I’d been living in a household dominated by a man the entire world believed to be a hero, and I’d seen what the world hadn’t seen. I’d endured it since I was a boy. Blow after blow—not physical, but worse: blows of scorn and insults. Now here I was, climbing a rope on the side of a hospital building, trying to put in place
a combination of counterblows to bring him down.
Yeah, I was scared of gravity. But I kept whispering to myself, That all you got?
Halfway up the wall I realized I was winning the fight against my fear. The process just took determination and a willingness to believe that if you hung in there—ha! Nice pun, given the rope that dangled three stories down the side of the hospital in the dark night—you’d win in the end.
I’d pull on the Jumar with my left hand, trusting that the mechanism would lock and hold. With my right hand, I’d slide the other Jumar up as high as I could. Then I’d pull down on the right Jumar, locking it in place, and slide the left Jumar up.
The effort didn’t hurt my biceps or forearms. My boxing workouts had left me with plenty of strength. But alternating the weight of my body from my left
hand to my right and back to my left was tearing at the broken and crusted blisters. Without the leather gloves, it would have been unbearable.
Pain I could deal with. Just like Ali. You took the shots until you were ready to fire them back in return.
The climb took ten minutes.
Raven had already opened the window to Dr. Evans’s office, and I pulled myself through, ready to throw the first in a combination of punches.
“Slack job you have,” I told Raven. “Climbing’s nothing.”
She was standing in the total darkness with a tiny flashlight to give us the light we needed.
“Not when someone’s gone up with no rope and put one in place for you.” I didn’t hear a smile in her voice. “Let’s get this done.”
No time to worry about her attitude.
“All we do,” I said, “is put the painting on his desk.”
She pulled it out of her backpack. A small Picasso portrait. It was one of his early works. It was a distorted portrait of a woman, who complained to Picasso when it was finished that it didn’t look like her at all. His tart reply was that someday it would. Historians called it Cubist, and I didn’t care why. All I knew was how much it was worth and that every time Dr. Evans had been at our oceanside vacation property, he’d spent a lot of time looking at it with open lust.
The rest would depend on his reaction to finding it.
“What about the video?” Raven asked.
“Of course,” I said.
Want to spy on people? Just google
spy video gadgets
, and you’ll find a dozen ways that video cams are disguised. Ballcap visors, rocks, wall clocks, wristwatches.
I’d chosen a ballpoint cam. It was an expensive-looking ballpoint pen capable of recording color video and sound for thirty-two hours.
Raven handed three of them to me from her backpack. I’d given them to her earlier, when I’d thought she would be climbing the wall alone. Expense wasn’t an issue for me. I doubted Dr. Evans would notice them in a fancy cuplike penholder he kept on a shelf. If, for some reason, he grabbed one to write with, that left a couple of others in place. And the pen would write, if necessary.
I touched the button on each of the pens to start the recording, then set them in the cup on the shelf in such a way that they would clearly capture the painting on Dr. Evans’s desk when the sunlight came in through the window.
What Raven didn’t know was that earlier in the day, when I’d wandered into Dr. Evans’s office to open the window latch, I’d placed a fourth pen there to record her breaking into the office.
Lack of trust was a two-way game.
At the window, as we prepared to climb back down, Raven said, “When you get to the bottom, unhook the rope from your climbing belt and give two tugs. I’ll know you’re free. Then step away with Jo, because after a ten-count, I’ll be throwing the rope down from the top, and I don’t want to hit her. The hook at the end looks small, but at the speed it will be coming down, it’s going to be dangerous.”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Not worried about hitting me?”
Her answer was a grunt.
I wasn’t successful in fighting a quick surge of temper. “What’s with the attitude?”
I said. “You and Jo are treating me like dog poop to scrape off a shoe.”
“We owed you this help, and you’re getting it,” Raven said. “Why should you care what attitude comes with it? But if you want to know, we’re seriously not happy about the blackmail thing and how you threatened to turn us in to the authorities if we didn’t help.”
“Didn’t say I cared,” I snapped back. “It was just an observation.”
“Then keep it to yourself. When we’re on the ground, that’s the last you’ll see of us. Our debt to you will be paid, and you can go back to preppie heaven.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” I said. Especially because there was a better than fifty-fifty chance it had been the two of them torturing me with curling irons.
Raven had removed the Jumars and replaced them with belay devices. These were simple hand brakes with the rope threaded through them to slow my descent. I pulled on the leather gloves
and gritted my teeth in anticipation of the pain. I lowered myself over the windowsill and began to slowly slide down the rope, using the belay devices as Raven had instructed to brake myself against gravity.
It was far easier going down than up.
I landed softly a few minutes later.
“Top of the evening to you,” I said to Jo.
“Whatever,” she answered.
“Look,” I said, “if it’s about kicking that kitten…”
“Huh?”
“Inside joke,” I said. “Very inside. Forget I said anything.”
I tugged twice on the rope.
“We’ve got ten seconds to clear,” I told Jo. “The grappling hook is coming down.” We both stepped back a healthy distance. There was a slight thump as the rope hit the grass in front of us.
Jo stepped forward to reel in the rope and wind it up to place in her backpack.
As she completed that task, I stayed where I was. Much as Raven’s attitude bothered me, I had to admit it was amazing to watch her climbing abilities.
She threaded her way back down the outer wall of the hospital, finding nooks and crevices in the bricks.
Halfway down, she froze. She gave a warning hiss.
That’s when the flicker of a flashlight to my left caught my eye. With her bird’s-eye view, she’d spotted it first.
The light moved and bobbed with the rhythm of a man at a walking pace. Security guard.
At this point, he didn’t seem to be hurrying. The light flicked around as he checked doors and windows. But that lack of purpose would only last about thirty seconds. This guy wasn’t a slacker—he was flashing the light up and down the walls. Chances were too good that he’d pin Raven with that light.
I was guessing Raven didn’t want to move because she was afraid it would catch his eye.
“Jo,” I said in a low voice. “Trouble.”
She saw it immediately. “We need to distract him.”
“We could make out,” I said.
“What?”
“You know. Like in movies. We could start kissing and look all passionate, like we didn’t notice the guard, and then be all embarrassed about being caught, and that would distract him from Raven above us. It’s a price I’m willing to pay.”
“Make out,” she said. “Kiss.”
“It’s a sacrifice I’m prepared to make for the team,” I said.
“I’d hate to make you pay a price that high,” she said. “Let’s try something else.”
She stepped back, then started screaming, “Get away from me! I don’t know you!”
“What?” I stepped forward and grabbed her arm.
She grabbed mine in return, twisted it and flipped me to the ground. The air rushed from my lungs. Standing over me, she yelled, “You’re disgusting! Slimeball!”
Then she turned and ran, leaving me alone with the guard coming up fast on the sidewalk.
“Hey!” the guard shouted. “What’s going on!”
“I dated a creep, that’s what’s wrong!” she shouted without slowing down. “He’s back there by the bushes!”
The flashlight beam swung in my direction. But by then I was already running too. Opposite direction.
Seven o’clock on Saturday night, and I stepped into the ring for the fifth fight on the card. There was a good crowd in Billy’s gym, and the air was heavy with sweat, fear, aggression and tension.
This was amateur night, and Billy was showcasing the best of his teenage fighters against a boxing club up from Seattle. We didn’t have the home-crowd advantage. Seattle was close enough to Vancouver that a busload of fans had made the journey, and they were doing their best to out-cheer and out-jeer the friends and family of our hometown kids.
With the referee at the center, I touched gloves with my opponent, Alex Meunster. He was big and brawny. No surprise, his nickname was “The Monster.” Although we were in the same weight category, much of my muscle was in my upper thighs. I could run forever. I told myself I would be faster and more intelligent than him, and in my mind I was Muhammad Ali facing George Foreman.
Meunster the Monster wore his hair long enough that it was bound in a ponytail. He had tattoos across his gleaming pectorals and massive biceps. Crude tattoos. Like he’d had them done in juvie. Not cool, expensive tattoos like the ones curling around my left shoulder.
His grin—blue because of his mouthguard—was more like the leer of someone with a big appetite about to dig into a buffet.
Billy had prepped me. This guy wanted to throw the glamorous knockout punch,
and he was 20 and 0 with that strategy. And I had no intention of being his buffet.
The bell rang and he moved in. I didn’t bounce on my feet, signaling what he expected, as I am sure he’d been prepped on my fighting style. He figured I’d be looking to counterpunch my way out, dodging his punches and looking for a big right-hander to take him out when he got tired.
Nope. Not this time. I’d already decided my strategy. We’d all been trained to throw the hard punches. Day after day at the heavy bag, that’s what we did, until our upper arms ached as much as our knuckles throbbed. Instead, to confuse his defenses, my strategy was to use something he probably hadn’t seen before. Light punches.
First, it would set me up for harder punches later. Second, light punches can be thrown from a wider range of positions and movements. Unlike a power punch,
a light punch doesn’t need you to be perfectly balanced or grounded. The lighter punches wouldn’t hurt him, but he was going to be seeing lots of them—and feeling them—from a lot of different angles.
As he closed in, I leaned backward and jabbed, a movement that threw me farther backward and took power out of the punch. But it popped him on the cheekbone, and I saw his eyes flare open in surprise.
I knew it hadn’t hurt him, but he’d reacted. I had surprised him. That was my goal. I was trying to make him fearful of getting hit, even though none of my hits would do any damage.
That was the pattern of the first round. I wasn’t thinking punch. I was thinking touch and slap, like I was trying to knock a bug out of the air. With each exhalation, I extended a jab. Left, right. Falling backward to dodge a big swing or ducking beneath a haymaker, I made sure that I kept flicking my hands in his direction.
Because I wasn’t throwing power into those punches, it took very little energy. I could do this for five rounds and be as fresh as when I started.
The bell ended the first round, and he was breathing hard as he went to his corner. I’d succeeded in puffing a point on his cheekbone, and he’d landed a heavy body blow to my right side that I knew would bruise later.
In the corner, Billy wiped my face with a wet towel and said only three words: “I like it.”
I nodded.
When the bell rang for the second round, Meunster took three hard strides toward me. He was irritated. Perfect.
Time to see if I’d softened him up. I made a quick jerking movement with my right shoulder. Didn’t throw a punch. Just that slight movement. It stopped him briefly.
That’s when I knew I had him. He was reacting to anything I did, worried
about my hands and where the next punch would come from. He believed I had punching power from anywhere, when the truth was anything I did from my off-balance positions would have been no worse than a friend poking him unexpectedly.
My intent for the next half of the round was to alternate between throwing those fast light punches and faking punches. And then, because I didn’t want him to have a chance to talk things over with his coach after the second round, I was going to use the last half of this round for a complete strategy switch. I wanted to take advantage of his confused defenses and work on the five-punch combo that Ali had used to set up Foreman for the big punch.
It didn’t happen that way.
“Get him, Jace!” came a distinctive voice from the crowd. My father. The world-famous neurosurgeon. Beloved by all except his wife and his own two sons.
Impossible that he knew I was here tonight. This was my secret alternative world.
I couldn’t help but glance over. He was in the second row from the front.
Impossible.
And sitting right beside my father was Jo. Holding an iPhone sideways as she videoed the fight.
What was she doing with him?
And what kind of message was my father trying to send me by announcing his presence here? That he—
I never got a chance to finish the thought. Not until later in the evening, as I headed into the locker room to shower and change.
Because interrupting my thoughts was a nuclear bomb that exploded against the side of my head. I didn’t even realize I was on the mat until that familiar whoosh of nitrate to the brain came with Billy popping open smelling salts below my nostrils and telling me I was an idiot.
Billy was correct. I was an idiot for letting anything distract me.
With the fight, Meunster the Monster had gained a 21 and 0 record, and all I’d gotten out of it was two loosened front teeth, a headache of biblical proportions and questions that wouldn’t go away about my father and Jo.