Page 105 of Main Event

He’s large. I knew that from the gas station—from the weight of him, the reach, the physique of someone who has been doing this for a long time. He looks different from what I imagined in the months since that parking lot. More ordinary. The kind of face that disappears in a crowd, which is the point.

He looks at me.

I look at him.

“You should have stayed away from her,” he says.

“You should have stayed out of my house,” I say.

He moves first.

What follows is not long. I’m a trained heavyweight boxer who has spent the last twelve months being made more precise than I was before, who has watched this man move through every space I consider safe, who put two men down at a gas station on instinct, and has had three months since then to understand what I did wrong and what I did right.

He’s professional. He’s capable. He’s been doing this for years.

He’s never been in a ring.

Three exchanges. He goes down on the third—not from the right hand, from the left hook to the body that Reyes spent six weeks building into my muscle memory. When he goes down, he stays down. The exact stillness of someone whose body has received information it can’t process while standing up.

I step back.

I call Bill.

“He’s down,” I say. “Front door. Call the FBI.”

“Already called,” Bill says. “They’re thirty seconds out.”

I hang up.

Andi is behind me. She came in through the back when the FBI contact cleared her with the discipline of someone who understood the plan and executed it without deviation. She’s looking at the man on the floor of our entryway.

“Is he⁠—”

“Alive,” I say. “He’ll be fine. Eventually.”

She looks at him for a long moment. Then at me. At my hands.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Yes, baby. I’m fine,” I say and pull her against my side.

Blue lights appear at the end of the street. The FBI car that’s been two blocks away all day finally has cause to move.

Andi takes my hand—the left one, the hook that ended it—and holds it. A memory surfaces of the first day I met her. Without conscious thought, she’s using the same gentleness as when she checked my hands and wrists for old injuries before putting me on the bag.

We stand in the doorway of our house, and we watch them come.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LUKE

Irun at six.

This isn’t a high-intensity workout—no sprints, targets, or Reyes encouraging me through my earpiece to push in the final quarter mile. It’s just the neighborhood, still shadowed at the edges, with the quiet Atlanta only has in late October before sunrise. My legs instinctively follow the familiar route; I’ve been running it for two years.

I run past the coffee place on the corner that Andi likes. Past the elementary school, which has been under renovation since July. Past the house three blocks over with the dog that always barks at me, and then seems embarrassed about it.

Everything is where it belongs.