12. Florida Man Joins Violent Spree 3 Casualties
Chapter 12
Florida Man Joins Violent Spree; 3 Casualties
R ainy estimated that he had about five minutes before Parish would start to question his whereabouts, so he dug into the desk straightaway. There were stacks of papers secured by clips, printed memos, and a yellow legal pad with such enlightening shorthand missives as “call m” and “b street no.” Rainy rifled through them all, pausing only to adjust himself uncomfortably every few moments.
He’d done a fair job of wiping himself off with the towel, but he still felt sticky and awful in those horribly tight pants. If this was how Adler had felt after they’d done it in the multipurpose room, Rainy was starting to understand why he’d felt the urge to shoot him.
There was a locked file drawer in the bottom of the desk, which Rainy picked open efficiently with a pilfered paper clip. Inside was the good stuff—files on Parish’s holdings at the docks. Everything was legit, stamped with the letterheads of real, heavyweight property law firms, not legacy mob attorneys like Lina. Parish’s was the kind of empire that was ironclad to everyone below his class. You couldn’t touch him without pulling strings higher than the ones he already had looped up in his hands.
But Rainy had once been a rising star in the Espinosa ranks, and he may not have understood arcane contract law, but he did know illegal shit when he saw it. And he saw it all over—off-the-books ledgers with the names of suppliers he recognized, shady contractors, bribes. Very much the Espinosas’ bread and butter.
Folded inside one envelope was a map of Parish’s holdings on the docks, marked up in ballpoint shorthand. Off-the-books storage, the kind you couldn’t register with the port authority. Rainy puffed out an impressed breath and snapped a photo with his phone.
Seong’s presence in Miami had clearly emboldened Parish to press Emilio. That meant that he was afraid of Seong’s connections in a way that he hadn’t been afraid of Emilio’s. And yet, Adler was here to spy on him, which meant that the two weren’t working together. So Seong wasn’t really a big enough threat for Parish to bargain with him. He was the inverse of Emilio—all connections, no brute force.
A delicate spiderweb of an idea began to spin itself into existence in the corner of his mind.
The door swung open on oiled-silent hinges and light leaped across the room, framing Rainy in a damning square of yellow. He jumped and, childishly, shoved the folded paper back into the drawer.
Adler closed the door behind himself, expression flat and humorless in a way that was all the worse because Rainy had now witnessed him displaying actual human emotion. He was still conspicuously unbuttoned, his tie loose. He folded his arms.
“Real subtle,” he said. “Don’t worry; I kicked a rug over the skid marks you left on the floor.”
Rainy now found out what his body did without Parish there to keep him in check. He darted across the room and slammed Adler against the wall. A shelf of heavy glass awards rattled, and Adler sneered at him.
“Be quiet,” he hissed.
“Fuck you.”
“We’re about even on that front now. Sore?” Adler grunted satisfyingly when Rainy crushed his slighter frame against the wall. “Now, hands off.”
There was suddenly a knife pricking through the fine fabric of Rainy’s shirt, pressing neatly into the divot between two ribs. He backed off, warily eyeing the five-inch fixed-blade Adler had magicked from somewhere on his person.
“How did you even get that thing in here? They practically cavity searched me.”
“We’ve been over this, Mister Rainy. I’m better than you.” Adler relaxed his wrist, holding the knife casually enough that it stung Rainy’s pride a little. “Even so, I don’t wanna make a mess of you all over this Turkish rug. So get the hell out of here before you blow my cover.”
“I don’t care about the rug,” Rainy snarled. “I’m going to wring your giraffe neck like a dish towel.”
“I’m busy.” Adler waved his knife hand dismissively. “I’ll deal with you later; just fuck off.”
No. No, no, no. This bastard didn’t get to put Rainy through what he had and then dismiss him like an afternoon appointment. He’d show him just how much of an afterthought he was. He stepped forward, hands raised, and was fended off again with the knife.
There was a crease between Adler’s brows now. “You were in the desk. You saw the reports. The Espinosas are punching above their weight class trying anything with Parish. He’d tie them up in knots and take their house right out from under them, so run on home and tell them that.”
“First off, I’m not some trained Espinosa dog. Sorry—I know that must be hard for you to wrap your brain around.” Rainy let a smile slip across his face, felt it curdle and turn nasty. “You know, I figured you were just obedient enough to follow Seong when he called, but maybe this is your MO. Did you get your day job by letting him fuck you, too?”
He was prepared for Adler’s lunge, all the viciousness behind it. He dodged the knife and tried to wrap his arms around from behind, binding Adler’s hands to his sides, but he was too slow. Adler executed a startlingly graceful high side kick that sent Rainy stumbling back into the desk, and then he was on him, knife raised.
Rainy didn’t let himself flinch. “You’re just as screwed here as I am,” he said. “That’s what I saw in the desk. That’s why you’re still here. Parish told your boss to go fuck himself, and Seong has the connections to bite him back. But you don’t have the ground game to liquidate his product, or handle his men. You don’t know how to operate in this city yet.”
Adler’s eyes burned with resentment, but his silence was answer enough. Rainy was just starting to chortle with delight when the knife curved at the corner of his vision, and he remembered with a throb of his injured ear why it wasn’t such a good idea to mock Adler while he was smarting.
That was how they were poised—Rainy half-thrown back across the desk and Adler over him with a knife—when one of Parish’s bodyguards pushed the door open and flicked on the lights.
There was a brief, frozen moment that hung in the air, crystalline, as the man’s eyes traveled over their grappled position to the knife in Adler’s hand and the open desk drawer with papers spilling out of it. Then his hand slid toward his gun, and time unstuck.
Adler threw the knife. It tumbled gracefully blade over handle and lodged directly in the man’s windpipe. He let out a horrible gargle and the gun in his hand went off into his own thigh before he crumpled loudly to the hallway floor. There was a shout of alarm from further up the hall.
“Fuck!” Rainy admonished. “You fucking—”
But Adler was already running, stooping to snatch his knife from the dying man’s neck and sprinting off down the hall. Rainy cursed and grabbed one of the heavy glass trophies off the shelf.
The hallway, with its carved wooden molding and hand-woven runner, stretched off in either direction, lit by blown-glass wall sconces. To Rainy’s right, there was the pounding of footsteps on hardwood as the other bodyguards came to investigate. To his left, Adler was running in the opposite direction and looking like he had at least some sense of where he was going. Rainy decided to follow him.
As men shouted at their heels, Adler looped around a corner. Rainy pushed himself to catch up right as Adler pulled open a door seemingly at random and slipped inside. Rainy stuck his foot out to stop it from closing.
“Get out of here,” Adler hissed, wild-eyed, trying to close the door on Rainy’s brand-new leather shoe. Fuck, did those things pinch.
“No,” Rainy said petulantly. “I will rat.”
Looking murderous, Adler yanked him inside by the tie and closed the door with a soft click. They both dropped into crouches in the dark, Adler bracing his right shoulder against the door.
The room was a half bath that was entirely too large. The toilet in its French tile alcove receded into distant gloom.
In the hall, there were voices and heavy footsteps. Adler shuffled his crouch around and pressed his left ear against the door.
“What are they saying?” Rainy whispered. Adler kicked him.
It didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out. Nearby, there was the thundering snap-thud of a door being kicked open. Then another. Rainy swallowed around the dry prickliness in his throat and adjusted his grip on the glass trophy where it was slippery with sweat.
Adler was shifting with those tight, economical military movements now, wiping the blade of his knife on a hand towel and evening his breath. Rainy could practically hear the clicks of tumblers and gears falling into place as his eyes took on that sharp, tactical look.
“You have a plan,” Rainy murmured. “Tell me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Adler may have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t that. He made aggressive eye contact as he spoke, tilting his head toward Rainy. Maybe that was some weird military thing too.
“There’s one stairway. We need to get through these men to double back. I estimate three.” He held up three fingers, which was pretty unnecessary, in Rainy’s opinion. “On my count. Just know I won’t stop for you.”
“I won’t stop for you either,” Rainy hissed, but then he couldn’t speak as he tensed in anticipation, adrenaline thrumming. Adler was dropping down his three fingers slowly, one by one. That kick hit Rainy’s bloodstream, the thrill of the fight. The only thing he’d ever been good at. Adler’s long index finger curled down into his palm.
He threw open the door and rolled straightaway in the direction of the shouting and shuffling. Rainy followed, keeping low and hefting Parish’s rich-fuck-of-the-year award.
There were indeed three guys, two of them already with guns in hand. Adler regained his feet fluidly in front of them and launched himself straight onto one of the armed ones, angling his knife into the man’s stomach. They went down grappling, the man’s gun useless when Adler was wrapped inside his reach.
The second gun went right to Adler’s back. Then Rainy was there, body-checking the unarmed man out of his way to bring his trophy down on the gunman’s head. He didn’t have time to check the result before he was spinning back to face his other attacker, dodging a right hook. They traded blows, the man trying to wrestle him into a grapple and Rainy dancing out of reach.
But he wasn’t particularly mobile in this constricting suit, and the guy was a lot quicker than him. Rainy took a hit to his chin and then to his solar plexus, and found himself up against the wall.
Over the man’s shoulder, Adler was on his feet. Rainy’s eyes caught his across the wide, wild gulf of the hall and, on instinct, he kicked the man advancing on him back like a passed soccer ball. Adler caught him easily with a knife in his back and looped an elbow around his throat to hold him. Behind him, there was movement—Rainy’s blow with the trophy had only been glancing, and the man had found his gun, and Adler didn’t—
“Duck!” Rainy shouted, and Adler just did, without question. Thank God for those military instincts. Rainy smashed his fist into the man’s temple hard enough that he felt the skin on his knuckles split and slide, and then the man was down and Adler was dropping his opponent and they were running for the stairs.
Behind them, he could hear one of the guards up and coming after them, but they had a head start. They crashed down the stairway with its wrought-iron banisters, taking the stairs five at a time. In the foyer below, Rainy spotted a flash of rumpled suit as one of the bodyguards frog-marched Parish toward the safety of the den.
Six guards that he’d seen on the way in—that left one more unaccounted for. Rainy found him when the glossy-lacquered front door swung open and the guard burst in with his pistol raised.
Adler hit the foyer and swerved to the right, dodging the newcomer. Rainy followed, dress shoes sliding on the tile floor. They cut through a dining room and a kitchen, and then there was a mudroom and a door in front of them.
After the house’s world-class air conditioning, the humidity hit like a sloppy, wet sucker punch. In the moonlight and the soft yellow glow of the house, the garden was a collection of loose, leafy shapes and pale gravel trails. Adler navigated it with the grace of a dancer. Rainy crashed through a rosebush, swearing a blue streak.
Two men were still on their tail, just reaching the edge of the garden. Outside, they seemed to have less scruples about discharging their weapons, because Rainy heard the crack of a shot and felt a hot zip of air pass by him. He drew in his shoulders and pushed himself harder. His hip flexors were smarting, and his feet would be blistered bloody from these goddamn shoes, but he reached the edge of the estate a second behind Adler.
Parish’s property was bounded by a tall brick wall that butted the wrought-iron gate at the foot of the driveway. Seemingly without thinking, Adler dropped to a knee and laced his hands to boost Rainy over. More leftover military conditioning, probably—it was just instinct to not leave a man behind. Rainy wasn’t about to waste time thinking about it. He planted his foot in the proffered brace and let Adler’s lent strength carry him easily up onto the narrow, flat top of the wall.
Before he could even consider his options, he was twisting on his awkward perch, ignoring another close call with a bullet to drop both arms down. Adler leaped up and his strong, sure hands wrapped around Rainy’s biceps. Rainy braced his feet and tipped back, using his own considerable weight as a lever to yank Adler up and over the wall with him.
They landed in a clumsy tangle on the cement on the other side. Whatever deep-trained fellow-feeling had possessed Adler seemed to leave him now, because he elbowed Rainy rudely out of his way and took off again, loping down the street. Rainy grit his teeth and followed.
He’d lost the trophy on his way out of the house. As the gate swung open and flashlights swept behind them, he followed Adler past the gated beginnings of several more driveways. At the end of the block—if it could be called that—there was a mansion still under construction, a palace of plywood, plastic siding, and exposed insulation. They both scrambled over the chain-link fence that guarded it and ducked through the missing front door.
Rainy pressed himself against an unfinished wall and slid down, panting. His suit was wrecked—torn and shredded by thorns and conspicuously bloody. Adler, leaning against the opposite wall, looked similarly awful. He was glaring daggers at Rainy even as he braced his hands on his knees to catch his breath. They sat in the beginnings of a foyer as voices bounced between the buildings outside, already moving further down the street.
“Were you dropped on your head as a baby?” Adler growled the moment he’d regained himself.
“Please,” Rainy said. “I did you a favor. You weren’t going to get anything else from that place.”
He pushed to his feet, stripping out of his ruined jacket and tie. His feet were in agony inside those terrible shoes, and he briefly considered ditching them as well. Across the way, Adler was putting himself to rights, straightening his shirt and vest into as crisp of angles as he could. Rainy was reminded of the photo of a younger Adler in his clean, meticulously-kept military uniform. Maybe it wasn’t just the combat instincts that had stuck around.
Parish’s men had faded into the distance, and they were alone in this half-finished house. Rainy hazarded a glance at Adler and found him staring right back, silent. The air fizzled uneasily with the first hint of electricity.
It was almost identical to the tension that had flavored the air while Parish played the piano earlier—the tip of circumstance to mutual certainty of what was about to happen. Rainy’s feet would have to wait; his wounded ear and pride demanded satisfaction.
“You know,” he said, because something in the moment demanded it, “we don’t make such a bad team, when it comes down to it.”
“Shame,” Adler replied.
They both stood perfectly still, waiting to see who would break the building tension. Rainy watched the expert shift of weight in Adler’s body, the nearly imperceptible transition from relaxed to deadly, heralded by tiny adjustments in the angle of his hips and shoulders.
Rainy wanted something. He didn’t know what it was, but he wanted it so badly it hurt.
In the end, he made the first move, if only to escape the swelling bubble of something in his chest. Rainy had never been called a patient man. He darted forward and swung.
Adler dodged him, but Rainy kept coming, a blitzkrieg of fists and elbows and knees. Adler had stowed the knife somewhere, but Rainy knew he still had it. He needed to make this too fast and hard for Adler to get it back in his hands. He pressed his advantage, which was in strength and brute force; when he landed a hit on Adler, it knocked him back into the wall. But Adler was so quick and tenacious. Any damage he took, he took and kept rolling with.
The first time they’d fought, in the hotel, Rainy hadn’t gone as hard as he could have. He hadn’t yet realized what a nightmare Adler was, and there was no point in really pounding a guy you’d already slipped a knockout dose. This was different. This time, one of them was going to be dead at the end of it, and Rainy knew that he had to fight as dirty as he could if he didn’t want it to be him.
Unfortunately, Adler seemed to recognize the same thing. Even through Rainy’s best onslaught, he managed to sneak in a few targeted shots to Rainy’s liver and then a direct hit to his wounded ear. Rainy stumbled, vision whiting. He could feel the new skin tearing and fresh blood soaking his bandage.
His rage was back, but, beyond it, he felt a deeper sense of immense gravity. His weeks of restlessness had solidified his anger into something heavy and dark that sat at the core of him, dragging down into his belly. The idea of this encounter as some kind of epic, fated battle didn’t feel like a melodramatic late-night musing anymore. This felt inevitable as the force that brought every object inexorably back toward the center of the Earth. From the moment Rainy had locked eyes with Adler over that bar, there had been no avoiding this. Kill or be killed. The enormity of it funneled and sharpened, drawn in like all the background static of the universe narrowing to the radio antenna that was the red-hot pain in Rainy’s ear.
He punched Adler between the eyes. It was so sharp and hard that Adler didn’t even have a chance to block it. And Adler may have been a champ at taking hits, but not even a lifelong boxer could just shrug off a blow like that. He fell back against the wall, looking violently dizzy. After a second, his vision cleared and he was scrabbling for skin again, but Rainy wasn’t a good enough sport to not press the advantage when he had it.
He grabbed Adler by the upper arms and slammed him against the wall over and over, hard enough that the plywood splintered and they almost fell through it. Adler wobbled, bloodied, and Rainy put him on the floor at the foot of the wall. Adler curled in to protect himself, a physical mirror of those internal walls, but he was too punch-drunk slow. Rainy brought his foot down, the heel of his leather dress shoe unforgiving.
The muffled, organic snap of breaking bones was so familiar that, most nights, Rainy heard it in his dreams. Adler’s ribs made that sound now. He let out an involuntary keen of pain, the kind that was wrenched out of someone determined not to show they were hurting. Rainy kicked him again, and again.
Please stop, he thought as Adler made another rough noise. Please, just let me kill you easy. Just let me get this over with.
He’d thought he would enjoy this, even fantasized about it. But now he just wanted it to end. He wanted Adler to stop fighting, so he could stop hurting him. He wanted to be done.
Then, unexpectedly, Adler was wrapped around his legs and dragging him down. They ended up rolling across the concrete floor, struggling. Adler was long and wiry and hard to pin down. Rainy dug an elbow into his broken ribs and got him flat, but Adler kept fighting, writhing and kicking with everything he had, and Rainy could barely keep hold of him. He let his arm drift too high, trying to lever it against Adler’s collarbone, and teeth sunk in deep enough to draw blood. Rainy yelped and pulled away, and then they were grappling across the floor again.
As they fought, Rainy’s body burning with small abrasions and everything matted with sweat and sawdust, there was a split second where he tried to wrap an arm around Adler’s neck and instead caught his eyes. They were feral and deadly and hard-sharp enough to cut glass. Rainy faltered for a moment, the breath knocked out of him.
It was exactly how he imagined encountering a grizzly bear or a mountain lion out in the wild would be—a sense of terrified awe, and peace with it. The sudden thought that fighting against something like that was like trying to fight a bolt of divine lightning. The proper thing to do was just roll over and die, and feel an appropriate sense of awe at the majesty of what had struck you down.
Just a moment, but that was enough. Adler lunged, rolled them over and over with an intent Rainy couldn’t counter. And then Adler was up on his knees, and Rainy was looking up at him, and there was the cold stinging kiss of a knife between Rainy’s ribs.
The world held its breath. The silence of the unfinished house echoed.
Rainy had a sudden sense memory of trailing after his mother across a stone floor as a child, hands fisted in her skirt. He’d been dressed neatly, hair combed, for his first confession. His mother had dragged him from their usual smaller church to the echoey old Cathedral of Saint Mary, a bastion of stained glass and drafts and the towering shadow of Christ suffering upon the cross, bloody wound in his side. He remembered that old building having a silence that smothered, that consumed. That reflected all one’s sins and shortcomings back until you drowned in them.
That was the silence that gripped the world now.
Adler knelt in the center of the concrete floor. Rainy was draped over his lap, chest propped over one knee so his ribcage jutted up at the sky. One of Adler’s scarred, long-fingered hands rested on his sternum through the open collar of his shirt. The other was pressing the knife into the space between his third and fourth ribs, angled inward with chilling familiarity. It was biting sharply into the skin, a tiny carnation of blood blooming on his white shirt like the one in a groom’s buttonhole.
They would make an excellent marble church statue, Rainy thought. Agony of a Saint. Or maybe Slaying of a Devil.
He gave an experimental wriggle, but Adler just pressed the knife another quarter inch into his pectoral muscle. Sharp enough to cut bone like butter, was that knife. Adler would be fastidious about his blades. Rainy craned his neck to watch the red spot grow, just over his heart, where the violets bloomed across his skin.
He didn’t try to move again. Adler met his gaze with characteristically grave eyes. Now, they didn’t seem out of place. Their steady unhappiness was almost comforting. Rainy wanted to reach up and touch him.
So this was how it ended. There was no out this time. Rainy had always thought his death would come in a flash of fire and brimstone, a maelstrom of glory and violence. This felt as echoing and infinite as that cathedral of memory.
“Wait,” he said. He didn’t know what for. Last time, he’d pulled a joke out of the air, but this atmosphere was flat and humorless. This time, there were no games left, no delays or second chances. Just as Rainy had wanted, it ended here.
Adler shook his head. “Close your eyes,” he said, not unkindly.
But Rainy didn’t want to miss this. He didn’t want to miss Adler, curved over him in the dim, the fine planes of his face picked out by the light of the distant city. The straight slope of his nose, the secret blond tips of his lashes, the silver-pink pucker of scar tissue. Rainy had never been a very good Catholic, but he knew something godsent when he saw it. Adler was penance, and oh, wasn’t he lovely?
The knife dug in further, severing skin and tissue. Another inch, and Adler would pierce his heart, send his life spilling out across the floor. But Rainy felt the other hand leave his sternum to curl around his shoulders instead. He remembered what Adler had said while tied to that chair in the multipurpose room, cigarette smoke lingering around his lips.
I just want someone to hold me while I go.
And the knife was sliding home, but, with sudden clarity, all Rainy could think was: Will you hold me while I go?
Will you keep me in your arms until the last of me bleeds away, and even a little bit after?
Will you handle my body gently once I’m gone?
Will you kiss me goodnight?
The knife stung, but only a little. It was such a small pain, for the end of the world.
Nonsensically, with finality, he thought, What a shame. We really did make a good team.
With that thought, something that had been coalescing at the corner of his mind in Parish’s study solidified into an idea.
“Wait,” he gasped. His voice was wet with unshed tears he hadn’t noticed gathering.
The knife paused, an inch into his chest. Adler shook his head, not meeting Rainy’s eyes.
“Wait,” Rainy repeated. “I have… I have a business proposition.”
Adler stilled, expression grave as death. He stared at the point where he was piercing Rainy’s chest, the red spot that had spread across the whole left side of his shirt’s breast.
The knife slid out. Rainy felt it leave his flesh, its absence like an ache.
“You got two minutes,” Adler said.