“That sounds good.” Calm, cool and collected; the ladies always ate that up. At least, that’s what he always told himself. The strong possibility that Citron’s involvement was merely part of a grander charade to cause him to part ways with his money hadn’t yet created within Micah any sense of unease.
“I thought it would.” She stood up and Micah slipped a ten-dollar bill in the strap of one of her heels.
Citron continued her set as a group of men on the other side of the stage, desperate for a woman’s attention, no matter how insincere, prepared to pull off the dollar bill trick. They each placed a half-folded dollar bill in their mouths and rested the backs of their heads on the stage, looking at her upside down. She reluctantly made her way over to them, leaned down, and grabbed the dollars by squeezing her breasts together around their faces, snatching the money from their mouths on the way up. For some, the affection is all they need, even if it’s strained.
The music faded to nothing as Citron’s set ended and another dancer made her way toward the primary stage. The DJ then announced the next participant in this week’s episode of How to Disappoint Your Father, a petite blond woman with implants that would make a pair of watermelons blush. Citron put her clothes back on and casually strolled over to Micah.
“Let’s go, sugar.”
He gulped down the last bit of his drink and left the glass on the table, following along behind Citron like a lost puppy eager to be taken in by a loving family. They went over to a stairway near the back of the club and walked up the steps to a landing where an oddly muscular man in all black stood guard. He nodded at Citron as she led Micah to an empty room at the end of a long hallway. He stepped in after her and shut the door.
The small room was lined from floor to ceiling in red velvet and sparsely decorated. A black leather sofa and an end table sat empty in the center of the room. Micah walked over to the sofa and plopped down, stretching his arms out completely. Citron followed and stopped in front of him, her legs between his.
“So, how much fun did you want to have?” Her voice had a playful quality to it as she tried to gauge his interest in what was to come. She didn’t bring him up here for nothing, but it wasn’t always easy to tell how far some guys will go once they stepped out from underneath the safety of the neon lights.
“What did you have in mind?”
“That all depends on what you feel like spending, sweetheart.” Citron had learned early on that many guys enjoyed being referred to as honeys, babies, cuties, and any other little pet name that a high school girl would use to describe her current crush. Some more than most. It gave the impression that the interest the dancer portrayed was genuine rather than part of the elaborate ruse it almost always was. Sometimes it was real. Strippers are still human, after all. But often the aim was more direct. After all, the women still had bills to pay.
“My good looks aren’t enough?” Micah knew corny liens rarely worked, but for them to blossom into something other than a polite chuckle, good timing was imperative.
“Only enough for a dance,” Citron replied with a devious smirk. “Anything else is extra.”
“Fair enough.” Micah shifted his body slightly in anticipation. “How about you start with the dance and we’ll take it from there?”
“That’s what I like to hear.” She turned around, a smile of victory on her face, and walked over to a stereo on the end table. She pressed play and an R&B track started up. As though time were on the verge of coming to an unavoidable standstill, Citron seductively returned to her spot in front of Micah. The mellow beat of the track reverberated throughout the padded room and came alive with each movement of her body in front of his.
Most men would succumb to their baser desires by the point that she leaned forward and removed her skirt, exposing the nearly invisible piece of fabric hiding her treasure. Not Micah. He was trying to play an angle. Give too much, and one loses all hope. However, give just enough without allowing your thoughts to be deciphered, and the prize would be his. By the time the song reached the end of the first verse, Citron was on his lap attempting to get some sort of physical confirmation from the unit downstairs that her trick was working since Micah’s face told nothing other than mild amusement.
As his body was about to rat him out, Micah leaned in for a kiss. Citron smiled and completed the exchange. It wasn’t something she did frequently with clients, but she admired the balls it took to go for it so casually. The music briefly hit a fierce beat as the song gradually switched over to the next track on the list. Citron effortlessly slid off Micah’s lap and onto her knees in front of him. She stared at him for a moment, waiting for confirmation that he wanted things to move further.
In his mind, Micah’s plan was a success. He had somehow wooed this woman into taking things further, all of her own volition. That she was simply following protocol failed to register as a potential reality in his mind. Just as he was about to let destiny take hold, a new beat jumped into the mix, throwing off the soothing song on the stereo. Alternative rock meshed with R&B for a few seconds before Micah realized what had interrupted. He grabbed his cell phone and accepted the call.
“Yo, Victor… what’s up?” Micah tried his best to sound normal, although the current situation made such a feat rather challenging.
“Micah, I’ve got some good news, but we need to discuss it in person. Get your ass over here, pronto.” There was a hint of recognition in Perez’s voice.
“I’m, uh, kind of in the middle of something right now. How soon were you thinking?”
“Let me rephrase that: Get your ass here now! This type of good fortune doesn’t normally happen so quickly, and there’s no telling when another window of opportunity like this one will open up.”
“Shit, all right. I’ll be there in five.” Micah ended the call and returned the phone to his pocket with a mixture of disgust and happiness on his face. He figured things would have worked out eventually with how well he had handled his recent job, but he thought he could have at least one night to himself before they did. Fate can be a cruel mistress. “Sorry to cut things short. How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Citron said. She may have taken him up there for work, but she had to admit she enjoyed being around the man. He had a certain air of dorky confidence that was refreshing compared to most of the people she dealt with daily. “Just come back here sometime and we’ll start back where we left off.
Chapter 5
Brantley approached the familiar steel door and pressed the red button. The same ding he had heard only hours before rang out, followed closely by the sound of a door changing from something designed to hinder progress into a means of entry. He slipped inside and approached the table. Perez looked as though he hadn’t moved from his seat. There was a single light on inside the building, shining down on the poker table while sheltering the rest of the room in the same darkness that existed on the other side of the windows.
“So, what’s going on?” Micah asked as he grabbed a chair and sat down on the opposite side of the table. He noticed a legal notepad in front of Perez with quite a lot of numbers and letters scribbled almost nonsensically across it. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it appeared his counterpart had been more productive of late.
“I spoke with Jimmy,” Perez said. The casual way the words rolled off his tongue, with no sort of accompanying facial expression, told Micah nothing of significance. It was almost as if he simply called him back to gossip about a dating prospect. Except the person in question was a high-ranking member of a local cartel.
“And?”
“He wants to meet with you.” Perez let the words sink in, enjoying the chance to toy with Micah. “You’re not in, but you’re not out either. I think you may have to prove yourself to him.”
“I just introduced a guy’s neck to a knife last night. What the hell else do I have to do to prove my worth? Hell, all he needs to do is look at my track record for
the countless other jobs I’ve taken care of over the years.”
“He’s well aware of the vast amount of blood that has been lost at your hands,” Perez answered slyly. “Look, he didn’t tell me much. He only gave me a number to have you call him on. Make sure you don’t use your cell when you call.”
“All right, what’s the number?” Perez found the relevant information on the notepad in front of him, tore it off and slid it across the table. Micah stared at it for a few moments before grabbing hold of the paper and placing it in his pocket. “I appreciate it, Victor, I really do.”
Micah stepped back outside and walked over to his car. He let the cool breeze brush against his face for a few moments, relishing in the notion that life may finally work out favorably, before sitting down in his car. He drove down U.S.-1 for a few miles until he came across a 24-hour gas station. He parked at the side of the building, near a payphone. It had a cement base which seemed to suggest that there was some sort of payphone theft ring that targeted machines found at local gas stations, and this was the only surefire way to thwart their nefarious efforts.
Certain that no one was watching him, he grabbed hold of the receiver. The dial tone droned endlessly in his ear as he retrieved the paper from his pocket with the pertinent information scribbled upon it. After two rings, the phone clicked.
“Speak,” Jimmy ordered, his voice one of painful indifference. Someone could call to let him know that his mother was in the hospital following a near fatal heart attack, and he wouldn’t have registered any sort of emotional recognition appropriate to the severity of the incident. His voice was the kind that told you from the get-go that he wasn’t to be taken lightly.
“This is Micah.” He fought the urge to say his full name, like an attentive student at the front of the class, hoping to score a gold star on the first day. “Victor gave me your number.”
“Meet me at La Cantina Sucia in twenty.”
The phone was dead before Micah could respond. Confusion filled his face as he absentmindedly returned the receiver to its cradle.
Chapter 6
Osteen was sitting in a small conference room on the second floor of the Miami Metro Police Department, attempting to piece together what little evidence existed for the murder of one Edgar Jennings. A tack board, propped up against the wall, housed various pictures of evidence and people believed to hold some significance to the case. A few of the pictures were of Edgar Jennings; both in life and postmortem. A thumbtack held up each picture, with one end of a piece of string tied to it. They connected the opposite end of each strand to a related picture. It looked like a person trying to figure out the distance between two cities on a map of the country before the days of Google Earth.
“I’ve got the results from the lab, Dan,” Vivian said as she entered the room.
Osteen shuddered slightly, as though she had woken him from a deep slumber. He looked groggily in her direction.
“How’s the coffee been working out for you?” Vivian asked sarcastically. She had been trying to get him to cut back on his caffeine intake for months. It started off with a reasonable cup a day and ballooned to six or more cups on more strenuous days. Unfortunately for Osteen, the caffeine kick eventually stuck with him after a long string of such shifts and he began drinking a cup of coffee almost as often as a cigarette smoker leaves the building for a quick drag. He and his World’s Greatest Detective mug were inseparable.
“Wonderful! Thanks for asking, Viv,” he replied with a sardonic smirk. “What’s the folder say?”
“Nothing too interesting,” Vivian replied, taking a seat next to him. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the trachea. No sign of a struggle. Single entry wound. There was slight bruising around the left side of the cranium, most likely from the assailant trying to stabilize the head for the kill. Pretty cut and dry.”
“Cut and dry would imply that this case is as good as solved. We don’t have a suspect or witnesses. Typically, you need one to lead to the other before you can reach the magical endpoint of this whole charade. My gut says there’s more to this case than what we know so far. More, even, than the ‘how’ of what went down at the time of the murder, but the evidence suggests otherwise,” Osteen said.
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what to think just yet, to be honest. There are too many random pieces to the puzzle for me to believe some thug just arbitrarily killed this guy and stole his car but left his wallet, with everything intact, mind you, inside the victim’s pocket. It just doesn’t add up,” Osteen said. He drummed his right index finger lightly on the desk, simultaneously staring at the wall across the room. “That there was only one entry wound, a clean one at that, and no sign of defensive struggle means that whoever killed Jennings knew what they were doing. It wasn’t like they only planned to steal the car but upped the ante once the owner of the car beat them to the punch.”
“You think we’re dealing with a professional here?” Vivian asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Osteen reasoned. “Hell, I could be way off base, and the evidence could guide us in exactly the direction we need to go already. We just don’t know enough yet. If this is the work of a professional, though, we need to figure out what conceivable motive there could have been. Who would have wanted Jennings dead badly enough to pay our killer?”
“We figure that out, and perhaps we can figure out the identity of our mystery man.”
“Exactly.”
The door at the front of the room opened, and a pimply faced intern hesitantly peered in. “Excuse me, uh… Detective,” the intern muttered, sounding almost like a child scared to go to bed because the Boogeyman would be there waiting for him.
“Yes?” Vivian answered.
“Dispatch just received a call from a patrol car that found a charred Mercedes abandoned behind a Publix about a mile from Crandon Park.”
Osteen and Vivian looked at each other, surprised by the turn of events, and bolted for the door, nearly knocking the intern on his butt.
Chapter 7
Miami is the epitome of the city that never sleeps. Even in the darkness of night, its citizens remain as active as they would be if the sun had never descended below the horizon. The roles played by this wacky cast of characters changes almost as suddenly as the weather. Every imaginable performer in this production takes hold of their role passionately, never missing a beat, for to do so would mean an unacceptable break from the norm. There are those who thrive on shifting drastically from what some may consider normal. For every person like that, there are twenty who don’t believe in fixing something that isn’t in need of repair.
La Cantina Sucia was the type of restaurant venture that flourished even in the toughest of times. The food was relatively cheap, but the quality was on a level that few eateries could come close to reaching. Rumors abounded that the success was because of a few secret family recipes the owner kept locked away in a hidden safe. Some more frequent patrons liked to spend part of their visits attempting to guess where the safe might be located if, in fact, it even existed. Most agreed that it was highly unlikely to be in the owner’s office, as that would be too obvious. Instead, a few theorized it was likely tucked away not in a safe, but in the drawer of an otherwise nondescript armoire in the owner’s home.
The restaurant had a distinct Caribbean flair to its exterior. A bright coral, with pastel blue accents and enough palm varieties to give a tree nursery a run for their money, it had the effect of walking into a quaint restaurant nestled into the outskirts of a rainforest in Cuba. This provided the citizens who fled Castro’s rein a little taste of the parts of home they remembered most fondly. During the lunch and dinner hours, it was tough to find a seat anywhere in the Cantina without waiting nearly an hour. At the twilight hours, however, the premises shared quite a lot in common with Western ghost towns.
Micah hurried down the damp sidewalk leading to the Cantina. His eyes subconsciously drift
ed to the plastic ‘CLOSED’ sign hanging behind a window near the front door. He halted in front of the beautiful Cuban Mahogany double doors and stared, dumbfounded. Castillo’s abrupt end to the phone call left him with an uncertainty about what he was to do once he reached the restaurant. Micah thought it would be odd to meet up in front and have a chat, rather than venture inside, but with no one in sight to let him in, his options appeared limited. He grabbed the handle and applied the pressure necessary to open it when a small, almost comical voice appeared behind him.
“What are you waiting for?” The voice was diminutive, as though the person from whom it emanated had no interest in sounding threatening.
“What the fu…” Micah pivoted to face the noise, instinctively placing his hand on the grip of the pistol resting securely in its holster. “Who the hell are you?”
“You Micah?”
The reluctance of the man to react to Micah’s aggressive shifting of his weight caused him to feel uneasy about the pair of eyes staring back at him. Someone that unfazed by the sight of a gun held by a person almost twice their size had likely seen their fair share of shit. “Who’s asking?” Micah kept his hand rested on the grip of the pistol, anticipating a rapid escalation to the situation that never materialized.
“Good answer,” the little man said, cracking an enormous smile as he stepped toward the door. “Jimmy’s in the private room. Follow me.”
Micah relaxed his arms and followed the little man into La Cantina Sucia. Once inside, they walked toward a pair of doors in the back of the main seating area. To most people who frequented the eatery, the doors in question simply led to the kitchen. That was true, to an extent. The little man led him through the kitchen, to another door which opened to a small foyer that was home to a single flight of stairs on one side, and a door that led outside on the other. The stairs eventually ended at a small landing, upon which existed only a door. An armed guard stood in front of it, waiting to make use of his tools.
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