“Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know a thing. Don’t know what he’d been up to, don’t know with who. Hell, all I do is teach and train and fight.”
“You managed to find time to do some talking too, didn’t you? You and your camera crew…”
Francovic folded his arms. “It was no crew, just one guy with a video camera. The promoter suggested it, said it’d be good hype for a potential rematch. So I did it. You ever do anything stupid?”
“Yeah, plenty,” Behr said.
A picture of Francovic was coming together quickly, and it was different than what Behr had expected. Behr had watched the clips of the man wresting the microphone from ring announcers to call out other fighters after a win and storming around the ring roaring like a rabid beast after delivering a brutal knockout, the black mouth guard across his teeth making him appear inhuman. But here he was, fairly soft-spoken, almost thoughtful. That very morning Behr had gone on You Tube and rewatched the footage of Francovic’s fight with Aurelio two years earlier, in which he’d been choked out with thirty seconds to go in the fifth round. The fight was a bit before Behr had started training and turned out to be Aurelio’s last before he retired. Despite being around the same age, Francovic hadn’t shut it down. He’d fought three or four times since, laying waste to all his opponents, mostly with ground and pound knock outs, and had been talking a lot on his web page about going again with Aurelio.
“So you weren’t done with him.”
“No, we weren’t done. Not by a long shot. He caught me in that choke… But, hell, anybody can get caught. You know that.”
“Sure,” Behr said.
“But I hadn’t shown what I could really do against him. I was going to if he agreed to it…” Francovic drifted away, deep in thought. “A loss like that… they just don’t shake off. I learned him in that first fight. The next one was gonna be a war.” Behr tried to imagine it-the first one had been a war.
“But he was done. Maybe you got frustrated with that. You couldn’t live with the loss, so you showed up one night to call him out, with some guys, with a gun…,” Behr said. Francovic shook his head. “… And it went wrong. It went wrong and now we’re here.” It was a hell of a suggestion, and Behr gripped the handle of his gun, which was still in his hand. He knew Francovic wouldn’t go tapping out with a few broken fingers.
“You think it was a battle between sensei, like The Karate Kid or some shit?”
Behr shrugged. “I don’t know how it was. You tell me.”
Francovic shook his head again. The resignation in the gesture persuaded Behr of his innocence. In order to be this convincing, Francovic would have to be in the lying business. Instead, like he said, he was just in the fighting and teaching business.
“Only thing you’re right about is not being able to live with it,” Francovic said. “But he would’ve come out and given me another one. I know it.”
Behr looked at him doubtfully. As far as he knew, Aurelio was actually retired, not just temporarily like most fighters. Francovic caught the look.
“I’m telling you, he would’ve come out and given me another one. Eventually. I know it in my bones. You spend twenty-five long minutes with someone like that-it’s a lifetime. You get to know him all the way through. I threw everything I had at that mother for five rounds and he was right there with me. He was a warrior. He understood…” As Francovic’s words trailed off, his eyes got watery. “I’m not saying I would’ve won if we did it again. I think I would’ve. I’m just saying I would’ve gotten a chance to… answer those questions. For myself. Now, I won’t ever have the chance.”
Behr let that clear before he spoke.
“While I’m here, why don’t you tell me where you were the night before and the morning it happened,” Behr said.
“I’ll tell you what I told the police: I was camping with my kid’s Cub Scout troop. They checked it.”
“You were camping with fucking Cub Scouts?” Behr said, incredulous, but also pleased the police had been thorough enough to check Francovic out in the first place. The fighter just lifted and dropped his shoulders.
Behr looked at him through narrow eyes. “So you got any idea who might be responsible?” Behr asked.
Francovic, in his own world now, thinking about a rematch that would never happen, shook his head.
“No. I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Call me if anything occurs,” Behr said, putting a business card on the desk. Then he stood, holstered his gun, and draped his shirt over it. He walked through the gym toward the exit and no one said a word to him.
TWENTY-FOUR
Vicky Schlegel stood in front of a window-unit air conditioner that was losing in its valiant effort to staunch the heat. She was taking a cigarette/iced coffee break from rearranging the knickknacks and photos on the living room shelves. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on her task, though, considering the problems and the noise. The noise was the music, mean and ominous, coming from Charlie’s room. A singer wailed about having a “ball and a biscuit,” and then blaring guitar erupted and shot through her head.
The problems were Deanie’s. She held a picture of him, standing on a softball diamond, sweet and unfettered only a few years back. Now her boy was hurting and Vicky knew why: it was that mocha-skinned bitch he couldn’t get over. Vicky had met her a few times-she’d only been to the house on a couple occasions, since she had a place of her own-and Vicky had seen her in action turning not just Deanie, but Charlie and even Terry, all drooling and stupid. Only her Kenny-bear seemed immune to the girl’s skanky Latin charms. It was bad enough when they were together, but now she’d gone and met someone else and left Deanie a mess. Vicky didn’t know anything concrete, but she was sure of it. A girl disappears like that, and that’s what it means. Her mother’s intuition told her that much. And it made Vicky want to pluck the broad’s smoky brown eyes out.
Then there was the fact that Terry was working the boys too hard. She looked at another framed picture of them, the three boys and Terry, about seven years back out at the fairground. Kenny was just a kid and hadn’t had his growth spurt yet. Charlie and Dean were teenagers, gangly, awkward, and unformed. It was hard to imagine them all then the way they would become: tough and funny and thick with muscle. They were doing well. It was an unbelievable plan Terry had. Sure, they’d had to do some rough stuff, that’s how it was in business. And who, really, had more grit than her men? No-fucking-body, that’s who. But they’d been at it all times of the day and night these last few months, and she could see the effects. Terry’s complexion had gone a little gray from fatigue, especially under the eyes. And all of them had grown a bit grim as of late. Except for Kenny. He’d kept his color and his bounce. But the snuffling and crying coming from Dean’s room, the mass of empty bottles she saw in there when he finally let her in to change the sheets once a week, and the snorting she heard coming through the door every hour or so had her practically grateful for the distraction of Charlie’s music. Practically, but not completely. And what the hell was he always doing on the phone in there? With all the racket, no less? Thousands of minutes per month. She’d seen the usage on his cell bill. A relentless, skin-peeling guitar solo leaked through the walls. She banged on the door to his room.
“Charlie! My ears are bleeding!” she yelled. The result? The “music” got louder.
Something needed to be done for Deanie, and she wondered what she could do. She grabbed her cell and went outside into the heat and quiet and dialed her brother.
“Larry Bustamante, please,” she said to whoever answered, and then she waited a minute.
“Bustamante,” came through the phone.
“Hi, Larry, it’s Vick. Can you find someone for me?”
Dean was feeling skinny, scared, and off his game. He was brain fucked completely. He’d been sitting in his room with the lights off all day and the only thing he’d left for was to piss and to get more to drink. He couldn’t shake the other night. It kept playing back in his head like a grind-house movie. He’d felt a wave of adrenaline and dread hit him that was unlike anything he’d ever experienced that night when he was in the bathroom waiting for the shake house to empty. He knew there was going to be trouble when he stepped out. Of course he knew there was going to be trouble in general-that’s what they were there for-but somehow he knew he was going to see a gun. He’d just felt it. It was like he had developed fear-based ESP. And instead of that knowledge fueling him, causing him to be so pissed off that he crossed the living room right at the little spic and put him down before there
