2. Florida Man, Bartender Cause Public Disturbance
Chapter 2
Florida Man, Bartender Cause Public Disturbance
T he first clue had been the way Jesse stood relaxed behind the bar—feet spread too far apart, hands drifting toward his back. Old habits died hard. His sharp, economical movements confirmed Rainy’s suspicion—ex-military, definitely. That had invited further scrutiny of the way he was dressed, out of uniform and too expensive for this job, wearing a jacket when he had to be nearly sweating through it. Packing, certainly, which was supported by his refusal to let Rainy feel him up too closely.
But, really, what had done it was watching Jesse make his drink. The precise motion of his hands, the sinew and stretch and certainty of them, easy in their old scars. People always thought they’d be able to spot a murderer by the eyes, the demeanor, the empty smile. But that wasn’t true. You never knew, just talking to a person, just looking at their face. Faces could hide anything—it was in the hands.
Rainy knew a killer’s hands when he saw them.
So, Jesse was an assassin. And, like all good ones, he followed a predictable pattern—Rainy’s three Rs. He’d done his research, known Rainy was going to be at this hotel on this night, and that he would follow through on tradition by going down to the bar to pick someone up. He’d put himself in a place where Rainy would have to talk to him, in a role most people would overlook.
And then he’d lured Rainy to the back.
Generally, Rainy preferred to deal with things head-on, so he’d been inclined to follow wherever Jesse led and get the confrontation over with. He hadn’t been expecting to actually get a blowjob out of it. It turned out that Jesse was full of all sorts of surprises.
Now, Rainy reclined on the stack of pallets, carefully relaxed, watching Jesse recompose himself. The wine cellar was cool, and the lingering sweat on his skin slid cold down his back, making him shiver. The post-orgasmic relaxation was fighting with the edge on his nerves. His eyes stayed glued to the movement of Jesse’s hands.
He was sure from the way Jesse had moved with him that his jacket concealed a gun. Best to keep from tipping his hand for as long as possible. Rainy’s Colt was still resting on his bed upstairs. All he had was his knife, and…
And.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to do anything for you?” he asked, watching Jesse straighten his tie.
“You know, most men wouldn’t be complaining too hard about getting a BJ with nothing expected in return,” Jesse drawled. He cracked his neck, where there was still a faint pink mark under his jaw from Rainy’s mouth.
Being forbidden to touch him, Rainy thought, was definitely cause for complaint.
“I don’t like owing people things,” he said.
It was true, and nagging at the back of his mind. He didn’t think he was wrong about Jesse’s purpose here, but why the blowjob? Why actually follow through on the flirtation, if it had just been a ploy to lure him here?
“That’s sad for you,” Jesse told him.
“But I still have a chance. You’re going to let me buy you a drink now, right? That’s plenty for me to work with.”
Jesse’s expression stayed flat. “I don’t think I wanna go back to the bar just yet. My break’s not over.”
No, Rainy wouldn’t be able to coax him back into public now. Most likely, one of them was never going to see that bar again. But—
He pushed himself off the pallets, buttoning up his jeans. “No need. I like it just fine here. As long as nobody’s going to disturb us?”
“No,” Jesse said. “No one’s coming.”
Rainy didn’t let his smile flicker. “Good.” He crossed to one of the racks of wine.
“You can’t steal that,” Jesse told him, disgusted.
“I’m not. I’m buying you a drink, remember? Put it on my tab.”
Rainy stepped along the length of the rack, keeping his shoulders loose, his back unguarded. He watched Jesse’s reflection on the dark, glossy curves of the bottles. He was a distorted pale smudge in their glass worlds, a ghost in the dark. Unease made the hair on the back of Rainy’s neck prickle, but he forced himself to hum nonchalantly.
He selected a bottle with a pink and white label that he liked the look of and pulled it out with a flourish.
“That’s a three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine,” Jesse informed him.
Rainy replaced it wordlessly on the rack and skimmed his fingers a few bottles down, then looked over his shoulder. Jesse nodded.
He tugged the bottle free with a dull glassy ring and held it up to the light.
“Toss me a bottle opener?” he asked.
Jesse’s eyes cut a quick, assessing glance around the room. Rainy pretended not to notice, just squinted down and fiddled with the cork as Jesse locked onto a cabinet near the door and went to rifle through it. He came up with a bottle opener, which he tossed to Rainy.
“That’s a Burgundy, low tannins. Don’t have to decant it.”
“Perfect,” Rainy said, digging the bottle opener into the cork. “Do you keep tasting glasses in here?”
Jesse extracted two glasses from the cabinet and approached. Rainy managed to free the cork and set it aside. He accepted a glass from Jesse and filled it. Wine splashed up its sides like storm-tossed waves and then receded, dark red as old blood. He passed the glass to Jesse and watched as he swirled it idly. While Jesse’s eyes tracked the motion of the liquid in his glass, Rainy’s fingers slipped into his own shirt pocket.
He took the second glass from Jesse’s hand and set it on the shelf next to him, going to fill it. “Well? How’s that drink taste?”
Jesse snorted, but took a sip. His eyes drifted shut as he did, focused on the taste. When the glass lowered, Rainy watched his tongue sweep along his lower lip, erasing the red sheen of wine there.
“Not bad,” he said. “But I’ve had better.”
Rainy laughed and took the glass from him. He turned the rim so the smudge from Jesse’s mouth faced him and closed his own lips over it, drinking deep. The wine was heady and a little bitter, something once sweet changed by years in the dark. It made the room gather in closer, stuffy.
“Funny,” he said. “I don’t think I have had better.”
Jesse rolled his eyes, but a pink flush crept along the tips of his ears. Instead of replying, he reached between them to pick up the other glass, the one Rainy had poured while he’d been distracted. Rainy watched him drink from it, then slid down until he was seated on the cool concrete floor, back braced against the shelf.
“You weren’t bluffing. You are really good with your mouth.”
“Mmhm.” Jesse settled on the stack of pallets, lounging like a cat between Rainy and the door. Outwardly relaxed, but with an undercurrent of feralness to the angle of his limbs that suggested he would be ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Pleasant warmth bloomed in Rainy’s stomach despite his wariness. The image of Jesse’s mouth wrapped around him, eyes hazy with lust, was superimposed over the image of him demurely sipping his wine.
“I don’t think it’s fair not to let me have a chance to show you how good I am,” Rainy said.
“Mm. Best not to let you embarrass yourself, I think.”
Rainy grinned. “You’ve got to at least let me buy you dinner.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Rainy pulled out his phone and opened the menu of the upstairs restaurant, scrolling through.
“What do you think about scallops? Or lobster? That classy enough for you?”
“Cute.”
“Ooh, I bet they make a mean eggs benedict. You know, you add a little ketchup, a little hot sauce, you might have something there.”
Jesse stared at him like he’d just suggested fileting a puppy. “Good God, is there a way to take back a blowjob?”
“You mock me now, but we’ll see who’s laughing when you try it.”
The wine seemed to be seeping its warmth into Jesse, staining his mouth red and sending a pleasant flush spreading over his cheeks, down his neck. Rainy watched it creep below his collar and out of sight, and imagined peeling Jesse out of those fancy clothes, spreading him out on the concrete floor and working him with his fingers just to enjoy the sight of that flush spreading down his chest, down—
Rainy took a gulp of wine to recenter himself. Jesse watched the motion with predatory disinterest. He was still holding his head that same way, slightly crooked so the scar was tilted away.
“So, Jesse. How long have you worked here?”
“Oh, not long. Just moved to town a couple weeks ago.”
“Really?” Rainy finished his glass, set it down. “You need a real Miami local to show you around. Take you to the good spots, catch you up on the local racket…”
“You know, there is something I’ve been dying to know since I got to town. Is there a story behind the nickname ‘Rainy’? Because if there is, I ain’t been around long enough to hear it.”
The cool dryness of the cellar froze around them. Time hung suspended like snow in the air. Rainy breathed, counted, felt his lungs expand and release. His body hummed.
Jesse’s gaze on his, dark and swift and deadly, felt like darts pinning him to the wall.
“How’d you hear that name?” Rainy asked.
Jesse tipped his head and emptied the last of his wineglass. He set it aside, angled its base just so. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun.
“I think you already know the answer to that question, Mister Rainy. No need for either of us to keep playing dumb.”
Rainy kept his gaze even on the pistol angled casually at his heart, the single black eye of it, swallowing up the light of the room. He arranged his muscles, let the adrenaline tension seep into them.
“Who do you work for?”
His mind clicked through the possibilities: disgruntled family member, Andy Parish, the Vees, that one deputy mayor he’d pissed off? If he could just get Jesse to—
“Seong,” Jesse said.
Oh. Well, that was easier than expected. Also, not surprising. Seong was new in town and stepping on a lot of toes—most notably, Emilio Espinosa’s. Rainy had been sent two weeks ago to deliver a few gentle warning shots through the heads of some of Seong’s enforcers. There were a lot of questions he should have been asking, information he could sell to the Espinosas. At the bottom of the list was:
“Why’d you blow me in a cellar if you were just planning on killing me?”
Jesse shrugged. “I had a little extra time. Besides, it seems only polite, don’t you think?”
Rainy felt a stupid grin spread across his face. It really was a shame that one of them was going to be dead at the end of this.
He started to inch the hand on his hidden side toward the knife strapped to his ankle. “So, what happened to the real bartender?”
Jesse remained seated, his gun hand steady. Left-handed.
“He found himself unexpectedly indisposed before his shift this evening. Luckily, I came highly recommended.”
Rainy thumbed up the hem of his jeans. “Who’s Jesse?”
Jesse—not Jesse, really—looked down at the name tag pinned to his breast pocket. “Fuck if I know.” He unpinned it with one hand and tossed it over his shoulder.
In his moment of distraction, Rainy leaned down to seize the knife’s handle and tug it free.
His fingers closed around an empty strap.
When he looked back at Jesse, the other man was smiling at him. Without breaking eye contact, he reached into his pocket and produced Rainy’s knife. Rainy swallowed.
Well. Okay. Maybe he’d let himself get a little too distracted while Jesse was giving him mind-blowing oral sex.
He retracted his hand and closed it into a quiet fist at his side. He forced a smile. “You’ve got good hands.”
“Too bad you won’t get to find out how good. Now, let’s go.” Jesse gestured with his gun toward the door.
“Not here?”
“It would be a shame to risk ruining those vintages. I’d prefer to spill your blood on a cheaper surface. Suits you better, don’t you think?”
Rainy licked his lips. He had no weapon, but that was okay, if he played it right. What he needed was time.
Slowly, telegraphing his movements, he pushed to his feet. Jesse rose too, and Rainy passed him on his way out the door.
“Left,” Jesse ordered. Rainy moved down the hall, away from the stairs. Ahead, the concrete was marked with signage for a loading dock. He checked his watch with a barely-there flick of his eyes as they went. The walls grew sparser and more utilitarian, culminating in a set of metal steps.
“Down the stairs,” Jesse told him. His accent had turned a little doughy at the corners, like the wine was getting to him. Rainy bit down on his lip to hide a smile.
Each of Rainy’s steps clanged heavily on the stairs, echoing the rising pound of his heart. The loading bay was dim, and his eyes had to adjust. He breathed in low and steady through his nose. He reached the grimy concrete floor. Behind him, there was a whisper of fabric.
Here goes nothing, he thought.
He spun and slammed Jesse’s wrist against the railing. Bones ground under skin. Jesse grunted and his hand spasmed, sending the gun clattering to the floor. Rainy lunged for it.
Jesse’s foot flashed in before he could reach it. With a neat flick of his toe, the gun jumped right back into his waiting hand.
“Holy shit—I think that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Rainy said, then tackled him.
They went rolling across the floor and the gun was lost again. Rainy ended up on his back, Jesse straddling him. A hard blow snapped his head to the side, then another. Jesse’s knuckles were an unforgiving edge against his cheekbone, orbit, temple. The pain brought a lightning flash of certainty, popped behind an eye like a blown bulb, that this man had killed people with his bare hands. Rainy’s vision swam.
Then, a heartbeat of reprieve. Jesse was rearing back for a stronger blow, but it was an opening. Rainy wrenched his body, leveraging his superior weight, and threw him off.
Jesse bounced off the concrete and was scrambling up again in half a second, but Rainy was already on his feet, putting him back down with a hard kick to the side of his head.
It was a nasty shot, but, well, fight to the death and all. Rainy prayed that it would speed this up.
His head was throbbing and the vision in his right eye was already going spotty from the battering he’d taken. Not-Jesse Last-name-unknown sure knew how to suck a man’s dick and beat the ever-loving shit out of him. Well-rounded guy.
Speaking of, he was already jumping up, mouth bloody. There was a matching smear of red on the white rubber toe of Rainy’s sneaker.
“Don’t make this harder on yourself,” he told Rainy. There was a definite slur to his words now, like he’d had a lot more than one glass of wine. He was tilting a little, off-balance.
It didn’t deter him as much as Rainy had hoped it would. Jesse lunged—a feint that Rainy bought, going to catch him head-on. Jesse ducked under his guard and behind his back. Panic stabbed up into Rainy’s gut like tripping onto a rusty spike, but before he could turn, Jesse’s leg swept through his knees and he fell straight into the garotte threaded around his neck.
White-hot pain and pressure in a line across his throat. The wire cut deep. Rainy’s stupid fucking gripless shoes slid on the concrete, and he couldn’t get his feet under him to push away from the squeeze squeeze squeeze—
A breath of air, a split second of slack. Jesse’s hands were fumbling, a little clumsy on the ends of the wire. It was all Rainy needed to throw him off, and Jesse tripped and landed on his ass.
Rainy panted and rubbed his throat, watching Jesse struggle to a standing position. His feet were braced too wide, his hands stretched out warily to either side of Rainy like he was seeing double. Finally, Rainy thought, looking back down at his watch.
“Feeling all right, sweetheart?” he called.
Jesse snarled, a feral animal sound like he was going to go for Rainy’s throat with his teeth if he had to. The effect was surprisingly undiminished by the fact that his eyes were a little unfocused. He went in for a tackle, and completely missed Rainy’s center of gravity. All it took was a small shove to send him sprawling again. He was cursing now, tipping over on his way up and landing back on his stomach. Rainy watched the realization move over his face in a ripple of hatred.
“You fuggin’... roofied me,” he slurred.
Rainy pulled the leftover packet he’d prepared for Holister, now empty, from his shirt pocket.
“In my defense,” he said, “it was a self-defense roofie.”
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Jesse hissed. Well, actually, it was more of a mushy string of syllables, but Rainy got the gist when his stolen knife was suddenly in Jesse’s hand.
He narrowly dodged a messy swipe that could have disemboweled him and caught Jesse’s wrist, twisting the knife away. He pinned Jesse’s arms to his sides. Jesse kicked and struggled, but his movements were sluggish. His head kept lolling against Rainy’s chest.
With the last scraps of his lucidity, he threw a shocking amount of strength into what appeared to be an attempt to rip out Rainy’s kidneys with his bare hands. God, he was a vicious little fucker. It was kind of adorable, actually. Rainy put a knee on his back and held him down on the concrete until he finally went limp.
Once he was well and truly out, eyes rolled back behind half-closed lids, Rainy fished around in his pockets until he found his cell phone and wallet. Password protected, credit cards and ID all with James Montgomery printed on them. No room key. Rainy retrieved his knife, then picked up the gun—Beretta M9; army-pedigree goon for sure—and checked the magazine before sticking it into his waistband and tugging his shirt down over it.
Held up, he texted Malia. Be there in two hours.
Rainy stood over Jesse’s immaculately dressed, unconscious form and considered the logistics of killing him. It would be easy to bring the car around and stuff him into the trunk, drive out to the spot on the edge of the Everglades he favored for dumping, and put a bullet in his skull. Leave him for the gators, who understood the arrangement as well as he did. If Jesse was Seong’s muscle, the legal heat wouldn’t be too bad. It would escalate things with Seong, but if he’d put out a hit on Rainy, those bridges were already flamed half to the waterline.
Jesse looked softer in his sleep. His brow was open, his lips parted. He twitched a little, like a sleeping puppy, then his face pinched minutely and his lip curled like he was biting someone in a dream.
Rainy sighed.
“Now we’re even,” he told him. Let it never be said that he was a selfish lover.
He tugged Jesse’s tie out from his vest and used it to mop the blood off of Jesse’s mouth and chin where Rainy’s shoe had sliced the inside of his lip open. He wasn’t that heavy, and Rainy easily got him up off the concrete and over his shoulder. He crossed the bay to the service elevator and dumped him inside, hitting the button for the second floor.
The plain, whitewashed staff corridor was empty when the doors opened, so Rainy scooped his charge up in a bridal carry. Jesse’s head lolled against his shoulder, mouth open, which might have been endearing if it weren’t for the stream of blood running down into Rainy’s shirt.
He ducked around a laundry cart and into the main hallway, making for his room. It was two corners to 1243. Luckily, the key was in his front pocket, so he just had to bump his hip against the sensor to unlock the door. He pushed it open and dumped Jesse onto the bed.
A few doors down, Dean Holister was starting to go cold and stiff in the tub. Rainy threw the deadbolt and flipped the light on to survey his situation, hands on his hips.
Jesse was half-buried in the hideous white confection that was the comforter, totally dead to the world. He looked ridiculous. Rainy snapped a picture before tugging off his expensive-looking leather shoes and sitting him up to strip off his jacket. Jesse mumbled in his sleep as Rainy arranged him on his side so he wouldn’t drown in blood or vomit.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Malia: I swear to God, if you’re making me wait here so you can make it with some stupid hotel bar slut…
Not exactly, Rainy replied. He looked down at Jesse, whose lashes were soft against his cheeks, blond and feathery at the tips.
He’s a special hotel bar slut.
The cocktail of depressants he’d whipped up for Holister had the potential to kill a man all on its own, so he settled into a chair and flicked idly through Malia’s notes, glancing up occasionally to make sure Jesse’s breathing hadn’t stopped. After ten minutes, he became restless. He paced a bit, then had an idea. He laid his Colt on the rug and tried to kick it up into his hand. It went skittering off into a corner.
“Motherfucker made it look so easy,” he complained, and went to retrieve it.
After an hour, he had managed several dings in the wood furniture legs and not one single sick gun-soccer trick, so he gave up. Jesse had started to twitch more restlessly, muttering into the pillow’s taffeta roses. Rainy checked his watch again, then walked to the phone on the nightstand and placed an order with the front desk.
“Charge it to the same card,” he told them. It was about time to scrap the Luis Pliego identity, anyway.
Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the door and Rainy opened it to accept the room service cart with its silver-lidded dish. He lifted the cover to reveal a picture-perfect eggs benedict. Then he picked up the requested bottles from the corner of the cart and, with extreme prejudice, smothered the plate in ketchup and hot sauce.
Jesse had rolled closer to the side of the bed at the smell of food, and his hand was doing a sort of weird little spasm on the mattress next to him. Rainy tore a page from the pad on the nightstand and stuck a note to the room service cart.
Room is paid for ’til 10, he wrote. Eggs not poisoned. Promise.
After a beat, he added, See you around.
Then he stacked Jesse’s things on the counter, gathered up his suitcase, and closed the door quietly on his way out. When he hit the street, the same young valet brought his car around, and Rainy pressed a hefty tip into his hand before tearing off into the night.