15. Florida Man Ponders Romance Chaos Ensues
Chapter 15
Florida Man Ponders Romance; Chaos Ensues
T he water of the bay lapped quietly at the concrete and corrugated metal of the docks. Black as ink. Rainy stared into it as he leaned against the grimy side of a loading bay, trying to see past its opaque surface. Overhead, a cloud drifted away from the face of the moon, and in the sudden light, he could see his reflection on the dark sheet of water.
He was wavering and insubstantial, like something unreal. He turned away quickly.
The group of Espinosa men were spread out across the dock like a tossed handful of dice, ribbing each other and shuffling with boredom. Felix, who was in charge, was trying to engage several disinterested men in a rousing pre-battle speech. At Rainy’s side, Julian was checking game scores on his phone. Marco was attempting to do one-handed pull-ups off the side of the building. They were waiting for Seong’s men.
It had been two weeks of frantic, hushed activity since the meeting at the Espinosa home. Lina had been working overtime with Gaumant and Dr. Ryuk to slice up Parish’s legal holdings and move in with bids, and within days, Parish was ruined on paper—or so Rainy was told. What he’d been working on was a little more hands-on.
He’d easily offed his assigned target, Belko. Out a window, nice and neat. The rest hadn’t been too difficult, a list of Parish’s small-fish friends who propped up his operation like the bottom layer of a house of cards. Rainy plowed right through them all, until his arms were wet with blood to the shoulder. On the ground, the Espinosas had been circling closer on Parish’s turf at the port, seizing small warehouses and a shipping yard and chipping away at Parish’s men, until only one thing remained: a little cluster of warehouses, packed to the gills with Emilio’s bread and butter. Guns, drugs, anything else that was illegal to import.
Seong had held up his end of the bargain; Parish’s empire was in ribbons with the people who mattered. All that was left was the product that didn’t exist on paper. And now, it was time to clean him out.
Rainy cast another glance around the midnight dock, empty save the Espinosa boys. “It’s not like him to be late,” he told Julian, leaned up against the bay next to him.
Julian shrugged. “What, like you and him are best friends now? The fuck do you know about what he’s like?”
Rainy turned back to the water.
He hadn’t seen Adler since the meeting with Seong. He’d tried and failed not to think about him. It was impossible not to worry at that ache like a loose tooth, feeling a part of him he’d once thought solid and immovable shift uncomfortably under the pressure. In some moments, he resented Adler for his apparent ability to wind his way down into Rainy’s clockwork and make a mess of the gears and cogs that had run without fault for so long. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt off-kilter this way.
Then again, maybe it was Rainy’s fault. Maybe he’d held the door open and invited Adler in. He resented that idea even more.
There was an uneasy itch that had been spreading under his skin like an infection ever since the meeting. He always grew restless during a long streak of contracts, and the trail of bodies he’d accumulated these past weeks had turned the flutter of unease into a fever pitch that made his stomach turn and his head swim. Rainy was a master liar, but he couldn’t quite convince himself that it had nothing to do with the tiny niggle of hope he’d allowed himself, which Emilio had shot out of the sky, an arrow protruding from its feathered chest.
There was a trick to living the way they did, on the underside of the world. When there was danger around every corner, you developed a second sense for when things were about to go south. Bad luck left a smell in the air. It had saved Rainy from more than one bullet.
He’d reloaded his Colt several times in the past two weeks, but the single round Emilio had given him was still safely burning a hole in his pocket. He slipped a hand in to thumb it now, over and over the tiny metal cylinder made warm by his skin.
“ Atten-tion! ” someone barked. Every man on the dock went rigidly straight with alarm, dropping what they were doing.
Rainy had heard laughter compared to the sound of bells, pealing or tinkling. Adler’s laugh was more like a gunshot, sharp and mean and solitary. It made Rainy’s heart do a little caper as Adler strode onto the dock sans jacket, in vest and shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“I’m going to fucking—” Julian started, taking a threatening step toward him. Rainy caught him by the back of his shirt.
“We’re all friends here,” he reminded loudly.
Only four men followed Adler onto the dock, eyeing the Espinosas unhappily. Felix hurried forward to meet them.
“Where are the rest?” he asked.
Adler calmly checked his Beretta. “Sorry we’re late. They’ll be here in one minute.” The clean, strong lines of his forearms were broken only by his watch. Rainy caught himself staring and deliberately wrenched his gaze away.
There was a sound of shifting water, and a motor. The Espinosas rustled in alarm as a small boat pulled alongside them. Adler waved off their raised weapons.
“That’s mine,” he said.
“We already have transport arranged,” Felix said.
“I think you can understand that Seong might not trust you with all our loot,” Adler replied. “We are who we are, after all.”
Even though Adler didn’t glance his way once during the exchange, or even put special emphasis on the words, the phrase still stuck in Rainy’s throat, too big and awful to swallow.
Adler caught the rope that was tossed to him from the deck of the boat and knelt to tie it off, leaving his back exposed. The nape of his neck was a smooth, pale line against the black water. It would have been easy to finish him. Nobody made a move. When he stood, he was smiling.
The Espinosas pulled in tight as eight of Seong’s men piled off the boat, filling out the ranks. Adler gave them brief, sharp orders in Korean, and they moved with military discipline.
“English, if you don’t mind,” Julian called.
“They’re new. They don’t speak English well.” The corner of Adler’s mouth was playful, and Rainy didn’t like it one bit.
“It’s fine,” Felix said. “Let’s just get moving.”
“He’s going to get us all killed,” Julian hissed. He flinched when Marco appeared at his shoulder as though summoned.
“Watch how you talk,” Marco said mildly, his eyes on his older brother. Julian ground his teeth, but lowered his hackles.
Adler had finished addressing his troops and strode up to Felix and his entourage now. He looked different at the front of a line of men, Rainy thought. Loose and authoritative. Like he wasn’t just in control of himself, but everyone around him as well. Sergeant Adler.
“We’ll go in from the east,” Adler informed them. “Charlie warehouse is our first priority. My men take point. Those five, you send around from the southeast; those five stick to the waterline.” He slashed with a flat palm, efficiently dividing up their force.
Felix looked beguiled by Adler’s field-commander act. “That’s—smart.”
“You serious?” Julian pushed past Marco to Felix’s shoulder. “He’s not our fucking drill sergeant, Felix.”
Rainy closed a hand around Julian’s upper arm. “Just take it easy.”
“You might be happy sucking this guy’s dick, Rainy, but I don’t take that shit.”
“We’re not enemies tonight.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Julian spat. “We’re always enemies with these fuckwads.”
“Get your man in line,” Adler told Felix impassively. He hadn’t glanced Rainy’s way even once throughout the entire exchange.
All eyes turned to Julian. He kept his eyes narrowed on Adler, but didn’t say anything more. He just drew his Bowie knife from its sheath in his jacket and flipped it in his hand, blade over handle, handle over blade.
Satisfied, Adler turned his back on them and started off toward the easternmost warehouse, his men falling in behind him. The Espinosas looked to Felix.
“Split,” he confirmed. The men peeled off into two groups, skirting opposite directions. Marco caught Rainy’s elbow and nodded after Julian.
“I’m sticking to the bitch parade to make sure they don’t get too out of line,” he said. For a moment, he teetered on the edge of jogging off, looking uncertain. “Look, Rainy—this is need-to-know, okay? And my father didn’t think you needed to know. But things are going to go crooked in there. And I need you on my side, okay?”
There it was—the blow Rainy had been waiting for. Emilio was going to screw over Seong.
He couldn’t feign surprise—he knew how this world worked, after all. They’d already gotten what they needed from Seong, and this shipment of spoils was the last thing on the table. It only made sense that Emilio would want to sweep it all into his basket. Still, anger boiled in his stomach. Emilio was planning to pull some shit on this operation, and he hadn’t breathed a word of warning to Rainy.
“He doesn’t trust me.”
Marco waved him off. “He doesn’t think you’ve turned. You’ve just been… flaky, lately. But I’m telling you now to get ready.”
“Because you need my help getting it running smooth under Felix. And stopping Julian from blowing it by running his mouth,” Rainy surmised.
“Because you’re my friend,” Marco corrected.
Rainy swallowed. “I’m loyal. You know I’m loyal.”
“I know. I know that. Just… remember where everyone’s loyalties lie.” Marco stepped away and dipped a hand into his jacket. He flashed Julian’s oyster knife with a grin. “See you inside.”
Rainy was left alone on the dock, watching men melt into the gloom.
He was going to follow instructions. He was going to rejoin Felix’s group, and carry out the warehouse sweep, and go along with the plan. And if Adler got in his way…
His hand dipped into his pocket again to fiddle compulsively with the bullet.
There was that now-familiar itch under his skin. Rainy just wanted to slit open his arm and drag out the clinging tendrils of it. He’d made up his mind—no, there’d never been a question. That was the core of his effectiveness—he was good at his job, and he’d never before felt conflicted about doing it. But now something was tugging at the edges of him, distracting and confusing.
He paused for a moment, fighting himself, then muttered a curse under his breath and took off down the center into the maze of shipping containers that separated Adler’s men from Felix’s.
He wasn’t going to give in to the itch, but he needed to see, just to sate it. He wasn’t hurting anything by scratching it just a little.
Corrugated steel boxes rose up around him like the walls of a labyrinth, blotting out broad geometric swathes of sky. Clouds drifted uncertainly overhead. Rainy struck a course for the border of Adler’s group’s path, moving at a clip and only pausing briefly at each junction to check for danger before forging ahead. He turned another corner toward the east, and then a strong arm was looping around his chest and yanking him back into the shadows. A broad palm clamped down over his mouth.
“Looking for someone?” Adler drawled in his ear before Rainy could throw him over his shoulder onto the pavement. Rainy bit his hand.
They were tucked into a little dim corner formed by a juncture of shipping containers. Under the clean linen-sandalwood scent of Adler’s cologne, Rainy could smell the salt and garbage of the docks.
He wondered briefly whether Adler wasn’t warm, even without a jacket. Despite the fact that it had been dark for hours, the air was heavy and oppressive in that way that trapped in the heat. He wasn’t complaining, though. The snug fit of Adler’s vest emphasized the lithe, deadly lines of him, and the bunched cuff of sleeve around his elbows was doing things to Rainy’s insides. Careless was a very sexy look on Adler. Very sexy and very ominous. Rainy tilted forward into his space, against the solid steel wall of the shipping container.
“Couldn’t resist giving everyone a show, huh?” He ran a hand down the lean muscle of Adler’s side, down to where his pants were tailored snug as ever over his ass. The look Adler leveled at him felt dangerous. Rainy wanted to lap it up.
“This is how I dress when I need to get my hands dirty.” Adler stepped away from him disdainfully. Rainy caught him around the waist and pulled him back, back into their little shadowy corner of the world.
There was a reason he’d come, he was pretty sure. There was a reason Adler was here, too.
“You didn’t dress this way when you came to kill me,” he pouted.
“Well. That’s because I underestimated you.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I’m sorry if I find it difficult to remain civil in your presence,” Adler said flatly.
“Don’t be.” Rainy leaned in, pinning Adler to the wall with his weight. “I like it when you’re mean to me.”
Adler’s lips were cool and a little chapped, and slid apart when Rainy pressed his tongue in insistently.
There was nothing chaste or tentative about this kiss. Rainy swept his tongue into Adler’s mouth, confident and possessive, and groaned when Adler pressed forward to meet him. He fisted his hands in Adler’s clothes, trying to get him closer, running his hands reverently over his ribs, his thigh, the delicate vertebrae of his neck.
Despite the adrenaline, he felt still. He was reminded of Adler murmuring, It’s not easy for someone like me to feel at peace, but there I just about managed it.
At peace, at peace, at peace. It echoed there, inside his skull. The itch under his skin was gone—it always disappeared once he got Adler under his hands. As long as Adler was here, in Rainy’s grip, he wasn’t an unknown enemy element, off somewhere turning Rainy’s world on its head. As long as Rainy had a grip on him, he could keep everything from spiraling out of control.
Remember where everyone’s loyalties lie, Marco told him. In his pocket, Emilio’s bullet weighed a thousand pounds.
Suddenly, he felt desperate, almost frantic. He sucked hard on Adler’s bottom lip, bit down until Adler made a small sound in the back of his throat. This was all there was, this small, stolen moment in a hidden corner on their way to shoot up the place. Rainy wanted to make it last, to make sure he remembered it. He felt like his wandering fingers were curling deeper than Adler’s skin, trying to pull off some figurative piece of him to hold and have and keep.
The moment was already over. Adler pushed him away.
When Rainy stopped kissing him, Adler looked himself—a perfect mixture of bored and amused, perpetually in on a joke that no one else knew about. It made Rainy want to shake him, and then kiss him again.
“You didn’t answer the question,” Adler said. “Why are you here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” Rainy smiled when Adler’s mouth flattened unhappily. “ You were looking for me. ”
Adler looked resentful at being caught out. “Maybe I was.”
“Why?”
Thumbing his Beretta where it was nestled in a shoulder holster, Adler glanced around the abandoned corridor of crates before sucking in a long-suffering breath.
“You’re smart,” he began. “We both know what happens when we get inside.”
Rainy tensed, but he wasn’t surprised. Adler couldn’t know the details of the Espinosas’ plan; he was talking about something else. For all it suited him, sometimes Rainy hated this world, where backstabbing was the only real way to come out with anything worthwhile.
There wasn’t a threat in Adler’s voice, though. Instead, his words were hurried and tight, an undercurrent of urgency to them, even imploration. It occurred to Rainy that telling this to him, an enemy, pained Adler.
And yet, here he was.
“You said it yourself. You’re not an Espinosa trained dog.” Adler’s face puckered, like the words tasted bitter. “You don’t answer to their every whim the way you’d have to if you worked for them.”
Rainy couldn’t help the startled laugh that burst out of him. “Are you trying to turn me?”
“Don’t be an idiot. I’m just telling you that I—” Adler’s voice caught, caught off guard. Like whatever his next words were, he hadn’t prepared them. “I don’t wanna kill you. Don’t make me.”
The words shivered in the air between them. Rainy physically leaned away from them, like if he let them settle, they would mark his skin. He wanted to grab them out of the air, shove them back into Adler’s mouth, and clamp his jaw shut like they’d never been spoken.
Don’t make me. Like it was as simple as that.
Rainy felt painfully, colossally stupid. Because it was as simple as that. He’d deluded himself into thinking that it was complicated, that it was conflicting. But they didn’t have that luxury. For them, it could only ever have been the simplest thing in the world.
He felt the frail, tremulous heartbeat of that hope he’d been nursing since their truce, just alongside his own. It was a feeling like humiliation, remembering the way he’d blindly fumbled for that kind of false hope, like a green amateur, like a child in a field of violets. He watched the pathetic hope Emilio had shot out of the sky struggle feebly. He would have to snap its neck himself. Of all the types he’d practiced over the years, mercy killing was the kindest.
“Right,” he said, and even to himself, it sounded like a death sentence.
“Rainy—”
“Right. I’ll see you inside.”
The gravel crunched under his feet as he turned and walked away without another word, before he could try to memorize the way the low light gilded Adler’s unhappy expression. He headed straight for the sound of one of the Espinosa groups moving a few containers away.
He waited for Adler to stop him—either with a hand on his wrist, or a bullet in his back. But nothing came. He didn’t look back to try and read the reason why in the shadow of Adler’s eyes.
He’d let himself indulge in the fantasy that this was thorny and complicated, but it was as simple as this: when the cards were down and the Seong-Espinosa alliance crumbled, they would be back to square one. Either one of them folded, or this ended the way it was always meant to. Yes, Rainy wasn’t entirely beholden to the Espinosas tonight. But when the sun came up, he would still have a career, contacts and contracts and working relationships. I don’t want to kill you, Adler had said, but the question had never been whether Rainy wanted to. It was whether he could. And the answer always had to be yes. He knew it was for Adler.
He couldn’t think about the epiphany that Adler too, for whatever reason, had been looking for an excuse not to kill him.
It didn’t matter. It was too late to think about that. It was too late for anything but this.
Felix’s group of men came into view around a corner, and Rainy walked toward them calmly, despite the fact that he felt dizzy, that his pulse was thrumming too loud to hear anything else. This was what it felt like to be drowning. And when you were drowning, everything was black and white. The only thing that mattered was this: Rainy knew what it took to keep his head above the water. He’d learned a long time ago that to keep swimming, sometimes you had to push part of yourself down into the depths to die. He’d done it before. It had been simple then, too.
Rainy pulled out his Colt and released the magazine. Fully loaded, the way he’d made sure it was when he left his apartment that night, from the suitcase under his bed, the only thing in his big, empty room.
He thumbed a round out, let it drop to the gravel at his feet. The round from his pocket was hot to the touch when he fed it in. He slid the magazine home and tucked the gun away as he came level with Felix.
“They’re planning something,” he said in response to Felix’s inquisitive look. “Be ready. God knows they are.”
Felix absorbed this information gravely, but only nodded.
It was smart that Adler had sent them around the flank, because when Parish’s men ran to deal with Adler’s team entering from the east, they were there to catch them in the back. They put down three men, and the remaining two crouched to kick their weapons across the floor and raise their hands. Adler assigned a man to watch them and kicked the lid off a crate.
Several people from each team splintered off to start digging through the loot, taking stock. Rainy didn’t approach Adler to see what was in his crate, instead leaning in to investigate one Eduardo had opened. Boxes of ammo, nine-millimeter hollow point. The rest seemed to be of a piece.
Outside, there was a sudden burst of shouting and gunfire that meant Marco had gotten bored and decided to get a head start on the next warehouse. Rainy sighed and jogged off toward the commotion.
They swept through the buildings quickly and with minimal difficulty. Parish’s numbers were low—most of the rats having already jumped ship—and those who remained weren’t eager to lay down their lives for a boss who might not be around much longer to make it worth their while. By the time they cleared the last warehouse, Rainy’s magazine wasn’t even empty. When he turned a final corner and came face to face with a Parish man, he didn’t even have to raise his gun before the guy was haring out through an emergency exit and disappearing into the night.
He made his way cautiously back to the center of the warehouse, where Marco and Felix had converged with Adler. Rainy nodded reluctantly to Felix.
“Looks like we’re all clean,” Felix said, a slight ring of nervousness in his voice. Adler caught it like a bloodhound.
“Looks like,” he replied. The lazy curl of the words in his accent, dry and bleakly amused, made something in Rainy ache. He wanted to press Adler between paper like a dried flower, and keep him frozen in this moment before the end until the pages crumbled to dust.
The air wobbled and stretched, the way it did when everyone knew what was about to happen, but no one wanted to be the first to tip their hand. Rainy caught Marco’s eye. He ran a thumb lightly over and over the hammer of his gun.
“Well,” Adler said finally, and then the eastern fire exit swung open.
A large posse of Seong’s men swaggered in, ones Rainy didn’t recognize—far more than Adler had arrived with. The boat, he realized. That’s how they’d smuggled so many in past the Espinosas’ lookouts. There had been far more on the boat than had first emerged.
They filed in and filled the mouths of rows and aisles around the central room, eyes grim and obedient on Adler. The Espinosas shuffled and tightened ranks. Rainy could see the pulse jumping at the side of Felix’s neck.
“I think you see where this is going,” Adler said drily.
He looked like he was about to continue, but he paused suddenly, frowning. He slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“You should answer,” Marco advised.
Glaring, Adler tapped the screen and issued a terse greeting in Korean. His face darkened further at the reply. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“You’re not the only one with friends,” Felix said.
That was the Espinosas’ play, then; while Adler’s reinforcements had stuck to the action, the extra Espinosa men had slipped into the other warehouses, where Adler had left a few of his men and most of the goods.
Adler dropped his phone back into his pocket, expression flat. He sighed and unholstered his Beretta.
Marco looked at Felix. “My turn?”
Felix’s mouth twisted unhappily. “Yeah.”
“Thanks, asere, ” Marco said, and shot the man next to Adler between the eyes.
The room erupted into chaos. Gunfire echoed deafeningly in the enclosed metal space, and everywhere men were scrambling for cover. Rainy ducked and rolled to avoid a bullet that lodged in the crate where his head had been, and came up just in time to catch the burly Korean man who was coming at him with a switchblade. He slammed the man into a shelving unit until he went limp, then spun to pop off a few more shots into the fray.
The initial frenzied fire died off within a minute as the danger of ricochet made itself known, and it was replaced with grunting and thudding and the crunching of bone. People were rolling across the floor and darting through the shadows of the shelving aisles where someone had shot out an overhead light. One of the fire exits slammed repeatedly, echoing like a shotgun blast and setting off another panicked volley of gunfire. Someone tackled Rainy from behind, and he jarred the bones in his forearm catching himself on the concrete floor.
His attacker was strong, but Rainy was stronger. He rolled them over and threw a punch, reared up to strike again. Someone kicked him in the side, hard. He flew sideways and cracked his head on a metal shelf, and then his first assailant was up and on him again. A punch landed on his temple, sending his ear ringing and the still-tender missing tip smarting.
Someone yanked the guy off him and tossed him aside. Rainy looked up to find Alé standing over him, panting and bleeding from a split lip. He hadn’t been part of Felix’s original party.
Reinforcements had arrived.
Rainy took Alé’s offered hand and leaped to his feet. The sound of violence was deafening, the ring of metal and thud of flesh and shouting in English and Spanish and Korean and something Rainy was pretty sure was Portuguese. He put down a guy who almost got one over on Alé and turned in a circle to try and get his bearings.
Felix was taking cover behind a reinforced crate, shouting orders which no one was listening to. Marco was brandishing his pilfered oyster knife where he’d pinned a terrified-looking member of Adler’s group. Rainy couldn’t spot Adler anywhere.
The fire exit opened and closed more quietly this time, and Rainy spun to face it, snarling.
Emilio stared back at him, a semi-auto clutched in his hands and his teeth set grimly. Here, like Napoleon, to ensure his troops secured victory. Rainy made eye contact with him, fingers tingling on the grip of his gun.
A heavy, dark eyebrow arched. Rainy swallowed, and nodded.
Before he could take a breath to second-guess himself, he dipped into the shadows in search of Adler.