No Rest for the Wicked

Chey · January 12, 2020

This thread is dedicated to the background and life of

Danielle "Angel" Mancuso.

This thread contains mature subject matter.

July 15th, 1999, 02:34 A.M. | Sandy Shores, San Andreas

Infomercials flickered across the box television, the only source of light in the run-down mobile home's living room. In the background, a single air conditioning unit worked tirelessly to cool the trailer, its incessant hum softening the sounds of a dog barking outside of the mobile home's walls. Roy Mancuso sat low in his stained armchair, smoking a cheap cigar and cradling a can of Budweiser on his knee, as he watched the cable television impassively. His white wife-beater was discolored underneath his arms from sweat, and his rotund stomach hung down low over his beltline. Roy ashed his cigar on the floor and sat upright in his chair. He used the remote to turn up the volume on the television set. His vision then traveled across the living room to his daughter and wife. Roy pulled himself to his feet with a grunt, and turned to discard the empty beer among the graveyard of beer bottles and cigarette butts on the end table by his chair. He ran a hand through his greasy, black hair, and stumbled across the room to the six-year-old girl sat on the floor.

"Come on, princess. Come with daddy," Roy Mancuso coaxed gently and quietly at the adolescent girl sat at the coffee table with a hand outstretched in invitation. His plump, unshaven cheeks flushed red with intoxication. She set down the broken blue crayon she used to color a torn page from her coloring book and looked up at the repulsive man as he towered above her. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead and dripped down the sides of his face. "Come on, honey," her father continued to cajole with a drunken smile as he took hold of her wrist. The hair raised on the back of Danielle's neck at her father's touch. Her eyes looked to her mother, passed out on the floral-printed sofa of the trailer's living room, for safety. Danielle rose quietly from the floor of the trailer, and her lifeless eyes lifted from her coloring book to meet Roy's.

Roy's grasp tightened around her wrist, and he brought a finger on his spare hand over his parted lips. "Shhh, now, Angel. Don't wanna wake your ma. Come on now, honey. Come with daddy," Roy whispered to the girl as he tugged at her arm. Danielle looked back at her mother as her father led her away, two Dutch-braided, blonde pigtails tossing behind her shoulders. Her mother turned over on the sofa, and a used syringe dropped to the floor from underneath her body. Silent tears streamed down Danielle's unwashed face.

Danielle Mancuso would continue to endure nightly abuse by her father for the next seven years, unbeknownst to her alcoholic and drug addict of a mother, Eileen. Roy Mancuso was convicted in 2006 of child abuse when attention was brought to the authorities by one of Danielle's teachers after Danielle was found to be self-mutilating in the school bathroom. Eileen would then move Danielle and her sister, Erin, to the projects of Davis in Los Santos, following their father's incarceration. Danielle was first introduced to drugs by her peers while she attended the inner-city high school, and she quickly became a regular abuser of marijuana and prescription painkillers. Danielle dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen. She worked a menial job as a gas station attendant in Davis to support her drug habits and help her mother with the bills. The day she turned eighteen, Danielle auditioned for the manager of the Vanilla Unicorn and was given a job as an exotic dancer. She received on-the-job training from her colleagues at the gentlemen's club, and was favored by the patrons for her long legs and bright blonde hair. She carried over her father's nickname for her, "Angel," as her stage alias.

Another dancer at the strip club, Alana Briggs, an African-American girl with calculating, brown eyes, would be the one to introduce Danielle to drugs such as heroin and cocaine, the pair using the latter of the two to ready themselves for a night of performances, and the former to fade to black in the backroom after they counted through their tip money. Alana would go on to become Danielle's partner-in-crime. The two graduated from private dances in the backroom to propositioning sexual favors to patrons of the strip club for whatever the John had to offer: money, drugs, connections, jewelry or notoriety. Alana Briggs was murdered by the hand of an abusive boyfriend in 2013 at the age of twenty-three. Erin, Danielle's younger sister by two years, moved out of the apartment they shared with their mother at the age of seventeen, and she took up residence with Roy Mancuso's elderly and dying mother in the city of Grapeseed in the county of San Andreas to escape Danielle and their schizophrenic of a mother figure. Eileen Mancuso was convicted on drug trafficking charges in the fall of 2011.

February 21st, 2011, 03:21 A.M. | Strawberry, Los Santos

"You stupid, stupid bitch!" screamed Robert Liotta between kicks to an eight-week-pregnant Danielle's stomach. Danielle laid crumpled in a heap at Robert's feet in the parking lot of the Vanilla Unicorn strip club, still dressed in her lingerie from her shift. Bystanders took leisure drags off of their cigarettes land watched the assault take place. They then turned their backs and resumed idle conversation inside of their group. Bass from the music playing inside of the strip club thumped continuously and mingled with the sounds of car alarms and police sirens in the distance.

"Bobby! Bobby, please, you don't understand?! We could have a family, me an' you!" Danielle plead as she picked up her torso from the pavement and wiped blood from her lip.

"A family? A family?! Look at you, Danielle! You think you're really fit for a mother? And, what's this?" Robert asked, the tone of his voice sharp with ridicule as he bent down to Danielle and took a firm grasp of her arm. He wrenched her arm over, his knuckles white, and eyed the fresh injection marks on the inside of her antecubital fossa with a scowl. "You been using again! For the love of Christ, Danielle! Me and you's going down to the clinic first thing in the morning, and we're getting that little son of a bitch inside of you taken care of! I'm not letting the mother of my child be some junkie dancer! I thought you said you were on birth control!"

Danielle snatched her arm away from Robert and used her hands to wipe the hot tears from her cheeks. The thick layers of mascara on Danielle's heavily painted eyes smeared and cast dark shadows on her sunken face. "I'm not gettin' an abortion, Bobby! I'm gonna have this kid, with or without you!" barked Danielle as she wiped blood from her mouth on the back of her hand and began to collect herself to her feet.

"Like hell you are!" Robert sneered down at Danielle as he loomed above her. He took a final drag off of his cigarette and cast it to the pavement. He then rolled up the sleeves of his baby blue dress shirt and sent repeated and violent kicks to Danielle's abdomen with his penny loafers, casting her back onto the pavement of the parking lot. She lay sobbing, cradling her stomach in her arms, by the front wheel arch of his car as he brought his assault to an end and stood upright to comb his fingers through his tediously groomed coiffure. Robert cast an apprehensive glance at the bystanders, whose attention had then returned, before filling his mouth with saliva and spitting it on the pavement beside Danielle.

Robert crossed in front of the 2008 Dodge Avenger to the driver's seat and collapsed into the interior before sparking up another Newport. The car raced out of the parking lot with a screech, Danielle left in a lifeless mound on the ground. A steady trickle of bright red blood seeped from underneath the French chantilly lace of her skirt and down her thigh.

The loss of her child and relationship with Robert Liotta drove Danielle into a downward spiral. Her abuse of heroin accelerated; no longer was the drug only used to bring her down after a cocaine-fueled night of pole work. All of the money earned from dancing at the local strip joint was devoted to feeding her addiction. Danielle struggled to maintain the rent on the apartment she once shared with Eileen. After eight months of unpaid rent and empty promises to her landlord, Danielle was evicted, and she was forced to take shelter in the beaten interior of her 1990 Cadillac de Ville, left to her in the will of her then deceased grandmother.

She was fired from the Vanilla Unicorn when she continued to show up to work high despite numerous warnings from the manager. Between the years 2012 and 2016, in-and-out of rehab, Danielle would fall victim to an emotionally manipulative relationship with a man by the name of Thomas Rodriguez, a longshoreman. She fell pregnant with his child in 2016, and against the protests of Rodriguez, she would go on to birth the couple's daughter alone in the emergency room of Pillbox Medical Center. Thomas left town and changed his phone number the next day, leaving Danielle alone with the neonate, growth restricted from Danielle's incessant cigarette smoking.

December 20th, 2019, 06:57 P.M. | Grapeseed, San Andreas

Danielle exited the interior of her rusted, fifth-generation 1990 Cadillac de Ville and exhaled a breath of smoke before dropping her joint into the dirt. She quickly doubled to the passenger side of the vehicle, and helped the dark-haired toddler, courting a battered teddy bear underneath her arm, out to her feet. Danielle's sister, Erin, pushed through the creaky screen door of her house and leaned against a column on the front porch with folded arms. Erin watched the two approach the house with a look of despondency.

"Well, well, well, Angel. You must need something to come all the way out here. What's wrong this time?" Erin asked as she made her way down the steps of the porch and met Danielle and the toddler in the walkway.

"You always said you would take her, so, here! Take her! I can't do it anymore!" Danielle replied and pushed the toddler toward Erin. "I can't fucking do it anymore, OK?! She's better off here with you than with me. So take her," Danielle continued with a breath of exasperation. Danielle then took to her knee and turned the toddler to face her. She took her face in both of her hands and stroked the toddler's cheeks with her thumbs. After a final kiss on the child's forehead, Danielle rose to her feet and made fast for her vehicle, rummaging in the pocket of her tattered denim jacket for her car keys.

Erin took up the toddler, dressed only in a Powerpuff Girls t-shirt and a diaper, and rested her on her right hip. She struggled to strum her fingers through the child's knotted and unkempt hair as she watched Danielle reenter the car. Danielle turned the key over in the ignition of the Cadillac de Ville several times before the engine of the car spluttered to life, and Danielle then quickly reversed out of the driveway and sped down the road, kicking up a trail of dust behind her. Erin traced her fingertips across the toddler's cheek with a weak smile and searched her face with her eyes. The toddler looked back at Erin with unfamiliarity and slotted her thumb into her mouth.

"S'gonna be OK, Bella. Auntie Erin's gonna take care 'a you, sweetheart. You look hungry. You want Auntie Erin to make you something 'ta eat?" Erin asked the child, and the child responded with a quick nod of her head as she sucked on her thumb. Erin adjusted the toddler's weight on her hip and turned to carry her up the broken steps of the front porch of her house without sparing a glance to the swiftly disappearing vehicle in the distance.

Edited July 15, 2020 by Chey