Nothing Good (Gratuitous Violets #1)

13. Florida Man Charms End to Gang Violence

Chapter 13

Florida Man Charms End to Gang Violence

A dler retreated to the other end of the room, sticking his knife into an exposed two-by-four within arm’s reach. Rainy watched a drop of his own blood roll down the wood as he pushed himself into a seated position on the concrete floor. He felt too weak and shaky to stand, like Adler really had nicked his heart and he was bleeding out.

Adler pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. His fingers were trembling.

“I thought you quit,” Rainy said, voice hoarse.

Adler took a long drag, closed his eyes, and exhaled through his nose. “You kicked me off the wagon. Talk fast, now.”

Rainy pressed a hand to his throbbing chest, where the thin puncture wound dug down between his ribs. It was bleeding, but not terribly. It didn’t even hurt that bad; not as bad as a broken bone, he thought, observing the way Adler was standing with an arm curved gingerly around one side of his chest, grimacing with each inhale.

“We’re here because the Espinosas and Seong are fighting,” Rainy started. “There’s not enough to go around in this city, so Seong is trying to chip away at Emilio’s slice and Emilio is fighting back.”

Adler looked at him like he was an idiot. “Yeah?”

Rainy pulled his hand away from his shirt to examine the blood pooled in the creases of his palm. “What if they didn’t have to be fighting?”

Adler’s only response was a thoughtful flare of orange at the tip of his cigarette. Rainy pressed on.

“They can keep tearing chunks out of each other and get just that—chunks. But you saw Parish’s papers. We’re both here because Seong can’t go after Parish effectively, and neither can the Espinosas, so their only choice is to fight each other. But, if they worked together…” Rainy smiled. “We could take it all. ”

Adler took another contemplative drag. Rainy had to mentally berate himself because, one, he needed to focus, and, two, there was absolutely no excuse for finding a man smoking a cigarette sexy. Cigarettes were fucking disgusting. And yet.

“This is a little above my pay grade,” Adler said finally.

“No, really? I thought you were the brains of the operation.”

Adler flipped him off idly with the hand that was babying his ribs. “But,” he conceded, “there might be something there.”

Rainy nodded. “I know you don’t make calls for Seong, and I’m not even an Espinosa. So who knows if this could be a thing. But if they were to consider it, it would probably be easier for them to work something out if their favorite hired guns haven’t murdered each other.”

“You wanna call a ceasefire.”

“Temporary truce,” Rainy amended. “We walk now, and take what we found at Parish’s back to our sides. If they don’t go for it, we’re back to square one, and you can go back to merrily impaling me to your heart’s content.”

It was a transparent ploy to get out of this building alive, and Rainy knew it. But he had something here, something that had the potential to be big. Something to shake up this game, and maybe end it.

There was something else, too, something that had lodged in him like a sliver of glass while he’d been driving his foot into Adler’s stomach. Please, please take it. Please take a ridiculous, wild chance on this stupid idea, because—

Because Rainy needed him to.

Adler flicked some cinders onto the concrete floor. He watched them smolder for a moment before extinguishing them with the toe of his boot.

“All right,” he said. “Temporary truce. Until I get clarifying orders.”

Rainy swallowed down the bright, painful balloon of emotion that swelled in his throat. It tasted like relief. He watched as Adler crossed back to the center of the floor, leaving his knife stuck in the wall, and held out a hand. Rainy let himself be pulled to his feet and groaned. The pinchy shoes had chafed him raw, and he was pretty sure he’d split his pants open in a few places.

“I paid so much money for this outfit,” he complained. “This is why I don’t dress up for work.”

“Didn’t suit you, anyhow,” Adler said. “I like your dumpster clothes better.”

Rainy beamed when he realized that, under its insulting wrapping, that actually might have been a compliment.

“You like the way I dress.”

Adler drifted out of the foyer and into what would probably become a dining room, a square empty space with an enormous cutout in one wall that heralded a future picture window. He propped his elbows on it, left hand poised by his jaw with its half-smoked cigarette. Rainy leaned against the window as well, leaving a cautious gap between them. Beyond the empty frame, the house’s private beachfront dipped its toes into the water. The sparkling technicolor lights of downtown rose over the flat black expanse of the bay.

“I think you dress like a moron,” Adler replied finally. “I’m starting to think you might be a little smarter than you look, though.”

Normally, it didn’t bother Rainy when people saw him as just a dumb lump of muscle. Usually, it played to his advantage. But, for some reason, the idea of Adler thinking he was stupid chafed. He was a lot smarter than people gave him credit for. He wouldn’t have lived this long or been so successful if he wasn’t. He was more observant than most, too; after all, he’d pegged Adler almost instantly. And there were plenty of things he’d noticed that he could point out to prove it, the chief among them being:

“You’re deaf in your right ear.”

Adler went rigid beside him.

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody. You’re good at covering for it. I noticed that you always put people on your left side, though. At first, I thought it was just about the scar. But it’s more than that—you have this weird way of holding your head when you’re talking to people, like you have to tilt it to hear them. When I whispered in your right ear last week, you couldn’t understand what I said. And earlier, in the bathroom, you were pressed right up against the door. You could have just put your right ear against it to listen, but you turned your body all the way around first.” Rainy idly examined his nails, which were packed with sawdust and blood. “Am I right?”

Adler rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, thinking.

“Not totally deaf. Everything’s muffled, like it’s underwater. I get real loud voices, and some music. Used to be just terrible tinnitus all the time, but it ain’t so bad anymore.”

I’m sorry, Rainy wanted to say, but he was pretty sure that if he did, Adler would burn him with his cigarette. So, instead, he said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

Adler exhaled a cloud of smoke that turned the glittering distant galaxy of the city lights briefly hazy. Rainy coughed, scowling.

“Those things will kill you, you know.”

“Not faster than anything else in my life.” Adler shifted and winced when the motion tugged on his busted ribs.

“How’d it happen?” Rainy blurted. It wasn’t a very clear question, and was probably off-limits, but Adler just eyed him briefly and turned back to the view.

“We were on a mission north of Raqqa. Covert ops, real serious shit. There was no advance team to sweep for explosives. Boom. ” Adler flicked his cigarette so ash spiraled off into the night. “The blast gave away our position, so they had to get the hell out of Dodge. I don’t really blame them for leaving me; I might as well have been dead.”

Rainy stayed motionless, silently fishing for more. After a moment, Adler delivered.

“The first thing I remember is waking up on a damp concrete floor, in the dark. I was all freezing and sweaty and delirious with fever. My nose and throat were clogged with congealed blood, like someone tried to drown me in it. That was the first thought I had. And my face hurt so bad, I thought, ‘Uh-oh, it might not be just a burn; there might be a cut too.’ So I reached up to touch my cheek, and my fingers landed on my back molars.”

Rainy flinched. Beside him, Adler was absently tracing the vicious slash of the scar across his face.

“I still dream about it. Took three reconstructive surgeries once I got to Busan to get it looking like this. Used to be much worse, after it healed the first time. I still had a hole in my face when Seong met me.”

“You mean when he bought you.”

“He didn’t buy me,” Adler said hotly. “I was held with a few other Western POWs. They—” He cleared his throat. “They beat us sometimes, but I wasn’t much fun to mess with when I could barely stay conscious. They were mostly content to let me starve in peace. My cell was a six-by-six-by-six box. I went weeks without being able to straighten my legs all the way, in the pitch dark.”

Rainy thought of Adler panicking when Marco pulled the bag over his head. Just nothing over the face. I don’t like feeling trapped.

Adler’s hand was curled around the plywood windowsill, knuckles white. Rainy slowly slid his own hand over until his pinky brushed Adler’s. Adler didn’t look away from the bay, but his hand unclenched a little.

“Anyhow, while they decided what to do with us, they would lend us out sometimes to do labor for this wealthy IS-tied businessman. I don’t even remember what I was supposed to be doing, I was so weak at that point. But Seong was there and said, ‘I haven’t seen an American around here in ages.’ And I told him his bodyguards looked too comfortable in a stranger’s house. They’d been bought off. He gave me this look, and just walked straight out of the house. A week later, he’d paid for my release. He’s always refused to tell me how much.”

“I still don’t see how this isn’t buying,” Rainy pointed out.

“Because he gave me a choice. He would buy me a plane ticket and send me back to America, or I could come to Busan and work for him. No questions asked.”

“You could have come home, and you decided to run off and become an international criminal instead?”

Adler offered a bitter twist of a smile that Rainy didn’t like at all.

“Home? I know for a fact that getting that folded flag was the happiest I’ve ever made my parents. Without the army, I had nothing and no one in the States.”

And looking at him with his too-posh suit and drooping cigarette, Rainy felt suddenly, overwhelmingly disappointed. Because Adler was supposed to be this grand, enticing mystery, unknowable and tantalizing. But in this moment, everything about him was painfully transparent. Rainy could see the line of it so clearly: kid with a shitty home life runs off to join the army and feels, for the first time, a sense of purpose and belonging. Then they abandon him too, and he pins all that misplaced loyalty on the first person who gives him a hand up. Trades his combat fatigues for a bespoke three-piece, but it’s all a uniform just the same.

“You’re kind of a letdown,” Rainy told him.

Adler’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile, but not quite.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Rainy drummed his fingers on the plywood windowsill and stared out at the city. He imagined it as an abstract grid of streets and corners laid out at his feet, the way he’d seen it as a kid. He knew every block of it like the sinews of his own body. And yet, from this angle, it felt both claustrophobically familiar and entirely new.

Something about this felt off. It was the sudden power imbalance between them. He’d forced Adler into showing a little of his vulnerable underbelly, and Rainy thought it was only fair that he do the same.

For the spirit of the game, of course.

“When I was a kid, I played football,” he said. Adler glanced at him, surprised. He picked at a splinter with his nail. “I was good. Varsity middle linebacker all through high school. State champions. There were scholarship offers. I was going places.”

He gnawed his lip. It had been so long since he’d told this story. So long since anyone had told it, even his parents.

“My older brother, though. He was in with the Espinosas. He and my father fought about it constantly, but Miguel just knew he wasn’t in over his head.” Rainy snorted. “He was a big, dumb lug. A na?ve sweetheart, like my mom. He was never cut out for this life. One day, he picked the wrong guy to trust. Brought him in on running some weapons for Emilio. The guy shot my brother in the back of the head and took the score.”

“Shit,” Adler said. He offered Rainy a pull from his cigarette. Rainy waved it away, grimacing.

“One of his friends called my parents, told them what happened.” Rainy swallowed. “My mother cried and cried, but I remember my father just made this… sound. And he slid down onto the floor of our tiny apartment and wouldn’t get up. The thing was, Miguel had told me where he was headed, and I may not have been involved in that shit, but I was a Miami kid and I knew how things were divided between the Espinosas and the Vees. So I took off for this gravel lot that skirts the river near the Espinosa-Vee boundary.”

“I know the one,” Adler murmured.

“I caught up to him there, where he was hunkered down under this shed, sorting out what to keep for himself. I remember it was dumping buckets raining even though it was only May, because that was the year Ana hit the coast. I found this guy, and I didn’t even have to say anything. He just took one look at me and pointed a gun at my head. But I didn’t give a fuck about anything that day. I tackled him into the gravel and pinned him, and I snapped his neck.” Rainy mimed the motion now. He could still feel the grind and pop under his hands, the storm running in rivulets down his skin.

“Then I gathered up all the stuff he stole and walked all the way to the Hub. I’d never even been to the place before. My buddy Julian was on guard duty that day, and the way he tells it, I just appeared out of the sheets of rain with this duffel bag of guns, soaking wet, and walked right up to Felix and said, ‘I think this is yours.’” Rainy smirked. “I wouldn’t tell them who I was—I think I was in too much shock—so they just clapped me on the back and called me ‘rainy boy.’ And the next thing I knew, I was standing in front of Emilio Espinosa, and he was offering me a job. The rest is history.”

Adler had finished his cigarette, and he dropped it onto the concrete to grind under his heel. He stared out the window for a long moment, silent, before glancing at Rainy out of the corner of his eye.

“Sorry about your brother.”

“Yeah. Sorry about your face.”

Adler snorted with involuntary force. Rainy looked over to find that he’d put a hand over his mouth. Rainy giggled at the childishness of it, and then Adler was laughing helplessly along with him. It was a nice laugh. Maybe a little rusty, but full and charming.

He broke off with a long-suffering curse in a language Rainy didn’t recognize, which set Rainy off again.

“I can’t believe you speak Korean.”

Adler gave him that look like he was a moron again. Rainy was maybe starting to grow a little fond of it. “I lived in Busan for four years.”

“What other languages do you speak?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Russian… Levantine. Okay Spanish, since I spent a few months in Buenos Aires earlier this year.”

“You’ve been to all those places?” Rainy asked him, in Spanish.

“Seong has business all over the world,” Adler replied, passably. Rainy guffawed again.

“Your accent is terrible,” he told him in English. Adler scowled.

Rainy drummed his fingers against the sill. “What’s your favorite place you’ve ever visited?”

“I went to Prague once, with my ex,” Adler mused. “That crashed and burned, but the trip was good. But, honestly, probably Fuji-Hakone-Izu. It ain’t easy for someone like me to feel at peace, but there I just about managed it.”

The concept of being at peace sounded as foreign to Rainy as the Japanese name. It made him uneasy, so he focused on the much more intriguing concept of Adler having an ex. What kind of person would Adler deign to say he’d dated? Rainy pictured him and another slinky international assassin in a tailored suit frolicking through Czechia.

He was distracted from the image when Adler asked, “How about you?”

Rainy laughed. “Oh, I’ve never really left Miami.”

“Why? If you make half as much as Seong pays me, you can afford it.”

“I…” Rainy paused, frowning at the distant cityscape. It had never occurred to him, really. “I’m just too busy, I guess.”

Rainy’s entire life had unfolded within the boundaries of this city. Every birthday, hookup, family gathering, hit—all of it had been contained within these few square miles. He’d only ever taken one overnight trip outside the city.

When he was nine and Miguel was twelve, their parents had taken them on a road trip to see the fall colors in the Appalachians. They’d camped for two nights in a tent whose capacity their parents had severely overestimated. His mother had absolutely hated it, and vowed that they would never try anything new ever again. But running through the red and gold woods, sniffing out babbling waterfalls and leaning over the guardrails of scenic overlooks to trace the rolling slopes with his outstretched finger, Rainy had fallen in love.

“There was this one time,” he admitted, “when I was in Virginia with my family, out in the woods. I went off on my own and stumbled across this clearing that was just full of wild violets. Like a purple carpet. I just ran around and lay down and I—it was like that. Someplace where you feel things you never realized you could.”

He unbuttoned his shirt to bare the tattoo on the left side of his chest, the violets that spilled over the skin like they’d been caged in by his ribs before the tattoo artist took a knife to him and let them out. Adler’s blade had punctured right through the center of them, so it looked like the flowers themselves were bleeding.

The memory of the sunlight and clean mountain air and the smell of crushed stems underneath him was still vivid in his memory. Among the violets, he’d felt like something out of a fairy tale, some feral creature no longer beholden to the laws of mankind. And when his parents had physically dragged him out of the flowers and back to their campsite, he’d vowed to himself that he would see the whole world.

That hungry joy and wonder felt distant now, as if it had belonged to someone else. Like it was something he’d seen in a movie once, not felt himself.

It felt like the dream of a child.

He shrugged off his sudden melancholy, uncomfortable with the scratch of emotion behind the bridge of his nose, and covered the tattoo.

“Guess I’m just married to my job. Can’t even tear myself away for a weekend. Real workaholic, am I.”

“What about the cowboy one?” Adler asked.

Rainy laughed and rolled his shoulders where the tattoo stretched across his upper back. “What, you mean Cherry? I did a couple-month stint in the county correctional when I was nineteen—practically a rite of passage for Espinosa boys. Twice a week, they had movie night, but the only movie they ever showed was Red River. I must have seen it fifteen times by the time I got out. That gun-comparing scene got me through a lot of cold nights, so it only felt right for a celebratory tattoo.”

He’d been hoping to wheedle another laugh out of Adler, but it was looking like that was a one-time miracle. Instead, Adler was frowning at the horizon, his nose wrinkled in that uncharacteristically cute thinking face. Rainy wondered if he knew that he did that.

He was about to say something just to break the silence, when Adler finally blurted:

“I don’t know how you do it.”

It was soft and close-cradled, like a confession he hadn’t meant to offer.

“Do what?” Rainy asked, mystified.

“I don’t know how you—everyone—can do the things we do, and still be yourself.”

There was a soft lostness to his voice that stole Rainy’s breath. Adler’s eyes were fixed on the water and glazed over with the past. He looked younger like this, and yet nothing like the younger self from the picture in Malia’s file. Rainy thought of the quaver in his cigarette hand when he spoke of his scar, the dull resignation in his voice.

He thought of an empty gray apartment full of little nothings, and a family home he hated, and a world map full of places he’d never been, and a face in the mirror that he hadn’t wanted to recognize since he was eighteen and a boy named Rafael, instead of a man called Rainy.

“Maybe I’m not,” he said.

They stood in silence for a long time while the first brush of dawn turned the horizon gray and then a faint blush. The ache of a rough fight was settling into Rainy’s body, bone-deep bruises and scrapes. The warm mugginess of the night was seeping into his skin where it was damp with sweat and blood, making him feel tacky all over. His joints smarted, and—okay, yes—his asshole was sore too. It was a pleasant, familiar ache from being pushed too hard, and his muscles kept clenching down around nothing. It made him acutely aware of the exact amount of extension it would take to reach out and touch Adler, and the tantalizingly close heat of his body.

He allowed himself a sideways glance. Adler’s lean, graceful form was outlined in the light of the newborn dawn. And Rainy didn’t want to kill him. He was spiteful, and vicious, and just sort of awful, but there was something about him that made those things feel charming. Maybe it was just that he was a novelty, a delightful little puzzle for Rainy to tease apart.

Maybe it was that they understood each other.

Whatever it was, Rainy just… he didn’t know what he wanted. He was a creature of the moment, after all. What he wanted began and ended with laying his fingers on Adler’s skin.

“Hey,” he said. Adler glanced at him, uncertain. Slowly, because spooking him was probably a death sentence, Rainy closed a hand around his wrist and tugged him closer.

Adler was stiff but not resistant when Rainy pressed their lips together. It was weirdly tentative and chaste, like they were kids at their first school dance. But Adler softened against him, and Rainy felt a thrill of victory a thousand times better than besting him in a fight. The kiss stayed closed. It tasted like blood; Rainy had busted Adler’s lip again at some point. Even with their mouths closed, there was a lingering hint of sweet-bitter smoke taste from Adler’s cigarette. Rainy ignored it and eased him closer, curved his hands around his waist. It was so much narrower than his own, and his hands spanned it neatly. He hummed, pleased, and squeezed—

Adler gasped. Rainy jerked his hands away, burned, as Adler curled in around his broken ribs in that animal response to pain. He hovered ineffectively while Adler smoothed over the sudden exposed nerve of himself until he was arrow-straight and composed again, if a little too pale.

“You should get that checked,” Rainy said, reluctant. He didn’t want either of them to leave—it felt like this strange spell of truce would be broken the moment it was stretched beyond this enormous, half-finished house and the pale dawn that lit it, like a thread of gossamer pulled too thin.

“Yeah.” Adler pointlessly straightened his vest, which was rather obviously a lost cause at this point. But it seemed to lend him the resolve to push away from the window alcove and move back toward the front door. “I’ll talk to my people. You talk to yours. That’s all.”

“That’s all,” Rainy echoed, trailing after him. Temporary truce. Adler might very well come back tomorrow with orders to put Rainy in the ground as planned. And Rainy might get his own orders, and he… he would kill Adler. That had never been in question. It was just that, now, he was starting to think he might not like it.

And that was the other reason, he realized, that he needed this truce to work: Rainy wanted an excuse not to kill him. He needed a tiny, desperate sliver of hope that this could end in anything but their blood on each other’s hands.

Adler stood in the open doorway, tall and precise and controlled. “Goodnight, Mister Rainy,” he said, outlined against the early morning. And Rainy wanted him.

It gave him a sinking feeling in his stomach that whatever way this went, and however it ended, it was going to hurt.

Even after Adler disappeared, Rainy lingered in the construction site, resting on a workbench. He toyed with the tatters of his beautiful suit that had lasted exactly one night, and felt a sharp rush of satisfaction. There was a startling joy in dismantling and dirtying something expensive and gorgeous and too good for you. Maybe he should dress up for work more.

He found himself missing the familiar, secure weight of his Colt at his back again, and then remembered that Adler still had it, the bastard. Somehow, the thought didn’t make him blind with rage. It was in hands that, at the very least, took proper care of things.

That didn’t mean he didn’t miss it. He aimed a contemplative kick at a staple gun on the floor that looked to be about its heft, flipping up with his toe. The tool arced up into his amazed hand, and he instinctively looked around for congratulation before remembering there was nobody around to see. He had an absurd notion of calling Adler back just to point at his foot and say, I learned your trick, you smug bastard. It’s not that hard.

He found himself laughing, curled over on a bench in a half-finished house, body shaking with mirth until he tired himself out and sat still.

When the light outside was officially tipping over into morning, he pulled out his phone and brought up Lina Espinosa’s contact.

One: Be advised that there is a small chance Andy Parish may be pressing some charges against me. I might have made a teensy mess at his house.

He paused, gnawing his lip.

Two: On a scale of one to ten, how good a mood is your dad in today?