3. Florida Man Crime Means Bad Coworkers
Chapter 3
Florida Man: Crime Means Bad Coworkers
R ainy was awoken when Marco Espinosa dropped onto the couch next to him with enough force to cause a tidal wave, bouncing Rainy’s head against the armrest. He sat up, groaning.
“Jesus, have some respect for your betters.” Swinging his feet to the linoleum floor, he fumbled for his sneakers.
He’d gotten back to the Rattrap, the office kept by himself, Malia, and a few other mercenaries, well after midnight. He and Malia had spent two hours polishing off the Holister contract until she went home and he passed out on the couch. Now, he had a terrible crick in his neck and his clothes smelled like mildew.
He and the others who hung around the Rattrap were technically freelance, but the lines in Miami were drawn pretty clearly—they were Espinosa-loyal, which meant no Vees or any other Espinosa enemies. Fortunately, they still got plenty of business; unfortunately, this meant that Rainy had to deal with Emilio Espinosa’s darling third child.
Marco rolled onto his back, feet propped up against the wall and head dangling off the couch, and pointed at Rainy’s face. “What the hell happened to you?”
Rainy probed his swollen right eye, wincing. When he flipped on his phone camera, it was mottled an ugly shade of purple. “Had some trouble.”
“From Dean Holister?” Marco asked. “Fucking how? ”
“No, not from Holister,” Rainy snapped, offended.
Before Marco could reply, a new voice cut in.
“Fuck, it looks way worse this morning. Why didn’t you ice it like I told you?” Malia strode through the ajar door, petite and delicate, looking unfairly fresh and rested in a clean pair of flared jeans with her butterfly locs pulled back into a ponytail. She dumped her bag in front of her desk with its bank of desktop monitors and flopped into her five-hundred-dollar gaming chair, which Marco was forbidden from touching under any circumstances.
“We don’t have an ice maker here,” Rainy protested.
“Then go home, you hooligan. This isn’t a halfway house.” She swiveled to address Marco. “Also, why is your sister lurking the entryway like a wraith?”
Marco sighed theatrically and flopped face down on the couch, which was gross considering Rainy was pretty sure it had been there when they’d bought the place. “I owe her twenty bucks.”
“Then pay the woman. She scares me.”
Marco turned a pair of watery brown puppy eyes on them.
“Oh, hell no.” Rainy shoved off the couch and crossed to the plastic jar of lollipops on Malia’s desk. It had a peeling masking-tape label that read Rainy’s. He unwrapped one and stuck it in his mouth. “Your dad is a millionaire. You can cough up twenty bucks.”
“You guys never let me in on anything with a decent payout.”
“That’s because your dad is a millionaire. Also, a crime lord. Only softballs for you, Junior.” Malia flicked on one of her monitors, then pointed at Rainy. “All you. I need to pay for a ride to class later.”
Rainy sighed and fished a twenty out of his wallet while Marco made a disgusted face at Malia.
“I can’t believe you have one of the coolest jobs ever, and to you it’s just a side gig to put you through undergrad.”
“That’s because, unlike you, I actually wanted to go to school.”
Emilio Espinosa, Puerto Rican expat and patriarch of the most powerful crime family in Florida, was a firm believer that his children were above ordinary grunt work. His elder son Felix was the heir to the empire, his daughter Catalina was the family’s personal defense attorney, and his youngest child Marco had sabotaged his own pre-med career until Emilio finally caved and accepted that his son’s dream was to be a lowly contract killer.
“I’m a man of the people,” Marco frequently told them, sweeping his arms expansively. A pain in the ass was what he was.
Lina Espinosa herself had pushed through the unlocked door and was now clacking across the floor in her shiny black stilettos. She and Marco had the same strong nose and thick, dark hair, though Marco had, in a delightful twist of fate, been passed over by the height that Lina and Felix had both inherited.
Rainy wordlessly handed her the twenty-dollar bill and she tucked it into the pocket of her smart black skirt suit.
“Thanks for the ride,” Marco called.
“Why did you need a ride, anyway?” Rainy asked. “Where’s your car?”
Lina rolled her eyes. “I had to bail him out of jail. Again. For jaywalking.”
“How do you even get arrested for jaywalking?”
“I just kept doing it in front of them until I disrupted traffic and they had to bring me in,” Marco told him cheerfully.
“Let me guess: the arresting officer was Sergeant Tessa?”
Marco sighed dreamily. “I actually got her to laugh at one of my jokes while I was cuffed in the back of the squad car this time. Next time, I bet I can get a real smile.”
Lina brandished her car keys at Rainy. “Please tell me that after last night, I don’t have to get you out of another homicide charge.” She squinted at his black eye. “Double homicide? I know that’s not from Holister.”
“No, I ran into this other guy. Apparently, Seong’s put out a hit on me.”
Malia let her feet drop to the floor. “Oh my God, you didn’t tell me it was Adler. ”
“Adler.” Rainy rolled the name around his mouth with the sweet-tart artificial taste of green apple.
“Spooky guy with the facial scar?”
Rainy pointed his lollipop at her. “That’s him.”
“Who’s Adler?” Marco asked.
“Seong’s assassin-on-retainer,” Malia said. “He has the Vees pissing their pants. If this turf war between Seong and you guys keeps escalating, he’ll probably be chewing his way through your ranks soon too.”
Rainy leaned a hip against Malia’s desk. Adler. He tested the name against his memory of the man from the previous night. His sarcastic drawl, his haughty eyes, the way he’d pushed Rainy back on the pallets and taken him apart with his mouth.
Adler.
“He’s ex-military, for sure,” Rainy offered. “What else do you know? First name?”
Malia shook her head. “No first name. If you put any stock in word on the street, he either used to be super-duper special ops, or Seong fished him out of some third-world prison. Either way, Adler’s been loyal as a dog to the guy for years.”
Lina snorted. “If you put any stock in word on the street, he once bit a guy’s pinkie off and just swallowed it instead of bothering to spit it out.”
“That one might actually be true,” Rainy said. “He’s a fucking terror.” He settled fully onto Malia’s desk. “Find me what you can on him.”
“If he really was military, it shouldn’t be hard to pull records. I just need some data other than the surname.”
Rainy pictured Adler in his mind’s eye. There were a few choice images that weren’t at all hard to conjure up. “White with brown hair. Thirty-ish, six-foot, but skinny. Dresses like a fucking Edwardian gentleman. Scar, obviously. Deep South accent. Montgomery was his alias, so I’m ninety percent on Alabama.” He paused. “Wait, hold on; I have a picture.”
The image he’d snapped in the hotel room was even funnier in the light of day. Adler was snuggled into the ugly, frothy bedspread, lips parted to show his bloody teeth. Rainy felt a weird flash of fondness.
The others leaned in to look at it. “Jesus,” Malia said, “did you kill him?”
“No, just knocked him out.”
Lina scowled. “You knocked him out and didn’t kill him while he was unconscious?”
“It just didn’t seem sporting.”
“You literally drowned an unconscious man earlier last night.”
Marco squinted at Rainy’s phone. “Is he in bed? Oh, shit, did you hit that?” He straightened and gave Rainy a high five.
“Confusingly, yes. Although not during the bed part.” Rainy frowned. “And especially not during the unconscious part. He was very conscious.”
“Ugh, I do not want to hear this.” Malia swiped Rainy’s phone and texted the photo to herself. “I’ll find you everything there is to know about this guy if you promise to never tell me about it.”
“Deal.” Rainy crunched the rest of his lollipop and tossed the stick. “Lina, you on your way out?”
He left Malia and Marco to bicker and walked with Lina into the Rattrap’s garage. His car was waiting there for him, sandwiched behind Lina’s SUV. It was his baby and by far the most expensive thing he owned, sleek and silver and lovely. He pulled out of the garage and drove with the top down, enjoying the sunshine and sticky air. There were thunderheads on the horizon, and it looked like afternoon showers.
His place was in Riverside, as close to downtown as he could get without edging out of Espinosa turf. Ever since he’d been a kid, the city had been divided up that way—Espinosas in the south, Vees in the north. Brickell, with its waterfront high-rises and business centers, belonged solidly to Andy Parish. And now Hyun-woo Seong had begun carving out his own slice of the waterfront, in the Upper East Side and northern edge of downtown.
Contrary to Malia’s insistence, it would have been hard to call Rainy’s apartment a home. It was a space for him to store his stuff and occasionally shower; other than that, he wasn’t around much. The apartment was on the fourth floor and was essentially unchanged from when he’d bought it years ago—airy, bright, and mostly empty. As soon as he stepped through the door, he began mentally calculating the quickest excuse he could come up with to leave again.
Minimizing the time he spent here made him less antsy. Rainy had been like that all his adult life—always feeling like he needed to shift, move, run, do whatever was necessary to stay in motion.
He dumped his kit onto the couch and went to rummage through the kitchen. There was some cereal, but the milk carton was empty where he’d put it back in the fridge as a reminder to himself to buy more milk. There was also a box of Chinese takeout that was no longer fit for human consumption. Rainy carried it to the balcony while crunching on a handful of dry cereal.
The week-old beef dish was pungent when he opened the box and set it on the balcony, a flat concrete platform with a wrought-iron railing that overlooked the shimmering glass skyscrapers of downtown. Rainy settled in the doorway and began to make sharp clicking noises with his tongue.
“Ay, Patoso!”
There was a set of scaffolding, left over from months-ago construction, that led up to Rainy’s balcony from a nearby alley. Presently, a plump, scarred tomcat came hobbling up it, awkward on the twisted foot of an old injury. He wound through the bars just out of arm’s reach, pretending not to be interested in the food. Rainy turned his head away and continued on his cereal. Patoso darted forward and dug into the beef, making gross feline chewing noises. When he finished, he deigned to allow Rainy one scratch of his ears before scooting off down the scaffolding, tail high in alarm.
Finished with his breakfast, Rainy moved into his bedroom, which was just as sparsely furnished as the rest of his space. It wasn’t that Rainy didn’t like things, per se; he certainly had the money to decorate the place however he wanted. It was just that he preferred to be out and about, and the thought of this place being cozy and comforting somewhere behind him filled him with an inexplicable unease. He preferred it as it was.
There were two big black suitcases under the bed. Rainy pulled one out and unzipped it to reveal a loosely organized stash of guns, ammo, knives, brass knuckles, assorted nasty chemicals, and an aluminum softball bat with a smiley face painted on the barrel. He selected another .45 semi-auto and laid it on the bed next to his Colt. If someone like Adler had it out for him, better safe than sorry.
Next, blessedly, shower. Rainy grabbed a fresh shirt from his closet (this one patterned with flamingos wearing leis) and stepped into the bathroom. He was running up a truly unholy olfactory mixture of murder sweat, fight-to-the-death sweat, general post-blowjob stickiness, alcohol, blood, and old couch smell. When he took off his shirt, there was a red wine splatter across the stomach and a patch of dried blood on the shoulder.
While he waited for the water to heat, he examined his face in the mirror. His right eye wasn’t swollen so badly that he couldn’t see, but it was a nasty red-purple. The bruise extended along the dip between his cheekbone and brow back into his hairline. No biggie; Rainy was used to shiners. If anything, they added a certain je ne sais quoi to his whole charming-boyish-rogue ensemble. His black hair, which was floppy at best and shaggy at worst, was long enough to flick over some of the damage anyway.
With his shirt out of the way, he evaluated the rest. There was a shallow bruise on his side, over the ridges of his obliques, from where Adler had tackled him. It was already going green. There was one high across his neck, too, where his throat was hoarse from the choking attempt. And then there was the dark mark on his shoulder, over the arch of his trapezius. Rainy’s fingers hovered, hesitant to touch it. He remembered the feel of Adler’s teeth there, the heat of his breath as he’d smoothed the pain away with an open-mouthed kiss.
When Rainy finally worked up the nerve to run a finger over it, he shivered at the muscle-deep ache.
The steam of the shower slowly loosened his stiff muscles, leaving him wrung out as an old washcloth. The heat made his face and shoulder throb again, and he rested his forehead against the wall, letting the water run through his hair.
The image of Adler’s eyes, cold and deadly as any predator’s, should have washed away the sweetness of the muscle memory of his weight pressing Rainy against the wall. And yet, Rainy couldn’t stop his hand from drifting up to skim over the bruise, again and again.
He was freshly dressed and about to go retrieve a new carton of milk when his phone buzzed with a message from “Big E.” He knocked milk down to the bottom of his to-do list and got into the car.
The Espinosa estate was a sprawling three-story in North Beach. It was barricaded with tall wrought-iron fences and a pair of grunts was always on patrol around the perimeter, rain or shine. Eduardo, one of the men on duty, fist-bumped Rainy as he opened the gate.
The driveway was modern, a spread of big white pavers gridded with neatly manicured grass. He parked next to Emilio’s beloved Tor Red 1970s Plymouth Barracuda and turned off his engine, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head.
The big, brass-bound front door with its thorny-rose knocker was opened by Jazz McCormick, Emilio’s longtime girlfriend.
“Rainy!” she exclaimed happily in her heavy Jersey accent, drawing him in to kiss him on both cheeks.
Jazz was a busty forty-ish bottle blonde who wore far too much leopard print. She was boisterous and friendly and entirely too open about her previous career as a sex worker, and Emilio doted on her like a princess, though anyone who came around was warned on pain of broken fingers never to bring up marriage.
“Emilio’s waiting for you,” she gushed. “He’s in the study. Can I bring you some lemonade? Splash a little rum and triple sec in there?” She tittered and threw up her hands. “It’s two o’clock somewhere!”
“Not today, Jazz,” Rainy said, extricating himself gently. “I’ll just show myself in.”
The Espinosas’ home was tastefully but lavishly decorated. Rainy passed through the marble-tiled foyer and the sitting room with its heavy oak furniture to the room adjoining Emilio’s study. There was a black duffel bag sitting on the table, with two men bent over it. The older one straightened when Rainy entered.
“Ay, Rainy! R-man!” He shot some finger guns. “Killing hard, or hardly killing?”
Rainy forced a laugh. “You got me, Felix.”
The eldest Espinosa sibling was tall and hawk-faced like his sister, but with his father’s prematurely receding hairline. He patted the kid next to him on the shoulder.
“Javi and I were just talking about a slipup he made, but now that he knows what’s up, no harm done, right?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure, Felix,” the kid replied.
“We’re going to have to dock your pay until we’re reimbursed for the quarter-kilo you lost, though.”
Javi made big eyes at him. “But, Felix, I can’t afford to lose that much. I need that money for my mom.”
Felix waffled. “Well, Javi, I’m trying to be stern with you here—”
The study door swung open, and all three spines in the room stiffened. Emilio Espinosa strode out. Barrel-chested and balding with a thick, dark mustache, he went right to the table and placed a hand on Javi’s shoulder.
“So, Javi. Losing merchandise, now, are we?” His tone was jovial, but the lightness of it was drowned in the bass of his voice.
Javi seemed to have shrunk several inches, as though Emilio’s hand were heavy enough to push his ankles down through the tile floor. “I had to run, and I lost track of it.”
Emilio grunted. Letting go of the boy’s shoulder, he reached into the duffel bag and pulled out a white, plastic-wrapped bundle. “I’m just a little fucking curious how you lose twenty-five grand of heroin.” He tossed the brick to Javi, who fumbled and almost dropped it.
“It was an accident. I swear on my life.” Javi looked to Felix, who had suddenly become very interested in the woodwork of the table.
Emilio boomed out a laugh, one that rumbled in the high-ceilinged room like thunder. “You hear that, Rainy? What a funny choice of words.”
Javi licked his lips and let out a reedy answering laugh, several seconds too late. It dropped out of his mouth stone-dead when Emilio pulled out his gun and set it on the table between them.
“You don’t do things on accident, ever. You do what I fucking tell you, or you do nothing at all. And, now, I’m telling you to get out there and find that fucking merchandise. Understand?”
“Yes,” Javi said thinly.
“Good. And next time you decide to do something on accident, I’ll have Julian cut off your thumbs. Now get out of my house.”
Javi scampered out of the room so fast that he practically left skid marks on the floor. Emilio sighed and stowed his gun, then kicked a fallen brick of heroin so it slid across the floor and hit the wall. Felix cleared his throat.
“I was, ah, handling it.”
“Just get down to the fucking Hub and make sure nobody else is losing anything.”
Felix nodded awkwardly to Rainy and marched toward the front door. Emilio waved Rainy into his study. He had gone all heavy, arrogant amusement again, the darkness from before shut glibly away behind a door.
The door, like most that people constructed with their expressions and words, was transparent to Rainy.
“They don’t make kids like they used to, I tell you,” Emilio said. “I got runners and enforcers making fucking videos on their phones. Why don’t they come like you were when you were that age? Smart and scrappy and grateful.”
“I remember being called impudent pretty often, though,” Rainy offered.
“Fucking funny too. Why did I ever let you go freelance?” Emilio settled into his desk chair with a resounding creak and folded his hands over his belly. “Sit down.”
Rainy sank into one of the plush chairs in front of Emilio’s massive lacquered wood desk. “Is this about Adler?”
“It’s about Seong in general. But, yeah. Marco tattled on you. You kicked the guy’s ass last night?”
Rainy wondered how heavily edited the version of events Marco had given his father was. “Uh, in a sense.”
“Good. I’m going to be frank with you. Seong has only been in town a couple months, but he’s already making the Vees his bitch. Now he’s edging in on the docks, and the only good fronting is between me and Andy Parish. Seong’s the type who got rich and then went dirty, not the other way around, and he’s full of all kinds of nasty corporate tricks. I don’t have the kind of above-the-board connections Parish has, so Seong is gunning for our share. He’s new in town; he doesn’t respect the understanding between us and the crooked bigwigs like Parish. I want to put him in his place before he gets any more ideas.”
“What happens to businessmen who don’t understand the way things work around here is what I did to Dean Holister last night,” Rainy said. “You want me to ice Seong? That’s a big ask.”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just want to warn him not to stick his hand in our cookie jar. Nice job with Holister, by the way. Painkillers in the bathtub. Classic. My hands aren’t going to turn up dirty on that, are they?”
“When have I ever let you down?”
Emilio grinned a toothy, predatory grin. “That’s why you’re here. Two days ago, Seong had one of my DA’s office guys put down. You know how long it took me to put him there? Now they’re after you. So, I want you to take care of Seong’s lap dog.”
Understanding crept, cautious, up Rainy’s neck. “You want me to kill Adler.”
“I’ll give you double the Holister job.”
“Triple,” Rainy said immediately. “What, you want a friends and family discount?”
“He’s already got a target on you. You need to deal with this anyway.”
“Lying low until they lose interest isn’t the same as gunning for the guy. Triple.”
“Double and some change.”
“I heard he ate a man’s pinkie.”
Emilio sighed. “Fine, fine. Just get it done before Seong pushes it too far. If I have to mop Marco or Lina up off a warehouse floor, this city is going to burn.”
Rainy thought of Adler in the docking bay, quick and efficient and brutal despite the drugs in his system. He was no joke. But Rainy had offed plenty of professional killers. He just had to find a weak spot. Everyone had one.
The thought of killing Adler wasn’t particularly troubling either. Sure, he gave great head, but he was a world-class asshole and clearly didn’t have any qualms about killing Rainy. And for triple the Holister payout, there weren’t many people Rainy wouldn’t kill.
“All right,” he said.
“Good,” Emilio said. “Before you go, though, I think you should remember that I’m not particularly sympathetic to accidents right about now.”
“Please, E, it’s me you’re talking to. Nice and smooth. No accidents, no distractions.”
Emilio smiled. “That’s what I like to hear. Now, bring me his head.”
Rainy spread his arms magnanimously.
“Medium or rare?”