16. Florida Man Locked in Battle to the Death
Chapter 16
Florida Man Locked in Battle to the Death
H e found him framed by the towering shelves of one of the aisles, holding an Espinosa pup by the hair as the kid’s feet scrabbled on the concrete, trying to find purchase. The kid was dropped unceremoniously when Adler spotted Rainy, and he scrambled away toward the exit.
As the sound of battle crashed and lurched around them, Rainy held Adler’s cool, assessing gaze. The tumult of sound and movement washed over him and receded as a sense of perfect stillness set in. He watched the lines of tension in Adler’s body, the minute angles of him. Fluid, predatory, deadly.
Still.
On the grip of his Colt, his palm was slippery with sweat.
If he let himself think, he would be lost in the memory of the few gentle moments between them, the confessions Adler had handed him in the secret dark of night, and the flutter of Adler’s eyelashes as he slept under the safety of Rainy’s watch.
So he didn’t let himself think. He just breathed, felt the steady expand and release of his ribs, willed the frantic rush of his pulse to slow.
He raised his gun.
The moment his wrist twitched, Adler was moving. He was down the aisle in half a second, and Rainy dropped his gun hand to brace.
It wasn’t the smartest play Rainy had ever seen from Adler. A lot of men would probably have been shaken by being rushed full tilt, but Rainy had played varsity linebacker for three years. He caught Adler’s full weight, swung it, and slammed him against the shelf at their right.
Adler made a sharp noise of pain, the impact jarring his still-healing ribs, but he didn’t stop moving. There was a shimmy and twist almost too fast for Rainy to follow, and then his elbow was being twisted so sharply that he had to step out to stop it from breaking.
As soon as Adler was free, they were really fighting. He lunged straight for Rainy’s face, pummeling him viciously so Rainy had to deflect him rather than using his gun before Adler could get his own free. Rainy dodged a knockout punch to the temple and caught it on his wounded ear.
“ Fuck! Seriously?”
Adler’s play was clearly staying too close and moving too quickly for Rainy to shoot him with the Colt still gripped in his hand. Well. Rainy was resourceful. He swung his gun hand up and smashed the pistol against the side of Adler’s head.
Adler reeled back, stumbling into a shelf and sending small boxes clattering. Blood trickled down his jaw where the gun’s hammer had gouged a small furrow. It cut across his scar, perpendicular. With dazed eyes, Adler reached up to touch it, then stared at the blood on his fingertips.
“Hey!” Rainy shouted. He wasn’t really sure why—Adler’s eyes sharpened right away, and Rainy lost his chance to end it with a quick shot right then and there when Adler tackled him.
Still better than seeing that look on his face, Rainy thought as his back hit the concrete and the wind was knocked out of him.
They rolled a violent somersault through the open central floor, hands scrabbling and nails gouging. Rainy was dimly aware of the other combatants in the vicinity pausing to watch as they crashed to a stop against a wooden crate, the Colt flying out of Rainy’s hand.
He went for a pin, but he was too slow. Adler had him on his back already, forearm against his throat and full weight bearing down. Rainy choked, feeling his Adam’s apple grind into the cartilage of his trachea. White patches spread in his vision, like holes being eaten in celluloid film. He fumbled at Adler’s sides, hands ghosting over his shoulder holster to find the tender spot on his ribs, and dug his thumb in with everything he had.
Adler hissed and faltered just enough. Rainy threw him, and he went rolling into the aisle at their right.
The worst part was that, deep down, the thrill was still there. This was what chess masters must feel, Rainy thought as he scrambled to his feet. He’d never felt it quite like this before—the joy of an opponent who was his equal. It was a kind of intimate connection. A fucked-up one, maybe, but one all the same, and that didn’t diminish the delight of seeing whatever Adler next pulled from his sleeve.
Now, though, when he faced off in the mouth of the aisle and watched Adler roll gracefully to his feet, the delight was choked in dread. Scalding, dark, sticky, like tar seeping down through his insides.
Adler’s hand went to his shoulder holster. His face went stiff when it came away empty.
“You should really keep better track of your stuff.” Rainy brandished the Beretta. Your move.
It did not disappoint. Adler took a running start toward Rainy, then leaped up onto one of the shelves that made up the walls of the aisle. He used the momentum to launch himself off the opposite bank of shelves, moving too abruptly for Rainy to shoot him, and grabbed hold of a crossbar at the top of the aisle.
Rainy just had time to think, You magnificent bastard, before Adler dropped down on him legs-first.
They went down in a clumsy tangle. It was all knees and thighs for a moment—at one point, Adler got a leg locked around Rainy’s neck, and Rainy wriggled out and went for a pin of his own, only to get his wrist bitten bloody for his trouble.
“The biting,” he hissed, trying to trap Adler’s arms with his shins.
“The teeth are an underutilized weapon,” Adler told him, miffed, and drove a knee up into the small of his back to knock him off.
The Beretta had slid off somewhere, lost. Rainy pulled himself out of the tight-woven trap of their limbs. Adler followed on his heels and immediately aimed a kick at Rainy’s head that he only narrowly avoided.
They ebbed and flowed along the edge of the open central space, blocking and countering in a seamless dance whose steps they each knew too well to be tripped up by the other. Rainy dodged a series of low abdominal hits and a blow that would have spun his head around like a cartoon character’s if it had connected. He could feel Adler growing more unhappy, his strikes turning more clinical and brutal, subsumed in mindless efficiency.
Most of the men in the center of the warehouse had warily spaced away from each other, pausing their own battles to watch. The glance Rainy spared to confirm this fact nearly cost him a broken jaw, so he didn’t look again. Someone was shouting in Korean, presumably cheering Adler on.
“Hey, Rainy!” Marco shouted from somewhere off to his right. “Catch!”
Fortunately, Adler was just as distracted this time, so Rainy didn’t get his neck snapped when he turned incredulously to watch Marco brandish Julian’s oyster knife and toss it overhand. The blade flashed under the harsh overhead lights before it was snatched out of the air. By Adler.
“Shit,” Marco called. “Sorry, bro!”
Rainy was too busy trying to avoid getting his throat slashed to reply.
He was on the defensive now, retreating as Adler wielded the knife in long, slashing arcs at his throat, his belly, his brachial artery. When Rainy threw up an elbow to block a jab at his carotid, he got a deep laceration on the back of his forearm. Adler didn’t let up, driving in with the knife again and again, until Rainy’s sleeves were ribbons and his skin from wrist to elbow was scored with tally marks like a cell wall. Blood spattered across the concrete floor, forming a smearing red trail under their shoes. Rainy yelped as another burning line carved through the mess of pain, and he saw Adler flinch minutely.
“Just,” Rainy gasped, stumbled back again. “Just—”
Adler’s eyes were black. There were lines carved deep around them, making him look so old.
“I told you.” There was a scratch in his voice, like someone had scored the inside of his throat. “You can’t put this back in the box.”
The blade darted out quick as a careless word. Rainy lurched to the side this time, the tall, dark walls of shelves reabsorbing him. He backed up blindly down the aisle, his sneakers dragging and catching on the concrete. Adler stopped in the mouth of the aisle, backlit by the harsh lights. His face was grim, his jaw set. Something dripped off the tip of his blade.
It hit Rainy then, more strongly than ever before, that this was the moment he died. There was regret, swirling thick and heavy, behind Adler’s eyes. But he was still going to take those few steps forward and finish this. Because, in the end, they were the same. Adler was like Rainy. He’d do what he had to.
Pain was squeezing into Rainy’s arm, a latticework of red-hot razor wire. He focused on the bite and sting of it, trying to clear his head. He was going to keep fighting. Until the very goddamn end.
An oyster knife. A fucking oyster knife.
The walls of the aisle formed a neat one-point perspective, narrowing Rainy’s world to the vanishing point in the center of Adler’s chest. He watched the knife turn over, contemplative, in a broad, strong palm. There was blood sprinkled lightly across the front of Adler’s pristine white shirt, a red splotch on his collar where it had run down from the cut on his face. Rainy could see the rise and fall of his collarbone.
He was suddenly overcome with the desire to kiss the curve of that collarbone, to trace it gently with the pad of his thumb. And then the apprehension and adrenaline were undercut by a flash of sadness from the knowledge that from the very beginning, from the very first moment they’d met, nothing good or soft could have ever come of this.
He wondered what might have happened if they’d met in that hotel bar in another life, where Rainy had stayed home that day in the rain and Adler had taken the ticket back to America that Seong had offered him.
The knife made another small circle in Adler’s palm, then his thumb settled on its edge, sure and steady.
“I’m sorry,” he said, quiet enough that only Rainy could hear. He started forward.
Rainy took another shuffling step back. The rubber heel of his sneaker tapped against something lying on the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shimmer of gunmetal and pearl.
His Colt.
It must have slid through the open space under the shelves when it was knocked out of his hand and come to rest here.
Adler was almost on him now, the knife glinting in his hand. There was no time. No time for anything at all.
Rainy kicked, dug in, and flipped up with his toe. The gun leaped up into his hand, and he swung it up. Adler halted, the barrel pressed to his forehead.
They stood frozen an arm’s length apart. The silhouette of the gun divided Adler’s face neatly in two; on either side, an eye, both staring unflinchingly into Rainy’s. One side smooth and unbroken skin, the other furrowed deep with the same old scar.
Rainy could see the breakneck calculation shimmering across the reflective surface of Adler’s eyes. He was weighing the merits of ducking, grabbing, slashing, trying to wrestle away the gun. Rainy could see the options wash in and out like the tide, each rejected.
The oyster knife clattered to the concrete at their feet. Its handle bounced off the rubber toe of Rainy’s sneaker, spattering blood.
They considered each other evenly. Silent.
“Well,” Adler said finally. “Go on, then.”
He closed his eyes.
Rainy’s next inhale stuttered against his will. He rolled his shoulder forward the tiniest bit, until the skin of Adler’s forehead pressed white, until his neck tipped with the force of it. His eyelashes fluttered a little, but he didn’t open his eyes. Rainy could feel the heat of his breath on his wrist.
All it took was the flex of a single forearm muscle, a tug on the tendons in his index finger. Curling the tip of his finger in toward his palm like a homecoming he’d made a hundred times before. Just moving one finger. The simplest thing in the world.
Rainy’s arm was still a razor net of pain. Blood dripped down his elbow, fell from the point to splatter on the ground. The grip of the gun was slippery with it. Another drop rolled down Adler’s neck.
One movement. One that cost so little, in the end. There was one bullet in the chamber. There was one bullet between Adler’s eyes. Here and there. Dead and alive. Pull, click, bang.
Magic bullet.
Pull the trigger.
Adler’s chest rose and fell, measuring out a countdown of breaths. Which one was best to be the last? The bullet would spray blood and brain matter across the shelves. Adler would be dead before Rainy could catch his body. And he would catch it, he realized.
He would catch him as he fell.
Do what you have to do.
Adler was a handsome stranger, leaning against the bar while he made Rainy’s drink. He was asleep against Rainy’s shoulder, limp and helpless, face slack and peaceful.
Everything around Rainy was still, but he had never felt anything further from peace.
Behind his eyes was a deep black sea where everything went to drown.
His head was an empty gray apartment, where nothing grew and nobody had lived for years and years.
His hand trembled. The barrel of the gun wavered and bobbed against Adler’s skin.
Do it.
Adler’s eyes flew open so suddenly that Rainy almost pulled the trigger from sheer surprise. His dark eyes found Rainy’s like a compass point to true north, round and shiny with shock. His mouth dropped open, but no sound came out.
What? Rainy almost asked, and then he noticed a bloom of color out of the corner of his eye and let his gaze drift down.
On Adler’s stomach, below his ribs and just left of center, the fabric of his shirt and vest bowed out a little. A pinprick of blood soaked through and, like a dam bursting, it began to spread, a soaking dark oil spill of red.
The pressure below the fabric disappeared, and there was another soft, wet sound and the grind of metal on bone. Adler made an involuntary noise.
Julian stepped back, coming into Rainy’s view in the narrow space of the aisle. His Bowie knife was slicked red. Blood ran down the handle of it and onto his hand, wrapping around his wrist in happy red tendrils.
“Try giving me orders now, you piece of shit,” he said.
When Adler crumpled like wet paper, Rainy caught him. They landed on the ground hard enough to bruise his kneecaps and the Colt bounced off somewhere, forgotten.
“Shit, fuck,” he said, scrabbling at Adler’s clothes, hands slippery with blood. There were two distinct dark patches on Adler’s back, spreading fast. Rainy pressed his hands down, and blood ran up between his fingers and over his knuckles. First, lower, intestines. Blood blooming on the front of Adler’s shirt. Second, higher, between the ribs. Kidney. Liver. Bad, bad, bad.
“ Fuck. ”
Adler’s fingers were tangled in his shirt tightly, like he was drowning and trying to use Rainy to pull himself from the quicksand. His eyes were still wide. Rainy pressed harder against the wounds, ignoring the way Adler groaned and tried to shift away. The blood was coming too fast, spreading, soaking. Aorta, Rainy thought in a panic. Vena cava. Blade scraping bone.
Julian wasn’t blocking the light anymore. There were voices, murmuring, tense arguing. Rainy didn’t think they were speaking a language he understood. Adler’s face filled his whole vision, and the rest was white noise.
There were lines of pain carved deep around his eyes. The sharp light of terror in them was dulling too fast, turning sleepy.
“No, no, no,” Rainy insisted. He shoved his hair back out of his eyes, felt the smear of blood his hand left there wet and hot on his skin. A drop rolled down his brow and collected on his lashes. He pressed down harder. Stop the bleeding. That was it, stop the life from draining out of Adler’s limpening body. But Rainy’s hands were made for the opposite, for tearing and breaking. He didn’t know how to fix things. He didn’t know how to fix this. Panic was a wild beast inside him, shredding its way up through the soft meat of his organs with frantic claws, trying to wrestle its way out of his mouth.
Adler felt fragile in his arms, slim and getting slimmer, like he was dwindling before Rainy’s eyes. There wasn’t enough of him left to hold on to. His eyelids were drooping.
“ Hey, fucker,” Rainy snapped. “Don’t fall asleep on me. Talk to me. Tell me how stupid I am. Tell me how much you hate me.”
Adler shook his head. His eyes fell closed. Rainy shook him.
“Talk to me, Adler.”
“What were you gonna study?” Adler murmured.
“What?”
“You said you were going to college.” His eyes were a little unfocused, like he was staring through Rainy’s head at the ceiling beyond. “What were you gonna study?”
Rainy’s fingers were cramping, they were locked so tight. “Psychology,” he admitted. “I wanted to study psychology.”
“Hm.” A half smile tugged at Adler’s mouth, and the ghost of a dimple appeared.
“What about you?” Rainy asked. He needed to keep him awake, keep him talking.
Adler snorted. “I was never gonna make it to college.”
“If you had. Anything you want.”
Adler fell silent for a long moment, and Rainy was about to shake him awake when he realized that he was just seriously considering the question.
“I always liked math,” he said finally. Rainy couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of him.
“Of course you fucking did.”
A pair of shoes appeared at the edge of Rainy’s vision, but he didn’t care. Couldn’t. Adler’s eyes were drifting closed again.
“Why’d you like math?”
Adler did smile this time. It had a delirious, dull edge to it. “I liked knowing the rules. Harder to get in trouble when you understand the rules.”
Rainy’s hands had gone nerveless. He wasn’t pressing down on the bleeding anymore, or trying to elevate. He was just holding, now.
I’ve almost died on concrete floors more times than I can count, Adler had said. Rainy felt like he was choking on the unfairness of it, the wrongness, that it should end like this. Bleeding out for nothing on another concrete floor.
Adler was shivering. Rainy held him tighter. He wrapped his arms around his shoulders, cradled his head, stroked a hand through his hair.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered. “I promise. I’m not going anywhere. I’m so sorry.”
Adler made a tiny gesture, and it took a moment for Rainy to realize that he was beckoning him close. He leaned in, using his chest to shield them from the rest of the world. Adler’s lips pressed against the ruined shell of his ear.
“Don’t ever apologize, Mister Rainy. It don’t look good on you.”
Before he could reply, Adler’s head slipped down into the crook of his neck. His breath was hot and shallow, and damp like a kiss just under Rainy’s jaw.
The shoes moved closer, attached to a pair of legs now, insistent for his attention. Rainy looked up dully and found Emilio standing in the aisle. Across from him, holding his gaze, was Hyun-woo Seong. Rainy didn’t think to wonder where he’d come from. In the central space, the fighting had stopped. The men were spaced and slumped, weary and warily watching Seong watch the blood spreading across Adler’s back and down Rainy’s arms. He turned his eyes silently back up to Emilio.
He called something in Korean, short and sharp. Every gun in the room held by one of Seong’s men was out and trained on an Espinosa man in half a heartbeat. The three nearest to the aisle all pointed their weapons at Emilio’s chest. The Espinosas jumped into motion, fixing their own guns, and the room became a statue garden bristling with weapons.
What we have here is a good old-fashioned Mexican standoff, Rainy thought, and an inappropriate giggle bubbled in his chest. He dug his fingers tighter into Adler’s arms.
“You should not have done that,” Seong told Emilio. “I would have been satisfied with victory. Now, I will take blood.”
Emilio’s jaw ticked, but he didn’t humor the guns pointed at him with a glance. Instead, he looked down to where Rainy knelt by his feet, still wrapped around Adler’s limp form. Their eyes met. Rainy felt sick, sick and infinitely tired. Emilio’s gaze was dark, and heavy with a weight that felt all too much like that old, familiar disappointment.
“I don’t think you want to do this,” Emilio told Seong. “Element of surprise out of the way, you’re outnumbered. If you back down now, the only further thing you lose tonight is the loot.”
Seong’s face was pale—with rage or with fear, Rainy couldn’t discern. He didn’t particularly care, anymore.
“You misunderstand,” Seong said. “I will burn this warehouse to the ground with all the merchandise inside just to make sure you are among the ashes. The loot is nothing. There is no scenario in which you walk out of here unruined.”
They sized each other up for a long, long moment, while the room held its breath. Rainy prepared himself to curl over Adler’s body to protect him from gunfire. Emilio’s eyebrows were low as he searched Seong’s face for the bluff, but he didn’t seem to find it.
“I have an alternate proposition,” Emilio said finally, without dropping Seong’s gaze. “Felix?”
“Yes?” Felix asked, from where he was in a triangular standoff with the two nearest Koreans.
“Call Nasrin,” Emilio ordered evenly.
Felix wavered. “I don’t think she—”
“Call Nasrin.”
Felix paused another moment before reluctantly lowering his gun and stepping away to pull out his phone.
“My daughter-in-law is the best trauma surgeon in the city,” Emilio told Seong. “There are no better hands, if you want your man to survive the night.”
Rainy’s heart jerked painfully against his ribs. It felt dangerously like that feathered thing. He squeezed Adler, feeling his waning, shallow breathing and the threadiness of his heartbeat, echoing Rainy’s own.
Seong considered Emilio for another eternity. Finally, he nodded.
“Lower your weapons,” he called to his men. “We’re finished here.”