Unleashed (5 page)
A sentry car.
It belonged to the neighborhood security force of hired wannabe cops.
I got out of the Mustang. I stretched with pretended casualness. It was definitely pretended. I had to get rid of this guy quickly.
I wandered to the driver’s side of his vehicle, a Ford Fusion with a decal of a shield on the side.
“Freddy,” I said to the driver. “Glad to be off the night shift?”
He was balding and middle-aged.
“Darn straight,” he said. “You doing okay?”
“Great,” I said. “Sorry that I didn’t register the Mustang with the checklist at the gate. It’s just a rental. I’m here to pick something up, so I sent my friend inside in case you showed up wondering who was here. And sure enough, it took you less than a minute. Good work.”
“Gave me something to do,” he said.
What it did, I knew, was take him away from watching classic-football-game reruns in the guard shack down by the golf course.
I felt the seconds ticking by. If Raven came back out, she’d freak. And I’d have some explaining to do.
“Well,” I said, “now you know the Mustang belongs here, we’re cool, right? I guess I’ll head inside and join my friend.”
Freddy saluted me and put the vehicle in reverse. He eased out of the driveway and then headed back to his reruns. There was nothing to concern him. I was parked in front of my own house. I’d gone through this all for Raven’s benefit.
Thirty seconds later, Raven made it back outside, carrying the backpack.
“All good?” I said.
“Switch made,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here. That was so easy it’s making me nervous.”
How you want to wake up is drowsy, in clean, comfortable sheets, with stripes of sunlight on your face from the slats of the blinds on a bedroom window. Not to the punched-in-the-brain jolt of ammonium carbonate crystals mixed with water.
Yeah. Smelling salts. In boxing, that jolt is a powerful clue that in the previous sixty seconds or so, you made an error of such proportions that someone rang your bell like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Some athletes—like hockey players—use the salts specifically to get that whoosh of clarity at exhaustion points in a game. It’s a sensation slightly less violent
than a slap in the face and gives an adrenaline rush of clarity and focus.
Me? I’d prefer the slap in the face. The sting of ammonia gas up the nostrils is about as pleasant as vomiting. It triggers an inhalation reflex that snaps you back into the present world and makes your entire nervous system surge with activity.
It also brings your eyes back into focus. Which meant that following an indeterminate period of unconsciousness after taking a hard downward punch across the top of my right cheekbone, I had the questionable pleasure of seeing Billy’s face right above mine as he leaned over my body in concern.
“Hey, stupid,” he said. “Welcome back.”
Billy’s face would never get lost in a crowd. He was bald and fifty. Or maybe bald and seventy. It was a prematurely old face with the clichéd pug nose of a boxer who had cycled a half dozen times through broken, healed and rebroken.
“Hello, beautiful,” I said. “Give me a kiss.”
“Aack.” He pushed away from me, giving me space to sit.
I could replay it now. Ducking and weaving, effortlessly slipping beneath and around the heavy punches of my sparring partner, someone six inches taller, forty pounds heavier and a jar of molasses slower than me.
What had happened was I’d noticed a guy outside the ring, at the speed bag, wearing white Converse leather shoes. A guy in a shiny blue tracksuit, maybe mid-twenties, reddish hair. I’d realized—too late—that my sparring partner was throwing in a big slow bomb of a punch that even a granny in a walker could avoid. And I’d gone down hard.
Hence the smelling salts and Billy’s concern.
Brutus, my sparring partner, was grinning at me with the blackened teeth of someone still wearing his mouthguard.
Mine was gone. Billy, of course, would have reached in and popped it out as he checked to make sure my tongue hadn’t fallen back into my throat.
Some trainers wore rubber surgeon’s gloves before touching saliva. Not old-school Billy.
“Next time, dude,” I told Brutus.
He laughed and punched his hands together in anticipation, the smack of his massive boxing gloves echoing in the ring.
I waved him away, signaling that I was done. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back into the ring and continue sparring with Brutus, but that I wanted to track down the red-haired Converse-shoe guy. What were the odds that two pairs of white leather shoes like that had the same scratch across the toe?
Billy followed me to a quiet corner of the gym.
“Never thought in a million years that guy could tag you,” Billy said. It wasn’t meant to bolster my spirits. Billy wasn’t
that type of fake motivator. He called it as he saw it. “You sure you’re ready for Saturday’s fight?”
“I’m ready,” I said. “Trust me—it was a freak thing.”
He nodded. “Okay then. Why not? It’s been a freak week.”
“You mean the break-in,” I said. “And you’re sure nothing was taken?”
I was glad my hands were taped up to hide the barely healing blisters. I’d lied to Billy about the night with the curling irons. I’d told him I’d locked up and was gone before the cops showed up. If I hadn’t lied, there would have been the obvious questions, like,
Why would someone want to torture you with curling irons duct-taped to your hands?
Just as dangerous, however, would have been questions about my identity. To Billy, I was Jace Sanders, a kid from an inner-city high school, trying to rise above a bad family life. To the cops, however,
it would have taken about three minutes to figure out that Jace Sanders didn’t exist and that my driver’s license said
Jace Wyatt
. Then Billy would have found out that I lived behind the high stone walls of the exclusively rich, pretending that every punch I threw was a punch directly into my father’s face.
So yes, I felt bad about the ongoing lie. I wouldn’t pretend it was justified, because a lie is a lie. But I wouldn’t apologize for it either. That was part of living a double life.
“Nothing stolen,” he confirmed. “That’s part of what makes it freaky. And if it wasn’t weird enough already, why would they vandalize the locker room and break a water pipe? To add to the freakiness, out of nowhere, the plumbers tell me that somebody covered the bill. Go figure.”
“Go figure,” I said. The repairs had cost nearly a grand. I knew that kind of
money would hurt Billy. And, sadly, it was mere pocket change from my other life.
“Hey,” I said. “Looked like someone new in the gym. Red-haired guy, blue tracksuit. He any good?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Billy said. “He’s looking for a sparring partner. Tell me when you’re ready to step into the ring with him.”
Billy snorted again. “And that’s another weird thing. He’s the same guy who complained his shoes were gone when he came in the morning after the break-in. Said maybe he’d have to put a lock on his locker if this was the kind of place I ran. But lo and behold, I walk once around the gym and find the shoes tossed into a corner by the heavy bag. Explain
that
.”
So Tracksuit Guy was just another gym rat. Whoever had tortured me had borrowed Tracksuit Guy’s shoes. Which meant I was no closer to knowing who
had been on the other side of the door, dropping notes by fishing line.
When I looked at Billy, I spoke the truth.
“Explain it, Billy?” I said. “I wish I could.”
“The way it’s going to work,” Raven said to me later that night, “is that when I reach the window, I’ll drop some rope from my backpack. You attach it to your climbing belt. Once I’ve secured the top end, I’ll give two sharp tugs. That’s when you start jugging.”
“Jugging?”
“Climbing the wall. For an athlete like you, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
It was just after midnight. She and I stood with Jo in the shadows of some bushes at the hospital building where my father worked. Three stories above us was a window to the office of the
chief of staff, Dr. Evans. I’d made sure to unlatch the window earlier that day. Because I was the son of the world-famous neurosurgeon Dr. Winchester Wyatt, most of the staff and other physicians were accustomed to seeing me in the hallway near his office. Opening the latch had not been a problem.
But climbing the wall? That was definitely a problem.
“Last we discussed this, you were going solo,” I said.
“Change of plans,” Raven said. “Jo is here to stand guard, so that means you can climb and bring down the risk factor for me. If I go up alone, all you’re risking is whether you can outrun a cop or security guard while I’m stuck on the wall. With you on the wall with me and we get caught, all we need to do is ditch the painting and pretend it was some kind of urban-climbing stunt dare. Your father is the big cheese around here. At worst, we get a slap on
the wrist and a kids-will-be-kids kind of lecture.”
There was a lot of truth in what she said. I could probably burn down part of the hospital and not even have to stand in front of a judge. But not because of my father. Given the scorn in her voice about my father’s big-cheese status, I was glad Raven didn’t know that my mother had been Margaret Croft before becoming Mrs. Margaret Wyatt. Because then Raven might have put together the fact that the Croft name on this hospital wing came from my mother’s family, just like most of the wealth that was drowning me slowly. Neurosurgeons made decent money, but it took third-generation forest- and-mining wealth to possess Bentleys and Lamborghinis and private jets and mansions scattered around the world. My father had married wisely, trading his status as an up-and-coming surgeon with a handsome face and charming smile for the gilded cage that he craved.
“I don’t like changes of plan,” I said. I also didn’t like Raven’s sullen attitude. It was like she’d caught me kicking a kitten and hated me for it. “What happened to the let’s-be-a-team attitude you liked so much when each of you needed my help?”
Actually, what I didn’t like was the thought of wall walking. I was afraid of heights.
“Too bad,” Raven said. “Jo came up with the idea, I voted in favor, and that makes it a two-thirds majority. You’re not afraid, are you?”
I could feel sweat on my palms, stinging the broken blisters. I was really afraid of heights. Even seeing a movie scene shot at the top of a building gave me the sweats.
“One small problem,” I said. “I forgot my climbing belt. Left it in the Himalayas during my last climb. A little hill called Everest.”
“Jo?” Raven said.
Jo slipped out of the shoulder straps of her backpack. She reached in, pulled out a belt and tossed it to me.
“That should fit,” she said. Same sullen attitude. It was starting to irritate me. I’d never kicked a kitten, and I didn’t intend to.
Raven worked her own backpack loose and pulled out a corded rope. In the dimness, I could see large clip-like objects attached to the rope.
“These are Jumars,” she said.
“Right. Jumars.”
“Don’t get smart-ass with me. They are the best ascenders money can buy. I’m going to go up on a free climb, but I don’t think it’s something you should try. The Jumars will slide upward freely and hold when you pull down. You’ll have one for each hand. I’ve got a locking mechanism that will make sure your end of the rope follows you up so that it serves as a safety harness in case you’re stupid enough to let go of the Jumars.”
“Raven?” Jo said.
“Yeah.”
“Give him the gloves, okay? I know it won’t break your heart if those blisters hurt him, but if he lets go, it’s going to be a pain for all of us.”
So now I was learning that Raven
liked
that my blisters hurt?
“Of course,” Raven said in a flat voice. She tossed me a pair of thick leather gloves.
It wasn’t too late to turn around. But anger was a powerful motivator. Enough to overcome my fear.
“Wonderful,” I told Raven. “Can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this.”
The best boxing match—I mean ever—was Muhammad Ali against George Foreman. Zaire, 1974. It’s called “The Rumble in the Jungle.”
I watch it twice a month, pulling it up from video archives. Foreman went into the fight as a twenty-four-year-old heavyweight who had demolished opponents with his punching power and sheer size and physical dominance. Ali had speed and boxing skills but was eight years older than Foreman and considered a worn-out underdog.
But Ali had a secret plan. He called it the rope-a-dope. When the second round
began, Ali began leaning on the ropes, covering up. Foreman threw tremendous punches, but Ali deflected them away from his head and fired occasional jabs that were straight punches to Foreman’s face.
In clinches, Ali leaned on Foreman, to make the bigger man support Ali’s weight, and taunted him, telling him to throw more punches. Enraged, Foreman threw them harder and harder.
In the seventh round, seemingly beaten, Ali held Foreman in yet another clinch and whispered into Foreman’s ear, “That all you got, George?”
That’s when the bigger, stronger and favored fighter realized the fight wasn’t what he thought it was. His first premonition, his first tremor of fear. In the eighth round, all those wild angry punches took their toll, and Foreman started losing strength.
It gives me an adrenaline rush to watch it in slow motion, the five-punch combination that Ali threw after a series
of right hooks as Foreman tried to pin Ali against the ropes. Five punches, rapid-fire, precision missiles ending in a left hook that brought Foreman’s head up into a vulnerable position, followed by a hard right from Ali that sent Foreman to the canvas, the knockout punch that ended the fight.
I’ve counted the punches that Ali took during those eight rounds. Hundreds. Thunderous blows from the world’s most powerful puncher. Blows to Ali’s sides. To his kidneys. To Ali’s forearms. To Ali’s biceps. Blows that bounced off his skull. Ali’s response will always echo for me.
That all you got, George?