Suckerpunch: (2011) (18 page)

Alan made eye contact with me and said, “Listen, Kendall isn’t here so just get out and call him. From outside.”

I said, “Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sure you have his number, so please—”

Jairo kicked the door in.

Alan flinched and dropped the clipboard. He ducked his head and said, “What?
What?”

“Kendall will pay for that,” I told him.

The Arcoverdes came out. They weren’t dragging Steve or the other guy with them, and nothing the size of Jake came tumbling out. Jairo held a computer keyboard, the cord trailing behind him like an empty leash. He looked around the room at the faces. “Any of these?”

I shook my head.

Jairo cursed and snapped the keyboard over his knee. Letters and numbers shot around the room like shrapnel. He threw the keyboard halves into the room and stormed out, Javier and Edson in tow.

Alan put his hands on top of his head. He stared at the ceiling.

“Where is he?” I asked.

Alan didn’t look down. “You think he tells me?”

“No cops,” I said. Somebody had to.

“Yeah, Kendall would
really
love that.”

When I walked past Hannah, she gave me the hands on the hips all the way out the door.

Gil steered with one hand and held his coffee with the other. He said, “Now what? Is there anything we can do? No. Can we go back to the gym and concentrate on the goddamn fight? Yes.”

“Call him,” Jairo said. “And this time give me the phone.”

Kendall answered on the third ring. “Hey, I got you saved in my phone as ‘Woodshed.’ You know what’s funny? I don’t have any other people in here under W.”

“Put Marcela on.”

Jairo’s hand appeared between the front seats, open for me to put the phone into it.

“You just talked to her, son. She’s all worn out from your expansive conversation skills.”

“What makes you think I’m not going to try to win the fight whether you have her or not? Let her go. You’ll still have Lance, you can make your money, and everyone’s happy.”

Jairo snapped his fingers.

“Don’t you
feel
it, though?” Kendall asked. “The juice on this is sweet, my man. Money alone can’t match this.”

“That’s because money isn’t personal. This is. And when things get personal, they tend to get red and sticky.”

Jairo tugged on my shoulder. I jerked it away. I was getting somewhere. Kendall was talking to me, and I could fix this. Jairo would just yell in Portuguese and put Marcela in more danger.

Kendall said, “You take it personal, that’s on you. I’m on the clock, so it’s business. Now Big Jake, degree and all, isn’t as professional as me. He’s got a big ole bandage across his nose and two eyes that look like he’s wearing a Lone Ranger mask. He might have something to say to you no matter what happens.”

I leaned forward fast enough to lock my seat belt. My phone started to crack. “I’ll put his fuckin’ jaw in international waters before he gets one word out.” It would have sounded better in Portuguese.

“Woody,” Gil said.

Jairo was coming between the seats to get the phone away from me. Another hand, Javier’s or Edson’s, pulled my seat belt backward.

Kendall laughed. “Woo! You’re ready for tonight. Don’t pop an aneurism or anything. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Wait. Wait. Marcela’s cousin wants to talk to her.”

Silence. I braced myself for the extraction into the backseat.

Kendall said, “Who’s that, more of them Arco-vair-days? I think we went past their hotel room when we picked up Marcela.” Like it was a date.

“Hold on.” I handed the phone to Jairo.

“I am Jairo Arcoverde. Who are you? . . . Okay, Kendall, listen to me now. You know where we come from? . . . That’s right, Brazil, my friend. This kind of thing, you do it down there, we take you into the jungle and you never come out.”

I winced and looked at Gil.

He kept his eyes on the road and shrugged.

Jairo said, “I know there’s no jungle here, but you have desert. I don’t know any Jake and don’t care about him. Bring Marcela back to me now, and we will talk about how to make this right.”

He was talking honor with Kendall. Like discussing gravity with an alien. The concept was familiar, but it just didn’t apply.

“No,
you
listen. Hello?” Jairo ranted in Portuguese and crushed the phone shut and threw it into the front seat. It bounced off Gil’s coffee and landed between my feet. It looked intact, but it seemed rude to make sure everything still worked right at that moment.

The brothers had what could qualify as a conversation. I didn’t catch any of it and regretted not learning at least a few common phrases, like “disembowel” and “leave him in a ditch.”

Gil and I sat in the front seat and didn’t look at each other, like prisoners in front of the firing squad waiting to see who got the first volley.

My seat moved, and I shifted to see Jairo two inches from my face. He stared into my eyes, nodded, and turned to Gil. “What time until we have to be at the fight?”

“The broadcast goes live at seven, so seven, seven thirty at the latest. I’m sure Eddie wants us there as early as possible.”

“Fuck Eddie,” Jairo said.

Gil and I nodded automatically.

“What time is it now, one thirty? Yes. Woody, we have six hours. That’s a whole night of sleep almost. We will spend it finding Marcela.”

Fight days are supposed to be restful. You stay loose, visualize how it will go, and don’t do anything that could get you hurt. Burbank was probably playing a video game, watching a movie, taking a nap. I was about to dive headfirst into a scavenger hunt through rusty nails and busted glass.

I rolled my neck and said, “Okay. I know where we can start. I know a guy.” That was the problem and the solution: I always knew a guy.

“All right,” Jairo said.

I said, “First we have to go to the gym and drop Gil off. He doesn’t need to be in this, and we need to switch trucks.”

“Of course,” Jairo said. “We have talked about this already. Edson cannot go, either, and Javier will stay with him.”

“Why?” I didn’t want to push it, but extra bodies meant extra muscle. You have enough of that, and maybe you didn’t have to use it.

Jairo said, “Because Edson is mad, and he’ll kill the first man we see who might help us find Marcela, and then no one will help us. And Javier will stay with him and hold him down to make sure he doesn’t go out on his own to find her.”

Gil said, “Can I drop them off at the hotel instead?”

We left them at the gym and switched trucks. My pickup was a ten-year-old Ford F-150, dark gray with black interior. Jairo went inside the gym and came out with bananas and apples and an orange and dumped them on the bench between us. Now that it was just me and him, the mood was calm and focused. We were past the blame and into the resolution, comfortable now that we were doing something.

We had the trust that came from days rolling on the mats and sparring in the cage. You could know someone your entire life, and if you’d never seen them in a fight, you still didn’t know who they really were. Watch someone fight the first time you meet them—or even better, be the one fighting them—and you could predict what they would do in just about any other situation.

I got out of the parking lot and started heading north while he peeled a banana and ate it in two bites. He folded the peel over itself and laid it on the floor mat and clapped and rubbed his hands together. “Okay, where are we going?”

“To see a guy Lance and I used to work for. They still run in the same circles, kind of, so maybe he knows something about Kendall or can call someone who does.”

“Why don’t we just call this guy?”

“Last I knew, he doesn’t have a phone. Landline, cell, nothing. Face-to-face is the only way.”

“And this guy, he likes you?”

I had to think about that one. “He respects me, but I don’t know if he likes me.”

“Respect is good.”

“I should tell you, though. The last time I saw Chops, he said the next time he saw me he’d kill me. So, you know. Be ready.”

I drove north on Nellis Boulevard and watched the graffiti blossom and store windows go from bright and full of merchandise to dark, dusty, and sometimes busted out. The buildings weren’t waiting for new tenants; they were waiting to be burned down by thugs or a careless bum or leveled as the Strip continued to feed. The sunlight was flat. There wasn’t anything clean or shiny for it to bounce off.

“This isn’t the best side of Vegas,” I told Jairo. “Sorry.”

He shrugged. “This is nothing. I haven’t seen anyone shitting in the street yet.”

“Be patient.”

Jairo perked up at a stoplight when he spotted a skinny guy wearing a Brazilian soccer jersey. He leaned out the window, saw the guy was actually a female with no hair and one boot talking to herself, and made a face like he’d licked a lemon-flavored turd.

I turned east on Owens and ignored the challenging stares and comments from the young hostiles standing on corners—
get a job, at least it’s air-conditioned
—and kept going until the houses stopped. One second we were rolling through a neighborhood and the next we were in the desert. The road was still paved, but sand had drifted over the shoulder, and the truck kicked up dust. I could see buildings ahead, some developer’s plan to spearhead farther into the frontier and offer a secluded setting along with the big city lifestyle. I hoped it had its own police force. About halfway between the last houses and the outpost, I turned south onto a dirt road stippled with ATV tire tracks.

Not from joyrides. Patrols.

Jairo asked, “This guy lives in the desert?”

“He likes to see people coming. We just ran over a hose that rings a bell in his house, so we’re expected.”

The track started a gentle incline into low hills, nothing around us but rocks and sand. At the tops of the rises we could see civilization off to the right, like a shoreline from atop the swells. The truck bounced over a final ridge, and the compound was in front of us. I had to stomp on the brakes because Chops had pushed his berm out farther, the wall of earth about eight feet high and covered with scrub. It wouldn’t be too hard to climb it, but at the top you’d see that the back side was a straight drop because of the steel retaining wall the earth was pushed against, and while you were standing there thinking about the drop, the crosshairs would find you.

Jairo braced himself against the dashboard, and the truck slid a few feet and stopped a car’s length from the gate, a dull barricade of battered sheet metal with rusty barbed wire coiled across the top. “This reminds me of Brazil.”

“Smile,” I said.

The camera was bolted to an antenna pole about twenty feet inside the berm and pointed right into the cab. It was a newer model than the last one I’d smiled into and was probably equipped with infrared and X-ray and lie detectors and death beams. Someone—maybe Chops, hopefully not—zoomed in on me. The camera panned to the right and gave Jairo some scrutiny. He squinted at it and muttered something.

We sat there for almost a minute; then Jairo said, “What happens here?”

“We wait. The gate opens, or it doesn’t.”

Another minute. Jairo drummed his fingers on the middle console. “How long?”

I’d sat in this spot for forty-five minutes before with nothing happening, but I didn’t want to tell Jairo that. We weren’t going to wait that long anyway. It was almost two o’clock, and Marcela was somewhere with Kendall and worm-lip Steve, and Burbank was resting. I was here to get what I needed and move on, and no earth berm or metal wall or amount of violent paranoia was going to stop me. I gave Chops five minutes to open the gate, or I was going over. I kept a smile on my face and hoped the camera couldn’t read minds.