Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jack slid the evidence bag across to me, and I worked the seal open carefully, holding the small spiral-bound book by its edges.
Daniels would process it properly once we got it back to the station—dust for prints, photograph every page, catalog it into evidence.
But right now, sitting in the passenger seat with the afternoon sun slanting through the windshield, I wanted to see what Dre had been so careful to hide.
“What’s your impression?” Jack asked.
“First page is a list of initials.” I turned the notebook toward the light, studying Dre’s careful handwriting.
The kid had been meticulous—every entry in neat block letters, every number lined up in columns as precise as a military ledger.
“V.C. is at the top. Then a dollar amount—five thousand. Then a percentage—twenty percent. Then W and L.”
“V.C.,” Jack said. “Victor Caruso.”
“It makes sense.” I moved to the next entry on the same page. “Below that, there’s R.M.—three thousand, fifteen percent, W. Then D.H.—two thousand, fifteen percent, L. Then T.J.—fifteen hundred, ten percent, W.”
“That’s a betting ledger.”
“Or a fight record. The W and L could be wins and losses.” I kept turning pages. “There are pages of this, Jack. Dozens of entries going back a couple of years. The V.C. entries are the most frequent and the dollar amounts are the highest. Some of them go up to ten thousand.”
“Twenty percent,” Jack said, his jaw tight. “That’s a manager’s cut. Vic was taking twenty percent off the top of every fight.”
“And from the looks of it, there were other fighters too.” I flipped through more pages. “Some of these initials show up over and over. T.J. appears a lot—lower amounts, but consistent. M.R., same thing. And then there are some that only appear once or twice.”
“The regulars versus the one-offs.”
“Right. And look at this.” I found a page near the back that was different from the others.
Instead of the neat columns, Dre had written what looked like a schedule.
Dates, times, and numbers I could decipher.
“There’s a pattern to the dates. They’re almost always on Saturday nights, roughly every two to three weeks. ”
“Underground fights,” he said. “Scheduled bouts, with a betting operation running alongside. Vic takes his cut as manager, the house takes a cut from the bets, and the fighters get whatever’s left.”
“Which for Dre was apparently enough to stash thirty thousand in his closet.”
“Kid was a moneymaker. Top of the card.”
I stared at the notebook in my hands, thinking about the young man on my autopsy table. The military precision of his apartment. The protein powder and meal prep containers. The discipline of someone who treated his body like an instrument.
He hadn’t been training for a legitimate boxing career. He’d been training for underground fights where the money was real but the rules weren’t.
“We need to go back to Iron House,” I said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
I sealed the notebook back in the evidence bag and set it on the console between us. We’d drop it at the station on our way. Daniels could work her magic with it while we worked ours with Vic.
* * *
Iron House looked different in the late afternoon light.
Harsher, somehow. The corrugated-steel walls caught the sun and threw it back like a challenge, and the gravel lot was fuller than it had been this morning—trucks and sedans crowding the spaces, a motorcycle propped on its kickstand near the entrance.
The sounds of the gym carried through the open bay door—the rhythmic thud of fists against leather, the staccato rattle of a speed bag, the sharp exhale of men pushing their bodies to the edge.
Jack pulled the Tahoe into a spot near the entrance and killed the engine. Through the bay door, I could see bodies moving inside—shadows and shapes working heavy bags, a pair of men circling each other in one of the two rings.
We got out and headed for the entrance. The warmth of the late May afternoon followed us inside, where the industrial fans mounted in the rafters pushed the air around without doing much to cool it.
The same young guy from this morning appeared almost immediately—lean, muscular, broken nose, thickened brows. He’d been working a heavy bag near the entrance, and he peeled off his gloves as he approached, his expression wary.
“Help you?” he asked, though his tone suggested he’d rather not.
“We need to talk to Vic again,” Jack said.
The kid’s eyes flicked at Jack’s gun. “He’s in the middle of a session right now.
Training one of his guys.” He jerked his chin toward the far ring, where two figures were moving—one tall and rangy, the other shorter and thicker, circling each other with the deliberate precision of men who knew what they were doing. “Could be a while.”
“We’ll wait,” Jack said. “While we do—we’re looking for a guy who goes by T-Bone. He around?”
“Yeah.” He nodded toward the back of the gym, where a row of benches lined the wall near the free weights. “He’s over there. Wrapping his hands.”
“Thanks.”
T-Bone was sitting on a bench near the back wall, methodically wrapping his hands with the practiced motions of someone who’d done it a thousand times.
He was young—mid-twenties, about Dre’s age—with dark brown skin and a lean, wiry build that suggested speed over power.
His face had the same hallmarks as every other fighter in this gym—a nose that had been rearranged at least once, scar tissue above one eye, the flatness to the bridge that came from taking hits to the face over and over again.
But where the other men in the gym wore their damage like armor, T-Bone wore his like a confession.
There was something in his eyes—a wariness, a watchfulness—that reminded me of a stray dog that had been kicked too many times.
He looked up as we approached and immediately looked back down at his hands, wrapping faster. But not before I saw the recognition. He knew who we were. Word traveled fast in a place like this.
“T-Bone?” Jack said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t look up. Just kept wrapping, the fabric going round and round his knuckles with mechanical precision.
“I’m Sheriff Lawson. This is Dr. Graves. We’re investigating the death of Andre Washington.”
The wrapping stopped. T-Bone’s hands went still in his lap, and for a moment he didn’t move at all. Then his shoulders dropped, and he let out a breath that carried the weight of something he’d been holding in.
“Yeah,” he said again, quieter this time. “I know who you are. I heard you were here this morning, asking about Dre.” He finally looked up. “I called his girl. Tiana. She’s wrecked.”
“You and Dre were friends?” I asked.
“Since basic.” T-Bone’s voice was steady, but his hands had started wrapping again—nervous motion, something to do while the rest of him tried to hold it together.
“We went through boot camp at Parris Island together. He was the only one who didn’t give me grief about the nickname.
” He smiled with the memory. “My real name’s Terrance James.
But I ate three T-bone steaks the night before we shipped out, and the drill instructor hung that name on me the first day. Been stuck with it ever since.”
Terrance James. T.J. The initials in Dre’s notebook—the ones that appeared frequently, in lower amounts but consistent.
“Dre got you into Iron House?” Jack asked.
“He got here first. Told me about it after I got out of the Marines, said Vic was looking for more fighters.” T-Bone glanced toward the far ring, where Vic was still working with his fighter.
“I’m not in Dre’s class—never was. He was special, you know?
Had that thing you can’t teach. Me, I’m just a guy who can take a punch and throw one back.
Good enough for the undercard, not good enough for the main event. ”
He said it without bitterness, like it was a fact he’d made peace with a long time ago. Some men knew their limits and worked within them. Others didn’t find out where the edge was until they went over it.
“Tell us about the fights,” Jack said.
T-Bone’s wrapping hands went still again. His eyes cut sideways—quick, checking to see who was in earshot. The nearest fighters were fifteen feet away, working the speed bags, their own noise covering any conversation at normal volume. But T-Bone still dropped his voice.
“What fights?”
“The ones that happen on Saturday nights,” Jack said. “Every two to three weeks. The ones Dre was keeping records of in a notebook we found.”
T-Bone’s whole body went rigid, his jaw clenching so tight I could see the muscles bunch beneath his skin.
Whatever composure he’d been maintaining crumbled, and for a second he looked exactly like what he was—a scared young man who’d gotten himself into something bigger than he could handle and was only now realizing how deep the water went.
“Look, man, I can’t—” He shook his head, his voice dropping to barely a whisper. “You don’t understand. These aren’t just gym fights. The people running this—they’re not playing around. They’ve got connections. Real connections. The kind where people disappear and nobody asks questions.”
“Like Dre disappeared?”
That hit home. T-Bone flinched like Jack had slapped him.
“I want to help,” he said. “Dre was my brother. Not by blood, but by everything else. He was the best man I ever knew, and somebody killed him, and I want—” His voice cracked.
He pressed his wrapped fists against his thighs and breathed through it.
“But I’ve got a sister. She’s got two little girls. If something happens to me—”
“We can protect you,” Jack said. “But we can’t do anything if we don’t know who we’re protecting you from.”
T-Bone was quiet for a long moment. Around us, the gym continued its rhythmic work—the thud of bags, the skip of ropes, the grunt of effort. Life going on as usual while a young man weighed the cost of doing the right thing.