4. Florida Man Revealed as Incompetent Stalker
Chapter 4
Florida Man Revealed as Incompetent Stalker
R ainy didn’t mind committing murder as much as he probably should have.
It wasn’t that he saw people as objects, or anything like that. He knew that the people he killed had souls and lives and dreams. It was just that, in the end, it was a lot easier to do calculus with the value of those lives than most people would be willing to admit.
The first man he’d killed had been with his bare hands. It had been easy, so ridiculously easy that he hadn’t been able to believe it. Human bodies were so fragile, if you had the willpower. He had knelt there in the gravel, soaked to the skin, over a limp body. It hadn’t been exhilarating, and it hadn’t been soul-crushing. It was just doing as nature intended.
Didn’t hurt that it paid well, either.
So he didn’t lose any sleep over making plans to kill Adler, who was just as much a stone-cold killer as he was. He was going to have to make this one good. Rainy was proud of the Holister job; it had been neat, quick, and creative. He was going to have to do a lot better than that for someone like Adler, so this was going to be one for the books.
Killing was mostly in the preparation. That first R—research—was the weightiest. Malia carried out her end of it in her invisible world of bank statements and insurance records. Rainy was a little more traditional. He learned by watching. That was the trick to being a really effective killer—being able to look at someone and know them, inside and out. Rainy had always had that. It was what his mentor, Rezakova, had seen in him years ago.
Rainy knew that Adler was physically dangerous, and that he knew his stuff. He’d done his own research, enough to know Rainy’s schedule and predict his movements. The “ex-military” was written all over him, from the way he stood to the gun he favored. He hadn’t figured out his craft through trial and error—he’d had it taught to him.
This all gave Rainy an idea of the essence of who Adler was. Exacting, thorough, regimented. Clever, but not creative. Inflexible. He was all raw ferocity, confident in his deadliness. That was how Rainy had gotten the drop on him; Adler was used to solving problems by ramming his head against them until they broke, and had never had a use for thinking outside the box.
Still, there was an elusiveness to the picture that made Rainy uneasy. That gleam of feral viciousness that had nearly killed Rainy despite his upper hand. The fact that Adler had followed through on their flirtation before going in for the kill.
It seems only polite, don’t you think?
But why? Certainly not just to steal Rainy’s knife. Was it a weird power thing that he got off on? Was he just that bored and horny?
There was something missing from his picture. Something that made Adler unpredictable. And there was nothing Rainy hated in other people more than unpredictability. Unpredictability got you killed.
So, it was time for some good old-fashioned recon.
The morning after he got the assignment from Emilio, Rainy put on a toned-down shirt and a pair of sunglasses and found, with Malia’s directions, Seong’s downtown offices. They were located in a glass-and-steel neo-futurist monstrosity that had a vaguely phallic suggestion to it. He parked across the street and snapped a picture to send to the Rattrap group chat.
Grow up, Malia replied, at the same time that Marco said, Nice.
Malia was still trawling for any kind of address on Adler, but Rainy figured that if Adler and Seong were as joined at the hip as everyone seemed to think, he would eventually be found here.
He only had to wait two hours. Around ten, Rainy glanced up from the sudoku he was idly completing on his phone to watch a tall, narrow figure in a tweed three-piece suit stride out onto the sidewalk. Fucking tweed. This was the man who’d given Rainy head so good that it kept randomly popping into his brain days later to drive him to distraction.
Fucking tweed.
It didn’t help that he looked fantastic in it. The suit was classy and professional and tailored to within an inch of its life, but it was the way Adler wore it that made it unbearable. With his physique, he should’ve been lanky, but he prowled around like a big cat, all lithe, deadly grace. He stood on the curb and checked his watch, and suddenly Rainy was having war flashbacks to watching him do the same thing while kneeling on the floor between Rainy’s open thighs, looking snide at Rainy’s boneless post-orgasmic bliss.
Rainy was so distracted by the memory that he almost missed the black car pulling up alongside the curb. He turned on his engine as Adler climbed inside, then counted out the appropriate number of cars between them before pulling out to follow.
The car took Adler south, out of downtown and into the city’s tiny Korean enclave. It took a turn down a narrow street and dropped him off in front of the kind of weather-grimy, battered shopping center only locals ever frequented. Rainy frowned, watching him walk in through the entrance archway before circling the block for parking.
It was a partially overcast day, but Rainy kept his dark glasses on as he entered the shopping center. Luckily, it was busy for a Friday morning. He kept to the edge of the two-tiered courtyard layout, passing through the shadow of shops whose signs were written almost exclusively in Hangul. He paused behind the natural blind formed by a line of customers for a eomuk stand.
Adler was easy to spot, with his formal suit and relatively tall stature. He was on the top level of the center, where a balcony with a sun-bleached wooden railing overlooked the courtyard below. He walked purposefully into a storefront that had no discernible English signage, and Rainy cut across the courtyard toward the large concrete staircase to follow.
He made himself inconspicuous on a bench across from and to the right of the storefront, keeping his head lowered to his phone. Inside the store, Adler was leaning against the counter, talking to the elderly, stooped Korean man who stood behind the register.
Rainy wondered what Adler was doing here. The man didn’t look particularly frightened, so Adler probably wasn’t here to kill him. More than likely, he was carrying out some business for Seong. It didn’t seem like a shakedown, and Seong wasn’t the type to play with small fish like that anyway. Was this an underground business contact? Maybe an informant?
Adler handed the man a slip of paper from his pocket. The man glanced at it before disappearing behind a curtain into the back of the store. Some kind of supplier, then. Weapons? Drugs? Information?
The man returned with something large draped over his arm—a pair of long fabric bags on hangers.
Dry cleaning.
He had followed Adler here to watch him pick up his fucking dry cleaning.
Adler accepted the bags and exited the store, headed the opposite direction from Rainy’s bench. Rainy rose after a few beats and trailed him at a distance, making sure to keep at least fifty feet between them. Adler descended the steps again and turned right into another store with solely Hangul signage. This one, though, was obviously a grocery store. Tall shelves formed a maze inside, packed with brightly packaged products Rainy couldn’t read the labels of. Adler vanished into the labyrinth, and Rainy waited outside for a full minute before following.
He hung back in a snack aisle, watching Adler fill a bag with produce and some canned goods. Before walking up to the register, he grabbed a bouquet of tulips.
The woman at the register greeted Adler by name. When she named a price for the produce he’d set down, he started saying something to her that had the distinctive sound of haggling, but Rainy couldn’t understand the words. The woman laughed at something he said and waved him off, her words just as nonsensical to Rainy.
He speaks Korean! he texted Malia.
Bitch, I am in econ lecture. Do not bother me unless you’ve been shot.
When Rainy looked up, Adler was gone. He cursed under his breath and exited the store, but the bastard must have hightailed it somewhere. He couldn’t spot him anywhere in the crowd that milled around the courtyard.
He made a full circuit around the center, keeping to the edges to seek unobserved, but he couldn’t find Adler. Finally, he stepped back onto the street, but a brief venture in both directions turned up no clues. He’d lost him. Get distracted for twenty seconds, and boom! Adler was a slippery fucker, Rainy had to give him that.
Resigning himself to hunting down another lead, he made one last inquisitive circle around the block before returning to his car. As soon as he approached, an odd feeling of wrongness tangled its fingers in his hair and tugged at the back of his skull. He’d parallel parked between two sedans, and the same cars were there, only now they looked… taller.
“Shit! Oh, no, no, no.” Rainy raced over to his car, which was riding unusually low against the curb. He crouched down, a hand braced on his baby’s glossy silver paint job, and ran the other hand over the first tire he reached. “God damn it!”
There was a straight puncture several inches long gouged into the sidewall of his tire. Upon further inspection, all four of his tires had been irreparably slashed. Rainy grabbed two fistfuls of his hair.
“Fuck!” He threw his sunglasses down on the pavement, where one of the lenses cracked. “Fucking hell!”
There was a note pinned under the windshield wiper closest to the driver’s door.
In neat, looping cursive, it read: Stop following me.
Eight hours later, Rainy was fuming on a rooftop.
Twelve hundred dollars. Twelve hundred dollars, plus whatever the tow bill was going to be. Threaten Rainy’s life, fine. Even fucking kill him, whatever. But mess with his car? Oh, hell no. That was not going to fly. Twelve hundred dollars.
Screw not getting a rush from killing. Rainy was going to fucking enjoy this.
He needed something really, really nasty. Electrocution, maybe. Burying Adler alive. Tossing him off a bridge in lead shoes. In an area with sharks. With some holes poked in him to let the blood out. And a hair dryer thrown in for good measure.
Rainy had had a lot of time to think about it during the five hours he’d sat at the dealership.
As he sweated on the cement lip of the roof in the muggy autumn evening, he distracted himself by daydreaming about ripping up one of Adler’s fancy tailored suits in front of him. Tearing it limb from lapel. Maybe taking a butane torch to that crisp tweed jacket while Adler begged for its life. Also, in this dream Adler may or may not have been tied up. And naked.
It was a multifaceted fantasy.
The good thing about the time he’d been forced to sit around getting new tires was that it had given him the opportunity to puzzle out where to look for Adler next.
He’d really bought quite a lot of produce for one person. He might have been stocking up for the week, but Rainy thought it was more likely that he was cooking for someone else. Then, the flowers. Adler didn’t really seem like the type of person to buy flowers for himself, and, with his impeccable taste in suits, Rainy assumed he wouldn’t be getting tulips for a date. That meant either he was visiting his mother—not likely, given the accent—or they were a hostess gift for an older woman he knew.
Well, that gave Rainy an idea, at least.
So now he was camped out on the roof of the insurance company headquarters across from Seong’s downtown penthouse. He’d bribed a security guard to let him up after business hours and now he was huddled up with a pair of binoculars.
Seong’s apartment was almost entirely glass-faced on the edge closest to Rainy. It took up the whole top floor of the luxury apartment building and was done up in sleek modern appliances and tasteful furniture, and it had to cost a bajillion dollars. Currently taking up residence on a gravel roof, Rainy kind of hated it.
Through his binoculars, he watched the Seongs bustle about their giant, shiny chrome kitchen. Hyun-woo Seong himself was a slight man in his fifties, with mostly gray hair and a crinkly smile too gentle to be trustworthy. He’d shed his jacket and loosened his tie at the door, and he was currently frying something at the stove. His wife, Su-jin, was busy setting the table while their kids, ages eleven and eight, were on the huge L-shaped couch, engrossed in some indecipherable teen drama that Malia watched religiously.
Su-jin perked up and wiped her hands on a towel, then walked to the front door. Rainy checked his watch. Seven on the dot. Su-jin opened the door to reveal Adler in his same pristine suit, holding a large foil-covered bowl and the bouquet of tulips. He bent down to accept a kiss on the unscarred cheek, then presented the flowers to her with the tooth-rotting charm of a Southern gentleman.
Damn, Rainy was good. He high-fived himself mentally, and then, since he was alone, also physically.
Adler deposited his bowl in the kitchen, where Seong clapped him on the shoulder. The kids leaped up and ran to wrap themselves around his middle, and it might have been a fault in the binoculars, but it looked like Adler actually smiled. It made his eyes crinkle and his scar bunch up, and it looked better on him than his bespoke suit.
Hmph.
The Seong family plus Adler settled in at the table to eat. It occurred to Rainy that this was actually a pretty boring stakeout scenario. It was starting to get dark, Rainy’s surroundings illuminated by the light through the penthouse windows, and they were just sitting there with their mouths moving soundlessly, eating from a spread that looked unfairly delicious. Rainy grumpily dug his hand into the bag of trail mix between his feet, which was just nuts and raisins now because he’d already eaten out all the candy.
In just twenty minutes or so, it was fully dark, and Rainy kept shifting uncomfortably on the gravel. Adler and the Seongs had cracked open a bottle of wine. Rainy was not looking forward to waiting through the whole bottle to follow Adler home. To occupy himself, he focused on watching Adler’s mannerisms—food cut neatly with fork and knife, meat and sides eaten one by one instead of all together. He still held his head in that slightly crooked way Rainy had noticed at the bar, his chin tilted like he was always trying to angle his unscarred side toward whoever was speaking.
Rainy devoted entirely too much focus to watching him drink his wine, unhurried, tongue sliding over the rim of the glass to catch the last drop of Merlot, and remembering the way he’d looked in the wine cellar. More particularly, the way his tongue had looked on Rainy’s skin.
Around eight thirty, Rainy was so bored that he started trying to read the Seongs’ lips, then gave up after about five minutes in favor of making up his own dialogue.
So, Seong asked, have you made any progress in taking down that devastatingly handsome and charming hitman I sent you to kill?
While waving off the offer of a refill on wine, Adler replied, No; now he’s on my tail. I fear for my life because he is so spectacularly talented, yet I also feel a burning passion for him. Ever since our brief sexual encounter, I haven’t been able to get him out of my head. I hope he’s gentle when he inevitably kills me, and maybe lets me make sweet love to him beforehand.
“Ha, in your dreams,” Rainy muttered.
The boredom was maybe getting to him a little bit.
It was nearly nine when Adler finally excused himself and stood from the table, disappearing deeper into the penthouse. A minute or two later, he briefly passed in front of the windows again, carrying a long black parcel under his arm. Seong called something to him, and Adler waved vaguely before vanishing once more into the recesses of the apartment. Rainy frowned, waiting for him to reappear.
Several minutes later, he still hadn’t. Rainy was getting antsy, and he’d taken to scanning the sidewalk below to see if Adler had used some unseen back exit to leave the building. So far, no luck. Where the hell had he gone?
His phone buzzed in his pocket, making him jump. Glancing around to make sure a nonexistent audience hadn’t seen the slipup, he fumbled for his phone. If he was lucky, it was an old hookup looking for a booty call. If he was unlucky, it was Marco asking which color of diamonds Rainy thought would be most likely to make Sergeant Tessa realize her undying love for him. He pulled it out—unknown number—and answered.
“Now’s not a great time.”
“ Hi, Mister Rainy, ” Adler drawled. Rainy was so startled that he nearly dropped the phone.
“How did you get this number?”
“ Come on. Don’t embarrass yourself. ” There was a mechanical clicking and sliding sound from Adler’s end. “ I just wanted to give you fair warning. You don’t wanna keep fucking around with me. ”
“I’m not too worried. If I remember correctly, things worked out pretty well for me last time.”
“ That’s what the warning’s for. Nobody gets the drop on me twice. Now, be polite and wave hello. ”
A flash of alarm ripped up Rainy’s spine. Adler knew he was here. But could he really see him? He scanned the penthouse windows. No sign of Adler. The sidewalk below was clear, too, which left only…
Body going very still, Rainy moved only his neck muscles to tilt his head up. The roof of Seong’s apartment building was approximately twenty feet above him, ringed with a concrete lip. Adler had his elbows propped up on it. He was holding a scoped rifle.
He snapped off a lazy salute.
“ Fuck. ” Rainy dropped, skinning himself on the gravel. A bullet slashed the air where his head had been. The shot echoed in the canyon between the buildings, and someone on the street shouted in alarm. Rainy was already moving.
Sending gravel flying off the roof, he scrabbled to his feet and took off for the concrete structure that housed the roof access door. Everything inside him was perfectly still, the calm at the heart of the storm that he felt when his body flew straight through panic and into life-or-death. Another shot cracked through the air, and he didn’t see, didn’t feel. Just ran.
A bullet hit the door shelter in front of him, showering him with chips of concrete. He dodged and kept going. The door swallowed him, wrapping him tight in the safety of concrete and steel. He felt his body, the air white and blistering in his lungs, checking for holes. His clothes were dry and clean. No hits.
He was safe.
He’d managed to hold on to his phone, but the binoculars and trail mix were a lost cause. Rainy cursed violently under his breath. He considered popping out with his Colt and squeezing off a few retaliatory shots, but Adler was well out of his range.
Bastard. Fucking bastard, stupid car-slashing, rifle-wielding, cock-sucking—
The phone was still connected. Rainy raised it to his ear, snarling.
“ See you around. ” Rainy could hear the smirk in Adler’s voice before the line went dead. He pressed himself back into the concrete wall and squeezed his hands into fists until they stopped shaking.
It was possible that this was going to be more difficult than he had first anticipated.