The Rich and the Dead (3 page)

She shook her head no.

“Thanks to you, I just had the distinct pleasure of getting my ass chewed out by none other than Jonathan fucking Golding, the owner of this very fine establishment. Do you know how many times he's called me? Just guess.”

Lila shrugged. Saying anything right now would only be digging herself deeper into whatever hole she was currently in.

“In my six years of working here, I've only spoken to that man once before tonight. And that was on the day he hired me.”

“You're acting like I did something wrong.”

“Do yourself a favor and shut your mouth!” he shouted. “I'll take bullshit from Golding 'cause that's my job. But I won't take it from you. Do you have any idea whose fucking ankle you broke tonight?”

“I don't know. A rapist's? A murderer's? I walked in on him and his little friend trying to kill a woman. If I wasn't there, you'd have a homicide on your hands right now. Is that what you want?”

“She's a whore who overdosed. That's the end of the story. The cops that are with her down at the hospital right now told me she's not pressing charges. She's staying very tight-lipped about the whole thing. Poor girl is just trying to keep out of jail herself. On the other hand, those guys you had so much fun bashing around already have their lawyers calling Jonathan fucking Golding demanding that you be brought up on aggravated assault charges.”

“
Me?
”

“Yes, you. And now I've got Golding up my ass saying how bad this looks for the hotel. He's trying to keep the whole thing contained. If this is leaked to the press, it'll be a total shit show.”

Lila sat there stunned. The worst she had expected was to be called out for letting the guys get away. But this wasn't the first time she'd been read the riot act for simply doing her job.

“I was warned not to hire you. But did I listen?” Danny shook his head. “You were a good cop. And you needed work, so I did what I thought was right and gave you the job.”

“And I'm grateful for that. Really I am.” Lila gave Danny a forced smile. “What I did tonight is part of the job you hired me to do.”

“For as long as I've known you, you've had a rotten habit of fucking with the wrong people,” he said.

“You mean rich people.”

“That's one way to put it. Most people just call them the boss. And most people learn early to play nice with the guys who call the shots. It seems to me those are the folks you like to go after.”

Danny stood up, walked around his desk, and stopped in front of Lila. “I'll need your hotel ID. Leave your uniform and flashlight in your locker. You'll get a final check sent to you at the end of the month. As of right now, you are no longer an employee of Hotel Armadale.”

Lila sat silent for a moment, studying her boss. Under the fluorescent lights, his face looked slack-jawed and exhausted. There was a mustard stain on his tie. He had always been sloppy, as a man and as a cop. All he ever really cared about was covering his own ass. The priorities of a coward.

Good riddance,
she thought, standing up. She slapped her ID and flashlight on the table.

“You'll land on your feet, kid.” Danny's voice was a little strained from this attempt at positivity, but also relieved. She knew he'd been worried she would make a scene. But she wouldn't give him the pleasure of seeing her protest. It was pointless. Instead, she just nodded as she left his office and closed the door behind her.

The moment Lila walked out of the Armadale for the last time, a wall of humidity hit her, the sun mercilessly bright overhead. It was only 7:30
A
.
M
., and already the temperature was unbearable. Two thousand eighteen was proving to be the hottest year on record—and the worst year of Lila's life.

Thoughts of her late mother's hospital bills, her overdue car payments, her rent, and her frozen credit cards descended on Lila like the oppressive weather, making it almost impossible to breathe. She was broke, she was in debt, and now she was unemployed.

She was crossing the parking lot toward her car, her mind listing one worry after another, when a rapid clicking noise interrupted her thoughts. She looked up and saw an old man on the other side of the street, sitting in a midnight-blue Bentley and pointing a long-lensed camera in her direction. She swiveled around to see what he was photographing, but there was nothing behind her except the empty parking lot. Was he taking pictures of her?

Just as she turned back to the man, the car pulled away and disappeared around the corner. Lila stood glued to the same spot, staring blankly at where the car had been. Its exhaust fumes still hung suspended in the morning air. There was something about that old man, about this specific moment in time, that seemed intensely familiar to Lila, almost as if this had happened before.

She shook herself out of her momentary daze and climbed into her already sunbaked car, which felt something like climbing into a furnace. Déjà vu, she thought with a shrug.

The sun had only been up for an hour, and Lila's day, as far as she was concerned, was already done.

CHAPTER 2

L
ILA LIVED IN
a run-down two-story stucco apartment building overlooking a small patch of grass and palm trees called Ernesto Lecuona Park, in the heart of Little Havana. With its thin, dirty walls, cheap tiled floors, and cracked ceilings, her apartment had an undeniable charmlessness. No one would choose to live in a place like this. It was where unlucky people fell when they stopped reaching for the life they wanted.

Sweating from the heat of the day and profoundly exhausted, Lila undressed clumsily, leaving her clothes in a careless pile by the foot of the bed. The sharp smells of blood and vomit still clung to her hair. She wrapped herself in a robe and started a bath. Her robe was a thing of beauty, made of deep emerald silk delicately embroidered with white and purple lilies. It had been a gift from her mom, their last Christmas together. The card attached had read, “Something soft for my tough little cookie. Love, Mom.”

Lila threw back two chalky aspirin and chased them down with a gulp of bourbon on the rocks. After everything that had just happened, she needed to clear her head.

A cop is only as good as her instincts. And for most of her short but remarkable eight years on the Miami police force, Lila Day's instincts had been dead-on. She was famous among the force for her preternatural ability to know who was guilty, who was innocent, and how to tease out the truth. When cops and prosecutors asked her how she was able to solve tough cases before anyone else, she'd just shrug. In her mind, there was nothing to it. Her only confusion was why it took everybody else so long to figure things out.

When she was fresh out of the academy, Lila's first assignment had been patrolling Little Haiti, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Miami. All of her superiors and fellow rookies thought she'd quit within weeks. None of them understood why a twenty-one-year-old woman would choose to spend her life chasing after bad guys.

“A sweet thing like you,” her sergeant had said to Lila her first day on patrol. “Those thugs'll be smacking their lips to get a taste.”

Lila had been forced to put up with a lot of that kind of bullshit. That was one part of the job she didn't miss at all—the sneering, sleazy stuff the guys liked to pull. She always saw it as a test, and one she passed by simply ignoring them. She never thought much about her appearance, and hated when she saw women using their looks for some kind of advantage. That could only ever be a losing game. Men always told Lila that she was pretty. They also talked a lot of other shit, and she didn't pay that any mind either. What did it matter when there was a job to be done?

After just two years on the force, Lila made detective. Four years after that, she was assigned as lead investigator on the most high-profile case in the history of Miami: the Star Island massacre. There was an immediate outcry among the other detectives—she was too young, too inexperienced for a case that big. She was bound to fail.

And they were right.

Lila's hunt for the Star Island killer robbed her of her center of gravity. Suddenly the relentlessness that normally made her so good at her job was working against her. She couldn't solve the case, but neither could she move on and let it go.

When perfectionists fail, sometimes they shatter.

If instincts are what make a good cop, then self-doubt is what gets cops killed. And the endless hunt for the Star Island killer left Lila drowning in self-doubt. She had lost her trust in herself.

She sighed, dropped her robe, and stepped into the tub. She hadn't meant to think about the Star Island murders today. The case was her greatest failure as a cop, and now she'd failed herself again, as a lowly hotel security guard.

Just then, there was a violent knock at her front door. Lila froze, up to her ankles in bathwater. She looked at the clock. It was a little after eight in the morning. Who it was didn't matter. That was a knock Lila had no interest in answering. Ignoring it, she was just about to lie down in the bath, but the knocking grew louder and faster.

“What the hell?” Lila muttered. She got out of the tub and put her robe back on, hurrying toward the door to give that noisy bastard a piece of her mind. She glanced out her apartment window and was startled to see that the person knocking was none other than the old man she'd noticed earlier, the one who'd been taking pictures of her. He was wearing a black suit, a chauffeur's cap, and driving gloves. Lila looked to the street, and there was the midnight-blue Bentley, parked behind her car.

“Ms. Day? Ms. Day, please open the door,” the old man said in a highly refined English accent. “Ms. Day, I come with an urgent request.”

Lila was immune to most temptations, but she never could resist the almost gravitational pull of her curiosity. So now that a strange man with mysterious business had come literally knocking on her door, there was no way in hell she wasn't going to answer.

CHAPTER 3