7. El Maestro
Chapter seven
El Maestro
Diego
The gym opened at five.
Most mornings I was inside by 4:45, before the air had warmed from whatever the night had been, running the floor with a mop that barely qualified as such anymore and checking the bag mounts and wrapping my own hands before anyone arrived.
This was the part of the day I protected.
Before the kids came in. Before the compound needed anything. Before the phone started.
This was mine.
The bag mounts had been in the ceiling since 2003.
Eduardo Santos had drilled them himself, a Saturday morning in October, with a drill that was too small for the job and a determination that was more than adequate.
I'd been fourteen and I'd held the ladder.
He'd said: "You hold it steady, Diego. A man falls off a ladder because someone didn't hold it steady.
" I'd held the ladder with both hands and all my weight — because I was fourteen and Eduardo Santos had a way of making you feel that whatever he asked of you was the most important thing you'd done.
I'd been holding ladders for him ever since. For ten years after he was gone, I'd been holding ladders for a man who was dead.
The building itself was club property. Eduardo had secured the lease in 1999 from a buddy who owned the building and wanted something done with it that wasn't a tire shop.
The lease had transferred into club name when Eduardo died and hadn't been touched since, which meant technically Vance was the landlord and the gym was the club's asset, and the only reason that arrangement hadn't been weaponized sooner was that Vance had either not noticed or had been waiting for a more useful moment.
I'd been managing the timing of Vance's useful moments for about three years now.
The doors opened at five and the first kid in was Marcus, age thirteen, who came before school three mornings a week and hit the speed bag for twenty minutes with an intensity that suggested he was working something out that had nothing to do with boxing.
I didn't ask. When he was ready to tell me, he'd tell me.
The gym had a policy about this — we don't ask, we receive — that Eduardo had articulated once in a speech to the first group of kids in 2003 and that I'd been operating under ever since without putting it into different words.
Jovani came in at 5:20, his little brother trailing behind.
"He doesn't have a session today," I said, jerking my chin at the brother, who was seven and wore shoes that didn't match.
"Mom had to go early," Jovani said. He said it the way kids say necessary things — matter-of-fact, no drama, the information delivered clean. "I'll watch him during my session."
"Put him in the back with the comic books." I moved to the supply cabinet and pulled out a pair of kid-size gloves. "And give him these so he doesn't touch the bags with his hands."
The kid's face lit up. I turned away before he could see what that did to me, because sentimentality was a luxury and I was working.
My trainer, Rudy, came in at six.
Rudy Espinoza was sixty-one, had trained three national amateurs and one professional, and had a shoulder that had been wrong since 1997 and that he refused to discuss.
He'd been training at Moreno's for four years, which was the amount of time it had taken me to convince him to trade three mornings a week for the free use of the space and a percentage of any competition prize money his fighters won here.
"The Santos girl," Rudy said, not looking up from his notebook.
"What about her."
"She came in the gym on Wednesday."
"I know. I brought her."
He looked up. Rudy had the eyes of a man who'd watched a lot of fighters and had learned to read tells. "She's going to be trouble for you."
"She's doing research."
"She's Eduardo's girl." He went back to the notebook. "Same thing."
I opened the supply cabinet again and found nothing I needed in it. I closed it. Turned around.
When Eduardo Santos had pulled me out of that bodega in 2003, I'd been carrying a knife and a bad idea and two weeks of not sleeping in anything that qualified as a bed.
He hadn't asked me questions — hadn't asked why I was in the bodega or what I'd intended to do with the knife or where my mother was or who my father had been.
He'd looked at me for one long moment and then said: "You're going to fight in a ring or you're going to die in the street. Pick."
I'd picked the ring because at fourteen, I'd had enough self-preservation left to pick the thing that wasn't dying.
I hadn't known yet that the ring was going to give me something I didn't know I was missing.
That it was going to give me structure and discipline and a framework for what to do with the thing that lived in my chest that had always felt like something that needed to be fought.
I'd patched into Devil's Throttle at twenty-two. Eduardo had made me wait — he'd said you needed to be old enough to know what you were carrying before you started carrying it for a club. I'd been impatient. He'd been right.
That was almost uniformly how it went with Eduardo Santos. Impatient, and he'd been right.
The photo on my gym desk was from 2010, the year I made road captain.
Eduardo had given me a copy. In the photo he had his arm around my shoulders and was laughing at something off-camera and I was looking at the camera with the expression I wore in photographs then — a kind of wariness, like the happiness was real but I wasn't sure it was allowed.
I didn't know when I'd started keeping the photo on my desk rather than in a drawer.
At some point in the last six years, it had migrated from the drawer to the desk and I hadn't moved it back.
I hadn't looked at it closely enough to see what it told me about myself until Nova Santos had stood in my gym on Monday and I'd watched her walk the photograph wall and I'd had to go adjust a bag mount that didn't need adjusting just so I had somewhere to put my hands.
At 6 AM, Saunders came in.
He came through the side door, not the front — the side door that was supposed to be staff-only and that he'd had a key to for about eight months now, by Vance's grant rather than mine.
He was wearing a jacket that was wrong for the weather and carrying a coffee and he didn't acknowledge anyone in the gym, not me, not Rudy, not the three kids who were already working.
He went through the gym to the back corridor.
I watched the door to the back corridor for two full minutes.
Then I went back to the bag mount that I'd been checking before he arrived and stood there until I could hear the kids and not just what was going on in the back corridor, and I wrapped my hands for the second time that morning because I had something to hit.
Saunders came back through at 6:22. Left via the side door.
Rudy was watching me from across the gym. He said nothing. He went back to his notebook.
I worked the bag for forty minutes straight and then went through the back corridor to check what Saunders had or hadn't left behind, and found nothing, which meant either he'd been careful or I was wrong about what he was using the back corridor for, and I didn't think I was wrong.
I called Colt from the parking lot.
"He's using the gym for something," I said.
"What kind of something."
"I don't know yet. But the timing is wrong and the entry is wrong." I looked back at the gym building. Morning light was coming in low from the east, laying the building's shadow long across the parking lot. "He's been in three times in two weeks. Always the side door."
"Keep watching."
"I'm watching."
"Don't move yet."
"I know." I knew. The instinct was to move — to confront, to clear it out, to protect the kids who were inside right now with their mismatched shoes and their secrets they'd tell me when they were ready.
But the calculation required patience. Vance had used this gym to run something through, and if I cleared Saunders before we understood the full shape of it, Vance would move it somewhere else and we'd lose the trail.
"I know," I said again, quieter.
I went back inside and finished the morning session and tried not to think about the freight invoices that I knew Nova Santos had in her jacket, and how close she was getting to the thing we'd been building toward for a decade, and whether the sequence was going to hold.
After the last kid left, I locked the front door and went to the back corridor.
The supply closet that Saunders had been using — I'd checked it three times in the past two weeks and found nothing each time, which told me he was careful, which told me it wasn't incidental.
A careful man using a side entrance and a back corridor didn't leave evidence because he'd planned the operation to be clean.
But clean operations had a seam, and the seam in this one was timing.
Whatever Saunders was moving through here, he was doing it on a pattern, the same day of the week, the same early-morning window, the same entry-exit duration.
I'd been logging the timestamps.
I pulled out my phone and opened the note I'd been keeping since the first time. Fourteen visits. Two or three times a week, over the past five weeks. Pattern start date: January 8. Three weeks before Nova Santos arrived.
The timing was too close.
I didn't know yet what Saunders had put in motion on January 8. But the fact that it had started before she arrived meant either he'd known she was coming, or the operation had been escalated for a different reason and her arrival was a coincidence.
I'd stopped believing in coincidences the night Eduardo died.
I went back to the main floor, turned the lights off, and locked the gym. On my way to the truck I looked down the block, the neighborhood quiet, a dog barking two doors down, the elementary school's crossing guard sign still deployed at the corner even though school was six hours away.
Eduardo had picked this location deliberately. Three blocks from Carmen's house. Two blocks from the school. The visible heart of the community he'd decided to protect.
I put the key in the ignition and sat there for a moment before I started the engine.
He'd built something worth protecting. That was what Saunders didn't understand, what Vance had never understood, you couldn't just run cargo through a building Eduardo Santos had built without eventually running into what he'd built it to be.
I started the engine and drove back to the compound.