shrub or a ship—or a dumb-ass idea like Jim’s savior shit—that you had visual confirmation the earth was in fact round, and not square.
And that Heaven was not where you were.
He’d been traveling without headlights and he didn’t turn them on. Instead, he took a white undershirt and held the thing out of the window, knowing that Jim would see it and hopefully not think it was the enemy. Fucker had been armed like a tank battalion when he’d left camp.
As Isaac had eased to a halt, he’d gotten out with both hands fully visible and allowed Jim to approach. The guy had looked exhausted, but then he’d been carrying Matthias’s deadweight across his back for God only knew how many miles through the shifting sand.
It had not been a surprise that Jim had glared at the knight-in-shining routine—in spite of their boss’s condition, which was clearly critical.
With a shake, he came back to this night, here in . . . Where was he? Malden?
His voice held the same exhaustion Jim’s had had way back when. “Don’t get yourself killed because of me, okay?”
Jim muttered something that sounded like,
Forcing his head back into the game, Isaac left the past and his emotions in the dust, his focus shifting to the present as he turned away and started walking into the entrance to the building.
As he stepped inside, Jim and the guy’s two buddies were tight on him and he had to wonder why Heron wasn’t wearing a hat to hide his face or anything to disguise who he was. Dumb son of a bitch. Gets free . . . only to come back in.
Crazy.
Fucking nuts.
But he had his own problems to worry about, and God knew, Jim was an adult and therefore allowed to be a moron when it came to his own life.
While Isaac went along, the rear hallway of the abandoned office building was an obstacle course, thanks to countless empty drywall buckets and a thousand half-drunk bottles of Mountain Dew and Coke. But it had been a while since anyone had lifted a finger here—there was dust all over the debris.
Clearly, the money had run out just as the screwdriver-and-monkey-wrench crowd had come in: Naked electrical wires snaked across the unhung ceiling, along with partially completed HVAC ducts and plumbing pipes. Illumination came from battery-operated lanterns placed every five feet on the floor, and the air was cool to the point of being cold. At least until they got into the huge lobby of the place. In spite of the cathedral ceiling, the fifty or so guys milling around on the raw concrete floor kicked up the temp, thanks to body heat.
It was clear why this was a perfect place to fight: The architects had planned some kind of glass extravaganza for the front entrance, but like so much else, it hadn’t been completed. Instead of a whole lot of see- through panes, there were plywood sheets nailed onto the girders.
So the lighting and the crowd were hidden.
The octagon had been set up in the center of the space, and as soon as Isaac walked into the crowd, the cheering started. As strangers slapped him on the back and congratulated him for getting out of jail, cell phones flipped up to all kinds of ears, the network going to town, with news that he was good to go even after the bust.
The promoter rushed up to him. “Holy fuck, they’re going wild already! This rocks . . . !”
Blah, blah, blah.
Isaac scanned the faces as he went over to the far corner and settled in to wait. As Jim eased into a lean beside him, he found himself saying, “Last night, an old friend of ours showed up.”
“Who.”
“And what do you know,” Isaac said grimly, “he’s back.”
Over where the bouncers were taking the gambling money and the fighting fees, Matthias’s number two was getting a wallet out of his pocket. As cash changed hands, the guy looked over and smiled like a crocodile.
Then he pointed right at Isaac’s chest.
“You’re not getting in that ring,” Jim bit out, stepping in front and blocking the sight line.
Isaac stared over Heron’s heavy shoulder, right into the face of the man who’d been sent to kill him. “Yeah. I am.”
CHAPTER 10
It was past ten o’clock when Grier parked her Audi out in Malden and cut the engine. She’d manuevered the sedan around on the packed dirt so that it was facing out and was away from most of the other cars—although it wasn’t as if the “parking lot” had any dedicated exit or entrance or spaces.
As she’d driven by the address Louie had given her over the phone, she hadn’t been sure she was in the right place. The office park had been empty as far as she could tell, the dozen or so matching five-stories spiraling off from an unlit main drive like schoolchildren lined up for a head count. Evidently, the development had been intended for high-tech companies, at least according to the sign that read, MALDEN TECHNOLOGICAL PARK. Instead, it was a ghost town.
Louie never steered her wrong, though, so she’d turned in and gone all the way to the back . . . and found about twenty-five trucks and cars behind the building farthest from the main road. Made sense. If she were trespassing to put on an illegal cage fight, she’d have made sure she was as hidden as possible, too.
Getting out of her car, she went over to the fire door that was propped open by a cinder block, and walked in. The deep, buzzing growl of a crowd of men boiled down the hallway, the testosterone forming a wall she practically had to push through. As she headed toward the sound, she wasn’t worried about the meathead quotient—which was clearly going to be high. She had Mace in one pocket and a stun gun in the other: The former was legal in the state of Massachusetts if you had a valid firearm identification card and she did. The latter . . . well, she’d pay the five-hundred-dollar fine, assuming she ever had to use the thing.
If she could walk into a crack house in New Bedford at midnight, she could handle this.
As she emerged into an atrium of sorts and got a gander at the six-foot-high, chain-link walls of the fighting octagon, she was well aware she could have just called the cops on the match tonight—but then Isaac, assuming he showed up, would either be arrested again or take off. And in either of those cases, she might not have a chance to get to him. Her goal was to have him stop and think long enough to see what he was doing. Running away was never the solution, and if he went that route, he’d have a warrant out for his arrest, more charges against him, and the beginnings of a record.
Assuming he didn’t already have one: That murder in Mississippi worried her—but it was, like all of his other stuff, something for the proper authorities to deal with. As his defense attorney, she had to try to get him to stay and face the music on his current charges. It was the right thing for society—the right thing for him as well.
And if she couldn’t get him to see the light? Then she was going to resign from the case and tell the authorities everything she knew about him. Including the guns and the details of that security system. She wasn’t going to become an accessory to crime in her pursuit of doing the right thing—
She froze as she saw her client, her hand coming up to the base of her throat.
Isaac Rothe was standing alone in the far corner, and though the chain links of the cage separated them, there was no mistaking who it was . . . and no diminishing the effect of him: He was a menace, his size and the hard expression on his face turning the other men into little boys. And whereas she’d been struck by his politeness back at the jail, now she got a true picture of who he was.
The man was a killer.
Her heart beat fast, but she didn’t falter. She was here to do a job of sorts, and damn it, she was going to talk with him.
Just as she stepped forward, some smarmy guy with gold teeth monkeyed up one side of the cage. “And now
