He Fixed My Fight, So the Champion Vanished novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: No Questions

Cal sets her terms and she starts fixing the gym's books. A man with her photo walks in and Cal lies to him.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I know the rule. I'll pay for the wall."

"I didn't ask about the wall."

Cal came down the stairs and stood on the other side of the bag.

He put one hand flat against it to stop the swing.

"Who taught you to wrap like that?"

"An old man."

"And the jab?"

"The same old man."

"He's the one who told you to drop your left hand after you throw it?"

"No. That one's mine."

He almost smiled, and then he did not.

"You're running from something," he said.

I said nothing.

"I'm not going to ask what. I don't need to know." He took his hand off the bag. "But I'm not going to pretend I didn't see you."

"Are you firing me?"

"It's your second day."

"Then I'm asking."

He thought about it, and I could see him thinking about it.

"Here's what I'll do," he said. "You don't ask me questions and I don't ask you questions. Nobody here needs your real name. And you don't spar with anyone, not Bea, not the boys, not me. Not until I say."

"And the bag?"

"The bag is for after hours, with the lights off, and with me in the building."

"Why?"

"That's a question."

"It's a small one."

"Because I'd like to hear you hit it," Cal said, and he turned and went up the stairs. "Go to bed, Callie."

I went to bed.

I did not sleep, because I was listening to him go up and down the stairs for another hour.

In the morning Bea found me sitting at the front desk in front of a shoebox.

"What is that?"

"Receipts."

"Where did you get that?"

"It was on Cal's desk, under a pizza box. He said, and I quote, 'Do whatever you want with it.'"

She pulled a stool over.

"That's three years of taxes in a shoebox. He hates paper. He hired a bookkeeper once and she quit in a week."

"What happened?"

"He yelled at her about a stapler."

I laughed.

It was the first time I had laughed since Philadelphia, and I felt it in my ribs.

By ten I had sorted the shoebox into piles by month.

By noon I had found that the gym owed an electric bill from May, an insurance premium from June, and a fine for a fire extinguisher that had never been inspected.

I told Cal at the front desk, with the list in my hand.

He read it twice.

"That's all of it?"

"That's what's in the shoebox. I'd bet there's more."

"You'd bet." He folded the paper once. "You're good at this."

"I told you I've worked a lot of desks."

"Not like that, you haven't."

Bea leaned across the counter with her chin in her hands.

"Cal likes you," she said in a stage whisper. "He told me yesterday you had good wrists."

"I said she wrapped them well," Cal said.

"He said wrists."

"Bea, bag."

"I'm just saying. In three years I've never seen him look at anyone's wrists."

I felt my face go warm.

I looked down at the shoebox, and when I looked up again he had his back to me and the back of his neck was red.

That was when the glass door opened.

A man in a tan coat came in, shaking rain off his shoulders.

He was in his fifties, heavyset, with a clipboard and a polite face.

"Morning. I'm sorry to bother you. I'm trying to find a young woman."

He took a photograph out of the coat.

It was me.

Rae Keller, in a robe, with a belt over my shoulder, smiling at someone off the edge of the frame.

The someone had been Vince.

"She's missing. She's a boxer, a champion. There's a reward of fifty thousand dollars from her fiancé." He held out a card. "I'm an investigator, working with Sorrell Promotions."

Nobody at the desk spoke.

Cal took the card.

He read the name printed across the top, and I watched his jaw go hard.

Then he turned the photograph over, and turned it back, and looked at the picture for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

I held on to the edge of the desk.

Bea had stopped talking, which in two days I had never seen her do.

"Never seen her," Cal said.

The investigator waited.

"You're sure?"

"I know every fighter who walks up those stairs," Cal said. "That woman hasn't. And you can tell Sorrell I said so."

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