Knockout

“Is she still talking about having a baby with him?”

“Yup. I’m sure it’s a ploy to get at his multimillion-dollar take for this fight.”

“He needs to dump her. He’s too smart for that.”

“Let’s hope so.” Both my father, who was a boxing legend himself, and Deacon had watched too many of the guys they trained fall in with, as Deacon called them, “fast women and phony friends.” We all thought it was pathetic when people like Mike Tyson ended up declaring bankruptcy. Entourages, flashy clothes and cars. They bought into the life, and it ended up leaving them destitute with only fleeting memories of the good life.

“Want to talk to Deacon?”

“No, that’s okay. Tell him that Keenan needs to stop leading with his left every time he’s going to throw an uppercut.”

“Okay.”

“Listen, there’s a line of guys here waitin’ for the phone. Bye, Jack.”

“Bye, Dad. I love you. See you next visiting day.”

“Love you, too.”

He hung up, and I felt my spirits sink. My father was framed. Sure, everyone says that whole “I’m really innocent” routine, but in my father’s case, it’s true. We even know who did it: Benny Bonita. Which was why, more than anything, we wanted Terry Keenan to win and decimate his opponent Gentleman Jake Johnson. We may not have been able to prove my father was not trying to extort Benny Bonita—it was the other way around—but we could plaster his fighter’s face on the canvas and prove, once and for all, that the Rooney brothers—and one Jackie Rooney—were the best trainers and managers in the world. Even from prison my father was a better trainer, a better man, than the oily Bonita.

Later that night, Miguel Jimenez’s face had the consistency of raw beef. He sat, shoulders slumped, in the locker room of the arena.

“What happened, Miguel? Look at you. You have bruises on top of bruises. You look like the friggin’ elephant man!” I snarled.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He wouldn’t look at me, his dark black eyes darting away from mine.

“Oh, you’re gonna talk about it. Something happened in that ring.”

My uncle Deacon said, “Leave him alone. The kid feels bad enough he got knocked out without your big ol’ mouth rubbing it in, Jacqueline Marie.”

When my uncle uses my given name—instead of calling me Jack like the rest of the world—I know he means business.

“Fine. Just go shower, Miguel.”

I shook my head and stormed out of the locker room. Deacon followed me.

“Jack, Miguel’s just a kid from the barrio. He got an attack of nerves. He had an off night.”

I wheeled around in the hallway outside the locker room. “That was no off night, Deacon. It was a dive. He took a goddamn dive!”

Deacon stared me down. Suddenly, I saw a flash of recognition go through him; his eyes changed almost imperceptibly. He shook his head. “My God…I…Lord, I think you might be right.”

“And I know who’s behind it.”

“Bonita?”

“Has to be. You know, Crystal keeps going on and on about Tony Perrone and Bonita joining forces to take over our fighters, and she says they have something on Terry Keenan. They want him to go down in round five. She said she heard them. She’s got this whole conspiracy thing going on.”

“Yeah, but she thinks she was alien-abducted during puberty.”

“I know. But she says she heard them.”

“Why would Perrone mess with Bonita? I mean, sure, allow the fights to be held at the Majestic, but get involved? Get his hands dirty?”

“I don’t know.” I suddenly doubted the whole thing. “Maybe Miguel did just have an off night.”

“Let’s just go home and think about all this before we go confronting Keenan—or Miguel.”

“All right. I feel sick to my stomach, anyway. What a lousy night.”

The two of us had ridden to the Las Vegas Metro-dome arena in Deacon’s Mercedes. We drove out of the city of Las Vegas toward our home. I planned to try to get Crystal to think harder about exactly what she’d heard happening in Tony Perrone’s office.

As we drove into our gated community, the houses sparkled with their outdoor lights twinkling beneath the Nevada sky. Deacon had taken his boxing earnings and endorsement deals he and my father did—a series of commercials for razors, and a popular one for Cadillac—and invested it all in Vegas real estate before the big boom hit. He had enough to live on in style for the rest of his life.

My uncle and father pretty much raised me together. Deacon never married nor had children, so it seemed as if I was his just as much as my dad’s, the way he doted on me. He never fell for fast women and phony friends.

My father, on the other hand, had no phony friends but loved cheap women. He was saddled with me as a full-time father when my mother, whom he married in a Vegas quickie wedding, decided to divorce him equally quickly after I was born, leaving me behind, and moving to Hollywood with a B-movie producer she met while cocktail waitressing. I don’t remember her, and frankly, I never missed having a mother, except when it was time to buy my first bra. Deacon and my father stood in the department store arguing over whether I should get the sexy black one (my choice—I wanted a boyfriend), plain white cotton one (Deacon’s choice) or the sports bra (Dad’s choice).

“Deacon, maybe we should have Big Jimmy around for Crystal. Just in case all this stuff she’s saying is true.”

Deacon nodded. I could tell he was still thinking about Miguel.

Big Jimmy was our cornerman and a former motorcycle club member. He was also Crystal’s last boyfriend before Tony Perrone. He still loved her, I think.

As we pulled into our driveway, Deacon said, “I forgot to turn on the outside lights.”

“Light’s on upstairs,” I said, nodding at my bedroom window.

Deacon parked the car, and we got out and walked up to the front door.

“Christ,” I whispered. “It’s open a little.”

An uneasy feeling settled over me, and I looked at Deacon. Then we cautiously stepped inside. Two goons stood in the foyer, holding Destiny, who was kicking and clawing like a feral cat.

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.