Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 3

The venue she took me to was just west of the river, in a mixed-industrial neighborhood near the Fashion District. The building had once been a meatpacking plant, hence the name. Now the main floor was empty and refitted with an octagonal cage and bleacher seating on all sides.

Though most of the fights were between guys, Serena told me that a girl could get a hundred dollars just to fight and five hundred dollars to win. The steep difference between winner pay and loser pay was designed to weed out the dreamers and wannabes.

"Really? Five hundred?" I'd said. The next week I'd gone back alone. I wondered if Serena had known all along that I would.

I learned pretty quickly that there was more to the Slaughterhouse than just fighting. I'd had good boxing instruction at West Point, where I'd also learned some submission moves, and I'd carelessly a.s.sumed that those things alone would make me a crowd favorite. I'd been wrong.

Jack, one of the two brothers who ran things, called me into his office early on to ask two things of me. First, he wanted me to improve my kicks.

"You box great for a chick," he'd said, "but if the guys out there just wanted to see boxing, they'd turn on the TV. They come here to see a mix of styles, street moves and Asian stuff, and kicks are especially a crowd pleaser. You're making enough money-go find a dojo you like and learn to mix up your moves a little."

"All right," I'd said.

"The other thing is," he'd said, "do a little something with your looks. Hey, don't get hot. This place isn't all about good fighting. It's a spectacle. The guys out there aren't gonna get behind you if you're dressed like a college girl on her way to lift weights. They'd rather watch a hot girl with sloppy moves. It doesn't matter how good your chops are-if you can't get the crowd behind you, I can't keep giving you fights."

Jack and I probably never quite saw eye to eye on how I should look when I came down to the ring, but I made some changes. About once a month, I went to a small salon off Melrose, redolent with the scent of chemicals and pulsating with Eurodisco music, and I let the girls brighten and streak my hair. I got temporary tattoos, flames up my arms from wrist to elbow, a sunburst rising over my tailbone. Sometimes I thumbed black kohl thickly under my eyes to create an angry, deadened gaze.

As Jack predicted, the guys liked it. But everything I changed about my hair and body was short-term; I never did anything permanent. I suppose a shrink would say it was my way of declaring that none of this touched the essential me.

I didn't always win. In particular I remember one girl, white like me, from somewhere out in the Central Valley. Five-foot-eleven, hard fat, staring at me with the impa.s.sive gaze of a bear looking at a wildlife photographer. That was one of my hundred-dollar nights.

It wasn't uncommon for me to hurt the next day, win or lose, but Serena always had Vicodin.

"Come on, baby! Head kick! Kick to the head!"

Being a good fighter, it's not any one thing. Technique is a lot, of course. But size is, too, because reach lets you hit opponents while staying out of range, and weight lets you put more force into the blows. It's just physics: Force equals ma.s.s times velocity.

Kat threw her first hook, and I dropped low over my heels, letting her fist graze above my head. The men whistled and jeered.

Experience matters. That's a close cousin to technique, but not the same thing, because experience also means a fighter who knows that bleeding stops, bruises heal, pain goes away. That lets you keep your head when things aren't going your way.

Kat dug a low left hook into my ribs. I couldn't get out of the way in time and had to absorb it. It wasn't a very hard blow. Good. If that was all she had, it wasn't enough.

A lot of people think anger helps. I tend to think that's a myth. An angry fighter with no skills may throw more punches, but flailing blindly will get you knocked out fast.

Confident now from landing a blow, Kat stayed in close, trying again to hammer my ribs. Mistake. I threw both my arms around her neck, taking advantage of her proximity.

The other thing that doesn't help as much as people think? Brains. You hear about "thinking fighters," but those individuals are rare and very, very good. Maybe, for them, time seems to slow and they can antic.i.p.ate, plan on the fly. I can't; most of the guys I know can't. The firstie who'd coached me and the rest of my company's boxing team used to say, Learn as much as you can outside the ring, but when you're in the ring, stop thinking. Let your muscles think for you, because your brain won't do it fast enough.

Still clinching Kat's neck, I threw my right knee into her midsection and both heard and felt the way it punished her. She would have doubled over, except that I put my hands on her shoulders, then shoved lightly to get her out at the end of my range, and threw my hardest straight right into her face.

I've heard men, experienced fighters, say they'll sometimes block body blows with their heads. I believe them, but I've never done it. Next time you see a picture of a human skull, notice the gap, the absence of bone, at the nose. It's a fantastically vulnerable place to get hit. Something about it goes straight to your brain and rattles you to the core. It's hard to recover from.

Kat didn't. She backed up, raised her arms against another blow, and then waved me off. She'd decided to have a hundred-dollar night.

After she was out of the cage, Jack's brother, Mav, beckoned me to talk to him through the mesh of the cage. I went over.

"Short fight," he said.

"Sorry." But I wasn't.

"You want to go again?" he said. "I've got another girl who's ready."

I wiped at a bit of hair that had come loose from my braids and fallen into my face. "Sure," I said.

I'd like to say that was how I had a thousand-dollar night, but it wasn't. It was how I had a six-hundred-dollar night.

The Slaughterhouse had real locker rooms, left over from its days as a working factory, but there was no water service anymore, so no showers. Cooling off, I checked out my reflection in the tarnished mirror.

"You look fine," a voice behind me said.

She was younger than me, Alice, a white girl of twenty. We hadn't yet fought each other. I'd seen her once outside the fights and barely recognized her. She was a clerk at Home Depot during the day, and her pale blond shoulder-length hair was curly in a way that could have been natural or could have been an unfortunate perm. Her face and eyes were both round, giving her a vacuous look, and under street clothes her body looked a little plump. Her middle-cla.s.s customers at Home Depot, the ones pricing Corian countertops and hardwood flooring for their home-improvement projects, probably looked at her and thought white trash, then double-checked their receipts for mistakes.

At the fights she was someone different. She laced her hair back into multiple narrow braids against her skull. The blankness of her face became cool hardness. And in sports bra, board shorts, and bare feet, the roundness of her body was clearly the roundness of muscle, like that of the dray ponies that had once worked in coal mines.

"Go kick some a.s.s," I told her. Good luck wasn't something we said. It wasn't about luck.

Alice went out to the ring, and I got my backpack from a locker and took out my street clothes. It was after ten, probably just cool enough outside to justify changing from my shorts into the jeans I'd brought, and my simple white T-shirt and crimson hoodie. I was sitting on a bench lacing up my boots when I heard my cell phone buzzing. The number on the screen was Serena's.

"Hey, esa, where are you?" she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, "You shouldn't be on the street, wherever you are. The cops are looking for you."

That was fast, I thought, remembering last night and the truck robbery. Then, "Wait a minute, just me? Why not you?"

"It's not about last night," Serena said. "A couple of people got killed, up in San Francisco."

"And?"

"You're the suspect."

"What? You're kidding me, right?"

"No, it's on the news," Serena said.

"You mean, like, last year, when I lived up there?"

"No, it was yesterday, they're saying."

"Well, then it's a mix-up," I said. "It's just somebody with the same name. My last name's not uncommon, and my first was only the most popular-"

"I know that, but it's not just a name thing," she insisted. "This is who they're describing: Hailey Cain, twenty-four years old, blond hair, brown eyes, birthmark on the right cheekbone. And-" She paused here. "Hailey, they're saying that your thumbprint was on one of the used, what do you call 'em, casings."

That's not possible.

I was silent so long that Serena said, "I know, Insula, I didn't believe it, either. It was Diana who saw it on the news first and called me, and I said, 'No way, that can't be right.' "

Then she said, "The other thing, the big thing, is that one of the two vics was a policeman. Prima, they think you're a cop killer."

to the limits of fate.

6.

Cop killer. I didn't need Serena to explain the implications of that for my safety.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" she said.

"You're asking me?"

"What're you gonna do?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Where are you?"

"At the Slaughterhouse," I said. "I was about to go home, but now I'm not so sure I should."

It was true that my Crenshaw apartment wasn't traceable to me through any kind of bill or rental contract, but my neighbors had seen me coming and going, and I'd introduced myself to several of them by name. More than that, I stood out in Crenshaw. I'd known that before, but it hadn't bothered me. Now I had to worry about it.

"I'll come get you," Serena said.

"No," I said. "Hold that thought. There's someone else I want to call."

After we'd hung up, I scrolled through my list of old calls, finding a number I didn't use enough to know by heart. Tess answered on the third ring, her voice, as always, slightly British-inflected.

"It's Hailey," I said. "Have you seen the news?"

"Yes," she said.

"Do you believe it?"

"No," she said, "I don't."

"Then I need your help."

Tess D'Agostino, the biological daughter of San Francisco organized-crime figure Tony Skouras, had already saved my life once. Last winter she'd called off her father's henchmen and brought to an end the torture session that otherwise probably would have ended with me floating facedown in the bay; more than that, she'd brought me back to her hotel and overseen my recuperation herself. At first I hadn't known how far to trust her-she was a Skouras, after all-and I'd been brusque to the point of rudeness, but Tess had been serenely polite in response.

A few days later, she'd called me to suggest that if I stayed in San Francisco and if she in fact took the reins of the Skouras syndicate-which officially was a shipping line and several related import businesses and unofficially brought Asian heroin, stolen artworks, and illegal Eastern European and Central Asian immigrants into the ports of San Francisco and Oakland-she would have use for me. In other words, she wanted what I'd gone on to provide for Serena: a right hand, protector and sounding board.

When she'd called me, I'd been walking on the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been a bright and promising morning, I still wasn't quite used to being alive when I was supposed to be dead, and despite the rough treatment I'd just suffered, my life at that moment had an anything-goes character, and I'd agreed to meet with Tess that evening to discuss her offer further.

That night she'd bought me dinner on Fisherman's Wharf. In the intervening hours, my mood had shifted a bit. The bright hour on the bridge was over, and the ghost of my newly severed finger had ached increasingly throughout the day. Over dinner, made more frank than I might have been by a martini and pain meds I'd taken for my hand, I not only turned down any potential job, I discouraged Tess from taking over the Skouras empire altogether.

"You seem to look at me as some kind of hero because I took it on myself to protect a baby whose parents I hardly knew," I'd told her, "but I didn't volunteer for that-it chose me. I'm not a hero. Me, my closest friend, most of the people I know-we're like an evolutionary chart of morally compromised people. I might be a little farther to the right on that chart than most of them, but you, you're not one of us at all, and I can't think why you'd want to be. And you will be if you take over your father's businesses. You won't change them. They'll change you. It's inevitable."

I don't kid myself that my advice could have had any effect on someone as self-a.s.sured as Tess D'Agostino, but she'd apparently come to the same conclusion. She sold nearly everything, keeping only her father's minority share in a film and television studio here in Los Angeles. Then she'd used the proceeds of the sale of the other Skouras businesses to buy a majority share. In short, Tess had become a studio head, and she lived locally.

I was reaching out to her now because she had no discernible link to me. No one knew that we knew each other, and thus no one would expect me to be with her. And her home, I felt certain, would be safe from close observation; every rich person I knew valued privacy and security.

So I'd given her directions to the Slaughterhouse-actually, to the intersection of two well-marked streets nearby, the neighborhood being somewhat confusing and forbidding to a newcomer, especially after dark. Then I'd collected my night's pay from Jack, in fifties and twenties that I divided up between my gym bag and my wallet, and left. I had to resist the urge to hurry. No one in the crowd pointed at me or stared. These weren't the kind of people who checked the news on their smartphones.

Outside, the temperature had dropped to the high sixties. The streets were mostly empty. The occasional car pa.s.sed, but I was the only person on the sidewalk. A newspaper skated past my feet. At the corner I stopped, shifted the gym bag on my shoulder. Beyond Tess's hospitality to depend on, I had six hundred in cash, two Vicodin, and the Browning. No change of clothes, but that was a minor annoyance. There were worse states of affairs.

Besides, wouldn't this be over in a day or two? Somehow the police had to figure out that there was a mix-up, that Hailey Cain wasn't their suspect. How could they not? I hadn't shot a cop or anyone else. I'd been in L.A.

One problem with that: I'd been off the grid a long time. No rental contract. No utility bills. No real job with a W-4 or a time card. Come to think of it, who could even alibi me that the police would take seriously? Serena? Diana? I hadn't even been hanging with CJ lately.

Oh, G.o.d, CJ. Had he seen the news yet? Would he possibly entertain the- That was when I heard the sirens.

Don't a.s.sume they're for you, I told myself. This is L.A., after all. I looked around for flashing lights and movement and saw them. Two squad cars were heading my way.

I set the gym bag down, sat on my heels, and quickly retrieved the money from inside. I didn't want to run with the bag. I didn't want to run at all, because if there was any chance these squad cars were on an unrelated call, I didn't want to give myself away. Nothing gets a cop's attention like someone who runs away from the sight of him.

The two cars turned onto the street I was on.

Tess, dammit, I trusted you.

I abandoned the bag and sprinted, looking as I did so for an alleyway or any tight s.p.a.ce I could disappear into. I didn't want to stay in the open. If I turned this into a footrace, with obstacles, maybe I could win.

The sirens grew louder behind me. Ahead I saw a narrow driveway between buildings and headed for it. When I dived between the buildings, I was almost in full dark while I ran about twenty yards, and then I emerged into moonlight again.

Dead end. I was in a paved area where several buildings backed up to each other. There were two Dumpsters and about several dozen cigarette b.u.t.ts from a legion of workers taking breaks, so many that the ghost of nicotine hung in the air. The doors that I saw were solid windowless double doors, almost certainly all locked. There were no open windows.

"d.a.m.n," I said. "Dammit." The sirens were growing louder. What now? Climb up on a Dumpster and jump for a low-hanging rain gutter, try to make the roofline?

The cop cars were so close that I could hear the engine noise under the sirens. I turned, resigned, to look back at the driveway I'd run along, saw a brief flash of black-and-white as the cars swept past. Then the sound of the sirens began to lengthen, stretching out in that Doppler fade.

False alarm. I took a breath and began to walk back down the driveway. The sound of the cop cars was still receding. Broken gla.s.s crunched under my boots.

Out on the street again, I saw nothing but a dark gray Chrysler Crossfire, the little coupe with that funny, rounded European shape, parked at the curb. The driver's door was open, and Tess D'Agostino was sitting on her heels outside, examining the gym bag I'd left pushed behind a trash can.

"Hey," I said when I was close enough, my breathing back to normal. I bent down to pick up the bag. "Thanks for coming."

Tess straightened up. She was wearing a dark pea coat, heavier than the weather called for, over a collarless white shirt, black trousers, and black stack-heeled boots, the same kind she'd worn the first time I saw her. She'd cut her bronze hair back to chin length since I'd seen her last.

"Did you run when you heard the sirens?" she asked.

I nodded.

"I thought maybe I was too late," she said. Then she nodded toward the Crossfire. "Let's not linger here longer than we have to, shall we?"