Page 71 of Ghost’s Awakening

"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.

"Fight me again." I gave it to the mat between us with my lips barely moving. "Get me to the middle. Under the mic. When I kick you in the stomach, go down. Hands and knees. I need a step."

"A step." His eyes went narrow over his fingers. "You want me to be a step."

"I want you to be a step."

"You're out of your fucking mind." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, under the hand. "Okay."

I'd planned on watching him take that in. Chew it. Argue with it. He didn't. Whatever he had left, he put into a low roundhouse from the crouch, his right shin whipping around at my head, and I stood up out of it, and the shin passed under my hip. I gave ground. Three steps back, a man buying room, and every step of it was for the seats.

Good. Good, Renzo. Get me to the middle. Put me under it.

"You motherfucker!" He came up off the ropes screaming it, raw, his hands up and coming, and blood flew off his mouth on every word. "I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you!!"

I hoped to God he was acting. His face said he wasn't, and the crowd believed every word. The sour went out of the room in a breath, and the roar came back, bigger for having been gone, three hundred people watching the Saint come off the ropes with his face in pieces and go after the man who'd done it. Money came back out of pockets.

"THE SAINT'S NOT DONE!" The horns cracked with it. "He is NOT done, ladies and gentlemen!"

"Come here!" Renzo, through the blood, following me with his hands. "Come HERE!"

He drove me backward across the ring. That was the picture from the seats, the Saint pushing Monk, and I let him have it. I blocked and slipped, giving ground a step at a time, angling as I went, and I didn't look up. I couldn't. One glance at that cable and every eye in the building would follow mine, and the pair that mattered most was up behind the tinted panel, waiting for me to give the mic away with one look.

So I counted my distance off the ropes instead. Ten feet to the far rope. Eight. The middle of that ring was a dark stain the bleach had never gotten out, and I could have found it blind.

Then he threw the hook. High. A foot too high, a mistake so plain that from an arm's length away it read as what it was, a door held open on purpose, and I ducked under it, turned my hips over, and put my right shin into the middle of his body.

It landed square in his stomach. The shin sank in and stopped against the hard wall of muscle underneath, and his breath left him against my thigh in one warm burst. He folded around my leg.

He groaned, and it was real, because that had been a real kick. And he went down, the way I'd asked him to. Knees to the mat, then both palms flat, head hanging, a man on all fours in the center of the ring, and the crowd went up like I'd dropped him through the floor. They wanted the end of it. Now.