Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,15

team used to say, Learn as much as you can outside the ring, but when you’re in the ring, stop thinking. Let your muscles think for you, because your brain won’t do it fast enough.

Still clinching Kat’s neck, I threw my right knee into her midsection and both heard and felt the way it punished her. She would have doubled over, except that I put my hands on her shoulders, then shoved lightly to get her out at the end of my range, and threw my hardest straight right into her face.

I’ve heard men, experienced fighters, say they’ll sometimes block body blows with their heads. I believe them, but I’ve never done it. Next time you see a picture of a human skull, notice the gap, the absence of bone, at the nose. It’s a fantastically vulnerable place to get hit. Something about it goes straight to your brain and rattles you to the core. It’s hard to recover from.

Kat didn’t. She backed up, raised her arms against another blow, and then waved me off. She’d decided to have a hundred-dollar night.

After she was out of the cage, Jack’s brother, Mav, beckoned me to talk to him through the mesh of the cage. I went over.

“Short fight,” he said.

“Sorry.” But I wasn’t.

“You want to go again?” he said. “I’ve got another girl who’s ready.”

I wiped at a bit of hair that had come loose from my braids and fallen into my face. “Sure,” I said.

I’d like to say that was how I had a thousand-dollar night, but it wasn’t. It was how I had a six-hundred-dollar night.

The Slaughterhouse had real locker rooms, left over from its days as a working factory, but there was no water service anymore, so no showers. Cooling off, I checked out my reflection in the tarnished mirror.

“You look fine,” a voice behind me said.

She was younger than me, Alice, a white girl of twenty. We hadn’t yet fought each other. I’d seen her once outside the fights and barely recognized her. She was a clerk at Home Depot during the day, and her pale blond shoulder-length hair was curly in a way that could have been natural or could have been an unfortunate perm. Her face and eyes were both round, giving her a vacuous look, and under street clothes her body looked a little plump. Her middle-class customers at Home Depot, the ones pricing Corian countertops and hardwood flooring for their home-improvement projects, probably looked at her and thought white trash, then double-checked their receipts for mistakes.

At the fights she was someone different. She laced her hair back into multiple narrow braids against her skull. The blankness of her face became cool hardness. And in sports bra, board shorts, and bare feet, the roundness of her body was clearly the roundness of muscle, like that of the dray ponies that had once worked in coal mines.

“Go kick some ass,” I told her. Good luck wasn’t something we said. It wasn’t about luck.

Alice went out to the ring, and I got my backpack from a locker and took out my street clothes. It was after ten, probably just cool enough outside to justify changing from my shorts into the jeans I’d brought, and my simple white T-shirt and crimson hoodie. I was sitting on a bench lacing up my boots when I heard my cell phone buzzing. The number on the screen was Serena’s.

“Hey, ésa, where are you?” she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, “You shouldn’t be on the street, wherever you are. The cops are looking for you.”

That was fast, I thought, remembering last night and the truck robbery. Then, “Wait a minute, just me? Why not you?”

“It’s not about last night,” Serena said. “A couple of people got killed, up in San Francisco.”

“And?”

“You’re the suspect.”

“What? You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, it’s on the news,” Serena said.

“You mean, like, last year, when I lived up there?”

“No, it was yesterday, they’re saying.”

“Well, then it’s a mix-up,” I said. “It’s just somebody with the same name. My last name’s not uncommon, and my first was only the most popular—”

“I know that, but it’s not just a name thing,” she insisted. “This is who they’re describing: Hailey Cain, twenty-four years old, blond hair, brown eyes, birthmark on the right cheekbone. And—” She paused here. “Hailey, they’re saying that your thumbprint was on one of the used, what do you call ’em, casings.”

That’s not possible.

I was silent so long that Serena said, “I know, Insula, I didn’t