Page 21 of Takedown

Sometimes it's a house.

Then Danny, hand still up in the referee's grip, chest heaving, looked past the crowd, past the team, straight to the bench — found me first, before Halloran, before anybody — and pointed. One finger. You.

Four hundred people saw a wrestler thank his drilling partner.

I saw the second look, made public, wearing a disguise.

I made it to the locker room before my face did anything unforgivable. Barely.

* * *

He found me by the equipment cage after, showered, hair wet, still lit up the way winning lights a man from inside — and hungry, obviously hungry, magnificently hungry, eight pounds and a war behind him and nothing in his tank but victory.

Kirby was locking the cage down for the night and pretending not to watch us the way a man pretends not to watch the thing he most wants to see. "Kovac," he said, sliding the grate. "Nice takedown. You still owe me for the headgear."

"I returned the headgear."

"You returned a headgear. Not the same transaction." He killed the cage light. "Whitfield. Get him fed. He wrestles hungry, it's undignified, it reflects on the program." And he left, whistling, having rearranged the entire rest of my evening in nine words and accepted payment in nothing but the private pleasure of being right, which is the only currency the man has ever consented to take.

Danny watched him go. "That man hates me."

"That man would take a bullet for you."

"Yeah." He toweled his hair back, grinning. "I know. It's why I keep the headgear thing running. Poor bastard'd be lost without something to bill me for."

And then he stepped in to sling his bag over his shoulder, and the strap swung wide, and I put a hand up to stop it hitting me — and got him instead. Flat of my palm, the wet bare skin above his collar, at the side of the throat where the pulse lives.

I could feel it going. Fast, from the win, and then — I would swear to this in any court my family could afford — faster.

Neither of us moved. Not for a full second, in a corridor, under a dead cage light, with my hand on his throat and a perfectly good reason for it available to both of us and neither of us reaching for the reason.

"Sorry," I said, and took the hand back, and it was the single least honest word I had spoken in twenty years.

"Yeah," Danny said. Not moving. "Don't be."

"So," he said, a beat later, in a voice that wasn't quite level yet. "Feud between the cooks. You booked Friday."

"I booked Friday."

"It's Friday."

"It is." My heart was doing something un-Whitfield. "Dining hall's closed. There's a diner in town that stays open late. It's terrible. The coffee could strip an engine block."

"Sounds rich-people terrible or actual terrible?"

"Actual terrible. Vinyl booths. A pie carousel with trust issues."

"Then what are we still doing here," said Danny Kovac, and picked up his bag, and held the door.

And I want it noted, for the ledger of this thing, that I walked out of that building past the trophy case with my family's name in it, benched, unsigned, invisible in every record that gym would ever keep — following a boy toward a bad diner —

and it was, at that point, the best night of my life.

The bar for which, granted, was on the floor. He'd raise it soon enough. He raised everything.

Chapter 10 — DANNY

The Wagon Wheel Diner sat on Route 12 like something the interstate forgot to kill.