10. Florida Man Losing Grip, Warns Coworker
Chapter 10
Florida Man Losing Grip, Warns Coworker
“ C ome on,” Marco begged. “ Please show it to us. You can just show it to me, if you want. You don’t even have to let the crybaby see.”
Malia dropped her pen with a sharp clack. “Rainy, tell Marco that if he can’t be a mature and respectful workplace contributor, he can get out of my office.”
“Tell Malia that she can suck my evil, murdering dick.”
“Oh my God.” Rainy set his disassembled gun on the mat. “I’m supposed to be the irreverent, flirty young assassin, and you two are turning me into a middle-aged mom. Shut up.”
He had spread out a yoga mat in the corner of the Rattrap’s office to clean his weapons while Malia assembled a complete movement map on Adler. Unfortunately, Marco had also set up shop upside-down on the couch to pester Rainy into taking off his ear bandage.
“I can’t believe he took your gun.”
“I kind of wish you would stop reminding me.”
“I mean, that’s your signature gun. Kind of emasculating.”
Rainy slid his Glock back together with a satisfying click and pointed it at Marco. “Again: leave me alone unless you want Tessa to become a widow before you ever even score a date. I’m in full war mode here. And, honestly, I don’t want you around if you can’t control yourself.”
“God, are you still upset about the waterboarding thing? I had it under control.” Marco kicked the wall for a few seconds, growing visibly bored when nobody replied. “Felix said you didn’t show up with your ear all fucked until past two. What were you doing that whole time if not torturing the dude?”
Rainy unhappily set in on sharpening his knives. “None of your business.” He glared at Malia out of the corner of his eye. “But, no, I wasn't torturing him, if that’s what you think.”
Malia didn’t look up from the monitor. “I didn’t say that. You guys are blowing everything out of proportion. I just don’t do well with blood, okay?”
“You work for a bunch of hitmen.”
“Oh, but, Rainy, don’t you know? She’s a perfect angel who’s never hurt a fly,” Marco simpered.
Malia slammed her hand down on the desk. “I can stop helping you with this, if that’s what you want.”
Rainy dropped his sharpener onto the mat and raised his hands over his head to command the full attention of the room. “Please, let’s all just pull it together for the ten more minutes we need to be in the same room, so I can make this guy dead as soon as possible.”
The couch creaked as Marco rolled down to a sitting position. “Wow, you’re really out for blood with this guy now. What’s up with that?”
“Oh, I don’t know—maybe it’s because he shot me in the ear and threatened my family? Besides, I always had it out for him. It’s my fucking job.” Rainy started packing his weapons back up, sliding the everyday ones into their homes on his person.
“Nah, the sick fuck is right,” Malia deadpanned, going back to her keyboard. “Before, you were totally acting like you had a crush on the guy or something.”
“I do not have a crush on him. In case you missed the memo, my primary objective is to erase him from the face of the Earth.”
There was a silence. “Don’t you mean ear -rase?” Marco asked sweetly.
“Marco.”
Malia was hiding behind her monitor. “Aw, come on, Rainy; he means well. Why don’t you lend him an ear?”
“ It’s not funny. ”
Marco and Malia exchanged a glance over the desk.
“Sorry, wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of feared assassin Rainy Half-ear.”
“Terrifying. Always up to his ears in murder.”
Rainy snatched his duffel and mat off the ground and stormed into the locker room. Little shits. He was fucking mutilated for life, and here they were, laughing it up.
“Sorry, Rainy, were your ears burning?” Malia called after him.
“No, don’t run out of earshot. ”
There was wild cackling, and then the sound of a high five. At least Rainy wouldn’t have to deal with their bickering anymore. His dignity was a small price to pay for peace in our time.
He took longer than necessary putting his things away, sulking in the locker room. When he returned to the office, Marco had wandered off to find attention elsewhere. Malia turned a monitor to face him.
“I’ve emailed the full report to you. This is the map of all the confirmed movements we have on him. It should be a good start. Now, we can start talking logistics, if you want…”
Rainy leaned in to examine the dots scattered across the uptown and midtown areas. “Sure. You can help me plan it all out, and then, when I’m committing violent homicide, I’ll be sure to let Adler know how not-complicit you were in it.”
Malia crossed her arms. “Really? Now?”
Rainy had been in a truly hellish mood since the ear incident and, with all the mocking, he was itching to stick a knife in something. If Adler wasn’t here, Malia would do.
“I’m sorry,” she gritted out, “that I’m not as used to casual violence as the rest of you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s not?”
Rainy picked up a stress doll off Malia’s desk and squeezed it until its eyes bulged. “No. The point is that you think you’re better than me—” than us, he’d meant to say us “—because you just sit here in this chair and handle people as numbers. Because you’re such a bright girl that you’re going to be out of here in a couple years, and fuck off to the rest of us.”
“I don’t think I’m better than you. And you don’t get to shame me for having a future beyond this place.”
Rainy squeezed the doll until it let out a little screaming leak of air. It smothered his flinch.
“Just own up to it. You kill people, Malia. You murder people for money.”
“It’s not the same.”
“What, just because you don’t have to wash blood out from under your nails at the end of the night?” Rainy didn’t know when he’d raised his voice. Malia was staring him down, cool and collected. It made him even angrier. “It’s not so different.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “I think you’re a horrible person. Is that what you want to hear? And maybe I’m just as bad. Maybe I’ve done things that are totally irredeemable. But that’s not what this is about.” She looked forlorn, suddenly. “I want to walk out of this place when I graduate. I don’t want this to become my life. I mean, look at you.”
“Me?”
Malia was so headstrong most of the time that Rainy forgot about the size difference between them, the way she was so tiny compared to him that he could have snapped her spine as easily as he would a baby animal’s. Now, the imbalance was all he could see as she tugged at her crochet top, staring through him.
“You’re the one who brought me in, Rainy. You’re the first person I met who let this become their whole world. And you’re fucking miserable. You’re totally miserable, and you don’t even know it.”
Rainy was so stunned that he lost grip of his anger completely. “I’m not miserable. I’m—my life is fine.”
Her lips twisted sadly. “Right. My mistake.” With a press of her thumb, she powered down her monitors and picked up her bag. “Happy hunting, Rainy.”
He wondered how, even while he was acutely aware of how big he was standing next to her, she could manage to make him feel so small.
Thankfully, he didn’t have any time to spare worrying himself over whatever Malia thought she saw in him. She had one thing right—he was on the hunt. He had to get it right this time. The Rattrap became his base of operations; he only left to scrounge up food down the block before returning to the office to eat it. He spent hours staring at the files and maps Malia had built, studying. Memorizing. He mapped out the patterns in Adler’s routine, studied every account by friends in the business who’d run across him.
It was sort of like studying wildlife, Rainy thought. Observing in the animal’s natural habitat. Adler was a feral sort of creature, a jackal or some other elusive desert beast. Rainy could only read the tracks and the empty spaces, the places he’d been and hadn’t been.
He was going a little crazy, maybe. Just a little.
Under his bandage, the skin was starting to web over the bloody-broken cartilage edges of his eartip. It itched like hell. Each time he unwrapped it to clean the wound, he was struck by how much it really did look like Adler had leaned in close and taken a bite out of him.
He learned Adler’s schedule inside and out, including the horrifying fact that he got up at five every morning to run several miles and that he owned two dogs, which was a horrifying fact in that it was disturbingly human.
When he needed a break from reading because his eyes ached, he retreated to the back where they kept the boxing equipment and sparred with the punching bag until his knuckles split.
The déjà vu of it wasn’t lost on him; it felt like an echo of last week, when he’d been preparing to intercept Adler the first time. But now, everything was heightened and more desperate. Like being stuck in a time loop, where each go-around became more frantic and panicked than the last. He was in a closed system filling with the fizzing static of entropy, and soon it was all going to pop like the cork out of a shaken bottle of champagne.
He was going to find a way to get ahead of the explosion, even if it killed him.
By the end of the week, he was ready. No backup this time—they’d only made things worse. He checked with the Espinosas guarding his parents, loaded himself down with his most reliable pieces, and staked out and waited and laid a trap on the way to a Vee hideout Adler was known to pop into regularly to police.
Nothing. He never showed.
Rainy went home and tried again the next night, at a different place. No dice. He tried all of Adler’s usual haunts, every place he’d been spotted, growing sloppier and more desperate each time, but Adler never appeared. He even staked out Adler’s apartment and didn’t catch a glimpse of the man. It was like he’d vanished off the face of the Earth.
There were two possibilities, in Rainy’s eyes: either Adler was avoiding him (which made him livid), or he was busy with something he deemed more important than Rainy (unbearable).
Maybe, in the intervening days, someone else had gotten off a lucky shot and Adler’s body just hadn’t washed up yet. Somehow, that was the worst possibility of all. Adler was his. Rainy was the one who got to finish this, to put a bullet between his eyes. It wasn’t just about dueling contracts anymore, Adler being paid to kill Rainy, Rainy being paid to kill him. He felt like they were connected now. Magnetized. Epic final battle written in the stars, or whatever passed for them in the hazy, light-polluted skies over Miami.
When he got too keyed up, wired and so angry in the echoey post-midnight silence that it felt like something deep inside him was bleeding, he found himself retreating to the bathroom and jerking off in a frantic, strangled rush. Despite his best efforts, his mind always turned to the weight and warmth and obscene, desperate sounds Adler had made riding in his lap. Interspersed seamlessly were fantasies of choking Adler ’til he turned blue, slitting his throat from ear to ear. The sex and violence blurred together, turning him hot and cold, stuttering, until he couldn’t tell them apart and didn’t know which he was getting off on. He came unhappily with a bitten-off cry in the back of his throat, and collapsed into too-few hours of dreamless sleep on the couch.
In the muggy daylight hours, Malia brought him a pack of dollar-store lollipops and Marco snuck a box of lo mein onto his lap. Peace offerings. After a few days of Malia’s loud side-eye, Rainy slunk back to his apartment to shower and change his clothes. He dished out the remaining lo mein to Patoso, then held still for the appropriate number of minutes for the cat to settle nearby and allow a few strokes down his spine before he capered away in overblown offense.
He sat in the middle of his empty living room, feeling the gray walls press in. The space felt too small and too large, made him seasick. He wanted to escape through the front door, run and run through the streets until the city washed the feeling away and he was anybody but himself. He squeezed the damaged tip of his ear until it bled again, just to feel the pain.
The floor was hard and unforgiving when he lay down on it and closed his eyes.
When he’d been taking his first, toddling baby steps away from the Espinosas, he had been enamored with Olga Rezakova. At that point, she’d been the only real independent assassin in the area. Nobody owned her—she was an artist of death who worked fully on commission. Rainy had wanted to be her. When he’d begged her to take him on as an apprentice, she’d made him play the same game she made all of her protégés play. She called it “magic bullet.” It went like this:
You took the magazine out of your gun, removed every last round. Made sure the chamber was empty, and it was harmless as a child’s toy. Then, you put the rounds in your pocket, held the gun to your temple, and pulled the trigger.
It was simple enough—a playground version of Russian roulette. But the trick wasn’t in pulling the trigger; it was in the moment before. Because in the moment the gun kissed the side of your head and your finger hesitated on the trigger, doubt crept in. You’d made sure it was empty, but what if you’d made a mistake? In your mind, you knew that you hadn’t, but what if what if what if. As long as the chamber was out of your sight, the chance that that space was occupied was never quite zero. Schr?dinger’s bullet, or whatever. And, like Rezakova said, even when it was empty, every time you thought about it for the rest of your life, you’d feel the phantom pain of what might have been right inside your skull. A shot that both was and wasn’t, suspended in time.
Click.
Magic bullet.
These hours and days of frantic waiting to face Adler felt like that moment right before the trigger was pulled.
Adler probably wouldn’t have gotten that game, Rainy thought bitterly. He was too controlled, too competent and self-contained. The doubt would have never occurred to him. If he had emptied the chamber, then there was no bullet. Rainy wondered what it was like, knowing exactly who and what you were. He wondered what it was like to want to know.
He sat up abruptly, his unbuttoned shirt sliding off of one shoulder. A thought had sparked, unbidden, from the crude smashing-together of rocks in the tumbler of his mind.
His problem was that he had been looking for Adler, when Adler controlled what the world saw of him. The trick was looking at the gun Adler wasn’t holding. Looking at what he didn’t control.
For example, Adler didn’t control Hyun-woo Seong.
Gathering up his toothbrush and a change of underwear, Rainy hurried back to the office.
Seong’s movements were much easier to follow once Rainy set Malia on them, since he was something of a public figure. One of the wealthiest men in the city, and all that. Most of it was boring and expected: meetings, dinners, a charity event at his children’s new-age hippie private school. But, a few nights ago, Seong had made a brief, unexpected stop at an exclusive Brickell club, the kind of den of investment bankers and trust fund burners where the escorts wore Louboutins and fur. A popular place in those circles, but definitely not Seong’s style.
“It pains me to say this,” Rainy sighed when Malia turned her monitor to show him, “but I might have to dress up for work.”
He bought a suit whose price was in very uncomfortable proportion to that of his car. It was French blue and paired with a pocket square, for God’s sake. He had them tailor the pants close across his ass, just because. Might as well go all out, if he was going out at all.
It looked great on him—accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, the warm hue of his skin—but Rainy felt stuffy and trapped. He normally went for “charmingly rough around the edges” with his clothes; this made him look like he managed hedge funds for a living.
When he looked in the mirror, hair combed neatly back, the clothes felt like a lie, a game. With Rainy’s usual clothing, everything was out in the open, and you got what you saw. Little left to the imagination, as it were. This was…
It was enough to pretend for a night.
On Sunday night, nearly a full week after the disaster with Adler, Rainy drove into Brickell to stake out the club. When he arrived, the place was already busy. Bodies milled and circled each other in a kind of orbital dance over the frosted-glass dance floor and the tables that lined the wide bank of windows. Over the bar was a panel of blue and green light fixtures that gave the whole place the air of an aquarium, complete with shark-nosed men in gray suits and glittering, scaly-sequined slips of girls.
Rainy settled at the bar and ordered himself a cosmo. The most badass of drinks it was not, but it was his favorite, and he might die tonight. Magic bullet, and all that. He sipped it as he surveyed the room, the bitter-citrus-vodka taste warming his nerves where they thrummed under his skin.
Seong wasn’t here, but that was expected. It wasn’t him, exactly, that Rainy was looking for—it was whatever business he had here. If it was important enough for Seong himself to pop in on, it was important enough for his favorite guard dog.
Songs changed. Rainy got to the bottom of his drink. He ordered another, scanned the room again and again, less hopefully each time. A woman named Charlotte sat next to him and he bought her a drink. They chatted a while, and she left, and Rainy scanned the room again, and Adler didn’t show. After a few hours, he started to doubt that this had been a good idea after all. He felt embarrassingly like a date who’d been stood up.
When he was at the bottom of his third drink, a hand trailed over his shoulder and he tensed, thinking, AdlerAdlerAdler. But the man who settled next to him was no Adler. He was near fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and laughing blue eyes and a casually unbuttoned collar, and Rainy almost choked on the disappointment.
“Buy you a drink?” the man asked, and Rainy’s figurative choke nearly turned into a literal one, because he recognized the man. And this—this was, without a doubt, the reason Seong had appeared at this club. Fucking hell.
Rainy let a little heat curl in his gaze as he looked the man up and down, pushed some seductive roughness into the scuff of his syllables. “Sure,” he said. “Name’s Alex Guerrero.”
The man grinned. “Andy Parish. What’re you drinking, Alex?”
Rainy could tell just from the cant of his voice and his posture that Parish didn’t recognize him. Of course he didn’t; Andy Parish had no need to get his hands dirty in street play the way the Espinosas did. He didn’t need to know who was doing the killing around the city when he hinted that things needed to get done—it was all arranged for him.
He didn’t have a damn clue who Rainy was.
And that could be useful.
Adler wasn’t here, but Rainy had no doubt that whatever Seong was up to around here was about Parish. Anything Rainy could get out of him would help him pin down Adler. And, more than that, Emilio would be willing to pay out in favors for any information on Parish’s new business plans that Rainy could bring him. This night might not be a bust after all.
“Whatever you want me to be drinking,” he replied.
Parish’s smile grew. He waved over the bartender, ordered them both Sazeracs, and told him to leave the top-shelf bottle of absinthe on the bar.
While he did so, Rainy looked him over carefully. Parish wasn’t a big man, and he’d approached Rainy, who was twenty years younger and about forty pounds heavier than him, all wrapped up in obvious muscle. The initial conclusion was that he wanted someone big, young, and strong to manhandle him, and that recommended confidence.
But that wasn’t it. Everyone in this bar knew Parish, and Parish knew it. He knew that Rainy knew who he was, the strings he held. He dressed tastefully but indiscreetly: gold-accented watch, silk pocket square. Preening. He wanted to be looked at and admired. Same with the drink order. He knew that Rainy admired him, but he took it further—he wanted Rainy starstruck, cowed. It was about having big, physically powerful men bend the knee. His smile at being handed the reins on Rainy’s drink was all the confirmation Rainy needed. By the time Parish turned back to him and handed him his Sazerac, he had already put together his plan of attack.
“I’ve never had one,” he lied, fingering the condensation on the lip of his glass.
“Try it,” Parish insisted. Rainy faked a shy glance down into the dark golden liquor and lifted it up for a sip. The orange peel tickled his nose, and when he smiled, he looked up into Parish’s eyes.
“Good?” Parish asked.
“Good.”
Parish sighed, downing a long sip of his own glass. “I love New Orleans. Greatest city on Earth, I think. You ever been?”
Rainy shook his head, rounding his eyes a little. He knew how to play coquettish, when it was wanted.
“That’s a shame,” Parish said. “I own a few high-end clubs there; that’s where I got my start. So much cheap real estate after Katrina. You just have to be savvy enough to act when conditions are just right.”
Rainy resisted the urge to grind his teeth. He could definitely dedicate a night to helping Emilio take this fucker down a peg.
“I always wanted to go,” he said, easy and flirty. “Nobody to take me, and I never take vacations on my own. Always working.”
“Take it from me,” Parish said, leaning in conspiratorially. “A pretty young thing like you has to learn to indulge every once in a while, while you’re still pretty and young.” His hand ghosted over Rainy’s knee in his fine, pressed blue slacks. Rainy butted up into the touch and smiled, indulgent and inviting.
Parish poured him a shot of absinthe, slid it over. Rainy examined the pale-greenish spirit. “None for you?”
“In a moment,” Parish soothed. “I just want to watch.”
Rainy threw back his head as he took the shot, exposing the line of his throat. He met Parish’s eyes as he licked a drop off his bottom lip, and tried not to wince at the bitter licorice taste. Parish looked pleased with everything about Rainy: the sleek hair and neat suit with the too-tight pants. Rainy knew he looked excellent, square-jawed and handsome and moneyed and just exotic enough to fascinate a man like Andy Parish.
He wondered fleetingly whether Parish would still want him in his cheap street clothes, covered in another man’s blood.
Rainy poured a second shot and held it straight up to Parish’s lips. He tried not to think about the fact that he was pulling a page from Adler’s playbook, or that instead of the authoritative way Adler had poured bourbon down Rainy’s throat, he was coaxing against Parish, a shy thumb pressed to the corner of his mouth. It felt like a falsehood.
“Is it rude to ask about the ear?” Parish asked.
Rainy laughed. “My cat. Please tell anyone who asks that I was shot, though. My reputation is on the line.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” Parish watched Rainy take a sip of absinthe straight from the bottle, eyes dark. “You know, last time I was in New Orleans, I bought the most beautiful antique piano. Used to stand in a nineteenth-century brothel, and then a jazz club. If you close your eyes while listening, it’s like being in the city itself. You can taste it.”
Rainy let his lashes dip. They were his mother’s lashes, long and dark. “Can I see?”
The next thing Rainy knew, Parish had paid the tab and was ushering him down to the street with jarring speed. A bodyguard peeled off from the wall to accompany them down in the elevator, but he didn’t recognize Rainy either. He was private muscle from an above-the-board company. Not the kind that usually played with Rainy’s type. Rainy made an excuse to duck into his own car, quickly stripping off his weapons and locking them inside. When he emerged, Parish was leaning against the wall, waiting.
He crawled half into Parish’s lap in the back seat of the chauffeured car, pressing lazy, absinthe-sticky kisses against his neck. He didn’t usually go for men Parish’s age, but Parish was attractive enough and Rainy was plenty incentivized. Besides, the frustrated anticipation of another night waiting in vain to confront Adler was fizzling in his veins, making him hot and itchy with the need to do something. If that something had to be Parish—well, Rainy had done a lot worse.
He kept track of the car’s turns while he made a show of panting into Parish’s neck. He could feel Parish getting hard against him as he felt up Rainy’s ass through his too-tight pants. The things were monstrous, honestly. He didn’t know how Adler did it.
Parish owned an estate in North Beach not far from the Espinosas, with a long driveway and a manicured garden that ran down to the beachfront. Over the black water of Biscayne Bay, the lights of downtown rose like modern Towers of Babel, built in man’s hubris to hang replacement stars. Parish’s home was tall and elegant, all archways. There were more bodyguards lurking. Rainy counted the one who came with them, plus another who patted him down before entry and four more they encountered on their way through the house to the study, Parish’s hand in Rainy’s back pocket the whole way. That was all right; Rainy didn’t plan on making any sort of trouble tonight that warranted the guarding of bodies. Just a little light snooping.
Parish’s study, unlike the modern interior of the rest of the house, was very old-money, boys-with-cigars-club. It was all dark wood paneling and vintage banker’s lamps, with a mantled fireplace and, as promised, an antique piano with a name stenciled in peeling gilded paint. Parish poured them some drinks (no more absinthe, thank God) and settled at the piano to play while Rainy lounged on a crushed velvet fainting couch that could have been pulled straight from a Victorian period drama.
The music was good, Rainy had to admit. Whether it transported one straight to New Orleans, he didn’t know. He’d never been. Had never been much of anywhere other than Miami, really.
Parish watched him more and more as he played, traced his eyes over the careful arrangement of Rainy’s body on the backless couch. In the warm, dark alcohol-slickness of his body, Rainy could feel the charge in the air, the tip in the scales when a moment between strangers turned from interest to Yes, this is about to happen. The room was too hot, so Rainy removed his tie and jacket, loosened the collar of his shirt. Parish’s eyes devoured each new inch of skin revealed, growing hungrier at the glimpse of tattoo that peeked out from Rainy’s open collar. And even if he wasn’t someone Rainy would have approached, well—it was good to be admired.
Finally, Parish left the piano and settled on the arm of the couch to trace a finger up Rainy’s thigh. He called out to a bodyguard hovering out of sight of the doorway, who Rainy had been keeping an eye on. “Can you send in Mark?” he asked, then returned his attention to Rainy.
“I’ve been told I’m a man of unusual tastes,” he said without preamble.
Uh-oh.
Parish laughed at the involuntary look of alarm that must have crossed Rainy’s features. “No, nothing gruesome, I promise.” He smoothed Rainy’s shirt with a hand. “It’s just that I like to play with friends, if you know what I mean. Are you okay with that?”
Rainy nodded, relieved. Three-or-more-somes, while not generally his style, weren’t entirely foreign territory.
“You could have just led with that,” he admonished, taking Parish’s drink.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Parish glanced up as his friend appeared in the doorway. “Mark, there you are. Come and see what delightful thing I picked up at the bar. This is Alex.”
Rainy glanced lazily over at the newcomer, tall and lean in his posh gray suit, and froze. The man’s steps faltered in unison, a quickly concealed flinch ebbing across his face. They stared at each other.
“Hello, Alex,” said Adler.