accentuate each sickening blow with one word per stroke.

  “No...one...ever...steals...from...me...and...lives!”

  When they burst into the office, it took three of Coltello’s men to pull him off the writhing body. Rock music from the nightclub flooded into the room as Jimmy Diaz, Coltello’s right-hand man, grabbed the hammer at the apex of its arc and pried the bloodied tool out of his employers’ maniacal grip.

  “Let go, Nicky! That’s enough. He’s more than dead.”

  Coltello was a frenzied mess. “The fat fuck was stealing from me!”

  Diaz, a thin, but deceptively strong man, let the hammer topple to the blood-stained carpet. “You swore to me that all you were gonna do was talk to him!” he reprimanded, trying not to look down at the mangled corpse lying at his feet. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, shaking his head disgustedly. “Why didn’t you just shove a lit stick of dynamite up his ass? It would have been a hell of a lot cleaner!”

  Coltello wiped the hair out of his face with a blood-soaked hand. “Because you can’t hang pictures with dynamite,” he growled.

  Diaz surveyed the room. “Look at this fucking place! This is your damned office, Nicky! How do you suggest we get rid of this dead whale? Drag him through the fucking nightclub?”

  With the front of his two thousand dollar suit drenched in blood, Coltello took a step back and tried to regain his self-control. “That son-of-a-bitch was stealing from me. I could see it in his eyes!”

  No matter how many times Diaz’s men had witnessed Coltello jump the rails like this, it always managed to scare the hell out of them.

  “You’re out of control, Nick!” Diaz urged. “You need to calm down, or you’re gonna give yourself a stroke!”

  Coltello wiped the back of his clenched fist across his cheek. He stared at the blood for a long moment, and then, with a cat-like movement that caught the other two henchmen by surprise, he spun around and pointed one of his gore-spattered fingers at them. “And I’ll do the same thing to you if I ever catch one of you mamalukes trying to steal what belongs to me!”

  Diaz, a lifelong friend of Coltello, was one of the few people who possessed the backbone to stand up to the raging crime lord. “Leave them out of this, Nicky!”

  Ever the quintessential clothes horse, Coltello adjusted his blood-soaked jacket back to its appropriate position on his shoulders and felt to make sure the buckle on his belt hadn’t slipped too much out of alignment. “Shut the fuck up, or I swear I’ll...”

  Diaz stepped back from the tide of blood that was spreading across the plush beige carpeting toward his shoes. “I’m not gonna shut up, Nicky. This bullshit has got to stop! You’re out of control again!”

  Coltello snapped his fingers at Diaz’s men and pointed down to the inanimate hulk stretched out in front of his desk. “Bury this bastard out in the concrete field, and then I want every strand of this carpeting replaced by tomorrow morning!”

  Diaz grabbed Coltello by the sleeve. “Are you listening to me, Nick?”

  But he got no response. Diaz had seen this all too often. One minute Coltello was seething with venom and fury, and then, without warning, he would merely turn oblivious to the world around him. It was like someone had flipped a switch inside of his head. Nicky The Knife would just check himself out of the Hotel Reality, and withdraw into a nearly catatonic state of apathy.

  After each of his sadistic rampages—which were becoming more and more frequent—the mobster’s brain would just short-circuit, as though overloaded by the violence he had just committed. And just like now, his face would become void of all expression, and his eyes would glaze over with an all too familiar, deer-in-the-headlights stare. It was a chilling scenario, played out time and time again, that had to be seen to be believed. Diaz wasn’t a shrink, but it didn’t take one to understand that if Nicky didn’t get some help soon, these reoccurring episodes would eventually trash everything they had worked so hard to accomplish.

  Diaz and his men stood speechless as Coltello, still in his stupor, abruptly began to peel off his clothes in the middle of the office and drop them haphazardly on the floor. “I got to take a shower now,” he said, dreamily. “Make sure you burn the suit.”

  “Nicky!” Diaz pleaded.

  He was already down to his underwear and socks and heading for the cold shower that always managed to snap him out of his delusion.

  Diaz’s men stared at their second-in-command with a mixture of dread and wide-eyed bewilderment. “Just do what he says, guys,” he shrugged back at them, doubtfully. “I’m running out of answers. I just don’t know how to handle this anymore.”

  With the drone of the shower coming from the adjoining bathroom, there was a collective pause taken for reflection and prayer as all three men huddled over their colleague’s mutilated cadaver. After the somber moment had passed, the taller of the two he
nchmen was the first to break the memorial silence. “Jeez Jimmy,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “You really think Padron would’ve pinched the Guatemalan’s bankroll?”

  Diaz gazed down at what was left of Estefan Padron’s pitifully contorted face and crossed himself in respect. “Not in a million years!”

  7

  A fish out of water...a sore thumb...a fifth wheel...how many other tired clichés could he think of to describe how he was feeling right now? As he patiently waited in the line for his turn to fork over the One Eleven Club’s exorbitant fifty-dollar cover charge, he became acutely aware that he was the only person dressed in a business suit. Amid the flamboyant and boisterous crowd, he suddenly felt as gray as his suit. After ten minutes of creeping along the wall, he finally reached the entrance, paid his admission, and had the back of his hand stamped. “No chance of you wanting to check my identification, eh?” He ribbed the no-necked bouncer. His weak attempt at humor was greeted with a vacant stare and an order to go in or fuck off.

  With a gracious smile, he held the door open for a leather-clad woman, whom he could have sworn was smoking a joint. When she failed to acknowledge his act of chivalry, he just chalked it up to the country’s declining moral values. Perhaps he had set his expectations a bit too high, but he decided he should look upon this little adventure as a journey of enlightenment and discovery...kind of like Neil Armstrong first landing on the moon. His instincts would prove accurate, for indeed, it was like stepping foot on another world.

  The throbbing bass that reverberated throughout the nightclub bludgeoned his body like a jackhammer. As he hunted for a square foot of clear floor space, he was confident that at any moment, his eardrums were going to rupture. The harsh tribal chanting they tried to pass off as harmony was a far cry from the soothing melodies served up by his country club’s thirty piece orchestra at last year’s Christmas Gala. But it only took a quick visual survey of the club’s customers to confirm his suspicions that an appreciation of fine music wasn’t what most of these people came here for.