CHAPTER SIXTEEN

By late afternoon, he was making love to a woman who couldn't stop telling him how good it was. It was the same woman that had given her a key to her hotel room when they were at Penelope's supermodel of the year luncheon. Only that day his gut told him to dump that key in the garbage and forget about that woman. Instead of cheating on his fiancée on the biggest day of her career, he went to his headquarters instead.

But they met up again. This time she had flown in from Bethesda to attend the mayor's breakfast celebrating the completion of the Safe Environmental Practices in the Garment District work group initiative. Giorgio had been appointed chair of the work group by the mayor himself, and they had completed their four-hundred-page assessment. The woman, Effie Ross, was an invited guess. And she was determined.

"I won't give you a key this time," she said to him the first chance she saw him alone, "since you won't show up anyway. This time," she said with a sparkle in her eyes, "you're leaving with me."

Giorgio laughed. He liked her spunk, not to mention her ass, and he didn't object.

And that was how he ended up in bed with her in her hotel room. And he was glad he had come. Because it wasn't bad at all. It wasn't great either. He only had great once, and that was with the woman he was thinking about while he was having good with her. The woman that was at this very hour locked up for crimes he knew she didn't commit. He even called Theo while he was still at that breakfast. He was fighting to get her and her brother bail. Giorgio told him to fight harder.

"That's how I like it," Effie was saying to him as he did her. "That's how I like it, Gio, that's how I like it!"

He could do without all of that carrying on whenever he made love to a woman, but since it wasn't love anyway, he didn't give a shit. She kept yelling how good he was doing her, and he kept doing her.

But her moans and groans and how she kept going on about how great it was began to distract him. He knew he was good in bed. Women the world over had told him as much. But this woman wouldn't let it rest. She had a hidden agenda. She wanted to be his lady despite his engagement. She was trying too hard.

"Harder, baby," she started saying as Giorgio pushed in deeper. "Harder. I want it hard!"

And as he started banging her even harder than she probably wanted, almost to the point of raunchiness, Penelope and Shelly stepped off of the elevator on the hotel's nineth floor.

"I'll find a maid to bribe," Shelly said as he made his way around corridors looking for a cleaning crew. They needed the key. He was determined to get that key.

But Penelope kept walking to the hotel room the desk clerk said Effie was staying in. When she heard that Giorgio had left with Effie, her blood boiled. She and everybody in her social circle knew what Effie Ross was about. And he had the nerve to leave with that slut??? Penelope was beyond hurt.

But when she got to the door and placed her ear against it, and she could hear Effie's annoying high-pitched voice moaning and groaning and screaming out as if he was doing her better than she'd ever had, a different emotion overtook Pen. And she had to get in!

She started turning angrily on the doorknob, but it would not open. But just as she was about to try and shoulder it open, a maid came out of the room across the hall. And she didn't hesitate.

"I locked myself out," she said to the maid. "Will you open it for me, please?"

The maid looked at her suspiciously, and was about to tell her in her heavy Spanish accent that she could do no such thing. Hotel policy was that the front desk had to give her a key. But when Pen reached into her purse and handed the woman a one-hundred-dollar bill, there was no conversation nor policy quotes at all. The woman went over, pulled out her key, and unlocked the door. And then she swiftly left the nineth floor.

Pen didn't wait for her to leave. She opened that door with a wide swing and hurried inside. The moans and groans and the bed-shaking was even louder inside, and Pen hurried to the bedroom. But when she saw the man she loved above life itself on top of that trash pile of a woman, pumping his ass off, something broke inside of her.

But when Effie looked at her, and smiled that reptilian smile, Pen no longer saw a man and a woman in bed. She saw red. And she pulled out the fully loaded revolver she always kept on her person, with her small Janardi purse falling to the floor, and she aimed it directly at Effie's smiling face.

Only Effie wasn't smiling anymore. As soon as she saw Pen raise that gun at them, she screamed a bloodcurdling scream and violently pushed Giorgio off of her. Her goal was to get out of that bed and away from the line of fire.

But she didn't make it.

Pen began firing shot after shot as bullet after bullet entered Effie's body even as she had tried to run away.

Giorgio, angry when Effie threw him off of her, and then shocked when he saw Pen with that gun in her hand, cried Penny, no ! But she didn't even hear him. Her entire rage was aimed at that beautiful whore that had deigned to take her place in Giorgio's life. But when she saw Giorgio lunging at her, to take her gun away, she turned her rage onto him and began firing at him too.

One bullet struck him in the shoulder, causing him to fall backwards, and other bullets were about to follow but Shelly had gotten another maid to open the door for him and had run into the bedroom just in time to grab Pen's arm and lift it up and away from Giorgio. Five more bullets, all meant for Giorgio, ended up in the ceiling. Shelly looked devastated at what Pen had done as he removed the gun from her hand, and wrapped her into his arms.

" How could you do this to me? " Pen was screaming at Giorgio from the top of her lungs. " How could you do this to me ?!"

Giorgio had fallen to the floor, with his back against the wall, as he held onto his wounded shoulder. He looked at Pen as she fell into Shelly's arms, crying hysterically, and he knew, because of him, that wonderful life as she knew it was over.

Then he looked at the woman that he had been sharing the most intimate of moments with, a woman whose name he didn't even remember, as she lay dead in a pool of her own blood. Also because of him.

But then Shelly, who loved Pen so much that Giorgio could feel his pain, knew that Pen would get life for what she'd done. He turned her around, placing his hands on her skinny arms, and he told her to tell them that he did it. Blame me , he said. Because he brought her there. Because he wanted her to see what a lowlife piece of shit her fiancé was and then she'd want him instead.

But he never dreamed this would happen.

"It's my fault," he said in tears. "When the authorities come, you tell them I shot them. You tell them it was me. Okay Pen? Okay sweetheart?"

Pen looked at Shelly and nodded her head, her eyes still filled with unshed tears. But then, before he could react, she snatched the gun from out of his hand, put it to her head, and fired.

Shelly screamed in agony, his body shaking in an uncontrollable fit, as she fell into his arms.

Giorgio dropped his head in anguish, rubbing his head with his hands. Then he looked back up as if he knew it was a dream. As if he knew he would wake up.

But Shelly was still screaming as if he was a broken record, stuck in his own terror, unable to find a way out. Pen was laying in his arms, as dead as the floor his hands stopped her from touching. The woman that had just moments before given Giorgio pleasure that was worth his time was already long since gone too. And although Giorgio knew he would eventually recover from his single gunshot wound, he also knew he never would.

Because all this carnage was nobody's fault but his own wanton disregard for the feelings of everybody else in this world but himself.

Because the very purpose of life seemed to seep right out of him.

Because he knew, as sure as he knew his name, that nobody in that room, for all intents and purposes, was getting out of there alive.