Samantha Moon: First Eight Novels, Plus One Novella (114 page)

But not in Russell’s fight.

Their fight, at least to my untrained eye—and the truth was, I was perhaps more trained than most—their fight seemed fairly even, as the judge’s scorecards had indicated.

Both fighters were trading punches. Both fighters were backing away. Both fighters were circling. Russell jabbed. Marquez blocked. Marquez circled, Russell followed. Both had quick feet. Quick hands. No obvious blood. No one staggered like in the other five video clips. No one was obviously getting their brains beaten in.

And there it was.

The punch.

It was a short, straight punch, designed to be used when two opponents were close-in to each other. Not a lot of back swing. Just power the fist at about shoulder height and use your weight to drive the punch home. Jacky had taught it to me years ago, and it was a common punch to use when practicing with the heavy bag. Myself, I had probably delivered thousands of such punches. They weren’t generally considered knockout punches, although, if delivered with enough force, could certainly stun an opponent.

Except Marquez didn’t look stunned.

He looked dead.

Prior to the punch, they had both been fighting an inside game, heads ducked, juking, bobbing and weaving, each looking for an opening. Russell saw his and struck, cobra-fast.

Marquez’s head snapped back.

HBO had been right there to capture the next image fairly close up. Marquez’s eyes rolled up. I saw the whites of them clearly. His hands dropped to his sides.

Russell had been about to deliver another blow when he clearly saw that something wasn’t right with his opponent.

As Marquez’s hands went limp, so did his knees and legs, and now he was falling forward, landing hard on his chest and face, where he proceeded to lay, unmoving.

I saw that Russell’s first instinct was to help him—and I admired him for that—but then his trainer bull-rushed him and lifted him up off his feet. And as his trainer ran him wildly around the ring, I saw Russell trying to look back to his fallen foe.

The longer Caesar Marquez lay unmoving, the more chaotic the ring became. People swarmed and buzzed around him. Russell fought to get close to him. A stretcher appeared through the crowd and soon Caesar was being threaded through the ropes, through the crowd, and down a side aisle into what I assumed were the locker rooms.

I stopped the video and studied the crowded ring. Dozens of faces. Some confused, some concerned, many excited. Men, mostly, but a few women.

I replayed the video again and again. Watching his trainers, watching the crowd, looking for anything that gave any indication that someone might have known what was about to go down.

But nothing stood out.

Nothing at all.

Chapter Four

“
So, do you still need to sleep during the day?” Kingsley asked, or, at least, I think he asked. Words had a tendency to get muffled when spoken around a side of beef.

We were at Mulberry Street Ristorante in downtown Fullerton, sitting by the window, drinking wine and eating steak. Just like regular people.

Of course, one of us wasn’t so much eating their steak, as slurping the bloody juice pooling around it, and the other wasn’t so much eating his steak, as wolfing it down.

I nodded. “I’m still a creature of the night, if that’s what you’re asking. And, yes, I still need to sleep during the day. I’m still weak during the day. I still feel like crap when I have to get up and pick up the kids during the day. The medallion only gives me the ability to
tolerate
the sun.”

“
No more burning?” he asked between bites.

“
No more burning.”

Mulberry’s was busy tonight. It was busy every night, as far as I could tell. It was our restaurant of choice, especially since the cooks and waiters here were used to my orders of raw meat, extra bloody.

Now, as I watched Kingsley tear through his meat in record time, something occurred to me. “Now I have a question for you.”

“
Shoot.”

“
Were you always this big?”

“
Big…how?”

“
Big, as in I’ve actually seen you turn sideways to go through doorways.”

“
Only some doors, and, no, the big part came later.”

“
How much later?”

“
Over time. Decades. Little by little, after each transformation.”

“
You mean, you grew after each transformation?”

“
Yes. At least, as far as I could tell.”

“
But why?” I asked.

“
Survival, I think.”

“
But you’re already immortal,” I said, lowering my voice.

“
A weak immortal doesn’t get one very far, Sam. And remember, I can’t turn into—” and now he lowered his voice to a low growl— “the thing I turn into, on cue. That happens only once a month, and generally in a locked room. And when it does happen, I’m often out of my mind. Gone to the world for the whole night.”

“
While something else takes over your body.”

“
Right,” he said.

“
So, being big in your daily life has its benefits.”

“
Of course. Stronger, faster, able to protect myself.”

“
So how big were you before?”

“
Big enough, but not this big.”

“
Do all werewolves get as big as you?”

“
Some bigger.”

I said, “I haven’t gotten bigger. If anything, I’ve gotten smaller.”

“And you won’t get bigger because each night you’re at full strength. And even during the day you’re not completely incapacitated.”

“
No,” I said. “Even though I feel weaker during the day, I’m still far stronger than I used to be.”

I recalled my boxing match with the Marine last year, the match that had occurred just before sundown. Sure, I had felt like crap, but I was still strong enough to take down America’s finest.

“Also,” added Kingsley, reaching over and cutting off a chunk of my nearly raw steak, “it’s just the nature of my kind.”

“
For the host to grow big,” I said.

“
Right. We all have our quirks.”

“
I think your quirks are better than my quirks,” I said.

“
And who among us can fly?” he asked.

I thought about that. “Good point.”

As the water refilled our glasses of wine, Kingsley asked what I was working on these days. I told him about my latest case, and as I did so, Kingsley began nodding. Turns out he’d seen the fight live on HBO.

“
Wasn’t much of a punch,” he said. “Not enough to kill a man.”

“
Or so we think,” I said. After all, I had done some research on the subject. “We still don’t know his condition prior to the fight, or the amount of punches he’d taken in practice and other fights.”

Kingsley shrugged. “True. Either way, it wasn’t much of a punch; in fact, I thought the fight was pretty even up to that point. What’s your gut tell you?”

I shrugged too, but, unlike Kingsley, my shrug didn’t look like two land masses heaving. I said, “Nothing yet, although I think Russell’s grasping at straws.”

Kingsley nodded. “Looking for a way to live with his guilt, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “One thing is clear: It’s eating him alive. Literally.” I told Kingsley about the black halo I’d seen around the young boxer.

“
The same halo you saw around your son?”

“
The same.”

“
What’s it mean?” asked Kingsley.

“
It means he needs help. Lots of help.”

Chapter Five

It was after hours and I was sitting in Jacky’s office.

Jacky, if possible, looked even smaller than usual as he sat behind a dented metal desk. He was drinking an orange Gatorade which, I think, was the classic Gatorade. Of course, if I drank Gatorade now, I would heave it up in a glorious orange fountain.

Jacky, of course, didn’t need to know that, and since I only spent a few hours a week with the guy—and most of that was spent with him yelling at me to keep my hands up—I hadn’t yet developed a telepathic rapport with him.

Which was just as well. I seriously suspected that the old man had suffered some brain damage himself. He’d been a champion back in the day. And in Jacky’s case, “back in the day” meant the early fifties in Ireland.

Jacky had spent the past few decades here in Fullerton. At one point his gym had been a happening place for up-and-coming boxers, with Jacky himself training a handful of champions. That is, until downtown Fullerton had become so trendy that Jacky—perhaps a better businessman than I’d given him credit for—had decided to turn his gym into a women’s self-defense studio.

Then again, if I was a spunky old man, I’d rather train cute women, too.

Anyway, when Jacky finished off the Gatorade, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, dropped the empty bottle into a nearby wastebasket and sat back.

“What did you think of the kid?” he asked, speaking in an Irish accent so thick that you would think he was only now making his way through Ellis Island.

“
I think the kid is deeply troubled,” I said. “And I don’t blame him.”

Jacky nodded. He seemed uncomfortable in his office. He seemed less himself, somehow. Out there, in the gym, he was larger than life, even though he was only a few inches taller than me. In here, at day’s end, he looked like a shell of himself. He looked tired. Old. But not weak. Never weak. Even in quiet repose, the man looked like he wanted to punch something.

“Russ isn’t the first lad to kill somebody in the ring, and he won’t be the last. And usually it plays with a fighter’s head, so much so that they ain’t ever much the same again.”

“
He feels guilt,” I said.

“
They all do. Except it’s part of the risk we take. Each kid knows that his next fight might be his last.”

“
Then why did you send him to me?”

Jacky didn’t answer immediately. Through his closed door, I could hear someone sweeping and whistling. A door slammed somewhere, and I heard two women giggling down a hallway that I knew led to the female locker rooms.

“It’s part of the risk, yes, but something about this one doesn’t smell right.”

I waited. I wanted to hear it from Jacky, someone who had seen tens of thousands of punches thrown in his lifetime. Jacky rubbed his knuckles as he formulated his thoughts. I wondered how difficult it was for Jacky to formulate his thoughts. How much brain damage had the old Irishman suffered?

There had to be some. His aura, which was mostly light blue and ironically serene, appeared bright red around his head. The bright red, I knew, was the body fighting something, perhaps a disease. Or dealing with an injury.

The Irishman rubbed his face and seemed to have lost his train of thought. The reddish aura around his head flared briefly.

I said gently, “You were saying something about this fight not smelling right.”

“
Was I now?”

“
Yes.”

“
Which fight?”

“
Baker vs. Marquez.”

He nodded and rubbed the back of his neck and gritted his teeth. “It’s hell getting old, Sam.”

“So I’m told.”

“
And this noggin of mine just ain’t right sometimes.”

“
Mine either.”

He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. He said, “Routine fight. No one beating up no one. Judges had Baker up a few rounds, but the truth is, they were only just beginning to feel each other out. No one had taken control yet. It was even as hell.”

“Were you there?” I asked.

“
At the fight? Hell, no. The wife doesn’t let me anywhere near Vegas these days. She’s afraid I’ll spend our retirement—and then I’ll never get to leave this damn gym.”

“
You love this damn gym,” I said.

He winked at me, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. Where the tears came from and why, I didn’t exactly know. “More than anything,” he said.

“You watched the fight on TV?”

“
Which fight?”

“
Baker vs. Marquez.”

“
Yes, of course. Russ is a local boy. He trains here sometimes. I showed him my best moves, and he never forgot his roots. Got to love a kid like that.”