10. Face-First
FACE-FIRST
CALEB
Four hours of sleep, and I could still feel his mouth.
That was the state I walked into Church with at seven in the morning.
Thirty-some patches around the table, butcher paper taped down the length of it, a coffee I'd already burned my tongue on, and underneath all of it, running like a pilot light, the memory of a cold concrete wall against my knuckles and Ghost's breath breaking against my lips.
We hadn't said a word about it. We'd said plenty of words since, in the corridor afterward, on the walk back across the gravel, none of them about it.
And now he sat down beside me at a war table with his knee an inch from mine, close enough that I could feel the heat of it through two layers of denim, and I picked up a marker and got to work, because eight days from now I was walking back into that warehouse, and wanting a man was not going to keep me alive inside it.
"Draw it." Hawk stood at the head of the table, arms crossed. "Everything. Take the room's time, we've got nothing more important."
I'd been drawing it in my head since my first night inside. Seventeen fights burn a place into you. Getting it onto paper took twenty minutes.
The ring in the center, twenty foot, an old boxing ring with worn hemp ropes.
The cage sat folded against a wall for the nights somebody didn't cooperate.
The main doors on the east side where the crowd funneled in past the pat-down.
The bar along the south wall, the betting windows beside it, three of them, cash only.
The fighters' hallway running off the west corner, the bench room, the med station that was a folding table and a bottle of iodine.
The counting room tucked under the mezzanine, steel door, a slot to push money through.
And the mezzanine itself along the north side, rail and shadow, stairs at the east end with two men on them always, and above it all, the box.
"The guards." I switched to red. "Four on the main doors.
Twelve on the floor, and they trade off when the early fights end, so for about a minute and a half there's eleven down there, not twelve.
Two in the fighters' hallway. Two on the counting room, plus one inside with a shotgun.
I've seen it through the slot when they paid me.
Two on the mezzanine stairs." I marked each one.
"The box, I don't know. I've never been up there.
Nobody goes up. People come down from it. "
"What are they carrying?" Reaper, from Hawk's right.
"The floor guys wear pistols where you can see them.
That's part of the show." I tapped the east entrance.
"The pat-down at the door is for the crowd.
They'll find a gun on you and miss a knife.
They're looking for the one thing that beats them from across the room.
They don't think anything else in there can hurt them. "
"Seventeen nights inside." Blade leaned over the map, dark eyes moving zone to zone, and there was something under the words, a fighter reading another fighter's scars.
"Seventeen nights and you walked out of all of them.
So you know things about that floor nobody standing outside it will ever know. What do they do when a night ends?"
"Count the money. The counting room runs busy for an hour after the last fight, that's when a third man goes in and that steel door opens more than it should.
Half the floor guys drink once the crowd's out.
The other half load the vans." I drew the big roll-up door on the southwest corner.
"Garage door, there. Two vans, sometimes three. "
The questions came for an hour. Tank wanted to know which walls held the roof up, and I told him what a man learns getting thrown into them.
Nolan wanted the power, and I gave him what I had, the breaker panel by the garage door, the generator out back for the nights the grid went down.
Tyler wanted faces, and I gave him twenty minutes of them, every handler and money man I could describe, while he built a gallery on that tablet of his.
Then I stopped, with the marker hanging over the north wall, and made myself say the thing I'd been circling.
"There's a hole in my map." I drew a rectangle behind the mezzanine, north side, and put a question mark in it.
"This stretch of wall. Thirty feet, maybe more.
No door I've ever seen, nothing stored against it, no traffic.
" I looked up at the table. "And here's the part I can't swear to.
I've seen Gravedigger exactly once, the night I told him no.
He was already up on that mezzanine when the fights started, and I never saw him climb those east stairs, and the stairs are the only way up that I know of.
Guys who'd fought there longer used to say he comes and goes on the north side and you don't see it happen.
" I tapped the question mark. "So it's a guess.
But my guess is there's a back way in that wall, and it's his. "
"A man that careful builds himself a back door." Hawk studied the rectangle. "Ghost."
Beside me, Ghost's knee went still.
"Tonight, tomorrow night, your call. I want the outside of that building read the way only you read a building.
Every panel, every seam, every camera, and I want to know what's behind that wall.
" Hawk's eyes held on him. "Blade watches your back from a distance.
You don't go in, you don't get seen. Just eyes. "
"Copy." One word, and his jaw did something on the way to it, a small flex, there and gone.
First time back out there since the night he got seen.
I watched his hands on the table and they were steady, and I knew what it cost to keep them that way, because I'd spent yesterday learning what his steady looked like when it was real.
"Inside crew." Hawk moved on. "Trenza. Mateo."
"Bettor and nephew." Trenza had clearly done her thinking already.
"I've got cash that looks like fun money and a mouth that knows fight odds.
The boy carries my beer and looks hungry.
Nobody in that world has met me." A pause, and her hand came up and touched the braid where it crossed her shoulder, and her voice went flatter.
"The braid comes off. Nobody's seen me without it since Montana.
So nobody there will be seeing me at all. "
She said it like a supply list. Around the table, nobody made the mistake of treating it like one. Mateo, standing behind her chair, looked like a kid who'd been handed live ammunition, terrified and lit up in equal measure.
"Two isn't enough eyes for a crowd that size." Hawk scanned the room. "Who else can stand in that building without ringing a bell?"
Hands went up along the back wall. Three of them, then a fourth.
A broad man with a quiet face, a woman with a tattoo sleeve of new ink, a wiry guy I'd seen hauling engine blocks like groceries, and an older man with gray coming in at his temples.
All four had the same deep brown skin as Blade, and all four, I realized as they stepped forward, were looking at me.
Introducing themselves to me. The table already knew them.
I was the one walking inside with my life in their hands, and they wanted me to have their names.
"Cuervo." The broad man dipped his head my way. "Very few people in Nevada have seen my face. I'll carry a beer and watch your back."
"Anima." The woman with the tattoo sleeve held my eyes. "Same. And I know how to stand in a crowd of men like that and be furniture. I had years of practice."
"Faro." The wiry one lifted two fingers at me. "I'll be by the betting windows. You won't see me. That's the point."
"Norte." The older man's voice came out gravel-slow, and he looked at me steadily. "You get in trouble in there, you look for gray hair. I'll already be moving."
The words sat a second before I understood the shape underneath them, and then Ghost leaned toward my ear, low: "Montana.
All four of them. They came off the ranches Blade emptied last year, and they prospected in the spring.
The Iron Wolves were disbanded after, so Gravedigger's new world has no idea they exist." He didn't need to say more.
He'd told me pieces of it across the medical-bay days, the labor camps up north, the front company, the brothers and sisters who'd been worked like animals until this club came through the fence.
Mateo had come off those ranches too. The people this club had pulled out of one cage, standing up to walk into another one, on purpose, for me.
Gravedigger had never seen a single one of their faces. And every one of them knew exactly what it was to be owned by a man like him.
Across the table, Blade's chin lifted. He didn't say a word.
He looked down the line of raised hands, the people he'd carried out of Montana, volunteering for the inside of a slaver's building, and his eyes shone with something he didn't try to hide, and Trenza reached over and gripped his forearm once, hard.
"Then the inside crew is six." Hawk nodded slowly, and his attention came back to me. "And the signal. When it goes wrong in there, or when it's time, how do we know?"
"The mic." I put the marker on the ring.
"There's an announcer's mic that hangs over the ropes on a cable, and big horn speakers bolted up in the roof beams. On fight nights you can hear the ten-count from the parking lot with your windows up.
The whole building is built to be loud." I looked at Nolan.
"If it's wired into speakers, the sound's traveling through something. "
Nolan's glasses came up off the map. Behind them, something switched on.
"Then I can listen in on it. Give me a van within range and I'll give you every word said over that ring, live.
" He was already writing. Beside him, Declan watched him write with the expression of a man watching his favorite thing happen.