THURSDAY NIGHT
MARCH 30th, 1989
MIAMI, FLORIDA

The cell phone remained gripped in a stiff hand as the other end of the line continued to ring. Adrian glanced up from the car dashboard to the apartment across the parking lot. A light drizzle was exposed by the light of the streetlamps and turned a sickly off-yellow color. Palm trees adorning the exterior of the building gently swayed and danced to the distant rhythm of a party from within the residence.

There came a click from the phone, followed by a soft voice.

"Hello?"

Adrian did away with his nerves. "Hey Lindsay, it's me."

"Please don't tell me you're—"

"I'm going to be late coming home tonight. Again." He could hear his fiancée stifle a curse. "I'm sorry, but it's just part of the job, you know? We need people in the office to get any real work done."

"Of course, just… don't wake me up when you get back."

The voice had lost its softness. The connection closed. Without lingering, Adrian stepped from his car and into the humid night, eyes set on the building's entrance.

With a tight fist, Adrian knocked on the door of apartment 104. The raging party began to peter out, but the door remained shut. He knocked again, a little harder, and still received no feedback. As he prepared to knock a third time, the door opened to reveal a middle-aged man in a white suit.

"What the fuck do you want?" he growled in a thick Russian accent, clearly holding no respect for Adrian's uniform.

"Miami PD, sir. There have been reports of illicit activity taking place at this residence." Adrian held up his police badge in one hand and a search warrant in the other. "I'll need to come inside."

The Russian looked Adrian up and down as his mouth twisted into a scowl, cold eyes flicking between the officer's badge, warrant, and cap. He folded his arms and stepped out of the way.

Avoiding eye contact, the police officer made his way into the spacious apartment. The sounds of the party had died down, with quiet, contemptuous discussion forming in their wake from across the foyer.

Turning a corner, Adrian discovered three men, all in matching white suits over blue shirts, lounging around a table playing cards. With one seat vacant, these men and the one at the door must have been meeting here over a stockpile of unloaded firearms. One of the men stared at Adrian a moment, jaw slack. Another snarled in Russian at the gentleman who let Adrian inside, who now stood beside the officer. Adrian's gaze traveled across the room to see all four men with heavy bulges in their jacket pockets.

"You have problem, officer?" the third man at the table slurred in poor English. An empty bottle of vodka was lying at the foot of his chair. "Is just guns. This is America! Can we all take in pastime of playing cards?"

The other three men continued to stare Adrian down with unease or vitriol before the one from the door stepped towards his comrades and began speaking in his mother tongue.

Adrian reached into his belt, drew a handgun, and fired into the back of the man's head.

One mobster sitting at the table could only raise his shotgun before taking a bullet. The other two merely arose from their chairs before they too were gunned down.

Adrian looked down at his hands as adrenaline began racing through him, magnified by the metallic reek of blood and the tinnitus screaming in his ears. Distant as it seemed, frantic shouting came from a room nearby.

The police officer rushed forward and grabbed a shotgun from one of the dead mobster's hands and took cover beside the door, prepared to kick it down.

The knob began to turn.

With a quick stroke of his leg, Adrian smashed the door open. He turned to the closest figure in a uniform and squeezed the trigger. A spray of blood erupted from the criminal's abdomen as he stumbled backward and collapsed to the floor.

The cop was deafened to all but the frantic beating of his own heart. He pulled the pump, took aim, and fired again. A second mobster could only brandish a baseball bat before his arm was messily separated from his shoulder.

A confused shout came from behind another door across the foyer and Adrian was swift to approach.

Pump.

Aim.

Squeeze.

The shotgun blast nearly separated the door from its hinges and sent the man on the inside backward into a bathtub.

Adrian's eyes darted around the room, looking for other doors or more armed men—but he found nothing more than tasteless neon décor, soaked and sticky with blood.

As he washed the blood from his hands in the bathroom sink, Adrian could feel the racing adrenaline wane. The world came back into focus, and the all-too-familiar stench of death came to him. Behind him, he could see in the mirror, a Russian man lay dead in the bathtub, knocked unconscious and drowned. He walked out into the hall and tried not to stare at the corpses littered within the bedroom beyond. One lay sprawled across a bedspread, missing his right arm. Another was face-up on a blue shag carpet, intestines exposed.

Adrian wondered if a lack of nausea at the sight of all this was a good thing.

At the kitchen sink, he dabbed the spots of blood from his uniform with a wet towel and gazed into the drain.

"Someone will clean up for you after you leave," said the voice on his answering machine that morning, "please be discreet."

So much for discretion, Adrian thought bitterly. He had no time to retrieve his disguise this time; the message on the phone had instructed him to arrive at this address at strictly ten o'clock to take care of a "rat infestation," which was very shortly after he had gotten off work. However, all it took was some improvisation and a meaningless, unrelated search warrant, and things worked out nonetheless.

He walked out of the apartment complex into the humid night and looked out at the twinkling pinprick lights of the Miami skyline.

We must make America strong again! the pamphlet proudly read when he received it many weeks ago. Little did he know at the time that this entailed pursuing the local mafia. He closed the door firmly behind him.

"I'm getting better at this," he said shamefully to himself as he walked away to his cruiser.

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