Ray snorted. “Ya hear that, Mark? We sound downright charitable.”
“I’m very charitable,” his brother said with a laugh.
Father Morris didn’t smile. He stared at them, face stern.
“What’ve you heard?” Ray softened his voice. He needed this kind of business – this under the radar, word of mouth reputation building, but if he was going to stick his neck out, he wanted the cause to be worthy.
“I know you were hired to keep Cynthia Abbot safe during the trial of her rapist,” the priest said. “I know you’re the reason Bryan Stanton was in violation of his parole when the police picked him up.” He sighed. “I might not approve of the methods, but I know you help people who need it.”
“And why” – Ray studied the other man – “would I do that?”
“It’s what ended your career. A man has a hard time letting go of his principles. He does what he can with the resources at his disposal.”
“I’d say you’re right, but I don’t have any principles, Father.”
The priest tipped his head. “We can disagree on that.”
Ray felt his brother kick at his leg under the table and turned toward him. Mark had a terrible poker face and his opinion was plain in his green eyes: he thought they should see what the padre wanted.
What would Cheryl say? he thought to himself. But he knew. His wife had given him a long, level look when she’d guessed the truth about Bryan Stanton. “That man doesn’t belong on the street,” she’d said in a voice that had been stronger than his confidence. Every time he thought about the ramifications of what he was doing, he thought about that look in her dark eyes. He might not have had any principles, but Cheryl did, and everything he’d ever done, he’d done for her.
He tapped his fingertips on the table and Mark turned away, nodding, understanding. “Father Morris,” Ray said, turning back to the clergyman. “What can we help you with?”
3
“How much?”
“Father Morris estimated close to forty grand worth of electronics.”
“Shit.” Eddie rubbed a hand down his carefully groomed, dark goatee and shook his head. “How’s a piss poor church like that get a hold of that kind of money?”
They stood in the parking lot of Mark’s shop, Ray, Eddie and Sly all gathered around the hood of Ray’s black Dodge truck where Ray’s day planner was spread open. To a passerby, they looked like three car guys talking shop. And they were…in a way.
“Donations,” Ray explained. He unfolded the rumpled list Father Morris had given him. “Every TV, every laptop, every iPod – all of it donated by church patrons and the good people of Cartersville.” There was an itemized accounting for every donation, though names had been omitted. “Once word gets out, Father Morris thinks his flock will assume the worst.”
Sly snorted, though his face never changed. “That the church stole it.”
“Sold it on the black market.” Eddie shrugged. “Worse has happened. Coulda been little boys who – ”
Ray cut him off with a sharp look. Of the two car thieves he’d rescued from the penal system, one had the brains, one had the beauty. Eddie had looks in spades, the little shithead, but with the exception of how to bag a woman for the night and how to hotwire a car, there wasn’t a lot else rolling around between his ears.
“Church volunteers were going to make a drop at Just Like Home – that charity group – today. Everything was loaded up in a van. Father Morris found the garage door open this morning, the van gone.”
His guys waited. Sly had a knowing look in his almost-translucent eyes. The man was downright spooky when he wanted to be. He had cold eyes. Dead eyes. They followed you.
“The Piper,” Eddie said, nodding. “If someone’s boosting electronics, chances are they’ll move it through him.”
“Or he’ll at least know about it,” Sly corrected.
“I thought we could head over to the fights tonight. Kick over rocks and ask questions. That kinda shit.”
Both the others nodded. Eddie’s cell chimed to life in his pocket and he stepped away to answer it, his wide, white grin giving away the caller’s identity as female.
Sly lifted his shoulders in a shrug, as if to excuse his friend’s behavior. “I’ll make some calls and find out where the fights are tonight.”
“Fights?”
Ray cringed at the sound of the female voice behind him. Lisa had mastered the art of sneaking long ago. Her penchant for cowboy boots with loud, wooden heels extended back to her elementary school days and when she was angry or excited, or proud of her boots, they clacked loudly as she walked. But she’d also learned how to walk up on the balls of her feet so that she was silent as a little wraith. And the brat had obviously been too curious to help herself when she’d seen them out at the truck.
He turned, sighing, and faced his daughter. Lisa had an innocent smile pasted on her face, one that she knew was effective. “Don’t even try it,” he warned, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a true grin. “And no. No fights.”
They’d made the mistake of taking her a time or two before, and though it hadn’t ended badly, she’d garnered way too much attention for his tastes. There was nothing like seeing drunken gamblers leer at your daughter.
Her smile fell. “Are you letting Johnny tag along?”
Yes. “No. He’s not twenty-one.”
“Pretty sure the Masters of the Pit Fight Series isn’t legal anyway, so a little underage gambling never hurt anybody.”
Damn. So much for logic. “You’re not going.”
Lisa sighed and folded her skinny arms over her chest. “If we argue about this, we’ll just waste ten minutes because you know you’ll let me go.”
She’s too bold. He should have been tougher on her. She’d always been too bold, even as a kid. “Not happening.”
He watched her eyes move toward Sly, who might have been holding back a smile. “No, no, no, don’t look at him. He can’t help you.”
“Dad.”
“Lisa.”
“I’ll just go by myself then.”
“You won’t know where it is tonight.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and stared down at the toes of her boots, frustration pressing lines between her drawn brows.
“Why do you wanna go so bad anyway?”
“I just do.” Because she was an only child and had served as both son and daughter. Because they’d been to rodeos and fishing tournaments, softball games and bowling nights together. She’d always been a bit of a tomboy. And despite the hoop earrings and all the eyeliner, she worked Mark’s garage because she loved cars. And she wanted to go tonight not – for the reasons he did – to gain some kind of intel, but because she liked boxing.
Ray could feel his resolve crumbling. He glanced at Sly and saw a laugh dancing around in the guy’s eyes. Ray wondered if it was as shameful to be manipulated by a daughter as it was by a wife. He didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure.
“We’ll see,” he told her, and Lisa dipped her head in final acquiescence, turned and headed back toward the office, boot heels clacking this time.
She paused halfway there and twisted her head over her shoulder. “That means yes, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She grinned and kept walking.
***
The Masters of the Pit was one of those events that didn’t technically exist. Flyers were stapled to telephone poles and tacked to the insides of diner windows and pinned on college corkboards outside dorm halls. You called a number, and someone on the other end asked for a password. If you knew the word, you were given another number, this one that connected to a prepay cell phone whose answerer gave you the location of that week’s fights. At each meet, new passwords were agreed upon and new prepay cells were bought. For an event so secret, it managed to grow week by week.
This week, the GPS led them to the given address: an abandoned metal barn out west of Atlanta, in the middle of some nowhe
re field. The fights had turned the place into a circus.
Cars and trucks had flattened the grass in a wide half circle around the open entrance of the barn. Bright, yellow light poured from the building and it highlighted hastily put together concession stands and t-shirt vendor tables. People would hawk anything at these sorts of events – from keychains to cigars to bootleg DVDs.
Lisa zipped up her summer weight sweatshirt and pulled its hood up over her head. Her long dark hair still spilled out around her shoulders; it wasn’t as if she could hide the fact that she was a girl, but it never hurt to add a little mystery about herself. At least, that was her logic. Standing between her cousin and Eddie, Mark and Sly and her dad in front of her, they moved into the barn amongst the swaying, squawking crowd. The gamblers and spectators were laughing and jostling one another, arguing about the night’s outcomes, spitting tobacco juice into the dirt. The air stank of cigarette smoke, sweat, and something that reminded her of scum off the top of stagnant water.
Inside, the ring had been set up in the middle of the floor and bodies were packed all around it, waiting impatiently. Ray raised an arm and pointed toward one of the tiers of bleachers that flanked the ring and they headed that direction. There were a lot of spectators who wanted to be close enough to feel the flying blood and sweat on their faces, but Lisa was glad that her dad, like her, wanted a good vantage point from which to really observe the fighters’ moves.
They found a spot up at the very top of the bleachers. Lisa wedged in between Johnny and Eddie; the three “elders,” as Johnny called them, sat one seat down in front of them.
“Do you know anything about who’s fighting tonight?” Lisa cupped her hand around her mouth and leaned into Eddie to be heard above the din of voices that swelled around them.
“This is some kinda semi-finals,” he shouted back. “Winners here move on to next week’s fight.”
“What do they win?”
He cracked a grin that did devilishly handsome things to his face, put dimples on either side of his smile. “Bragging rights?”
She rolled her eyes. “Only men would compete for that. You’d have to pull out a purse for me to stand up and get my teeth knocked in.”
“I don’t wanna watch chicks fight. Too much hair pulling and shit.”
True. She nodded and straightened.
There were no programs or schedules of any kind. No announcer. But when a knot of four men started pushing their way through the crowd toward the ring, a cheer went up. Lists and betting books started coming out of people’s pockets and the first two contestants slid through the ropes, their trainers taking up posts in opposing corners. The ref clambered up into the ring, red-faced and panting, and waved his hands for quiet. The noise only lessened partially. He screamed the names of the opponents, a bell was struck, and it began.
Lisa scooted forward on the bleachers, elbows on her knees, eyes trained on the fighters. As adrenaline tickled her stomach, she wondered again if maybe she should have been born a boy.
In the dim glow of a security light, Andrew Forester sat on the lowered tailgate of a truck, listening to the pulsating roar of humanity just on the other side of the barn walls while his hands were being wrapped.
“I don’t expect to be embarrassed tonight,” Ricky said, because that’s what Ricky always said. He wound another strip of white tape around Drew’s knuckles and pulled until Drew swore he felt his bones shifting beneath the pressure. “We are not losers. My boys do not lose.”
Dark out in the country was different than dark in town. It swallowed a person up. It was full of strange night sounds: owls or coyotes…and something that screamed. Something he’d never heard before, but put goose bumps down the back of his neck. Other fighters paced across the trampled grass of the field, warming up with their shadows, imagining the fights to come in their heads.
Drew tried to do that – tried to push out all the sounds of voices and crickets, tried to visualize the ring, the man he would fight. But Ricky liked to hear himself talk. So Drew watched the wraps go round and around his knuckles, listening.
“Two more weeks after this.” Beads of anxious perspiration glittered on Ricky’s forehead as he reared back into the path that the security light cut across the property. “Two!” He held up two meaty fingers, eyes bugging white and bloodshot from his head. “You know what it means when we go legit?”
Yes, boss. But he shook his head.
“Vegas!” The trainer’s teeth were gapped and crooked when he smiled. Someone had put a fist in his mouth years ago and he’d never bothered to have them fixed. “’Cause you know what’s in Vegas?”
Yes.
“UFC headquarters.”
To Drew’s knowledge, Ricky had zero experience training Ultimate Fighters. The closest he’d ever come was watching it on Pay-Per-View. But Ricky was convinced that because it was popular – and it was – that it meant bigger media coverage, bigger money, better sponsors. And while all of that was true, Drew wasn’t so stupid that he believed he could go from underground boxer to sponsored cage fighter overnight.
“You’ll like that, won’t ya?” Ricky put his hands on his fat knees and leaned down low so they were on eye level. His breath stank of the Philly cheesesteak he’d had earlier: onions and cheese. “Huh?” he pressed when he got no answer. “Won’t ya?”
He talked to his fighters like children. Or maybe more like dogs. Drew hated that Kung-Fu, kicking and biting UFC shit. He was a boxer, end of story.
But he nodded. “Yes, boss.”
“Good.” Ricky reached up and slapped him across the top of his head. “Then sack up. You haven’t won anything yet. You go in and you win tonight. Then you’ve got work tomorrow. I’ll call you a winner when you are one. When you deserve it.”
The only thing worse than the idea of moving to Vegas to become a Tae Kwon Do head-kicker was knowing he had to work the next day.
But he nodded again. “Okay.”
4
Fighters were animals. And in Lisa’s mind, that was not a wink-and-a-nudge suggestive comment; it was just a fact. As the two men in the ring traded jabs, they ceased to be human in her eyes. She sized them up like horses at auction, watched the muscles and tendons jump beneath their skin, estimated the speed of their striking arms. No matter how evenly they were matched, one was always just that much quicker, stronger. Lisa liked figuring out which one that was early in the game. She made silent wagers with herself. While the rest of the women in the stuffy, overcrowded barn hung off men’s arms or looked for men to take them home, she watched the action.
“The guy in the red shorts is stronger,” Johnny said beside her.
It was true. His shoulders looked too wide to fit through a doorway. His biceps were as big as hams – solid, strong hams, not fleshy hams like on the woman who owned the deli next door to King Customs.
“Blue shorts is faster, though,” she told her cousin. That was true too. She’d been watching his strikes for five rounds; his arms didn’t swing away from his body, they lunged, lightning fast, and then snapped back. His blows weren’t as hard as his opponent’s, but he ducked those. He was like a dancer, always a half a step ahead, his feet stepping more lightly across the mat.
“I wanna put money on Red,” Johnny said. He touched Mark’s shoulder. “Dad, I wanna do that.”
“It’ll have to wait till we get back,” Ray answered him, twisting around. “Eddie, can you sit with them?”
“Yep.”
Johnny’s face fell. “Where are you guys going?”
Mark stood and turned to face them, knuckling the stiffness out of his back. “To see a friend.” He offered his son a smile. “We won’t be long.”
“Can I come?”
No, Lisa knew the answer before Ray shook his head. Johnny was still a kid…and though that frustrated him, at least he would grow up, whereas she would always be a girl. Tonight, Eddie was the appointed sitter for kids and girls.
He didn’t look happy ab
out it, either. “Thanks, guys,” he called as Ray, Mark and Sly trooped down the bleachers.
“So not fair,” Johnny muttered under his breath.
Lisa sighed and bumped her shoulder against his. “Life’s not fair. Watch the fight.”
Something Ray had learned before he was disbarred, before law school even – when he and Mark had been long-legged teenagers growing up in Cartersville and dreaming about bigger cities and bigger things – was that certain events drew in certain types of people. An illegal boxing match was just the sort of thing to bring all sorts of nefarious types crawling in on their bellies like the roaches they were.
Which, if he thought about it, wasn’t a fair assessment of some of his favorite vagrants. But when he thought of Simon Piper, roaches always came to mind.
He’d called himself “The Piper” so long it had finally stuck. He thought of himself as someone who had some sort of control over the tumultuous, chaotic world of bootleg merchandise. He was a small fish in a huge pond. But no one could tell him that. Ray found him standing at the back of a knot of men on the far side of the barn, near the open back doors. Stick thin and half a head taller than everyone surrounding him, Piper was easy to spot. To compensate for the bald spot on top of his head, he wore the rest of his hair long and tied it up in a greasy ponytail that trailed over one shoulder. He was constantly sweaty – which Ray attributed to a drug habit – and even in the dim light of the barn, there was a wet sheen across his forehead. He wore a Harley-Davidson t-shirt with the sleeves cut out and cargo pants. It was an outfit Ray had seen him in more than once.
“Piper.”
At the sound of his name, his head swiveled on his neck like a bird’s might, saucer-wide eyes finding Ray as he and the others moved through the crowd. “Ray…” He didn’t look happy to see them.
Made for Breaking Page 3
