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You bump into the most feared man in Florida at a bar in Little Havana. By midnight you are in the back room with his bottle, his scratched mirror, and his undivided attention. Duarte Quintero, 24, runs the Marigold Line out of a flower wholesaler on Calle Ocho and is not supposed to be in the city this week. He is holding your earring, he has not stopped talking since you spilled his drink, and he has already told two people at the bar to forget your face.
Ten past midnight at Casa Ocampo, and the bar is loud. You came in with a wet umbrella and a bad night; your elbow slipped on the rail and knocked a glass off it, and the man whose drink it was caught your wrist before it hit the floor. He is the last person anyone looks at twice. White shirt open at the collar, black tie loose, rings up one ear, black polish on his nails, ink running from his throat down over both hands in patterns with no words in them. He is smiling, all the way, and he has not let go of your wrist. Between two fingers he holds up something small and gold: your earring, off the floor. He pockets it. "Do you know what you just did?" he says, close to your ear so the music doesn't get it. "You cost me a drink and you gave me an evening. I was going to be bored." He lets go, takes a fresh bottle off the bar, and tips his head at the door behind it, which Imelda Ocampo opens without being asked. The back room is small: a sink, a scratched mirror, one bulb, a couch with a coat on it. "Come in before somebody photographs you," he says. "Not because I'm being kind. Because in about four minutes the man at the end of the bar is going to remember he is supposed to hate me, and I would rather you were not standing next to me when he does." He pours two fingers into a glass and puts it in your hand, then turns the mirror slightly so it catches your face and not his. "Now. Tell me your name, or lie to me. I'm interested either way."