Chapter 19: The Cold Room

Cal's POV

Eight Gyms Night was one day away.

At two in the afternoon I stood at the loading dock of the Delaware Avenue bottling plant, holding a clipboard.

The doorman looked at the clipboard, and then at me.

"You're number eight," he said. "From the spring."

"I used to be."

"You cut my eyebrow shut in the dressing room two years ago. I never paid you."

"I remember."

"What do you want, Marek?"

"I want to deliver the water."

He stared at me for a while. He was a big man, and he had never been quick.

"I'll give you two hundred dollars to let me wear your jacket," I said. "And ten minutes with the crates."

"Stahl will have my head."

"Stahl will never see yours. He'll see mine, and he'll think I'm you."

"You're a lot uglier than me."

"I know. That's what the clipboard is for."

He took the two hundred.

He gave me the jacket, which was too small across the shoulders, and the key to the freight lift.

I rode it down, in its cage, in four slow groans.

I had never been inside the Cellar with the lights on.

It was smaller than I remembered.

The ring was bare canvas under a bank of work lamps, and the folding chairs stood stacked against the brick.

The whole place smelled of old beer and wet concrete.

Four iron flights ran up the far wall to the street.

I stood at the bottom and looked up them.

Tomorrow she would come down them with her face bare, and eight hundred people would see it.