Murder and Other Equally Festive Holiday Traditions
Calling his boss a dipshit was the least of his worries
Boyd stretched out in the snowbank and looked up at the stars with a contented sigh. Patting his shirt pocket, he found the Pall Malls and wrestled one free. He lit up, keeping his eyes fixed on the luminary delights overhead.
He should be cold, but whether it be the eight doubles he had at the staff Christmas party, still in full swing through the French doors north of his head, or whether it be the sweat he worked up in the bathroom stall with Scarlet, it mattered little. The warmth in his torso, despite the cold, was comforting, as was the lacy coolness that tickled around the edges of it. He would describe this state as bliss, if not for the dull ache in his lower back that started while he laid the blocks to Scarlet Mannynvali in a hard-pressed bathroom cubicle only moments before.
Ah, Scarlet. The office bicycle and soon-to-be District Principal of Student Support Services — or so she would have you think.
He chuckled to himself, the sound muffled in the hushed air that always accompanied snowfall. The music from the staff party floated out the doors from the other side of the garden from where he lay in repose, having found a charming snowbank. Someone briefly opened a door, and for a moment, Cindi Lauper was caterwauling about Having Fun, albeit at inhumane decibels — because, evidently, that is just what girls wanted to do. Thankfully Cindi was silenced by someone shutting the door.
It was hard to watch a bunch of middle-aged muffin tops try to relive their youth after one too many. God, how he hated them all.
What a bunch of clowns they were, all vying and posturing for promotions and recognition when he alone had discovered the key to success. He’d been rising in the ranks for years and had his eye on the top position — Superintendent. Once the pinhead retired, Boyd would be up, and everybody knew it. Those trailing in his footsteps thought it was education and hard work that would herald their success. Buffoons, the lot of them. Total pricks.
He took a drag off his cigarette and realized it had gone out. He tried to light it again and failed, so he tossed that one and took out another. He took a drag off it and issued a wet cough. The stitch in his back gave him shit, but the cold seeping up from the ground where he laid eased it.
He felt so fucking good it was almost criminal. Pink Floyd’s song stuttered across his mind, Comfortably Numb, and he decided at once he understood the lyrics on a cellular level here in the snow with a ripping buzz on.
“Hello, is there anybody in there…” He couldn’t remember much, but he knew it was better than Cindi Lauper. It was more Fun. There you have it, girls, proof positive you do not have a fucking clue. Then again, he’d decided that long ago.
Had it not been for the snow he rested in, he may have felt a bit feverish. He was getting a little out of shape to be going at a young thing like Scarlet, but she started it.
Note to self: New Year’s resolution — join a gym. There, done.
He felt fitter already.
Hell, he would never be Jason Gorosh. Now, that guy was ripped. However, Boyd doubted even Jason saw the amount of ass he did. Hell, he got more ass than an outdoor loo a Woodstock, but that was because he played the game.
What could he say? He still had it at 35 despite the pillowy belly and receding hairline. Knowing what they wanted and how to play it was one reason for his success with the ladies. The other was he was but one step away from the highest position a school district could offer. There were a few Scarlets in his history, and when he made Superintendent, there would be more.
The key? Work smart, not hard.
Don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, and don’t kiss ass. No sitting in waist-deep piles of reports or attending meetings for him. That was Boyd’s modus operandi, and he rocked it like a fucking boss.
The months he spent investigating Cole Long, the current Superintendent, and the individuals on the board had been the hardest he worked, before or since. And the fruits of his labor were bountiful, indeed.
He would never have to work that hard again. Once his search revealed the backgrounds and shenanigans of the three board members along with the Superintendent himself — well, his succession was a foregone conclusion.
He needed only to let them in on his findings, and Bob’s your uncle, he was next in line and destined for the big office. The Scarlets of the District would be lining up outside his door, offering up a shag for the promise of a corner office.
He adjusted his weight again and considered how the pinch in his back would give him shit tomorrow once he could feel again. He smoked his cigarette while he thought. The music had stopped, and the night had grown very quiet. A door opened somewhere behind him, and he could hear the murmur of voices.
He took another drag on the cigarette — at least he tried to. It had gone out like the one before it. He tossed it and took another from the pack of Pall Malls, now slippery with melted snow.
His hand shook a little as he held the lighter and lit up, but that first drag was heavenly. As he laid there, the first hint of cold seeped through his shirt to his back, and his whiskey-soaked mind played tricks.
He could have sworn he heard his name coming from the room behind him where he assumed staff and colleagues continued their lame assault on the Christmas season and the free bar — although the music was either off or too low to hear.
Maybe he did hear his name. He typically was the life of the party, after all. Maybe Scarlet was looking for him to have a second go-round. Although, he found that hard to believe after the workout he gave her.
As it was, when he let her go, she had swooned and fallen to the floor in the bathroom stall. To her merit, she regained her composure soon enough and was righting herself as he did up his belt.
She had tired herself out playing her game. He got that she wanted to play the role of a respectable colleague and all that. He wasn’t insensitive. Women just wanted to feel in control; they didn’t want to be in control. They wanted — women like Scarlet — to be taken, usually by force. The faux rape was what they wanted, knowing it was all safe and shit. Time and again, that was how he played it.
Well, he would comply because it turned him on like crazy. He was their guy. So he played Scarlet’s little game, and they both found it immensely gratifying — the fake struggle and all that nonsense. She’d put her back into it too, but once her panties came off and he pressed into her, she quieted down pretty quick.
He chuckled to himself, or that had been his intent, but it erupted in another wet cough that left his cigarette soggy and useless. Lighting another was made difficult by the shake in his hands, and he gave it up. He considered getting up because falling asleep in the snow was probably unwise in his current state of inebriation. At any rate, he was content to hang here for a bit longer.
He gazed at the stars overhead. In a battle for consciousness with the alcohol in his bloodstream, he tried to remember the words to Good King Wenceslas, which came out more like Welesness.
No worries. Close enough. Perfectionism was not a fault he needed to address.
Doors flew open behind him, and voices carried through the silence. It wasn’t his imagination this time. His name floated in the thin air amidst the suggestion calling the police was advisable.
What the hell? He couldn’t leave them alone for a minute. Fucking stupid union shits. He tried to sit up, but there was insufficient strength in his torso, what with the stitch in his back.
No, he would finish his smoke and then venture in to deal with their hysteria. No doubt a general case of the vapors — someone in need of some attention — a little ego-stroking. A pat on the back after missing their fearless leader, he thought. He sucked on his cigarette only to find it had also gone out.
He groped around in the snow, trying to find where he dropped the pack of Pall Malls and fumbled with the smooth paper to push it open once he laid his hands on it. Having navigated that hurdle, he pulled a cigarette out and set about trying to light it by way of multiple clumsy attempts to produce a flame on his Bic, all of which failed. Finally, success was his.
Once he had the flame, and in the glow of that flickering light, he saw his crimson hands — sticky and dripping. With strength sufficient to lift his head only a few inches, he gained adequate height to view the snow around his prone body. The shake in his hands increased. Until that moment, he had not realized how weak he was.
Confusion swept over him as the facts tried to align in his brain, but only one thing was clear — that was his blood that painted the snow a festive red. His thoughts, muddled in his alcohol-induced stupor, swung back to his interlude with the curvaceous Scarlet. Her words came back to him. Sort of.
He had stepped back to get the door open, and she hissed something. He’d paid little heed at the time, but it amounted to ‘the last woman you fuck with’ or some such blather. He wasn’t big on after-coitus banter.
That was when he first felt the stitch in his lower back. He did recall with more clarity than he would have thought possible after that many whiskeys that she had called him a ‘motherfucker’. Hardly a ladylike thing to say after he had just done her an epic favor.
He would have loved a drag from his cigarette as he navigated through the recollections, but his arms were now far too heavy. All but completely spent from holding his head up to view the crimson stain around him, he released the burden of his head back into the snow as he heard the voices coming closer.
Someone yelled out, “He’s over here.” The callout was followed by others yelling and footsteps crunching through the snow.
A gasp followed a scream and then more voices and commands.
“Who has their phone on them?”
That was Wayne Marx calling that out, Boyd thought. Wayne headed up finance and thought he was, all that. Boyd’s eyesight, thinning around the edges, continued closing in. A confounding predicament, it was, Boyd thought. As was this complete inability to speak out on his own behalf.
In a distant, less alcohol-soaked part of his brain, a voice whispered in a conspiratorial tone perhaps he was dying. There was too much blood, and where he may have wished to take control of the situation and further define himself as a natural leader, he was unable. Instead, he wanted to giggle, but all that amounted to was a gurgling sound.
“Did somebody call 911?” That voice belonged to Scarlet. He tried to focus on her face but could only make out general shapes.
Someone was rolling him over.
“Don’t move the body.” That was Cole’s voice. So the Superintendent had finally decided to show up.
What a turd, Boyd thought. And what was that about a body?
“Phil’s got 911 on his cell.”
“He’s still alive, so it’s not a fucking body, Dipshit.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Cole said.
Somebody just called the Superintendent Dipshit? That was why they say, don’t drink too much at staff parties. You might call your boss a Dipshit.
“He’s been stabbed.”
And there would be the second reason you shouldn’t get drunk at staff parties, Boyd thought.
“What the fuck?” said several people in unison.
“It’s a switchblade. Looks like he may have had it in his back pocket.”
“What is the ETA on the ambulance, for fuck sakes?”
“Phil’s still on the line with them,” Wayne said.
The beefy Jason Gorosh leaned over Boyd. He gazed past Jason’s thick neck into the stars beyond and focused there as the behemoth looked at the wound on his back.
“For what it’s worth, he wasn’t stabbed with a switchblade,” Jason said. He continued, “Scarlet don’t touch it. Your fingerprints are on it now.”
“I was just going to say you shouldn’t touch that,” Cole said.
“He was stabbed with a shoe?” Nancy asked. Nancy was in finance and not the most useful tool in the shed.
“No. A stiletto is a knife.”
“Then why not call it a switchblade?”
“Because it’s not a switchblade. A switchblade is a switchblade. A stiletto is a stiletto.”
“You don’t need to use that tone,” Nancy said.
“That’s not a tone; this is a tone.” Jason shifted his considerable weight in the snow and pinned Nancy with a glare. That much, at least, Boyd could imagine.
Crunching snow indicated Nancy had left the party.
“So what’s a stiletto?” someone asked.
“It’s a knife.”
“Well I gathered that. But what kind of a knife?”
“The blade doesn’t swing in the same manner as a switchblade, but pokes out.”
“This one has a pearl handle. Scarlet, for the love of God, quit manhandling it.”
Snow crunched as people moved closer to get a better look. Several faces appeared in Boyd’s ever-narrowing field of vision.
“Sorry, but shouldn’t we remove it?” Scarlet asked.
“No.” Several voices said in unison.
“So what? We just let him bleed out?”
Jason’s baritone spoke up again. “He probably had it in his back pocket and it sprang when he dropped into this here snowbank.”
This here? What a tool, Boyd thought. They just needed to sit him up, and he would be right as rain. He was, after all, destined for the big office, and some cheap slag like Scarlet would not keep him from it. If he could only speak and take command of the situation.
Phil chimed in. “Ambulance is 20-minutes out.”
“Thank God,” several voices said.
“Thank, God,” Scarlet said.
Well fuck, thought Boyd.
