A Fistful of Collars (7 page)

H
ad I ever been in a house this big? Not close. It spread across the whole top of the ridge and also had levels going down the mountain, kind of like the decks of this cruise ship we saw on our San Diego trip. There was even a gym with a boxing ring. Thad Perry, dressed in shorts, stood near the ring, working the speed bag. I’d seen lots of dudes working the speed bag—comes with the territory—and Thad looked pretty good to me, his hands
bap-bap-bapping
real fast, the bag itself a blur. Bernie watched from a stool in the corner. Jiggs sat at a desk near the door, paging through a magazine.

“How’m I doing, Jiggsy?” Thad said.

“Better and better,” said Jiggs, although he didn’t take his eyes off the magazine.

Thad stepped away from the bag, turned to Bernie. “I’ve been training with Carlos Longoria,” he said. “Carlos thinks I could’ve gone pro if I’d started young enough.”

“Who’s Carlos Longoria?” Bernie said.

“Who’s Carlos Longoria?” Thad said. “You hear that, Jiggsy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where have you been, Bennie?” Thad said. “Mars? Carlos Longoria’s the middleweight champion of the goddamn world.”

Bennie? Mars? This was confusing.

“I don’t keep up with boxing anymore,” Bernie said. “And it’s Bernie.”

Thad went to work on the bag again. “Bennie, Bernie,” he said, and then lots of
bap-bap-bap
, faster and harder than before. “Don’t like boxing? Too violent for you?”

“Boxing’s okay,” Bernie said. “It’s prizefighting I don’t like.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“Doesn’t matter—just my opinion.”

“Whoa,” said Thad, winding up and giving the bag a tremendous blow. He wheeled around and stared at Bernie. Thad had great big blue eyes, maybe slightly farther apart than usual. “I said I didn’t get it. I like to get things.”

Jiggs looked up.

“Yeah?” Bernie said.

“Yeah,” said Thad. “So help me get it.”

“Two guys trying to beat each other senseless in front of a paying crowd bothers me,” Bernie said. “I’ve got no problem with them doing it for fun.”

“Still don’t get it,” Thad said.

Bernie shrugged. “Like I said, doesn’t matter. Just one man’s take.”

Thad seemed to think that over. Sweat ran down his big, muscular chest. “What makes you an expert?” he said at last.

“Didn’t say I was.”

“Like, for example, have you ever actually boxed?”

“A little,” Bernie said.

Hey! That was a surprise. We’d been partners, me and Bernie, practically as long as I remember, and here I was, still finding out things about him. I’ll never get tired of Bernie.

“What does that mean?” Thad said.

“Just fooled with it when I was in high school,” Bernie said.

“Jiggs?” Thad said.

“Boss?” said Jiggs.

“Remember that line from
The Last Warrior
?”

“Which one?”

“For Christ sake—the best line in the goddamn picture, where I say ‘Make me believe it, bro.’”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jiggs. “Brilliant line—who was the writer?”

“Writer? No goddamn writer. Improv, Jiggsy. I improvised that line right on the set.”

“Brilliant line,” Jiggs said.

Thad nodded, took a few steps toward Bernie, and smiled—a little smile, but there was something real cool about it that made you want to keep looking. “Right now, Bernie, I’ve got a strong urge to say that line again, only this time in real life.”

“Yeah?” said Bernie.

“Yeah,” said Thad. “You say you boxed in high school. I say make me believe it, bro.”

Bernie gazed at Thad for a moment, then rose off the stool. They were close together now, so it was easy to see that Thad was taller and bigger, and way more ripped. Bernie wasn’t soft—oh, no, not at all—but you couldn’t call him ripped. And, kind of a strange thought for me, Thad looked younger, too, a thought I didn’t like and hoped would go away soon. That’s something I’ve been lucky with in my life.

“Jiggs?” Thad said. “Go find the sixteen-ounce gloves. Nothing to worry about, Bernie. It’ll be like a pillow fight.”

Jiggs checked his watch. “The manicurist is due in fifteen minutes,” he said.

“Jesus Christ, she can goddamn well wait,” Thad said. “When am I gonna start getting some cooperation around here?”

Jiggs got up, opened a wall cabinet, took out boxing gloves.

Not long after that, they were in the ring, both wearing head protectors. Bernie still wore his jeans, but he’d taken off his shirt. Not ripped, but no flab on Bernie, excepting the tiniest bit around the middle. You had to look real hard to see it. In fact, it might have been my imagination. I’m almost sure of it.

“How do two three-minute rounds sound?” Thad said. Or something like that. The mouth guard made him hard to understand.

Bernie shrugged.

“Count it down, Jiggs,” Thad said.

“Sure thing,” said Jiggs. He was looking at Bernie in a careful sort of way. Was it because of the scar on Bernie’s shoulder from his baseball days? Or the one from when he got slashed by Spiny Price, who was now sporting an orange jumpsuit up at Northern State Correctional? Or was it something else? No time to figure it out, because the next moment Jiggs said, “All set?”

“Whee-ooo,” said Thad, his chest swelling way up. “Raging fucking bull.”

Bernie turned to me. “Sit, boy,” he said. “Sit and stay.” Like Thad, he was hard to understand with the mouth guard, so I just stayed how I was, standing by the ring. “Ch—et?” Bernie said, in this special way of saying my name. I sat. I sat and promised myself to stay until further notice.

“On three,” said Jiggs. “One, two—”

Was three coming next? Not for me to say: I stop at two, which is a real good number, in my opinion. But if three was coming next, Jiggs never got to say it, because right at two, Thad
lunged forward and launched a heavy roundhouse punch right at the middle of Bernie’s face, the part not protected by the head guard.

Bernie and I never watched boxing anymore, but we’d gone through a stage of running old fight videos on TV, back around when he and Leda were going through the divorce. “Our own little rumble in the jungle,” Bernie said to me at the time. Not sure what he meant by that, but the rumble in the jungle, Ali and Foreman? Forget it! And the Thrilla in Manila, Ali and Frazier? Shut up!

But that’s not the point. The point is I’ve watched a lot of fights and I know the lingo. Slipping the punch, for example, is the way Bernie handled that first blow Thad threw at him. He shifted his head to one side, just enough so that Thad’s punch hit nothing but air. Funny thing about the look in Bernie’s eyes: he’d been expecting that punch. Hard to explain how I knew, I just did. I was on my feet now; very hard to stay sitting at a fight.

Boxing has its own time, Bernie says, speeding up and slowing down in a way that proved Einstein was right. He’d lost me there—the only Einstein I knew being Wilbur Einstein, a forger from down Arroyo Rojo way who’d been totally wrong when he’d said no jury would ever convict him, and was now breaking rocks in the hot sun—but I got the idea about speeding up and slowing down. Now, for example, after the speed of Thad’s roundhouse and Bernie’s head shift, things were slowing down. Bernie hadn’t even raised his arms. Bernie! And Thad was just sort of gaping at him, like this fish Charlie used to keep, before the unfortunate accident.

Then came another slow thing. This reddish color appeared on Thad’s face, spread all the way down his neck. And just like that: boom! We were back to full speed. Thad stepped in, threw a
whole flurry of punches at Bernie’s midsection. Somehow Bernie’s arms were up in time. Thad’s blows landed,
thud-thud thud-thud
, the sound echoing off the bare walls of the gym and coming back,
thud-thud thud-thud
, real hard, but Bernie said in boxing you had to watch where the punches land, and Thad’s punches were landing on Bernie’s arms and shoulders. Lots and lots of hard punches and they had to hurt—red welts were already showing on Bernie’s skin—but I knew that was better than getting hit in the head or the guts or the kidneys, wherever the kidneys happened to be.

And then Bernie kind of got Thad in a clinch and they danced around together, their heads very close, both of them already sweating.

“You want to waltz or fight?” Thad said.

Bernie pushed him away, and then got up on the balls of his feet and started moving sideways, circling Thad. Bernie on the balls of his feet! Wow! Have I mentioned the way one of Bernie’s legs gets tired sometimes, on account of his war wound? It didn’t look tired now.

Thad lowered his head, moved into the circle Bernie was making, tried a jab to Bernie’s chin, caught by Bernie with his gloves, and then a hook that landed on the side of Bernie’s head, and landed good. Bernie’s eyes went a bit blurry, then came back to normal, just as Thad moved in with another one of those roundhouse swings. Bernie slipped that one, too. Uh-oh. Maybe not completely.

And now he was against the ropes, ropes, by the way, that I could jump through, no problem, and take Thad down before you could say Jackie Robinson, Bernie’s favorite baseball player of all time, Teddy Ballgame being second. Not all of that: only the Jackie Robinson part.

Thad started in on another one of those punch bombardments,
some landing, some not. Bernie sagged against the ropes, leaned one way, then another, couldn’t get free of Thad. Thad had a hot glow in his eyes, wild and mean. He lined Bernie up, let loose with another big hook. Hey! Bernie ducked it! No time to go into the whole duck thing now. Bernie ducked that big hook and came up with a hook of his own that whapped Thad on the side of the face. A snapping hook, yes! You could hear it snap! And then Bernie jabbed off the hook, so quick it almost happened at the same time. That jab was a stinger, popping Thad right on the button, the button meaning the nose in boxing lingo.
Snap, pop
, and then
crack
: loved the sounds of boxing!

Crack?
Turned out that was Thad’s nose, now lined up kind of sideways and dripping blood. Why did I glance over at Jiggs at that moment? Not sure. He’d slid his hand inside a suit jacket pocket and was pulling out a gun.

Thad was staring at Bernie in an out-of-his-mind-with-rage sort of way. “You fucking cheeseball son of a bitch, I’m gonna kill you.”

Then we were back up to full speed again. Thad charged at Bernie, hurling punches, wild and ferocious, giving me no time at all to go back over the cheeseball thing, get my mind around the concept. Bernie stepped inside and threw a short uppercut to the chin, landing it square, bang on. Thad’s eyes rolled up. His face went all white. Then he toppled over on the canvas and lay flat on his back, sort of like Sonny Liston at the end of the second Ali fight, except that Sonny Liston was one scary dude and I now knew for sure that Thad Perry was not.

Jiggs? Maybe a different matter. I looked at him again. He was moving toward the ring now, mouth hanging open a bit, no sign of the gun. I trotted over behind him, following close. He climbed through the ropes and hurried to Thad. Bernie was already there, leaning over him.

“Why the hell did you have to go and do that?” Jiggs said. “Is he dead?”

Uh-oh. Hadn’t thought of that. But no worries. Thad’s chest was rising and falling, rising and falling, and they’re never dead when that’s happening.

Bernie spat out his mouthpiece. “He was beating the crap out of me,” he said. “It was just a fluky punch.”

Jiggs glared down at him. Jiggs was really a big, big dude. “The fuck it was. You played him like a goddamn fish.”

Bernie glanced down at Jiggs’s suit jacket pocket, the one he’d taken the gun from, then looked back up at Jiggs, meeting his gaze and saying nothing.

“Not saying I don’t blame you,” Jiggs said. “But I know what I saw.”

“It was still pretty fluky,” Bernie said. “And I didn’t know he had a glass jaw.”

“Of course he has a glass jaw,” Jiggs said. “And look at his goddamn nose. They roll film day after tomorrow.” He shook his head. “Christ. Starting with the bar scene.”

“What happens in that?” Bernie said.

“He beats the shit out of a whole mess of renegades,” said Jiggs.

They gazed down at Thad.

“I’m gonna lose my goddamn job,” Jiggs said. “And what happens when the media gets hold of this?” He gave Bernie an angry look.

“They won’t get it from me,” Bernie said. “And why does the news have to travel beyond these four walls?”

“What’s the matter with you?” Jiggs said. “You’re not seeing that hooter of his?”

“I know a good doc,” Bernie said. “Completely trustworthy.”

“Yeah?” said Jiggs. “You really think—”

Thad groaned. His eyes, such an amazing shade of blue, like the early morning sky out in the desert, fluttered open.

Jiggs got down on his knees. “You okay, Thad?”

“Do I look okay?”

“Uh,” said Jiggs, “yeah, pretty good.”

Thad’s eyes shifted toward Bernie, then away, real quick. “Must have passed out,” he said.

“Hardly at all,” said Jiggs. “Not worth mentioning.”

“Fuckin’ dehydrated,” Thad said. “This goddamn altitude.”

Jiggs blinked. “You fainted on account of the altitude?”

“Not fainted,” Thad said, strength returning to his voice, and with it some of that harshness. “Passed out.”

“Passed out,” Jiggs said.

“Scratch that,” Thad said. “Blacked out.”

“Blacked out,” said Jiggs.

“Happens when people first get here,” Bernie said.

“Yeah?” said Thad, looking at Bernie and then quickly away one more time.

“More often than not,” Bernie said. “Practically the rule. Drink some water, get a full night’s sleep, you’ll be good as new.”

“Feel like sitting up?” Jiggs said.

“Huh? Don’t talk to me like I’m some kinda candyass,” Thad said. “If I want to sit up, I’ll sit up.”

Back up. Candyass? A new one on me, and very, very interesting. Not that I’m a big candy lover, but the whole thing together—candy, ass—for some reason reminded me of a night when we were working a case down in Mexico, and a brief interlude with a member of the nation within named Lola. Funny how the mind works.