Knockout

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“You know you can’t hide her forever, right?”

I nodded. “I keep expecting to see my face and an Amber Alert up on the television. What gives? Why hasn’t Perrone pressured the cops to find Destiny?”

“I don’t know. In fact, they’ve pretty much pulled me off the case. They have me working that murder over on the Strip. Because Crystal was Perrone’s fiancée, and because Perrone is one of the top two hundred wealthiest men in the world, and because the chief is a friend of Perrone’s from way back, this has a hands-off atmosphere about it. I was told to forget the angle she was murdered.”

“What about the fingerprint?”

“They’re going with it belonged to her dealer, that this is like some John Belushi case of a dealer shooting someone up and it just being too much and she died. Perrone is saying she had a drug problem. He even produced a letter from some doctor friend of his saying he treated her privately for drug abuse.”

“But her arms were clear. You saw them.”

“I didn’t say this doesn’t stink to high heaven like a bad fish, Jack. I’m just saying what the party line is.”

“And Destiny?”

“Perrone’s saying he wants her found privately. He says he knows where she is and it’s a family matter until he says otherwise.”

“And you?” I turned to look into his eyes, amazed in the sunlight at how clear and gray they were.

He clenched his jaw and glanced away. “She was your friend. I’m going to get to the bottom of it. But that doesn’t mean I want you snooping around.”

“Well, you better get to the bottom of it quickly because I’m not going to park myself out here like a sitting duck. Did you know Benny Bonita paid us a visit last night with a few of his posse?”

“What’d that asshole want?”

“Something that Crystal ‘took’ from him.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did you check her suitcases?”

I looked at him. “That must be why you’re the detective and I try to get men to punch each other’s lights out for a living. Come on.”

I jogged toward the house, and Rob tagged along behind me. Quietly, we let ourselves into the house and moved down the hall to the office. I didn’t want Destiny to see us going through her mother’s belongings. Deacon had hidden her luggage in a locked closet. All of them were Louis Vuitton suitcases that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.

On top of the first suitcase was a huge makeup bag. I started with that, going through each cosmetic—and there were a lot of them. I opened each compact, each jar of wrinkle cream, each tube of cleanser, everything. I smelled each one, thinking maybe they concealed drugs. All the cosmetics and skin products were from La Prairie—one of the most expensive cosmetic companies in the world. But nothing else.

“Damn!” I looked at Rob.

“Keep searching.”

We went through suitcase after suitcase, each piece of clothing.

“Feel along the hems,” Rob told me. “In case she sewed something into the lining of a skirt or a pair of pants.”

“Like what?”

“Like a safety deposit box key or the key to a locker. I don’t think she’d really be so dumb as to have whatever it is on her.”

After an hour of careful fingering of her clothes, we came up with nothing. Now that the suitcases were empty, Rob and I began moving our hands along the seams, feeling the bottoms, looking for any indication there was a secret hiding spot.

“Nothing,” I said disgustedly. I looked around at the floor where all her flashy-trashy Vegas clothes lay—sequins and tight low-ride jeans, stiletto Jimmy Choos. Suddenly, I felt tears overtaking my eyes. “This is all that’s left of a life, Rob. This and Destiny.”

He reached out to rub my shoulders. “Baby, she touched a lot of lives. And that’s always going to be with you and Deacon and Big Jimmy.”

“Yeah.” I wiped at my face. “And when I find out who killed her, his life isn’t going to be worth shit.”

“Jack…” Rob’s voice was warning and measured.

“Like you said. This whole thing stinks like rotten fish. And I’m not going to let her die without a word, just swept under Tony Perrone’s carpet.”

“Did I ever tell you that you scare me sometimes?”

“You tell me that all the time.”

“Yeah, but this time, Jack, I really mean it.”

Chapter 6

Rob left in the afternoon, with a passionate kiss and a promise to continue looking into Crystal’s death. I took Destiny and went over to the gym to see how training was going.

We had two full-size boxing rings out in an enormous barn. Jimenez was in one, and Keenan was in another. They were sparring with two up-and-coming boxers—one a kid from the barrio in L.A. and the other a refugee from Kosovo whose real name was unpronounceable to most of the guys, so they called him Sovo.

Big Jimmy came over to Destiny and me and picked her up. In his arms, she looked even tinier.

“Now, don’t you get scared, Destiny. They’re pretend fighting,” he soothed.

“It looks like they’re really fighting.”

Gazing into the ring, I knew she was right. Sparring has a lot of heavy breathing, spitting, snorting, and the sounds of glove smacking flesh and boxing shoes shuffling on canvas, same as a real fight.

“Well, Destiny,” I said. “It may look real, but in sparring, they’re practicing for a real fight, and so they don’t try to hurt each other quite so much. Sometimes someone has a lucky shot, of course. But mostly they’re just practicing.”

“Why do people fight?”

“Fight? Well, this is boxing. And it’s a sport. Just two guys, two athletes, highly trained, in a ring, seeing who can outbox the other. And sometimes the two boxers don’t like each other, but it’s not like a real fight. I mean, there are rules and judges and even doctors standing by to stop the fight if it looks like someone’s really gotten hurt.”

I watched her as she stared at the men in the two rings. Every once in a while, she winced. I’d grown up in gyms. I can’t recall if I ever winced, though Deacon told stories of how, when my father and he used to fight, the other brother would take me along to the match, and I would cover my eyes if they started losing. But eventually, Deacon said, I stopped covering my eyes and started yelling at the judges if they scored the fight incorrectly—or at least in a way I didn’t agree with.

Big Jimmy patted her back. He was one-quarter Cherokee, and the size of a tank. His hair was jet black, almost blue, and his face, considering how many fights he’d been in, was regal with wide slashes of cheekbones and a straight—for a boxer—nose. Big Jimmy was a motorcycle-club member years before, a real hell-raiser. He drank too much, and my father told me he sold crystal meth and was just bad news. He’d been arrested for something, and he had to do some community service to get his record expunged. So he took a job helping out at my father’s and Deacon’s summer camp, working with under-privileged kids. From that experience, he got in the ring and began channeling his anger and energies into fights. He did pretty well, too, until he tore his rotator cuff. That’s when they offered to make him their cornerman. He had great instincts in the ring. And he was the best cornerman in the business.

He became part of our inner circle. And then, when we all met Crystal that night she was a ring card girl, he was a goner. He really loved her. He brought her flowers, he held open doors, and she told me that in the bedroom, he rocked her world. But no one ever gets wealthy being a cornerman. Hell, not many people get wealthy training fighters. It was my uncle Deacon’s investments that fed his lifestyle. Of course, now that Terry had a real title shot, we all stood to make some serious money.

I concentrated on Terry for a while, yelling instructions from ringside. “Dance more. You’re planting your feet too much. Stop dropping that left shoulder and telegraphing your left hook…jab…jab…work on the body, tire him out.”

Destiny and Big Jimmy came over to ringside, too.

“What are you telling them?” she asked.

“You ever study spelling words or anything in school?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, you study words to learn how to spell. I study boxing films to make Terry a better boxer.”

“What do you mean? Like you go to the movies?”

“Kind of. Now, the best boxer who ever lived, probably, was Muhammad Ali. Graziano, now he had a punch that could knock a man from here to Kansas. But Ali was the whole package—footwork, strong punch, tireless, and with so much charisma, honey, he could light up a room. And do you know what he called himself? What his nickname was?”

“No.”

“The Greatest. As in the greatest fighter…ever.”

“Wow!”

“Right. So back in the den, we have hundreds of videos of fights and matches, of the most brutal, most grueling fights, of the fights that were over in twenty-seven seconds…”

“Twenty-seven seconds?”

“Yeah. There was a time when Iron Mike Tyson had the world fooled that he was invincible. And he took down everybody with these shots that just—boom—brought them down quickly. So we study him. We study all of them. And then we have to figure out what Terry and Miguel are doing wrong and what they’re doing right. And we build on that.”

“I don’t think I’d want to be a boxer. It would hurt.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes it does hurt.”

I looked at her and memories flooded back of the first time I saw my father badly beaten.

“Hey, Princess,” he whispered, his voice barely a rasp. He was in a hospital bed, and Uncle Deacon used his status as reigning champ to bend the hospital rules so that I could go to my father’s bedside. I was seven years old.

“Oh, Daddy.” I rushed over to him and flung my head on his belly and hugged him. He winced.

“You probably shouldn’t hug Daddy right now,” Deacon said, coming over to me and patting my back.

I lifted my head and took a small step backward, tears blurring my vision. “You look terrible, Daddy.” His head was bandaged where he had sustained a deep gash over his left eye. He had a concussion. His face was swollen and bruised. It almost wasn’t recognizable as a human face in spots. Oxygen tubes were inserted in his nose, and he had two different IV lines flowing into his veins.