Knockout. Erica Orloff
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my hands, as if I’d panicked, and let the car fishtail a bit. I let them think I was going to plow right into the cactus—an out-of-control female driver. But at the last minute, I grabbed the wheel and took a sharp left. Then I screamed with delight as I watched them smash their black BMW into the cactus, exploding the air bags and wrecking their car.
“Sayonara, boys,” I sang, then drove steadily down the road to the ranch, the sign over the long, sandy drive proclaiming Rooney Training Camp.
Chapter 3
The first time I met Terry Keenan, I was punching a heavy bag in my uncle Deacon’s gym—which was technically half my father’s, though we’d transferred the title to me to avoid anyone trying to come after it to pay legal bills.
“I’m looking for Jack Rooney,” he had said, surveying the gym full of fighters. The scent of stale gym socks and sweat permeated the air. I’d grown up in the stench of windowless gyms, and I was used to it after all this time.
I stopped punching the bag and turned to face him, out of breath, my arms aching slightly. I clumsily pulled the mouth guard out from between my teeth. “You’re…looking…at her. My name’s Jacqueline, but everyone calls me Jack.”
Keenan’s blue eyes narrowed. “Son of a bitch! No one told me you were a girl.”
“Woman,” I corrected him, less winded. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone set up a fighter like that as a joke. Miguel Jimenez came looking for a guy, too.”
“Well, I sure as hell am not training with a woman,” Keenan seethed. He stood about six foot two and was in superb shape, from what I could tell as he crossed his arms across his chest, his T-shirt sleeves bulging at the biceps.
“Suit yourself,” I snapped, and turned back to what I was doing, punching the bag more forcefully. As he walked away, I muttered under my breath, “Fine, asshole, don’t train here, then. You and that pretty face of yours will soon regret it.”
And regret it he did. Terry Keenan was back three months later, his beautiful face—big blue eyes, two dimples, a solid chin and a smattering of boyish freckles across his nose—now just a tad less beautiful since his nose had gotten broken, twice.
And that was how Terry Keenan came to train with me and Uncle Deacon, and now we were poised for the biggest fight of all our lives—the heavyweight championship of the world in four weeks.
“Get off the ropes!” I screamed at Terry. I looked at my uncle. “Can you see what happens when he gets backed up against the ropes like that?”
Deacon and I were standing on the ground, looking into our boxing ring, where our best chance at a title was sparring with a fighter by the name of Rock Morrison. Deacon had his arms folded, his face stony as he studied our two boxers. Deacon wasn’t a screamer. I was. I would yell from the corner or scream “fake left,” “jab right” or even a desperate “just fucking hit him!” Deacon, as befitted his nickname, which implied a near-biblical wisdom in the ring, studied fighters and videos of matches, and taped sparring sessions, poring over them time and time again until it became clear what our boxer was doing wrong. Then he made a pronouncement, like Moses coming down off the mount with two tablets of stone.
“All right, guys,” I shouted at the fighters. “Break it up. Catch your breath.”
Deacon finally spoke. “Son…” He motioned to Terry Keenan, wanting him to come closer to the ropes.
“Mmph,” our fighter responded, his mouth guard still in place. He walked to us and leaned over the ropes, sweat dripping down his face.
“The good Lord gave you two legs, Terry. Both of them work just fine. But you’re always relying on just one. Change up your footwork.” End of pronouncement. Deacon was done for the afternoon.
“Terry, you heard him,” I said. “Work out with the jump rope and then shower up. We’ll look over some tapes tonight before dinner.”
Terry nodded at me. That pretty face was unusual for a boxer, and his upcoming opponent, Gentleman Jake Johnson—whose face was decidedly less pretty—had offered to permanently make Terry’s face ugly in all the prefight trash talking. Now Deacon and I both, privately, wondered if Keenan had also gotten another kind of offer—to take a dive. Benny Bonita couldn’t be trusted, and though we believed in Terry, he had an enormous family. His seven brothers—and one sister—all seemed to think Terry was the ticket to the big time. We wondered if that meant that an even bigger paycheck, courtesy of a bribe from Bonita, was awfully enticing.
Deacon and I headed out of the gym and over to the ranch house, walking over sand and passing small cacti and scrubby-looking bushes. The ranch house was a rambling building with ten bedrooms. It had been a brothel once, and after that, it had been an actual ranch of some sort. I think the former owner had gone from hustling hookers to rustling ostriches.
I opened the front door and went into the large den, where Destiny sat watching a show with a bright purple dinosaur.
“Hi, Destiny,” I said, sitting next to her and reaching out to brush a stray hair from her face.
“Hi, Auntie Jack.”
“How are you doing, kiddo?” Dumb question. How was she supposed to be doing? Her mother was dead, and she was stuck with me and Deacon at a boxing camp while we figured out what to do.
“Okay. Uncle Deacon says Mommy went up to heaven.” She said it very matter-of-fact. Deacon said children didn’t grasp the permanence of death until ten or eleven.
“Yeah…Mommy is in heaven, sweetie pie, which is really sad. But you know what?”
“What?”
“You get to have a guardian angel. Honey, she is going to watch over you.”
Destiny leaned into me, burying her face near my belly. I’d never spent much time with kids. In fact, though I felt badly for her, inside I was realizing the enormity of hiding her. I expected at any moment a phalanx of cops and FBI agents to come swooping down to grab her—and I would get a nice cell to match my father’s.
“Destiny, honey…do you miss Tony?”
“Uncle Tony? Kinda. Did he go up to heaven, too?”
“No.” Though I suppose to some people, Vegas is kind of like heaven. “He’s back at your house.”
“Did you know I have a pet tiger at our house? I couldn’t pet him, but Uncle Tony let me name him.”
“What’d you name him?”
“Tigger.”
“Cute.”
“He’s huge. As big as one in the jungle. Uncle Tony told me he could eat me in one big gulp.”
“Probably could. Did you spend a lot of time with Uncle Tony?”
She shrugged her tiny shoulders and shook her head. “Uh-uh. He was always very busy, Mommy said. I wasn’t s’posed to bother him. But sometimes the three of us did stuff together. Or Mommy would take me to his work to visit him.”
“Did you like visiting him at work?”
“Kinda. I drew pictures on paper in his office, and then the three of us would go out for dinner.”
“What’s your favorite dinner?”
“Chicken nuggets.”
“I think I know how to make them,” I said without enthusiasm. “But Big Jimmy does the cooking out here. I’ll ask him if he can make you some.”
“Big Jimmy and I made cookies.”
“Really?” I knew he was a softie.
“Uh-huh. He used to be Mommy’s boyfriend. She always talked about him.”
“She talked about him? I didn’t know that.” I thought about how