The coffee was already poured when Jo sat down. Two cups, steaming, on a tray, in an office on Harbor Street that she had told no one she was visiting.
She had driven there with $41,000 of her own money in her head and nobody's permission. Everything she had saved since twenty-three. How long had Desmond Kell known she was coming?
"Cream, Josephine?" he said. "I remembered you took it."
"I never told you that."
"Your father did. Once. He talked about you more than you'd think." Kell stirred his own cup. He was fifty-eight, soft-voiced, his silver hair combed like a man who had never once been rushed. A boy came in with a bakery bag. Kell paid him from a money clip and tipped him before the boy asked.
Jo put it on the desk plain. "Forty-one thousand dollars against the principal, from me, today. You extend the note one year. You keep your collateral and your interest and you wait."
"Forty-one." He nodded slowly. "That's every dollar, isn't it? That is a very lean person, Josephine."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a kindness, and I decline it." He smiled. "A year buys you nothing. A year buys the building another winter. I own the lots on either side, and a condominium tower wants a corner. Yours. And you signed a letter on Wednesday, I'm told. Fourteen days, renewing, unless someone writes in the proper way. You're not free to dance with anyone else."
*I'm told.* He wanted her to hear it. She heard it.
"In 2012 I offered you a professional contract," Kell said. "You were seventeen. Your father wouldn't sign for you." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "He cost us both something."
Jo kept her face still, the way she did across a desk from a man losing his shop. Her pulse did not keep still. She had thought she'd buried that offer in the same place as the red gloves.
"One more thing, and I mention it kindly." Kell glanced at his watch. "This morning I called Duffy Witt at Rusk Mercantile. A courtesy. A bank officer ought to be careful about conflicts, and I wondered if his people were."
"You didn't."
"I said nothing about you by name. I said I'd be grateful if someone looked."
The door opened before she reached it. A big man in a gray hooded sweatshirt held it for her and said nothing at all. The hall smelled of floor wax. She went past him with her bag against her ribs, thinking: that was the second thing he paid for.
She sat in her car on Harbor Street and did the math on the back of the August letter.
Balance, $140,000. Due December 21. Her $41,000 covered less than a third, and he had waved it off anyway. Frankie had four hundred dollars. No bank would lend on that lien, and she knew exactly why, because she was the bank.
Then she did it again, slower, from the other end. Where in all of this was there money?
One place. Northline Sports Management, $150,000, the manager's share, paid on Monday, December 21. The same day the note came due. And only if Noor won the title on the eighteenth. A loss, a no-show, a cancelled card, and the money didn't exist.
The only thing that could pay Kell off was the fight. It had never been about the gym at all.
The afternoon regulars were already loose in the gym. Leather snapped on the heavy bags. Noor was shadowboxing by the ring, humming under her breath, a tuneless low note that she made before every round.
"Can you beat Sasha Vell?" Jo said.
Noor didn't stop. Slip, slip, left hand. "She's nineteen and one."
"I know her record. I asked you."
"She's twenty-nine. She goes to the body and she doesn't get tired." Noor finished the combination and looked at her. "Put gloves on and find out."
The gym got quiet the way a bar does. Jo had not thrown a punch since she was seventeen. She said, "Fine."
Somebody found her sixteen-ounce gloves in the lost-and-found box. Augie, gruff, a cotton swab behind his ear, wrapped her hands without a word and then said, "Don't count the rounds out loud." The headgear smelled of someone else's year. She climbed through the ropes in a bank blouse and borrowed shorts.
The bell on the bicycle timer rang.
Noor circled, light, and Jo's feet moved before she told them to. Left foot out, weight on the ball, chin down. Her father's voice came up through the floor and she didn't have to hear it. She threw a jab. It landed, soft, on a glove.
"There she is," someone said from the apron.
Noor carried her through the round. Slow punches, no steam, a teacher letting a kid hit the pad. Jo's lungs burned by the second minute, and everyone in the room could see it.
"That all you've got?" she said. "Champion?"
Noor stopped humming.
The left came in low, a hook to the body, under Jo's elbow and a little to the side. Everything inside her folded. Her breath left through the top of her head and did not come back. The canvas was against her cheek, rough, tasting of rosin and old smoke, and she lay on it with her mouth open and no air to put in it.
But she had seen it, going down. Noor threw the left, and her right hand dropped. Down by her belt. Her whole right side open to the sky for a full half second, every time.
*Sasha Vell will live in that hole,* Jo thought, and the thought was her father's.
From the apron Frankie was laughing, out loud, helplessly, his hands on his knees. Then he ducked through the ropes and knelt beside her, still wheezing, and got an arm under her shoulders.
"Easy, chief," he said. "Easy. Breathe in. There you go." He lifted her to her feet with real care, the way you carry something that belongs to somebody you love. "That was the worst jab I ever saw. Dad would've cried."
She leaned on him longer than she had to. He let her.
Her phone was buzzing on the desk in the glass office, the stopwatch ticking beside it. The screen said GRAHAM WITT.
She answered with her breath still short.
"Jo." Witt did not sound angry. He sounded like a man reading from a page. "Compliance flagged two searches on the commercial database Wednesday night, late. Ironside Holdings. Saltmarket Partners. Neither one is a Rusk Mercantile account."
She said nothing.
"Monday, nine a.m., video call," Witt said. "Bring your badge and put it on the desk where I can see it. This is a termination review."