15. Seven #3
Harlan came up the lane, one arm out, breaking drunk hands off his shoulders without looking. He stopped at the foot of the steps and gave it to the line of seven at a volume made for the back wall.
"Whoever wants the fight, get up there! You can concede, same as any night. No order. Your call." I'd heard Harlan bored and I'd heard Harlan careful, and this was a third thing, dark and dragging under the volume, a man reading out a sentence he hadn't written.
Nobody moved.
The crowd howled and waved money, and the seven men stood in their line looking at me, at each other, at the mat where I'd put seventeen men down, and for thirty seconds the space between them and the steps stayed empty.
My pulse ticked in my wrists. Maybe nobody comes.
Maybe the whole obscene machine stalls right here, seven men refusing to feed it, and the thought was so bright and stupid I almost?—
A hand closed on the bottom rope.
Renzo came over the hemp the way he always did, smooth, no wasted motion, and set his feet on the mat ten feet from me. He still wasn't looking at my face. He was looking at my stance and my hands. A fighter's look. An opponent's.
"The Saint versus Monk!" The announcer's handheld crackled and spat. "First fight of seven! Get your bets in, ladies and gentlemen, two minutes! Two minutes!"
The floor turned into a market, runners fighting through the rows, fists of cash in the air, odds rolling front to back in a chant. The sound crawled into my head and sat on the thoughts I needed. I walked a small circle to keep my legs warm and pushed my voice through the noise.
"Renzo, stop!" I pitched it under the crowd, hard, just for him. "Climb back out. I don't want to hurt you, and you don't know who you're helping! He's the one who put your wife in that bed! Her and my brother both, the same way, the same reason!"
"Big words, Cal." His feet kept moving, side to side, warming.
His eyes finally came up to mine, and they'd gone somewhere flat and far away.
"Big, big words. Look, I'm not saying you're lying.
I'm saying that's an operation the size of a city, and the feds would've smelled it, the cops, somebody, in all the months this thing's been running.
However long that is. You've got a story. You don't have proof?—"
"That man has more eyes and paper and bought badges than you can imagine! You don't know who he is, Renzo! I do!"
"Enough, Monk!"
The switch of names went through me like cold water down my back, and it took the last of my hope with it.
"The only thing I know for sure," and his voice cracked once, in the middle, and he stomped it flat, "is that her bill can be zero tonight. That's real. That, I can touch. You're talking, and talking's free, and it hasn't paid for one hour of one machine she's plugged into. So fight me!"
Somewhere behind the ropes the two minutes died.
The bell fired off, a rapid cling-cling-cling, and three hundred voices came down on the ring like a wave on a seawall, and Renzo left the ground.
He came up and forward all at once, higher than a man his size had any right to jump, hips already turning, and his knee rose at my face like something launched.
Two blocks away
GHOST
"I don't like this."
I'd been saying it for an hour. Out loud, at first, to whoever was nearest. By now the words had worn a groove and went around it on their own.
Nobody had told me I was wrong yet. That was the part I hated.
The second floor of the warehouse two blocks off the pit was one long dark room with a spine of steel columns, and we'd been in it since sundown.
Twenty-two of us spread along the south windows, every pane painted out years ago except where we'd scraped sightlines at the corners.
Through my scrape I had the angle on the pit's east door, a wedge of it, the entrance lit up hard and the line of the crowd long gone inside.
Cars packed the block nose to tail, more than I'd counted on the night I'd entered the pit myself.
Behind me the room breathed. Twenty-two people could be quiet, but they couldn't be silent, and the dark was full of the small sounds of waiting.
A boot easing on grit. The slow zip of a jacket.
Somebody's knuckles, cracked one at a time.
Kai had claimed a folding table under the far scrape and laid his kit out on it in rows, clamps and gauze squared off like a parts tray, and he'd checked the rows so often his hands had memorized the checking.
My knee was going. It had been going since the sun went down, bouncing off the ball of my foot, and I'd quit telling it to stop somewhere around nine.
It had started going hard at half past eight, when Declan's voice came over the radio from the roof into every earpiece on the block, flat the way only Declan and dial tones ever managed.
"Hold your people. They're screening the door."
The glasses were up in two seconds. There it was, at the east entrance, where for months two bouncers had patted chests and waved men through: a gray arch, portable, airport surplus, planted square in the doorway with a guy running a wand behind it for beeps.
Metal detectors. At a warehouse fight ring in a dead district, where half the crowd carried knives out of habit.
Our six were still a block from that door when Declan's warning came through.
Early enough to fix it. Trenza turned the crew around, walked them back to the cars, and six earpieces went into a door pocket.
Then I stood at my window and watched the people I love walk into that building deaf.
Trenza with her hair loose down her back, a stranger without the braid, laughing at something Cuervo didn't say.
Mateo with her beer and his own, a bored nephew, nineteen years old and selling it.
Then Faro. Anima. Norte. One at a time, spaced out, nothing to see.
Declan had called each one through the door. "Four in. Five in. Six in." Then, later, the one that mattered. "Monk's at the arch." A pause I could've parked a bike in. "He stopped. Three seconds. He clocked it." Another pause. "He's in."
He'd seen the trap change shape at the door, and he'd walked in anyway. Of course he had.
"I don't like this." It came out of me again, to the window this time, and my breath fogged a coin of glass and shrank.
"Jake." Kai left his table and came to stand beside me, and he didn't touch me.
He just put himself where my eyes would have to trip over him on their way back from the pit.
"You'll have to have faith in Caleb. And in the others.
They know the walk-away rule. If nobody can confirm the man's in the building, they finish their beers and they leave, and we try again another way. "
"They never screened that door, Kai." I kept my voice down and it wanted not to be down.
"Months of Thursdays. A pat on the chest, in you go.
Tonight, the one night six of ours and Caleb walk in wired for sound, there's an arch in the doorway?
That's not a coincidence. That's a man who's been told something, or smelled something, and either way he changed his building for it. I don't like it."
"You've mentioned." A thread of dry came through it, which from Kai counted as a hug. Then it went again. "Rosa's got the infirmary at the compound set up like a field hospital, and I've got this. Whatever comes out of that building tonight, we're ready. That part I can promise. The rest I can't."
"Caleb saw the arch and went in anyway." Hawk's voice arrived from the dark to my left, where he'd stood so long I'd quit seeing him.
"That was his decision, and he made it knowing everything you know.
We made ours when we voted. We wait for the signal that puts Gravedigger in that building, because the hit has to count.
This ends tonight or it doesn't end. The earpieces were a comfort.
Comforts get taken. They were never the plan.
The plan is Nolan's wire, one word into that mic, same as it's been since Church.
Our six don't need earpieces to stand up for Caleb if it comes to that, and they don't need them to walk out that door whenever they choose.
The bet was always the mic." His head turned, and even in the dark I felt it more than saw it.
"And if that mic gives us nothing and the night runs long, we go in anyway and we take our people back.
All of them. That was always the floor under this plan, Ghost. Nobody's being left in there. "
I looked at him. Boots planted, arms loose, the shotgun slung across his back, and he hadn't touched it in an hour, and not one part of him moving that didn't have to. I'd have paid money for ten minutes inside that calm. Some people were born with an idle that low. The rest of us bounced a knee.
And he'd planned it like a man with that idle.
I'd sat in Church while he built it and I could still see the map.
Thirty-five of us staged on this block, if you counted the four who'd never worn a patch, and tonight everybody counted.
Twenty-one patched members here at the windows with the east door in view, and Nolan under the middle window with his receiver.
Declan on the roof over our heads with the rifle, Logan spotting for him and Tyler on the long lens beside them, three men who'd never worn a patch holding the high ground for everyone who did.
If cars full of reinforcements came up that street, Declan would stop the street.
Ten more at the north wall two blocks over, flat in the dark against the bricked-over door only I had ever seen open, and Blade running that ten.
If the big man tried to leave through his secret wall tonight, the club hadn't needed much discussion about what should be waiting to meet him.