Kitabı oku: «Knockout», sayfa 2

Deacon punched the one without Destiny powerfully in his sternum, sinking him to his knees with a loud grunt. I took aim at the other one, but he held Destiny up in front of him. She shrieked—loudly.

The goon Deacon punched was now leaning forward, almost to the floor, clutching his gut and gasping. I grabbed the brass lamp from the front hallway table and brought it down on his head. Then I turned and kicked the other guy in the balls. He doubled over for a second, then popped up madder than before. Sticking Destiny under one arm like a sack of flour, he reached out with his fist and tried to punch me in the face, managing to land a strong blow on my forehead.

But I didn’t spend my life in boxing gyms for nothing.

I held both my hands up in a boxer’s stance and ducked from his next blow. Then I delivered my own right hook to his jaw. Swinging around with my left, I connected with his nose, which spurted blood as he screamed in pain. He dropped Destiny, and I scooped her up.

Boxing is a sport of kings. And gentlemen. Apparently, no one told him the rule about fighting fair, because he withdrew a semiautomatic from a holster at his waist and fired several rounds as I dived for cover into the den and overturned the coffee table to protect Destiny and me. She was screaming again. Deacon tackled the gunman. The guy on the ground stirred and rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Give up the kid, and you won’t get hurt,” he shouted out.

“Fuck you!”

“One more chance…then you will get hurt. All we want is the kid.”

Destiny looked up at me and clutched my arm.

I was trapped. I knew they would come into the den and shoot me unless Deacon overpowered them both. I heard fighting, the sounds of fists against flesh, and I peeked over the table. The guy with the gun was now on the floor, courtesy of my uncle, his gun clattering across the hardwood.

“Wait here,” I whispered to Destiny. Then I took a brass urn and hurled it, catching the second guy in the head. I leaped from behind the table and screamed, “Get out!” at the top of my lungs, rushing up to him and kicking him in the stomach. Deacon was fighting the second guy as if it was a title match. The bad guys fought back, blow for blow, but Deacon definitely wore them down, and I was hurling anything I could at their faces. Eventually they backed out the door and ran to their car. Deacon and I decided not to give chase, and instead came over to Destiny.

“You okay?”

She nodded, and I picked her up and handed her to Deacon so he could hold her tight and calm her. He shushed her and rocked her gentle as a teddy bear. I remembered when he used to do that for me.

“Crystal?” I looked at Deacon in a panic and went running up the staircase.

I prayed she was cowering in my bedroom, though I couldn’t imagine her giving up Destiny without a fight. I went to my room and pushed open the door.

She was in my bedroom, all right. With a tourniquet around her arm and a needle hanging out, her big blue-green eyes staring straight up at the ceiling.

Rob looked at me as I finished telling him everything that happened. “You know, I could have dated a schoolteacher, a nurse, a librarian. Someone with a nice, quiet profession. But no, you have to be involved with the most crooked sport on the planet.”

“Deacon and I aren’t crooked.”

“No. But my guess is after tonight, you’re both as good as dead.”

Chapter 2

Rob called 911, and while we waited, we got our stories straight. Yes, Destiny had been at the house that afternoon, but she wasn’t there now. Perhaps they should begin their search with Tony Perrone.

“See,” I said to Rob. “Tony has the money to pursue custody. Crystal never named Destiny’s father, so he’s the closest thing she’s got to one. But, on the other hand, he may be the one who murdered Crystal.”

“Now, wait a minute. She’s got a bag of heroin up there and a needle hanging from her arm. Those two guys may have been up to no good, but they didn’t murder her.”

“Don’t you watch Law and Order, CSI?”

“No. I have too much to do keeping track of my fiancée to watch TV.”

“Girlfriend.”

“Fiancée. You accepted the ring. It’s just a long engagement, given we don’t want a wedding at the state penitentiary.”

“No. He has to walk me down a real aisle.”

“Fine. Let’s just call you my girlfriend for the moment, okay? So what are you saying? That they forced her to do heroin? Come on, Jack. This was just a bad scene all around.”

I poked Rob in the chest. “Listen, Crystal didn’t use drugs.” I felt a choked-off sob rising in my throat at the use of the past tense when referring to her.

“I’m not trying to denigrate your friend. But when was the last time you saw her?”

“Today.”

“No, before that.”

“It’s been a couple of years. But we spoke on the phone often.”

“She was living the high life in that mansion. You don’t know whether or not she was also living the high life. She could have been a user and you didn’t know about it.”

I crossed my arms. “Not Crystal. She never even smoked pot. Nothing. She was chicken. In high school, she knew this guy who smoked a joint laced with PCP and he went crazy. And she just never tried drugs. It was totally not her, Rob. Besides…I…I stared at her there on that bed, on my bed. I put a…” Suddenly, what I had been through caught up with me, and I felt the tears starting to come, so I willed them away. “I put a blanket on her. I couldn’t bear to see her there. Cold. And one thing I didn’t see? Track marks. Her arms were as porcelain and beautiful as the rest of her. Unmarked.”

Rob looked at me, then ran upstairs. When he came back down, he said, “I’m not sure what kind of mess you’re in, but you’re right about her arms.”

We heard the sirens approaching.

“Rob, when I solve her murder, I will get even with whoever did this to her. And if I’m right, I think all paths will lead to that snake, Benny Bonita.”

“Look, this isn’t Nancy Drew, Jack. Let me handle this. You worry about Destiny. Poor kid. Do you know what, if anything, she saw?”

“No. She’s shaken up, and she knows her mother’s dead. But at that age…I don’t know if she gets that it means Crystal’s never coming back.”

“Okay, I’m giving this a day or two, tops. At some point, you’re going to have to give up Destiny. We have to talk to her. We have to get her seen by a child psychiatrist. Have to find out who her legal guardian is.”

“And if it’s Tony Perrone, I can tell you, you’re getting her over my dead body. And I mean it. You’ll have to kill me to get her.”

“You’re always saying ‘You’ll have to kill me first to get me to marry you without my father there,’ ‘You’ll have to kill me first to get me to meet your parents.’ One of these days, Jack, I’m going to take you up on that offer!”

“The vein in your temple is pulsing.”

“Shut up!”

We heard several car doors being slammed, and suddenly my house was overrun with police and two guys from the medical examiner’s office.

“Detective Carson?” Another detective, this one in a cheesy gray jacket with stains on the lapels, reeking of cologne, approached us.

“Yeah,” Rob said, and stuck out his hand.

“I’m Louie Palmer. How is it you came to arrive first at the scene?”

“I’m Rob’s fiancée, Jacqueline Rooney,” I said. Rob shot me a look. I knew what he was thinking. Sure, now that you need to get in good with the cops, I’m your fiancé.

“Nice to meet you.” Detective Palmer shook my hand. “You live here?”

“Correct.”

He looked around the foyer at the hurled brass urn, the broken lamp, the bullet holes in the wall, the turned-over coffee table in the den, visible through the archway. “You came home to two unidentified men.”

“Yes.”

“And you were alone?”

I nodded.

“And you surprised them, as I understand it, according to the call Detective Carson placed.”

“Yes.”

“And you—” he gazed down at me “—managed to overpower and chase away a man with a semiautomatic weapon and his accomplice.”

“Yes, that’s precisely what I am saying.”

“I’m not sure I buy that.”

“I’m a trainer. Boxing. They wouldn’t be the first two men I’ve decked.”

Palmer looked at Rob, who nodded. “Trust her on that one. You don’t want to cross her. On our second date, a drunk was harassing this waitress. When Jack here butted in and told him to quit it, the guy grabbed her arm. Jack broke his nose.”

“I see,” Palmer said. “Must make for an interesting relationship.”

Rob nodded. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“And the woman upstairs is?”

“Crystal Lake.” I saw him react to her name. “She had it legally changed to that when she moved here years ago. I only knew her by that name, and I have no idea what her given name was.”

“And she’s a friend of yours?”

“Old friend. Yes. I hadn’t seen her in a while. She lives with Tony Perrone. She’s technically his fiancée. It’s his rock she’s wearing on her left hand. She’s the star of the Majestic show.”

Palmer wiped his brow. “Tony Perrone? Jesus H. Christ, this is going to be a long night.”

For the next three hours, I went over and over my story so much that I started to believe it. I had surprised the two men. But no, I hadn’t seen Crystal’s little girl. I left Deacon out of the entire equation.

Somewhere near four o’clock in the morning, the last of the police left, taking Crystal’s body with them. They told me they’d like me to look at mug shots in the next day or so. Rob and I were the only ones remaining in the house.

“I need a tequila,” I told him.

“You and me both.”

We sat in the kitchen, and I poured us two, neat. “Screw the lemon,” I said, and tossed mine back.

He slammed his back, as well. Rob has dark brown hair cut neatly and those unfathomable gray eyes of his. Sometimes at night, in bed, I had the feeling they glowed in the dark, they were so pale in the moonlight.

“I won’t ever sleep in that bed again. I’m going to replace it. I don’t even know if I can sleep in that room again. She didn’t deserve that. And I know it has to do with the fight. With Keenan. With me and Deacon and my father.”

“But you don’t know that, Jack. Maybe it has to do with drugs, or with an affair she was having behind Perrone’s back. Listen, as a detective, we’re really a lot like archeologists. They go on a dig, and then they sift through sand, looking for tiny bone fragments—”

“You watch too much of the Discovery Channel.”

“You have ADD. Let me finish. As detectives, we do the same thing. We sift through pieces of a person’s life. What they’ve left behind. And eventually, we find the fragments we need to figure it all out. Crystal left behind all the clues we’ll need. What am I saying? All the clues I’ll need. You keep out of it.”

Near dawn, just as the sun was rising, I kissed Rob goodbye, promising to talk to him later, and packed a suitcase, also grabbing Crystal’s things, which I had hidden from the police. After making sure Crystal’s Ferrari was still safe in the garage, and then setting the alarm for the house, I got in my car to drive to the ranch. My car is an old—I prefer “classic”—Cadillac my father had gotten for free when he and Uncle Deacon did their commercials. It was still in beautiful condition, and she was my most prized possession.

I was beyond exhausted as I headed out the highway to the ranch. Few cars were on the road, and I turned on the radio. Crystal’s death was the lead story, in the true fashion of news—if it bleeds it leads. I turned off the radio, not wanting to hear it. I tried to remember the first time I met Crystal. She was the ring card girl, the woman in a bikini who walked around the boxing ring, holding a big placard pronouncing what round it was. She and I hit it off, and we became fast friends.

I looked in my rearview mirror and squinted. A shiny black car with no front license plate was a respectable distance back from me, but if I switched lanes, it switched lanes. If I sped up, it sped up.

“Christ,” I muttered. I thought I should ignore it, but I didn’t want whoever it was to follow me all the way to the ranch. If I suddenly sped up, they’d know I’d spotted them. I decided I didn’t care. I’d give them a run for their money.

Years before, my father’s Cadillac had needed a new transmission. My father got some great idea that he’d soup up the engine a bit, too, at the same time it was at the mechanic’s. So I knew my car would hold up on open road. I floored it, watching the speedometer hit 120. Luckily for me, I think the national speed limit should be about 90, anyway, and I was used to letting her fly. I headed down the flat expanse of highway, looking in my rearview mirror to see what the black car would do.

Sure enough, it was gaining on me, riding dangerously close to my bumper. Just like the evil scum who had killed Crystal and tried to take Destiny, the two guys inside looked massive and mean. They wore dark sunglasses. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were federal agents. But I did know better. They worked for either Perrone or Bonita, and my money was riding on Perrone.

I gunned the car harder, taking it to speed limits not even registering on the speedometer. I prayed the desert highways would stay empty and that I wouldn’t get into an accident. At that speed, my adrenaline was causing my heart to race. I was tired, very tired, and I needed to stay on top of my game to get away from these two creeps. They nudged still closer, and taking a chance, I drove a little faster, and then spun my wheel. With a screech, I left the highway and drove into the desert, doing a tight 180-degree turn, the steering wheel fighting against me all the way on the shifting sand and pebbles, and then I drove back on the highway again.

They were still with me. I spotted a cactus up ahead. One of those big, tall Joshua trees, right out of an old Western movie set. I aimed straight toward it, as if I was playing a massive game of chicken with a twenty-foot-tall cactus. The guys in back of me followed right behind. As I left the road again, my tires spun, then I lifted my hands, as if I’d panicked, and let the car fishtail a bit. I let them think I was going to plow right into the cactus—an out-of-control female driver. But at the last minute, I grabbed the wheel and took a sharp left. Then I screamed with delight as I watched them smash their black BMW into the cactus, exploding the air bags and wrecking their car.

“Sayonara, boys,” I sang, then drove steadily down the road to the ranch, the sign over the long, sandy drive proclaiming Rooney Training Camp.

Chapter 3

The first time I met Terry Keenan, I was punching a heavy bag in my uncle Deacon’s gym—which was technically half my father’s, though we’d transferred the title to me to avoid anyone trying to come after it to pay legal bills.

“I’m looking for Jack Rooney,” he had said, surveying the gym full of fighters. The scent of stale gym socks and sweat permeated the air. I’d grown up in the stench of windowless gyms, and I was used to it after all this time.

I stopped punching the bag and turned to face him, out of breath, my arms aching slightly. I clumsily pulled the mouth guard out from between my teeth. “You’re…looking…at her. My name’s Jacqueline, but everyone calls me Jack.”

Keenan’s blue eyes narrowed. “Son of a bitch! No one told me you were a girl.”

“Woman,” I corrected him, less winded. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone set up a fighter like that as a joke. Miguel Jimenez came looking for a guy, too.”

“Well, I sure as hell am not training with a woman,” Keenan seethed. He stood about six foot two and was in superb shape, from what I could tell as he crossed his arms across his chest, his T-shirt sleeves bulging at the biceps.

“Suit yourself,” I snapped, and turned back to what I was doing, punching the bag more forcefully. As he walked away, I muttered under my breath, “Fine, asshole, don’t train here, then. You and that pretty face of yours will soon regret it.”

And regret it he did. Terry Keenan was back three months later, his beautiful face—big blue eyes, two dimples, a solid chin and a smattering of boyish freckles across his nose—now just a tad less beautiful since his nose had gotten broken, twice.

And that was how Terry Keenan came to train with me and Uncle Deacon, and now we were poised for the biggest fight of all our lives—the heavyweight championship of the world in four weeks.

“Get off the ropes!” I screamed at Terry. I looked at my uncle. “Can you see what happens when he gets backed up against the ropes like that?”

Deacon and I were standing on the ground, looking into our boxing ring, where our best chance at a title was sparring with a fighter by the name of Rock Morrison. Deacon had his arms folded, his face stony as he studied our two boxers. Deacon wasn’t a screamer. I was. I would yell from the corner or scream “fake left,” “jab right” or even a desperate “just fucking hit him!” Deacon, as befitted his nickname, which implied a near-biblical wisdom in the ring, studied fighters and videos of matches, and taped sparring sessions, poring over them time and time again until it became clear what our boxer was doing wrong. Then he made a pronouncement, like Moses coming down off the mount with two tablets of stone.

“All right, guys,” I shouted at the fighters. “Break it up. Catch your breath.”

Deacon finally spoke. “Son…” He motioned to Terry Keenan, wanting him to come closer to the ropes.

“Mmph,” our fighter responded, his mouth guard still in place. He walked to us and leaned over the ropes, sweat dripping down his face.

“The good Lord gave you two legs, Terry. Both of them work just fine. But you’re always relying on just one. Change up your footwork.” End of pronouncement. Deacon was done for the afternoon.

“Terry, you heard him,” I said. “Work out with the jump rope and then shower up. We’ll look over some tapes tonight before dinner.”

Terry nodded at me. That pretty face was unusual for a boxer, and his upcoming opponent, Gentleman Jake Johnson—whose face was decidedly less pretty—had offered to permanently make Terry’s face ugly in all the prefight trash talking. Now Deacon and I both, privately, wondered if Keenan had also gotten another kind of offer—to take a dive. Benny Bonita couldn’t be trusted, and though we believed in Terry, he had an enormous family. His seven brothers—and one sister—all seemed to think Terry was the ticket to the big time. We wondered if that meant that an even bigger paycheck, courtesy of a bribe from Bonita, was awfully enticing.

Deacon and I headed out of the gym and over to the ranch house, walking over sand and passing small cacti and scrubby-looking bushes. The ranch house was a rambling building with ten bedrooms. It had been a brothel once, and after that, it had been an actual ranch of some sort. I think the former owner had gone from hustling hookers to rustling ostriches.

I opened the front door and went into the large den, where Destiny sat watching a show with a bright purple dinosaur.

“Hi, Destiny,” I said, sitting next to her and reaching out to brush a stray hair from her face.

“Hi, Auntie Jack.”

“How are you doing, kiddo?” Dumb question. How was she supposed to be doing? Her mother was dead, and she was stuck with me and Deacon at a boxing camp while we figured out what to do.

“Okay. Uncle Deacon says Mommy went up to heaven.” She said it very matter-of-fact. Deacon said children didn’t grasp the permanence of death until ten or eleven.

“Yeah…Mommy is in heaven, sweetie pie, which is really sad. But you know what?”

“What?”

“You get to have a guardian angel. Honey, she is going to watch over you.”

Destiny leaned into me, burying her face near my belly. I’d never spent much time with kids. In fact, though I felt badly for her, inside I was realizing the enormity of hiding her. I expected at any moment a phalanx of cops and FBI agents to come swooping down to grab her—and I would get a nice cell to match my father’s.

“Destiny, honey…do you miss Tony?”

“Uncle Tony? Kinda. Did he go up to heaven, too?”

“No.” Though I suppose to some people, Vegas is kind of like heaven. “He’s back at your house.”

“Did you know I have a pet tiger at our house? I couldn’t pet him, but Uncle Tony let me name him.”

“What’d you name him?”

“Tigger.”

“Cute.”

“He’s huge. As big as one in the jungle. Uncle Tony told me he could eat me in one big gulp.”

“Probably could. Did you spend a lot of time with Uncle Tony?”

She shrugged her tiny shoulders and shook her head. “Uh-uh. He was always very busy, Mommy said. I wasn’t s’posed to bother him. But sometimes the three of us did stuff together. Or Mommy would take me to his work to visit him.”

“Did you like visiting him at work?”

“Kinda. I drew pictures on paper in his office, and then the three of us would go out for dinner.”

“What’s your favorite dinner?”

“Chicken nuggets.”

“I think I know how to make them,” I said without enthusiasm. “But Big Jimmy does the cooking out here. I’ll ask him if he can make you some.”

“Big Jimmy and I made cookies.”

“Really?” I knew he was a softie.

“Uh-huh. He used to be Mommy’s boyfriend. She always talked about him.”

“She talked about him? I didn’t know that.” I thought about how Crystal left Big Jimmy. She wanted the lights of Vegas to shine on her, and Big Jimmy wasn’t part of that scene. If she hadn’t left Big Jimmy, she’d be alive and holding Destiny instead of me.

The phone rang. I leaned over to the end table and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Jack, it’s me.”

“Hi, Rob.”

“Listen…Babe, what I’m hearing…the syringe…it had a fingerprint on it. Not Crystal’s.”

“How long can I keep hiding you know what?” I looked down at Destiny.

“I’m not sure. Not long. But for now, keep that kid safe, while I figure it out.”

I stroked Destiny’s cheek. “Like I said, you’d have to kill me first, Rob.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”