were beginning to collect the day’s heat, which enveloped her body like a shell. Sweat was in her eyes when she heard from below, “Hiya.”
She dropped down, panting. Nobody ever came into her alley, and definitely not at seven in the morning. She wrapped the end of the belt around her hand, staring at the man, who was standing alone in a wife beater and jeans, with a holster at his side.
His smile sagged. “You don’t even remember me?”
Nina squinted, never good at faces. This guy was huge and blond and bristly, with a boxer’s stooped shoulders. His eyes were so pale they matched the glare from the clouds. Acne as a teenager, but now he was coming up on thirty. He had plucked his white unibrow into two distinct eyebrows, but they were already growing back into each other, like twins conjoining. His nose had been broken until the cartilage was crushed smooth. Both of his ears had transmogrified into a permanent state of cauliflower. And, of course, there was that gun.
Nina’s right foot slid back automatically, but the man seemed too clean to be a threat. She decided to slip past him, but he sidestepped, blocking her path. He grinned, but what his mouth was doing was disconnected from the blank expression in his eyes. “So, you punched me in the face.” He pointed at his left cheekbone, which looked the same as the other one.
Now she remembered him. Months ago in a bar, he had reached for her breast, like it was his beer mug. She felled him, slipped his wallet out of his pocket, and ran out the back door. In her car, she opened the wallet to discover it had a police badge in it. The thing scared her so much she ran home and threw it into the depths of her desk drawer without looking at it again.
So she was finally going to jail. Confused by her own feelings of relief, she stretched her wrists out.
“I’m not going to arrest you.” His voice was pleasant and sonorous, as if it had picked up momentum on its way from the inside to the outside.
Was he going to shoot her instead? Nina put her hands in the air. She wondered if she should run. But this cop just retucked his wife beater into his jeans and smiled. The holster remained snapped and untouched. Nina dropped her arms and pulled a cigarette from her shirt pocket.
“Filthy habit,” the cop said. “Have you ever seen the inside of a smoker’s lung?”
“How would I see that?” Lighting her cigarette, Nina glanced at him. “You’re really not going to arrest me?”
His smile vanished so quickly she saw it had been fake. “Give me my badge back.”
“I left you your gun,” she said. “You still have your gun.”
“I want the badge.” He didn’t say “need.” He smiled again.
“If you had been in uniform, I would never have hit you,” she said.
“Oh, that. I’m a detective. It’s like, business casual.”
“Get your boss to give you a new badge.”
The cop laughed.
“You can probably get a counterfeit one on Colfax for fifty bucks,” she said.
“I already did. Thanks. But I can’t have my badge in the wind. It’s traceable to me.” When Nina shrugged, he asked with unnerving gentleness, “Do you even know who I am?”
“You’re the cop I…from a few weeks ago, right?”
“I’m also Cage Callahan.” He grew an inch, but his shoulders slumped. “Maybe you saw me fight on TV about eleven years ago? MMA?”
“I don’t have a TV.” Nina blew out a clotted stream of smoke. “Is Cage your nickname?”
“What?”
“Don’t you guys all have nicknames?”
“Oh. No. It’s ‘Killer.’ Cage ‘Killer’ Callahan.” He half-shrugged. “A fighter retired right before my debut. So ‘Killer’ became available.”
Nina remembered how he fell on her first punch, like a diving falcon.
Cage’s upper lip tightened into a ridged line, transforming his fleshy face into a hard thing. “You caught me off guard. And I was hammered.”
She tried again to mount the stairs, but this time Cage swung his whole body in front of her. The charge radiating from his skin was vaguely acrid. The white hairs on his arms glinted, and hers stood up. His skin smelled strong, like Lysol. She sneezed, and then twice more.
The smile worked its way off Cage’s face. He snarled and “Bless you” wrested itself from his florid lips. Then he said it twice more, “Bless you bless you,” his face etched with despair.
That was interesting.
Nina squinted at the glare from his immaculate sneakers. The cuffs of his jeans were ironed. His perfect shave shone in the sunlight. A drop of sweat appeared on his brow, and he pulled a plastic pack of tissues from his pocket, picked one out, and dabbed at his face with quick motions.
And she thought she had seen everything. “I never met a fighter with OCD before. Or a cop, for that matter.”
Now that he was all cleaned up, Cage’s ever-present smile was back. “It’s a mild case.”
“It must be. Blood and murder and all that.”
“I work in the Robbery Unit.” At Nina’s face, Cage said, “The irony is not lost on me.”
“What’s it like, going from fighting to crime fighting?”
“Oh, it’s fine. Like being a garbage man, except the trash is human. Better than being a junkie, anyway.”
Nina agreed. Then she realized he was talking about her. “I’m not a junkie.”
“Then why rob people?”
She flicked ash. “We can’t all be cops. The world needs robbers, too, or there’s no game.” Apart from their guns, she wasn’t afraid of cops themselves. The only real difference between a cop and a criminal was one bad day.
Cage said, “Your casual demeanor with me is interesting.”
“You already told me you weren’t going to arrest me.”
“No. But.” Cage leaned against the wall and sighed. “The thing is, there are rumors now.”
“What rumors?”
“That I’m a tomato can and got knocked out by a bitch,” he said pleasantly. “The night I met you, remember the people I was with?” Nina did. They had cheered. Cage said, “You hit me in front of the VP of Talent Relations for the biggest fight promotion company in the world. He poured a beer on my face to wake me up. That’s not the kind of thing Antonio Ricardo Ricardito Gino Joseppe Irving Spina forgets.”
“Who?”
“Antonio Ricardo Ricardito Gino Joseppe Irving Spina? The biggest fight matchmaker on the planet?” He shook his head at her blank look. “We were
