by Jon F. Merz
Bob’s Gymnasium sat at the back of a warehouse nestled away in a forgotten part of Wrentham, which lay southwest of Boston by about twenty plus miles. It was roughly twenty minutes away from my home in Medfield, but since I was coming from Boston, I took 95 south to 495 and then snaked my way up into the town from there.
When I parked, I could hear loud music already streaming out of the gym. It had the look of an old school joint where the weights were all iron and the dumbbells started at twenty-five pounds and went up. None of those rubbery two and a half pounders, no yoga mats. Just serious hardcore lifting.
And mixed martial arts apparently.
When I entered, I could see an improvised octagon had been set up near the back of the gym, padded with all sorts of mats and the like. Heavy bags hung around it and a couple of guys worked jabs and crosses in steady rhythm on them. A bunch of jacked dudes were benching heavy while another couple were doing heavy presses with dumbbells. The place stank of sweat, a bit of body odor, and the iron itself.
I dug it.
A guy in a tank top that barely concealed his bulging pecs came sauntering over. I could feel his eyes on me, trying to size me up. I stood six feet and weighed a bit over one hundred eighty five pounds. I’m not skinny, but neither am I some huge bulking creature. This is the weight that fits my body the best, so that’s where I keep it.
“How ya doin’?”
I held out my hand. “You the manager?”
“If that’s what you wanna call it. I’m Bob.”
“Lawson. Good to meet you.”
“So, what can I help you with?”
The way he looked at me, I was guessing I wasn’t going to fool him with pretending I was interested in joining. He also looked like a cop. And they can smell bullshit a mile away. “Derek Cousins used to work out here, right?”
His eyes narrowed. “Who the fuck wants to know?”
“Someone looking into his murder,” I said evenly.
He eyed me for another few seconds and I could see the thought process rattling around in his head. Who the hell was I, asking about someone who was most likely a friend if not a partner on the force? Bob would size me up before he spilled any information.
“That’s a police matter,” he said finally. “You’re not a cop.”
“True.”
“But you’ve got a look about you,” said Bob. “Military…Fed…something.” He frowned. “So which is it?”
“Whatever you need it to be,” I said. “Look, I get it: you were a friend of his. You want to protect the guy. I’m cool with that. But I’m also trying to prevent anyone else from becoming the killer’s next victim, so if you’ve got information, I’d really appreciate it if you shared some with me.”
“Like about what?”
“Derek worked out here, right?”
“He trained here, yeah.”
“And he was divorced.”
Bob held up his hand. “Look, I don’t know you, and I don’t like it when people start poking around into my friend’s private life.”
“I don’t blame you. But I’m trying to find a pattern. You’re a cop, you know what I’m looking for.”
“Yeah, the same thing the cops in Boston are looking for. And if they stopped sitting on their asses, they might have some real leads instead of chasing ghosts all the damned time.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So help me put some shit together that might help them find this killer.”
Bob hesitated but finally nodded. “Divorced. Yeah.”
“He come in here a lot?”
“Daily. Used to help him blow off steam about the failed marriage. He wanted it to work, but she didn’t. Sometimes you just can’t help a bad situation get any better so you gotta walk away. Derek hated doing it, especially cuz of his kids, but she just didn’t want to try anymore. It was hard on him. But he found solace here. A reprieve from all the bullshit. I was happy I could give him a place to free his mind for a while.”
“He find solace with anyone else that worked out here?”
Bob frowned. “What-like hooking up with someone? Derek wasn’t gay.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
“We don’t have a lot of female members,” said Bob. “Something about this place tends to scare most of them away.”
“Most. But not all.”
“No, we’ve got a few. They’re badasses. They don’t cower when weights hit the floor or guys scream ‘fuck’ after a lift.”
“Good to know there are strong women out there who don’t wilt when things get tough.”
“I’m proud of ‘em.” Bob grinned for the first time. “Couple of real serious powerlifters here who could probably out lift you.”
“I don’t doubt it. But did Derek ever hook up with any of them? You know, blow off some steam in a way he couldn’t here in the gym?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that sort of stuff.”
I smiled. “You own the place, Bob. Maybe you could just let a little something slip. Like, say, if one of your regular woman is a girl named Eileen. Ring any bells?”
Bob stood there for a moment. “You lift, don’t you?”
“I do.”
He nodded. “I can see it in your traps. You don’t get those doing pilates. How much do you clean?”
I cut my actual number in half. “About two-fifty.”
He shrugged. “Better than I thought, but that’s cool.” He gestured to the back. “You ever do any boxing? Any fighting? I mean, I’m guessing you do by the way you carry yourself. The look you’ve got. Street fighter? Martial artist?”
“Whatever saves my life is usually what I employ.”
He grunted. “Good answer. I’ll tell you what: I’ve got some guys in the back there training right now. If you can take them out, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
I sighed. “Seriously? We’re going to have a dick measuring contest now?”
Bob shrugged. “No play no pay.”
“I think you have that reversed, but the point is made.” I gestured to my clothes. “You got something I can change into?”
He shook his head. “What you’ve got on will do. It ain’t the clothes that are gonna help you anyway.”
I frowned. “I’ll be sure to send you my bill for the tailor.”
“And I’ll be sure to flush it down the can.” Bob turned and started walking back to the octagon. “Your choice, Lawson.”
I sighed and followed him to the back. As we came up to the octagon, all three of the fighters stopped working on the bags and looked me over. Bob clapped his hands.
“Guys, we’ve got us a visitor. He’s agreed to step into the ring with you all and if he holds his own, he and I are gonna have a sit down about a few things. But if you guys get the better of him, he goes home without shit.”
They all grinned and looked me over. I could already hear the bookmakers in Vegas getting a hard-on over the odds on this one.
“Rules?” I asked.
Bob shrugged. “Don’t break any bones. No eye gouging, no ball kicks. Pretty much everything else is open.”
I nodded and shucked my jacket and shoes before stepping onto the floor of the octagon. The floor had a slight amount of give to it so I bounced around getting a feel for it.
“You want to warm-up some?” asked Bob.
I shook my head. “I don’t have that luxury in combat, why should I have it here?”
“Fair enough. One at time. One right after the other, cool?”
I flexed my hands. “Let’s get on with it, already. I don’t have all day to waste on this bullshit.” I bent my knees, brought my hands up, and waited for the first victim to step into the ring.
He looked about twenty-five with a crew cut and enough tattoos to read for a week. He was about my weight but shorter, which gave him a stockier look. It also meant his hips would naturally be lower than mine, already giving him the advantage when he came in to take me down.
Bob rang the bell soone
r than I expected, but apparently this guy was already primed because he came at me so fast with a roundhouse kick, I barely had time to step inside and deliver an elbow to the side of his jaw. It snapped his head around and I ducked out and under as he brought his leg down, then dropped him with a left hook to the other side of his jaw. He fell to the mat unconscious.
Bob nodded for the other two guys to drag him out where they proceeded to bring him around. He was going to have a bad headache, but I’d pulled the strikes enough so that there wouldn’t be any lasting damage.
The second dude had tan skin and a gold-capped tooth. I saw the eagle on his shoulder and figured him for an airborne veteran. That mean he had some experience in the real world.
He didn’t come charging in at the bell, but stalked around, throwing a few halfhearted jabs trying to range me for a big over-the-top punch. I let him get close enough to think he’d figured me out and when he launched the punch, I simply shot to the outside of it and sent a vicious strike into his liver. He turned green and dropped to the mat where he retched a few times. Those body shots are awful stuff. I was going to say he was done and out, but Bob forced him to come back at me. It wasn’t even a contest; when he tried to tackle me around the waist, I sprawled back and then shot a knee up under his chin and he dropped out cold.
But Bob had saved his best for last and this guy was a beast. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, possibly more. And he had two inches of height over me, giving him the reach advantage. He didn’t waste time trying to flatten me with strikes, he simply charged in headfirst in an attempt to get me in a lock and choke me out.
I waited until the last possible second, as his huge arms started to close around me, then I simply dropped, rolled to the side, came up and as he turned, gave him a hard shot to the corner of his jaw, and then sent a vicious side kick into the side of his thigh. He dropped immediately and even as he struggled to get back up, I moved behind him and applied a rear blood choke. He tapped as soon as it started to go on and I let him go.
Bob stood there with his arms folded. He was clearly pissed off I’d gone through his fighters as easily as I had. For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then he threw me a towel that I mopped my forehead with. Then he threw me a bottle of water and nodded toward the office at the other side of the gym.
“I guess we’ll have that talk now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think that would be a good idea.”
14
Bob’s office had an assortment of old boxing posters and notices for charity motorcycles rides for fallen police officers stuck to his wall. A small fan circulated a breeze and I sat while Bob got himself behind the desk and took a swig of water. I nursed my own.
“Figured you were the real deal,” he said folding his hands in front of him and eyeing me carefully. “Still, I always like seeing a professional at work.”
“It was a stupid thing to do,” I said. “There was no sense in it.”
“From our perspective,” said Bob. “But those three guys out there just got a real good lesson. I’ve been training them and they all think they’re the shit. Then you walk in - a nobody as it were - and proceed to dust every one of them.” He grinned. “I think I’ll have a bit more attention from them now when I coach them on how to not telegraph their moves.”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t that they were necessarily telegraphing anything; it’s just they’re locked in that competition mindset. I don’t operate there.”
“Hell, you might have saved one of their lives. Or all three. They come in her all the time talking about what’s on the news and how if they’d only have been there, how they coulda stopped the bad shit from going down.”
“Like what?”
“The airport shooting last month or so, for one.” Bob sighed. “World’s going to hell in a hand basket but it doesn’t help when young guns like these cats think they could have done shit. If anything, they probably would have just ended up cold and dead alongside the other victims and I’d be out what I hope will be a trio of decent fighters.”
“A lot of people throw out an awful lot of observations about shit they have no clue about because it makes them feel good, helps them reconcile their fear that they might become a victim some day if these events keep happening.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Bob leaned back in his chair. “So what is it you do? I mean, I can see the military training, that’s pretty obvious. But your unarmed combat skills are something new to me. You showed no interested in really blocking anything. That was pretty cool.”
I shrugged. “I just happen to pick up stuff from my experiences all over the world.”
“Wish I could get you to teach those guys how you did what you did.”
“Not enough time,” I said. “I’ve been doing martial arts for over thirty years. That’s a lifetime to these guys. And everyone else for that matter. It’s all instant gratification these days. No one has the time or willingness to put in the hours of training necessary to develop those skills.”
Bob sighed. “You’re right about that.” He took a swig of water. “Anyway, I said I’d help you and I’m a man of my word. So what do you want to know? The sooner we get this done, the better. I’m gonna have to go back out there and console some bruised egos for the rest of the afternoon.”
“Derek Cousins. Tell me about him.”
“He was a good guy.”
“Yeah we went over that already. You told me you’d tell me if he ever hooked up with anyone here or not.”
Bob sighed again. “Yeah, I mean, who could blame him? The shit he was going through. The guy needed an outlet. Hell, if I’d had to endure the divorce he had to, I might have turned to pretty much anything to cope. For Derek, it was coming in here hitting the bag, tapping out a few of the guys, and then shacking up with Jackie.”
“Jackie.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that was the girl he ended up seeing a fair bit of when they were both here.”
“When was this?”
Bob shrugged. “Middle of December, I’d guess. Jackie got transferred out of town. Overseas, I think. She was military, or so she claimed.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”
“I dunno. Just a gut feeling.” He nodded at me. “Take you, for instance. You’ve got the look even though it’s dulled down. There’s still a tangible presence to you that I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to shake. When you walked in, I said to myself that you were military or had it in your past. But Jackie? She had to tell everyone she was military before any of us would ever have guessed.”
“Was she still with them?”
“I doubt it. Hell, if you told me you knew her and she wasn’t military, I’d say that made even more sense.”
“Unless she was doing something classified.”
Bob shook his head. “Nah, I just think she said military because this is a place that caters to that crowd. Cops and soldiers. It helps when you come in here knowing that the other people who work out here have that similar mindset. We look out for each other. This isn’t some big box gym in case you hadn’t noticed.”
I thought about Chaz from earlier. “Yeah, trust me, I know all about those places.”
“Jackie was a cutie. Probably in her thirties. Said she was divorced, but maybe that was a lie, too.”
“How’d she work out?”
Bob shrugged. “Knew how to lift. I didn’t have to spend much of any time with her. She’d come in and do her thing, which I thought was probably her version of CrossFit crap or something. She’d do some barbell work, hit some body weight exercises, and then go for a run or hit the rower. She had a good motor. If you told her to up her weight on the lifts, she’d go there. She wasn’t afraid to try and fail on a lift. I liked having her here.”
“So what happened?”
“She and Derek started talking. I didn’t think he’d noticed her, because all of the crap in his life. But then they started talking and it sorta snowballed. No one gave
a shit. If they were happy together, I think we were all happy that Derek had a source of sun in his life aside from his kids. His wife had done some dark shit to him. The guy deserved a break.”
“Describe her to me.”
“Jackie?”
I nodded. “Because I’m assuming you guys don’t do ID cards here.”
Bob smirked. “Yeah, you show up and I don’t know you, I’m gonna be all over your shit.”
“You don’t say,” I smiled.
“I guess the best way to describe her would be to say she was sort of a MILF, you know?”
“She was a mom?”
Bob shook his head. “Nah, but she was in that age range where if you’d told me she had kids, then I would have said that it made sense. She was out of the prime looks stage and had moved on. Older women are beautiful, too, just that most of them don’t know how to age gracefully. Instead of learning how to be beautiful in their age range, they still cling to the looks of younger women. They still try to make their faces look like they’re nineteen. You know, Botox and shit like that.”
“I could say the same thing about men who don’t know how to age well.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Bob nodded at me. “But you seem to look good. What’s your secret?”
“The fresh blood of virgins,” I said. “Tell me more about Jackie.”
“Not much to tell. She was blonde, petite. She had some muscle on her. But I got the feeling that her workout ethic could have waned if she wasn’t trying to impress a dude.”
“You think she worked out hard to attract Derek?”
“Maybe.”
I nodded. “Was Derek nuts about her?”
“I think Derek was grateful. Yeah, if I had to choose a word that made the most sense to describe how he felt about her, that’s what it’d be. Just…thankful to know that not all women were out to rape him for everything he had. Derek was a worker. A hard worker. And what his wife did when she took him to the cleaners was pretty damned awful. Guy just couldn’t handle it. She almost gave him a complete breakdown for his trouble. Not a nice woman, by any means. I mean, when we found out what happened to him, his ex was the first person I thought of.”
