16. Ignite #2
"Telling me the plan doesn't help you, man!" He got up slowly, and the words came half through his nose, thick and wet, and he turned his head and spat red. "Now I know. So I'll do less of it."
"You think you can change a habit you've spent years building?" I let it come out flat, with nothing in it for him to hold onto. "In a few seconds, with your nose in pieces?"
He didn't answer. His eyes did something, one flicker wider, and he couldn't put it away before I saw it. He knew I was right.
I went again. A hop-step off to the side and into a jump, my right leg out at his face, and this time he was ready, the way I'd wanted him to be, because I'd just shown him what my legs did in the air.
He took his head back out of the way and both his hands snapped shut on my ankle.
One leg in his fists and one on the mat, and he thought he had me.
A man with my leg in his fists thought he was holding the whole fight.
What he was holding was a step. I didn't pull the leg back.
I jumped off the other one that second, before he'd decided what to do with it, the way that gym had drilled into me at nine, the year after the palm.
I jumped. Straight up off the left foot and around, and with my right ankle still locked in his two hands, my left shin came across and hit him in the side of the head.
It landed like a bat on a side of beef. Heavy, wet, and I felt his skull give under it, felt the whole weight of his head move off the line of his neck.
His hands opened. Then the mat came up at me, because there was nothing under me anymore, and I turned in the fall and took it on my right shoulder and rolled, and came up facing him.
Renzo was on the ropes. He'd gone backward into them on legs that had stopped taking orders from him, and now he hung there with his elbows hooked over the top rope, and his eyes swam.
"HE'S ON THE ROPES!" The horns shrieked with the volume of it. "Somebody check the Saint for a pulse! Monk is undefeated for a reason, ladies and gentlemen!"
"Get UP, Saint!" A woman's voice from the front row, ragged, over the boos and the cheers fighting each other for the room. "I got two hundred on you, get UP!"
He pushed off the rope. Everything about him had gone slow, his feet finding the mat one at a time.
I walked toward him. No hurry in it, one foot in front of the other across the plywood, the way you walk up to a man who isn't going anywhere.
I kept my voice down, and the crowd went quiet anyway, three hundred people leaning in to hear what Monk had to say to the Saint.
"That's how long you leave a leg in the air.
Half a second. Then it comes back, and it's a weapon. You don't stand around on it."
"Shut up!" His hands came up. "Shut up and fight!"
He threw. A jab, then a short elbow off the same hand, and both arrived late and a few inches wide, because the shin to the head was still in him.
His eyes hadn't finished coming back from it, and his hands were working off what they remembered instead of what they saw.
I moved my head. An inch here. Two there.
He was throwing at where I'd been a half-second before, and I could see him knowing it, and swinging anyway, because stopping wasn't in him.
That was the something else I'd felt under the Muay Thai. Somebody had taught him not to stop.
Then he found something. A right hook, faster than the rest, fast enough that whatever he had left had gone into it.
I ducked under it and turned into him, a full spin with my back passing his chest, and at the end of it my left elbow came around with everything the spin had built and went into his ribs.
It landed low on his right side, and something in there gave with a sound I felt in my own arm more than heard, and his whole body folded around it.
His face came down with the fold. My right palm came up. Open, the heel of it, an uppercut with the hand instead of the fist, and it met his face on the way down while my hand was still on the way up.
The sound was ugly. A groan tore out of him and his head snapped back, and he went straight backward into the ropes a second time, both hands over his face.
I spun away and got my distance. I didn't want to watch what I'd done.
I had no choice. I didn't take my eyes off him, not even with him on the ropes.
Blood ran out between his fingers. All of it from the nose, broken twice now, running down his wrists into the tape.
I walked back to him and didn't stop where a fighter would stop, out of reach. Close enough to smell the copper coming off him. Then I went down into a crouch in front of him with my forearms on my knees, and I dropped my voice to where only he could hear it.
"You worried about my legs the whole fight." Low. "You went for my knee because you'd decided I couldn't hurt you with my hands. I can. My legs are what I like. They're not all I've got." I made myself take a breath. "You can't win this, Renzo. Please. Listen to me."
He didn't move. His hands stayed on his face, and above the hands his eyes were on me.
"That man put your wife in that hospital.
He's the reason there's a bill at all. He's got money.
He's got cops and paper. He's building something with it, his own crew, his own army, and he's using men like you and me to build it.
The ones who win tonight go up those stairs and belong to him.
" My voice wanted to climb and I held it down where it was.
"I've got people outside this building. I've got people inside it.
Right now, in this crowd. Let me end this. Help me."
His hands didn't move. His eyes did. They filled with tears, and the tears ran down into the blood on his fingers.
I'd seen men cry in this ring, and pain does it, but he was stuck and he knew it, and if what I'd told him was true, then every Thursday he'd bled in here had been for the man who'd put her in that bed.
"Dammit, Cal!" It broke coming out of him, wet through the blood.
"What the hell do you want me to do?! My wife is half dead in a hospital bed!
I'm desperate, man, I'm—" His voice cracked clean through.
"If what you're saying is true… if that fucker did that to her…
" He dragged air through his mouth. "Then he pays for it. And I don't mean money."
"I know, Renzo." It came out barely a whisper. "That's what I'm doing here. Help me."
I didn't look up. I could feel the eyes from the mezzanine on the top of my head like a hand, the same way I'd felt them the night Gravedigger had said Liam's name from up there.
He was watching me crouch in front of a beaten man and talk instead of end it, and he'd be doing his math on it the way I was doing mine.
Mine came out bad. One fight down, and look what it had cost. My lungs were pulling harder than they should have been this early.
My left forearm had swollen where the shin had landed.
Two more like him, and my legs would start arriving late.
By the fourth fight I'd be a man in a ring with his hands down, and fighters five through seven would know exactly where to put their feet.
I couldn't win seven. Nobody could. That was why he'd made it seven.
I needed the mic. Now.
The crowd had gone from hungry to sour. Boos came up out of the back rows.
"Finish him!" Close, hoarse with beer. "What is this?!"
"Get on with it!"
"Next fighter! Give us the next fighter!"
"Boss is waiting, Monk." The announcer, through the handheld, flat now, no showman left in it. "Don't keep the man waiting."
"Rossi." Harlan, from the foot of the steps, pitched under the boos, and I knew that voice. I'd heard it out of him once, my first night, when he'd told me to be smart, please. "Finish it. Please."
A bottle hit the concrete and rolled. The bet runners had stopped running, because there was no bet to make on a man crouching.
Renzo looked at me over his hands. They hadn't moved once since I'd crouched, and I'd taken enough noses apart to know that the first thing a man does with a broken one is touch it.
He was covering his mouth, and the nose had nothing to do with it.
Whatever he was going to say next, three hundred people and a man behind glass weren't going to read it off his lips.
"What do I do?" It came through his fingers, low and thick, and his eyes had gone hard over the top of them.
The relief went through me like the first hot water on cold hands, and for one second it hurt more than the forearm. My fingers had been locked on my knees without my asking, and they let go.
Then my eyes went up. Past his shoulder, past the top rope, one second, and there they were.
Trenza, at the rope. An arm's length off the ring, her black hair loose down her back with the lamps in it, a woman I'd have walked past on the street without a second look, which was the whole point of her tonight.
Beside her, Mateo with a beer in his fist and a face with nothing on it but the beer, and both of them looking straight at me.
I'd told myself not to look for them, and they'd found the one spot in the building I'd have to look at eventually.
Five days ago, over beers and the folded map, Norte had asked what we did if the wires got taken.
So the six of them and I had made up signs.
Nothing anybody would look at twice. A hand through hair.
A thumb on the neck of a bottle. Then the arch had gone up in the doorway tonight, a metal detector where there had never been one, and every earpiece had stayed in the cars.
My right arm was lying along my right knee. I let the hand hang off the end of it and moved two fingers. Index and pinky up, the rest curled down. The horns. We'd picked it over that map, and it meant one thing.
Incoming. Wait for it.
Trenza's face did nothing at all. Mateo lifted the beer and drank. That was their answer. They'd seen it.