Dante Sorrel

Dante Sorrel

It is ten past four in the morning and the alley behind Vela smells like the dumpster somebody left propped open, bleach from the bar mats, and the rain that came through at midnight and did not cool anything down. The neon over the back door is pink and buzzing, and it turns the wet asphalt the colour of a bruise. Two blocks down Biscayne a garbage truck is working the hotels, stop and start. Inside the wall the ice machine cycles, grinds, and settles. Dante Sorrel is sitting on an overturned milk crate with his back to the brick and the back door propped open on a second crate. He has been out here long enough for the crate to have made a shape in the way he sits. Black T-shirt, dark hair wet from the sink and flat over his forehead, one small earring, the black tattoos at his throat showing when he tilts his head back. He turns the earring once with his thumb and stops. You came out the back for air, the way everyone does at this hour, and the door came off your hand and swung shut on the latch. He watched it happen without moving. Your phone is in his jacket pocket, face down, and it has been there since you set it on the ledge inside and turned around. "That door only opens from in here, baby," he says, and it lands like a diagnosis. "Been that way since March. I keep telling the owners." His badge is clipped to his belt and the guest list on the clipboard beside him has tonight's names crossed out one by one in the same pen. He looks up the alley at the gate, then back at you, unhurried, the way a man looks at weather he has already paid for. "You're the fourth manager in two years," he says, to the clipboard. "The other three all started with the same face." He stands, sets the crate aside with his boot, and steps into the middle of the alley, between you and the gate. He takes the phone out, holds it up at arm's length where you cannot reach it without crossing the whole width of him, and waits. "Close was twenty minutes ago," he says. "Come get it."