The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “I didn’t mean any offense,” Boyd says, still smiling.

  “See, it sounded like you did.” Boone isn’t smiling.

  Some of the activity in the room stops as the students sense an impending conflict. They have a nose for this kind of thing, an unerring radar that tells them of imminent violence. They’re into it, wanting to see what their teacher will do to this guy.

  “Where are we going with this?” Boyd asks, feeling their eyes on him. He knows he can’t even look like he’s backing down. If he shies from a fight, or loses, half his devoted team will find a new school. The other half will stay and eat him alive—they’re pack dogs.

  Boone has no such worries. “We don’t have to go anywhere with it.”

  He hears a guy in the back of the room mutter, “Pussy.” A few of the others are smiling and shaking their heads. Boyd feels the momentum and doesn’t want to let it go. He says, “You came into my place, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend.”

  “Tell you what,” Boyd says. “Strap up, get into the ring with me, and I’ll show you what MMA is all about.”

  Maybe because it’s been a sad day, or because he’s pissed off about a lot of things he can’t do anything about, maybe even because he let that kid at Rockpile mouth off to him, Boone decides it might be a good time to throw a little.

  39

  Five minutes later, he’s stripped down to just his jeans, is wrapping the MMA gloves around his hands, and one of the students is handing him a mouthpiece.

  “This is new, right?” Boone asks.

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I just took it out of the wrapper.”

  “Better.”

  The guy looks at him funny and then says, “I’m Dan. I’m your corner.”

  “This is a circle.”

  “Huh?”

  “There are no . . . Never mind,” Boone says. “What does a corner do?”

  “Coach,” Dan says. “Yell out advice and encouragement. Help carry you out of the ring if you, like, can’t walk.”

  “Great.”

  Dan explains the rules. They’re going to fight one five-minute round. You can kick, punch, wrestle, grapple, but no kicking in the balls, eye-gouging, biting, or kicking or kneeing the opponent in the head when he’s down.

  “If he gets you in a joint lock or a chokehold,” Dan says, “and you feel something about to pop or break, tap him three times and he’ll stop.”

  “Okie-dokie.”

  “We have a saying.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘Better to tap a second too soon,’” Dan recites, “ ‘than a second too late.’”

  “Good saying.”

  If a guy were to have a crew, Boone thinks, this would be a most excellent time to have one. It would be really nice to see Dave, Tide, or Johnny walk through that door. If I feel something about to pop or break—

  “You ready?” Boyd shouts.

  Boone already has his mouthpiece in, so he just gives a thumbs up and shuffles into the center of the ring, trying to remember some of the wit and wisdom of Dave the Love God, the chapter on fighting. If it’s a big guy, Dave said, try to take his legs away from him early. Those pegs are holding up a lot of weight and wear out easily, especially with a little assistance from you.

  So Boone comes in and shoots a quick, slapping, low roundhouse kick that hits Boyd in the low left calf. It makes Boyd wince a little, so Boone does it again right away and then moves off to the side.

  Boyd comes forward, shooting two left jabs that Boone sidesteps. The teacher looks a little surprised—Daniels has a few more skills than he thought. But he keeps coming forward—two more jabs followed by a right hook, then a straightforward kick to set up a spinning backfist that whizzes just past Boone’s nose as he jumps back and gets a collective “Whoo!” from the crowd.

  No shit, whoo! Boone thinks. If that had connected I’d be on queer street until next week. He tries another low kick to the calf but Boyd is ready and moves his leg out of the way, throwing Boone off balance. Boone tries to recover with a straight right punch, but Boyd ducks under it, grabs him around the ribs, lifts him over his head, and walks him toward the edge of the ring.

  Boone feels it coming, but even if he didn’t, there’s plenty of time to hear the onlookers groan in happy anticipation, and one of them narrates, “Slam!” Boone’s being carried along like he’s backward on a wave, and he looks down to see Dan looking up at him, wincing.

  “Any advice?!” Boone asks.

  “You’re kind of fucked!”

  “Encouragement?!”

  “Uhhhh, hang in there!”

  Yeah. Then Boone feels himself going over backward, there’s a second of that awful falling feeling, and he tries to remember what Dave told him. Look at your belt, so you don’t hit the back of your head.

  Boone looks at his belt.

  A second later he slams onto the canvas half a second before Boyd drops all his weight on him. The air goes out of Boone’s lungs, he feels like his back might be broken, and the world is doing this funny spinning thing.

  Yeah, but he’s been here before, at the bottom of a big wave that weighs a hell of a lot more and is even meaner than Mike Boyd, so he knows he can survive it. He hears a couple of the onlookers yell excitedly that Boyd is “achieving full mount,” and is a little concerned what that might be, recalling the time that he and Dave attended Dave’s little brother’s high school wrestling match and agreed that any sport that gave points for “riding time” and didn’t involve either a horse or a bull was at least a little homoerotic. And now Boyd is sitting upright on his chest, like the classic schoolyard bully—“full mount”—and starts to rain elbow strikes down on Boone’s face.

  “Ground and pound!” Boone hears someone say, and that about sums it up as he tries to move his head to avoid the “pound” component. It sort of works—Boyd’s elbows glance off Boone’s face instead of splitting it open and breaking his cheekbones. Boone gets his forearms up around his head and Boyd switches to roundhouse punches, trying to find an open spot to hit.

  Boone waits until Boyd leans in to give his punch more leverage, then bucks up and throws Boyd forward, over his own head. Now Boone’s face is jammed into Boyd’s crotch, which isn’t pleasant, but at least puts it out of punching range. Boone slithers out from under, rolls, gets to his feet, and turns, just in time to see Boyd getting up. Timing his punch, Boone rolls his right shoulder and lets it go just as Boyd turns. The punch connects hard on the jaw. Boyd sprawls backward, bounces off the ring, and slumps down on his ass, half out of it.

  “Jump on him!” Dan screams from the “corner.”

  Boone doesn’t. He just stands there, sort of confused. Any other martial art he ever dicked around with—hell, in life itself—you don’t hit a man when he’s down. You just don’t, and now he gets the diff between MMA and all the rest—in MMA, the whole point is to hit the dude when he’s down.

  Boyd gets up, shakes his head to clear it, and comes toward Boone.

  “Three minutes!” Dan yells.

  Three minutes?! Boone thinks. Three minutes left? He would have thought it was maybe twenty seconds. Anyone who doesn’t believe Einstein’s take on relativity has never gone a round in the ring. Time doesn’t slow down or even stop, it slams it into reverse and goes backward.

  Now Boone totally gets it—he should have jumped on Boyd and pounded him into total unconsciousness. Boyd is coming toward him, the lights are back on in his eyes, and now—as the joke goes about Jesus’s return—he’s pissed.

  But definitely more cautious, almost respectful. He’s seen Boone survive the slam, the ground and pound, escape, and rock him with a single punch. The surfer has heavy hands—one-punch hands—and he doesn’t look tired or even winded.

  He isn’t—you want a cardio workout, paddle a surfboard. Boone launches two more low kicks, aiming one at the inside of Boyd’s thigh to smack the femoral artery.
Boyd winces at each one but keeps coming forward. Boone moves backward, circling so as not to get trapped against the ropes. Shooting jabs to keep Boyd at a distance, he keeps moving, trying to gain space, trying to waste time.

  “He’s a pussy!” someone yells. “He don’t want any part of you, Mike!”

  True on both counts, Boone thinks. He goes in for another kick, but Boyd is ready and grabs Boone’s leg, lifts it, and throws him to the mat. Boone covers up to ward off the ground and pound, but it doesn’t come. Boyd drops on to him, but rolls over so that Boone’s on top, his back against Boyd’s chest.

  Boone feels Boyd’s thick right forearm slide under his chin and tighten on his throat, then Boyd’s left hand press against the back of his head. Boyd arches his back, stretching Boone out and tightening the grip like a noose.

  “Tap out! Tap out!” Dan yells.

  Boone twists to loosen the grip but it’s in too tight. Boyd’s forearm is locked onto his throat. Boone can see the thick muscles knotted and, just above the wrist, a small tattoo.

  The number “5.”

  Boyd hisses, “Tap, Daniels.”

  Fuck that, Boone thinks.

  Then he’s out.

  40

  He’s on the mat when he comes to.

  Dan looks down at him with concern.

  “What happened?” Boone asks.

  “Rear-naked choke,” Dan says.

  Sounds ugly, Boone thinks, especially the “rear” and “naked” parts.

  “Why didn’t you tap out?” asks Dan.

  After a little bit of thought, Boone remembers what “tap out” means and what happened to put him in the position to do it. Or not, as the case may be. Dan and another student help him to his feet. His legs feel shaky. He looks across the ring and sees Boyd looking at him. Boone takes some small satisfaction that Boyd has an ice pack pressed against his jaw.

  “Why didn’t you tap?” Boyd asks.

  It seems to be the question of the day.

  “Didn’t feel like it.”

  Boyd laughs. “You’re no bitch, Daniels. Only a real freak would rather black out than tap out.”

  “Real freak” apparently being high praise.

  “Thanks.”

  Boone walks toward the door on legs that are still objecting to being given so much responsibility. Then he stops, turns around, and says, “There is something you can teach me.”

  “Shoot.”

  The Superman Punch.

  41

  You have to have your legs under you to do it, which Boone doesn’t, but Boyd demonstrates on a heavy hanging bag.

  It’s basically simple, but it’s harder to do than it looks. You jump off one foot, toward your opponent, then while in midair, execute a downward chopping punch with the opposite hand. The impact is incredible because of the momentum of the whole body being thrown into the punch.

  Boyd does it and the heavy bag hops on its chain, comes back down, and shakes.

  “It’s not a move you want to try a lot,” Boyd explains after he does it, “because both feet are off the ground and that leaves you vulnerable to any kind of counter. If you miss with it, you’re truly fucked. But if you connect—”

  “So you teach this,” Boone says.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you teach it to Corey Blasingame?”

  “Maybe,” Boyd says. “I don’t know.”

  Yeah, maybe, Boone thinks. He takes two steps toward the bag, then launches himself. Twisting his hip in midair, he throws everything into the punch and can feel the energy surge all the way up his arm as his fist makes contact.

  A wild adrenaline surge.

  Superman.

  The heavy bag sags in the middle and pops back.

  Mike Boyd seems impressed. “You can come train here anytime,” he says, then adds, “We need men like you.”

  Boone walks out of the dojo. After a day of dipping his spade in the sad, barren soil of Corey Blasingame’s life, his question isn’t how the kid could have beaten someone to death, but how it didn’t happen sooner.

  He gets into the Deuce and heads for the Spy Store.

  42

  The small shop is a creepy little place in a strip mall in Mira Mesa, its customer base being a few actual PIs, a lot of wannabes, hard-core paranoids, and not a few of the grassy-knoll, wrap-your-head-in-tinfoil-the-government-is-attacking-you-with-gamma-rays set who won’t buy off the Internet because the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and Barbara Bush are all tracking their downloads. The store usually is filled with a lot of browsers who just like electronic gadgets and cool spy shit.

  And there’s a lot of cool spy shit in there—bugs, listening devices, cameras that look like anything other than cameras, computer cookie devices, computer anticookie devices, computer antianticookie devices . . .

  Boone finds his first item: a LiveWire Fast Track Ultrathin Real-Time GPS tracking device. It’s a black box about 21/2 inches square, with a magnet attachment. He picks up a ten-day battery to go with it, then looks for the next item on his mental list.

  The Super Ear BEE 100 Parabolic is a nasty and effective piece of intrusive work, a cone-shaped listening device capable of picking up a conversation from a good city block away. Boone picks out a compatible digital recorder with the appropriate cord and plug-in, and decides that he has what he needs for the job. He already has the camera—it came with the basic Private Investigator Starter Kit along with the cynicism, a manual of one-liners, and a saxophone sound track.

  He walks up to the counter and says to the clerk, “You talk to me in Vulcan, I’m puking on your floor.”

  “Hey, Boone.”

  “Hey, Nick,” Boone says. When Nick isn’t working, he’s playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s just the way it is. Boone hands Nick two credit cards, one his business, the other personal, and asks Nick to run the tracker and the listening device separately. He’ll toss a little time onto his hourly billing to cover the cost of the Super Bee and hopefully Dan will never have to find out about it.

  It’s a little sleazy, but it’s really for Dan’s protection. He hasn’t asked Boone for audio evidence of his wife’s alleged infidelity, but Boone’s going to get it anyway, even though it creeps him out.

  What usually happens is that the wronged party confronts the cheater (“I had you followed by a private investigator”) and the guilty spouse just gives it up. But every once in a while the philandering partner goes the “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it” route, just stonewalls and denies it all, which puts both the PI and his client into a bad situation.

  (Get a group of PIs in a bar after a few stiff pops and they’ll tell you some beauties, the responses ranging from the simple “Nu-unnnh”—that is, it just didn’t happen—all the way to Boone’s personal favorite, “She’s an event planner and we were working on your birthday party. Surprise, honey!”)

  Most people don’t want to believe that their loved one is cheating on them, some of them so desperately that they’ll jump at any out. Even showing them photos or video of their beloved going into and out of a house or hotel room won’t do it, because they’ll cling to the flimsiest excuses. One that seems to be really popular lately is “We’re just emotional friends.”

  Emotional friends. You gotta love the phrase. The rationale is that the cheatee hasn’t met the cheater’s emotional needs, so he/she had to go “outside the relationship” to feel “emotionally validated.” So the cheatee is asked to believe that their loved one and the other man/woman spent the hour in the motel or the night in the house just talking about their feelings, and the desperate cheatee goes for it.

  Unless you have a tape of the spouse working out more physical feelings. The grunts, the moans, the heavy breathing (“What, honey, you were planning my party at the gym?”), the sweet whispered nothings, are the collective, cliché smoking gun, but no decent PI wants to lay that on an already hurting spouse unless he has to.

  So what you do is record the main event and stick it away so
mewhere unless or until you absolutely have to pull it out. You don’t tell the client that you have it, because most of them can’t resist the temptation to listen to it, even though you advise them against it.

  But you have it if you need it. It’s for your client’s protection and your own.

  So Boone puts the eavesdropping technology on his own card so Dan doesn’t see the expense, ask about it, and end up with the sounds of his wife’s illicit lovemaking on his mental playlist.

  Nick runs the item across the scanner and says, “You got the software for this?”