Only Child

He bounced the roll on his palm, thoughtfully. “I let Azumah loose and you going to be leaving anyway.”

“You want us to leave, just say so. Toss the money back and we’ll be gone.”

“I’m thinking, maybe that’s right. You should leave. And maybe I should keep something for my trouble, too.”

“You don’t want to be like that,” I said. “We came here respectful. Don’t go all Bogart on us. It’d be a mistake.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding the pistol out of the same pocket I’d taken the money from.

“Bullet wouldn’t stop Azumah,” he said calmly, “even if you could hit him on the run.”

“I got a full clip,” I told him. “And that knife you’re holding somewhere won’t stop my partner.”

The man tunnel-visioned in on Max, his pit-trained eyes measuring, adding up the score.

“I ain’t going nowhere with you,” he said warningly. “Money or not.”

“You won’t even have to get off that couch,” I promised him.

“You want me to run it again?” I asked Ozell.

“No need,” he said. “What you want to know? For your money,” he added, quickly.

“You know where this was shot?”

“Could be.”

“Yes or no, friend.”

“Is that enough? For the money, I mean?”

“No. Look, I don’t need to know the exact location where it was shot. Just if you recognize it, so you remember if you were there for this particular bout.”

“Why?”

“Because, if you were, you saw somebody with a camera. The one who made this tape.”

“That’s what you want, man?”

“For the money,” I reminded him.

“It was a white boy,” he said. “I don’t mean a white boy like you is a white boy. I mean a for-real boy. Punk- ass kid, couldn’t be more than, I dunno, twenty, twenty-two?”

“He have a dog going that night?”

“No, man,” he said, dismissing the thought. “He was just this weaselly guy. Comes up to me, asks can he shoot with that fancy camera? I tell him, he don’t get the fuck outta there, I throw his puny ass in the pit, too. He says there’s five yards in it for me. Says I can watch him close as I want—he’s only gonna shoot the dogs, not the people. I know he’s not The Man. So, I figure, why not?”

“How long was he there?”

“Maybe two, three bouts. Paid me up front. I didn’t even see him go. Be lucky if the pussy made it back through the parking lot, that place.”

“Describe him.”

“I told you, man. A gray boy. Nothing special about him. About your height, maybe a inch or two taller. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t skinny.”

“Hair?”

“He had a cap on, man. Some kind of baseball one, I don’t remember....”

“What about his face?”

“Wasn’t like yours, man. No offense, but I’d know you, I ever saw you again. This kid was just...plain, like. He had, I think he had, an earring,” Ozell said, touching his own left ear, “but I couldn’t swear to it.”

I didn’t trust his ghetto-game accent any more than I did those bad blue eyes. But I went at him another few minutes, and the vacuum bag didn’t get any fuller.

“Thanks,” I told Ozell, holding out my hand to shake. “This guy ever contacts you again, you call that number I left you, there’s five in it for you, all right?” I said, leaving it ambiguous, five hundred or five thousand.

“All right,” he said, not going for the bait. He’d negotiate when he had something to trade, not before.

“Yeah,” I said, moving very close to him. “And one more thing. You don’t want to be calling anybody else, Ozell. I wouldn’t forget your face, either.”

“You like her in those?” Cyn asked me.

Rejji pranced around the room in a pair of side-laced black boots that went to her knees.

“I don’t go for those cloven heels,” I said. “Or those built-up soles, either.”

“You’re old-fashioned. Miss the stilettos, huh?”

“Maybe just old, period.”

“No man’s so old that Rejji can’t make him sit up and pay attention,” Cyn said, smiling knowingly. “That bitch’s got a tongue so educated, she can lick up a bowl of fudge ripple and never touch the ripple.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to do that,” she said. “Just sit there, smoke your cigarette, and pay attention.”

“Nothing,” Terry said, his tone somewhere between disgusted and offended. “Two of them, I don’t think they even knew her.”

“It was odds-against,” I told him.

“Worth a shot,” the Prof said.

“The one girl, Heidi, I think she was a friend for real,” Terry said. “She was crying when we talked about it. But she said the cops had talked to her—talked to everybody in the whole school, she said. She didn’t know anything.”

“That wasn’t our last chance,” I assured him.

He didn’t look comforted.

The girl in the pink T-shirt with a black “NHB” curling over her small, high breasts looked vaguely Hispanic. Maybe it was her long, dark hair, or the gold hoop earrings. But her voice was pure Ozone Park Italian.

“You look like you’ve been in some,” she said, “but you’re, like, too old now.”

“I’m the manager,” I told her.

“Manager? You must have us confused with the UFC or Pride, mister. The purses here are five hundred dollars, for the top of the card.”

“That’s all right.”

“You mean him?” she said, tilting her head in Max’s direction.

“Yep.”

“You look like a grappler,” she said to Max.

He bowed his head, very slightly.

“Doesn’t he speak English?” she asked me.

“No,” I told her, truthfully.

“He ever go No Holds Barred before? This isn’t karate, you understand. People get hurt....”

“We understand.”

“Well, you bring him around, I can make him a match.” She looked at Max appraisingly. “He’s what, two twenty?”

“About that,” I agreed. “But we’ll go against whatever you’ve got.”

“All right. Bring him down on Friday. Not this Friday, a week from.”

“Uh, is anyone going to be taping?”

“Taping? You mean like for TV?”

“No. Just...You allow cameras?”

“No. No, we don’t. The only video in there is what we shoot. If you want a copy, it