Vacation with the Shifty Shark (Monsters and Margaritas #13)

Chapter One

The first rule of owning a beach bar was that the ice machine waited until you needed three hundred pounds of ice to start making a noise like a dying Vespa.

The second rule was that nobody cared because summer tourists on the Miami boardwalk still wanted frozen margaritas, fried mozzarella, and a place to act like sunscreen counted as formalwear.

Beyond the wide front of Bite Me Boardwalk Bar & Bites, palm fronds rattled over the hot wooden boardwalk, beach umbrellas striped the sand, and the Atlantic flashed bright blue between bodies in swimsuits and tourists dragging rolling coolers they had no business dragging into a restaurant.

I braced one hip against the back counter, wedged the phone between a sack of limes and a cambro of marinara, and stabbed the FaceTime button with my elbow.

My mother answered on the second ring with curlers in her hair, red sauce on her apron, and the expression of a woman preparing to diagnose my entire life through a four-inch screen.

“Antonella, why are you shiny?”

“I’m shiny because it’s Miami in July, Ma. The air has calories.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer Florida gave me.”

Behind me, the blender screamed through a test batch of limoncello margaritas. The fryer hissed. Garlic and hot oil wrapped around the bar while the open front let in beach music, humid air, and a pack of sunburned men by the patio rail. One of them lifted a fried ring like evidence.

“Calamari’s basically a vegetable.”

It counted as survival if they paid full price.

Shay leaned over the service well with two empty rocks glasses in one hand. Dark curls were tucked under her Bite Me visor, a silver nose stud caught the light, and she carried the sharp-eyed calm of a woman who could spot a bad tipper from across a crowded patio.

“Nella, the well tequila order is still not here, and table six is using the words gluten-free and mozzarella sticks in the same sentence.”

“They’re fried cheese, not a miracle. Tell her no with compassion.”

My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s Shay? Is she eating?”

“Ma, everyone here is eating. That’s the problem.”

Mari slapped the kitchen bell twice. She stood at the pass with black hair twisted into a tight bun, gold hoops flashing under the kitchen lights, and a chef’s towel thrown over one shoulder like she might use it to strangle the next person who delayed pickup.

“Calamari cones are up,” Mari said, “and if Dusty stacked the tomato pies near the mop sink again, I’m feeding him to the tourists.”

Dusty drifted past carrying ice like a man delivering offerings to a very angry god. Sun-bleached hair fell into his eyes, his faded shark tank had seen better decades, and three woven bracelets slid down his wrist every time the ice shifted against his shoulder.

“I heard my name and a threat, and I respect both,” Dusty said.

“You put tomato pie near a mop sink again, and I’ll respect you into the ocean,” Mari said.

Dusty adjusted the bag against his shoulder. “The ocean and I have a long-standing spiritual understanding.”

“The ocean won’t save you from Mari,” I said.

“It never has,” he said, and drifted on.

My mother leaned closer to her screen. “Antonella, why is that boy carrying ice like he’s in a church procession?”

“I’m calling the priest for an exorcism if that thing quits.”

“You should come home. Your uncle knows a man who fixes restaurant equipment.”

“Your uncle knows a man” was how my family opened conversations about plumbing, real estate, parking tickets, and at least two situations nobody discussed in front of the cousins under eighteen.

“I’m not calling Uncle Frankie,” I said.

My phone buzzed against the lime sack.

The sound cut under the blender, fryer, music, and Mari’s knife hitting the prep board. One small vibration, and I tightened my grip around the metal jigger hard enough to chill my palm.

I looked down.

TORRETTI HARBOR CAPITAL:

Five days remain. Payment or possession.

The bar noise rolled on. The sun hammered through the doorway.

A woman in a straw visor laughed too loudly at the patio rail while her husband tried to photograph his margarita before it melted into green soup.

Past them, cyclists wobbled along the boardwalk between palm shadows and sunscreen-bright families headed for the beach.

I took one tight breath.

Then I moved.

I flipped the phone facedown beside the limes and poured the test margarita into a plastic sample cup. It was limoncello, tequila, fresh lime, a tiny bite of salt, and enough sugar to make tourists think life loved them personally.

The drink was too sweet.

“Antonella,” my mother said.

I picked up the cup and drank again anyway.

“Nella,” she said, softer now. “What was that face?”

“What face?”

“The face you made when your father used to tell me the Giants would turn it around this year.”

“That’s not a face. That’s generational trauma.”

“Don’t joke with me when I’m looking right at you.”

Taryn appeared at my left shoulder with a stack of menus hugged to her chest. She was tall and freckled, with a honey-brown braid pulled through the back of her visor and the kind of customer-service look that could turn merciful or deadly depending on the table.

“We’ve got six waiting at the host stand, two pickup orders trying to turn fries into calamari, and an uncle at seven campaigning for espresso martinis.”

“Tell the uncle I respect his journey, but this is a margarita bar with Italian boardwalk food, not a cry for help.”

Taryn nodded. “I’ll make it sound nicer.”

“Don’t make it too nice. They come back when you feed them false hope.”

My mother’s mouth pinched. “You’re busy. I can tell when you’re busy because you become your grandfather with earrings.”

“I’m always busy. That’s how ownership works.”

“That’s how hiding works too.”

I took the apron from the hook and tied it over my fitted black tank and cutoffs.

My hoop earrings brushed my neck when I turned toward the room.

Bite Me was loud, bright, sticky, understaffed, and mine.

A neon shark glowed over the back mirror.

String lights crossed the patio. Mari’s perfect block letters filled the chalkboard menu.

Fryer heat fogged the takeout window. Outside, palm shadows moved across the boardwalk railing, and the beach beyond it seemed too pretty to be attached to this much debt.

Garlic, lime, hot oil, sunscreen, and money I needed very badly filled every inch of the room.

That phone on the lime sack had Jersey in it.

The bar around me had my name on every repaired stool, every string light I’d hung after midnight, every chalkboard special I’d rewritten when the numbers got mean.

I had borrowed from the wrong men after the right bank laughed me out of a chair, and now those men wanted proof I could pay or keys to the only thing I’d built that didn’t belong to my family.

“Ma, I love you, but I have to go.”

“Are you eating?”

I considered the calamari cone Mari shoved through the pass. “I’m eating professionally.”

“That’s not eating.”

“It counts if I charge market price.”

“Antonella.”

“I’ll call you after close.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“You might.”

“I’ll send a picture of mozzarella.”

“You know me too well,” she said, but her eyes stayed worried. “Call your brother if you need anything.”

“If I call Vinny, he’ll get on a plane with a duffel bag full of tools and emotional volume.”

“That’s because he loves you.”

“That’s because none of you let a woman fail privately.”

My mother pointed at the screen with a sauce-stained wooden spoon. “You’re not failing. You’re being stubborn far away.”

“Those are different menus, Ma.”

Before she could answer, two women near the entrance shifted sideways to clear space.

Bite Me didn’t pause. The blender shrieked. The fryer spat. The tourists chewed with their mouths open because civilization was a group project Florida had declined.

A man walked in from the white punch of late-afternoon light like he expected the sun, the boardwalk, and all of Miami Beach to move out of his way.

He was huge. He wasn’t tall in a normal, basketball-cousin way.

He was huge in a doorway problem way, with dark hair, dark stubble, tanned skin, an open pale linen shirt, designer swim trunks, leather sandals, sunglasses, a heavy watch, and enough gold on his chest to make my mother’s side of the family forgive several misdemeanors.

The man was every bad decision on the Jersey Shore after it moved to Miami, found a tailor, and developed a taste for dark cologne.

I stopped tying the apron knot.

The man took off his sunglasses.

Across my bar, he found me with blue-gray eyes. Then he smiled, slow and sharp at the edges, and I felt one hard kick under my ribs that I refused to discuss with myself.

My mother gasped through the phone. “Antonella.”

I snatched the phone up. “Ma, I’m hanging up now.”

“Who is that?”

“A customer.”

“That’s not a customer. That’s a mistake with a nice watch.”

“Goodbye, Ma.”

“If he’s Italian, find out whose people he belongs to.”

“Goodbye.”

“If he’s not Italian, find out why he’s dressed like that.”

I jabbed the red button and set the phone facedown before Carmela DeLuca could start a background check through FaceTime.

Shay drifted closer with a towel over her shoulder. “That man looks like trouble with a credit limit.”

“I hate credit limits,” I said.

“I figured.”

The man crossed to the bar with a predator’s ease I legally didn’t notice. He took the center stool like he’d reserved it in another lifetime.

I grabbed a shaker tin. The cold metal bit my palm and kept my hand away from my throat.

“Welcome to Bite Me,” I said. “If you’re here for frozen drinks, bad decisions, or mozzarella fried in a way your cardiologist would call personal, you’re in the right place.”

He glanced at my apron, then came back to my face. He didn’t rush. Men like him never rushed unless they wanted you to know they could.

“Antonella DeLuca,” he said.

The sound of my full name in his voice had too much gravel in it.