Spirit of a Champion (Sisters of Spirit #7) (4 page)

"Over 600 million acres. Almost all of it in the western
United States and Alaska. Why do you think Alaska threatens to secede from the
Union? It's a very big problem."

“There’s a lot of land out here.” Glancing past her, out the
window, he could see miles and miles of what looked like uninhabited desert.
Except he knew better. It was what his ranch looked like from the air.

“There's not enough private land left to spit on,” she said.
“Those fellows back east take their pens and draw on the map and say, 'Look at
the good we're doing.' Alaska looks so small on a map, but when they draw their
circle they are confiscating a huge area, the size of several of their states.
I don’t know if they even realize how much land they are taking away from
Alaskans."

He drew back. As a Westerner himself, he’d heard comments about
this, but Stormy was giving him an earful. He had never thought seriously about
it.

"If it’s even got a tree on it, they'll call it a national
something or other. With one stroke of a pen, Utah lost a million acres with
rich coal deposits on it. You can bet the people of Utah didn't want that to
happen. Especially the company which had done all the costly permits and
studies and was all ready to mine it."

“I see.”

 She looked up at him and smiled,
actually smiled
! "I shouldn't have
gotten on my soap box. I try to remember not to."

"I don't mind. Really. Were your folks farmers?"

"Oh, no. But my neighbors were. The kids I went to school
with. You hear it often enough, and see the results. Someone wants to put in a
pond, cut a tree, or improve their land, and they are told no...they can't do
that because of some rule or regulation.”

Kyle remembered his dad talking about some of this. He just
hadn’t paid attention. “Can’t you get them changed?”

She shook her head. “No. Some unelected bureaucrat in Washington
DC made it a rule, and there’s no way to reach him and say, ‘This regulation is
wrong. It’s destroying our way of life.’ You take a mountain person and tell
him that he has no say over the land he lives on, and he erupts. Most of the
people in Idaho don't like feds.” She paused, took a quick look at him. “Which
you aren't, I hope?"

"No. No. Far from it."

"Good."  She lapsed into silence again.

Kyle by now was even more intrigued, because people had been
pressing him to run for congress from his state. Texas. If elected, he would be
a "fed."

He felt the plane lurch and looked out the window. He must be
losing his touch. They were landing and he still hadn't reached any of his
goals.

"You didn't say what you were down here for," he said.

"No, I didn't," she replied, and left it at that.

"Well?" he prompted her.

"What are you down here for?" She reversed the
question onto him.

"I'm uh—"

"Business or pleasure?"

"I'm on a business trip," he said. After almost
arguing with her about politics, he certainly wasn't going to tell her that he
was Killer Kyle. Oh no. She'd probably erupt just as much or more over that as
she had over the feds.

“What kind?”

“It’s just temporary work. Why don’t I give you my phone number?
You can call me if you need any help while you’re here.”

“Thanks, but I’ll manage.”

The airplane alert chimed. It was time to remove seat belts. She
took hers off and waited for him to stand up.

He tried once more. “I’d like to see you while you’re here.
Maybe we could have coffee together.”

“I won’t have time. Thanks, anyway.”

Strike three. He couldn’t even make it to first base.
He stood up, let her out,
then grabbed his bag and followed her off the plane. He doubted that he’d see
her again.

You’re losing your touch, champ.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stormy slammed her pen down on the table, incensed by the utter
stupidity of the men she had talked to so far. Stonewalled. That's what they
had done. They had stonewalled her....assuring her they would look into the
problem. And yet she knew that none of them had done any more than wait until
she was out of the room before completely ignoring her request.

She had been in Vegas four days so far and had been totally put
off by a bunch of men who were convinced they had a hysterical woman on their
hands. It hadn't helped that her mother had been adamant against boxing, and
that she herself had never expressed any particular fondness for the sport...if
you could call it a sport, when two people tried to bash each other to pieces.
Her reputation preceded her, and didn’t help a bit.

Stormy had gone to see Jerry and her father the day after she
arrived, knowing that Jerry always got up early to do his road work. She had
caught them at their hotel on the outskirts of Las Vegas—on the road to
Boulder City—and told her brother about the second phone call from his
doctor, but he proved impossible to talk to, even when she stressed the danger
he was in. He shook his head, laughing, saying that she didn't know the whole
story; that he was fine.

Her insistence prompted her father to call her hysterical and
tell her to go back to Idaho. Instead she had taken a room at the cheapest
hotel she could find on Boulder Highway and called John Easton, the main
promoter. Upon hearing her story, he said it was up to Jerry and his doctor;
the tickets were sold and there was no way he himself was going to stop the
fight.

That shook Stormy, but she made one more attempt, calling the
sports editor at the newspaper and talking to him until she had the names and
phone numbers of several members of the boxing commission. After running two of
them down, they assured her that they would have Jerry re-checked before the
fight.

They sounded sincere, but by now she had grown distrustful of
the condescending replies. Their voices in effect patted her on the head and
told her to stop making a scene over something she knew nothing about.

Fighting hard against the overwhelming negativity of their
discouraging attitudes, she stared down at the list she had made of those with
control over the fight, the names ticked off one by one. She had contacted
everyone she could think. Everyone except The Killer.

The world's champion. Would he even give her the time of day?
Probably not. Still, if she couldn't stop the fight by talking to men on
Jerry's side, she would try the enemy...then start going through her list
again.

She was not a quitter. She’d go see him even if he had her
thrown out. But the hopelessness of her quest weighed down on her. It wasn’t
helped by the fact that her money had disappeared so rapidly that she had
stopped eating any other meal than breakfast, just so she could pay her hotel
bill for a few more days.

Just maybe the champ would listen to her. He certainly wouldn't
want to have his opponent die, would he? Even if his nickname was
"Killer?"

Stormy didn't have his phone number, but there had been a news
article yesterday that named the gym where he was training temporarily. Pete's
Place? Harry's Place? Something like that. Pulling out the Las Vegas phone
directory, she looked up the name and addresses of the local gyms.

Marty's Place. The other side of town. Just her luck.

Her finances were dwindling rapidly. The plane fare down, the
hotel room, cab fares, food...all were quickly sucking the last cash out of her
bank account. She had worked her way through college, but getting her masters
had been expensive, forcing her to take out a student loan...which she hated,
having gotten into debt once in high school and tearing up all her credit cards
to get herself out.

It wasn’t a big loan, but Stormy was determined to pay it off
right away, since the borrower was always under obligation to the
person—or entity—handing out the money. She wouldn’t be her own
person until she was debt free.

She knew some students figured it was their “right,” but Stormy
knew better. There were Idaho farmers who could barely survive, much less pay
their taxes. She didn’t like getting an education on their backs. Government
money always came from taxes, and taxes came from people. It didn’t give her
the right to take any of it.

 Until she began to work, she had no capital. She might
have to take a job here, temporary of course, while she tried to keep Jerry
from killing himself. She had nine days left. Not long, really.

Stormy located the address to Marty’s Place on a map, figured
out the closest bus route, then looked at a timetable. If she ran, she would
just make the bus. The next one didn't leave for another hour.

Grabbing up her purse, Stormy left her room, hurrying down the
long hotel hallway, the variations in floor levels attesting to the fact that
the hotel had "grown" to its present size from several smaller
buildings. It stunk, as did her room, from sources Stormy refused to consider.
After the fresh air of Idaho, the stench was particularly hard to take, and she
held her breath as long as possible, taking the first exit outside.

It was noon, hot as only Las Vegas in July can be. Stormy ran
across the soft asphalt in the parking lot, down three blocks and across a major
road to the bus stop.

Twenty minutes later she was still waiting. And waiting. She
must have just missed the bus, but she refused to leave in case it was running
late. Then it got too late to go search for a place to eat, so she sat there,
closing her eyes against the glare.

The next one came an hour after Stormy had first reached the
stop. Wilted from sitting in the heat, she climbed aboard and sunk down onto a
seat, grateful for the cooler interior. She felt terribly thirsty, and realized
she had only had one glass of water—with breakfast—so far today.

The gym where the champ was supposed to be training was twelve
long blocks from the bus stop. Half residential, half commercial, this part of
town had seen better days, and she jogged at first, passing the boarded-up
buildings and run-down houses as swiftly as she could.

The sun, still hot at three-fifteen, made Stormy seek the shade
of whatever tree or overhang she could find. She rested whenever possible, so
that it was close to four in the afternoon before she drug her feet across the
last few yards, feeling as if the heat had permanently scorched the bottoms of
her feet and the top of her head.

Someone had scrawled the street number on the front steps, or
she would have passed it by. Red dust marked every crevice and crack in the
ancient concrete structure, it's corners rounded-off, smoothed by years of
crumbling. The name—Marty's Place—written in two-inch high caps on
the wooden door, was barely discernible, the paint flaking off in tiny chips.

With a sigh of relief, Stormy climbed the three concrete steps,
noting the hollows worn in each one, and tugged on the door handle. It refused
to open and she tried again. Locked.

She glanced around. The few windows had heavy mesh screens over
them, but they were open. She could hear activity inside.  

Making a fist, she banged on the door, hard. Again. And again.
She kept banging. She knew they were in there.

It finally opened—a crack—and an elderly man stuck
his head out and glared at her. His face was as lined as the building, deep
wrinkles crisscrossing a dark suntan. Thin white hair, crew cut, barely covered
his scalp. He was at eye level with Stormy.

"What do you want?"

A tall, cold glass of lemonade
, but she would settle right now for a trickle
of warm water out of an old drinking fountain. Then she wanted to see the
champ. "Water." She sounded like a dehydrated frog. "I'm dying
of thirst."

"Get lost."

The man scowled and attempted to close the door but Stormy's
foot was in the way. A small, wizened old man, he did not have the strength to
close it against her. Realizing this, she thrust herself forward and halfway
inside.

"Stop that! Go away!" He tried to hold the door
against her, but she was stronger.

"I have to get a drink."

"Then stay outside and I'll bring you one."

She pushed harder and stepped all the way inside. It was darker
in the room, cooler but not air-conditioned. From here she could see through an
open doorway and into the inside of the gym. Two rings only. One occupied by
two men sparring, several others watching.

"I'm already in. Just show me where the water fountain
is."

"Have it your way then," he grumbled. "Over
there."

He pointed to a spot just past the doorway into the gym itself
and she hurried ahead of him, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes fully
adjust to the dimmer light. The gym aroma of sweat and stale air struck her
forcibly, making her wonder, as always, why men liked being in gyms.

Yes, it was The Killer in the dark trunks. She had watched his
fights long enough now to be able to spot his style. She was only about twenty
feet away from him.

The drink first. She could barely croak.