The clientele at Ortega’s ran the gamut of prospective fighters. Street kids got a break on a locker and lessons for a flat forty bucks a month. Petyr paid half again that just for the locker — but that’s all he needed. It was the steady stream of corporate warrior types who paid the rent. These were the executive fighters — the mortgage brokers, investment bankers, and accountants. They didn’t fight to find a career. Hell, virtually everyone who stepped in the cage got a trophy, win or lose. But there was something about the smell of spit buckets and liniment, the taste of sweat and blood that added some missing element to their mundane lives.
There were plenty of other fight gyms around Manhattan, but the men and women who ventured into Ortega’s in East Harlem seemed to believe that working out in a gritty gym would give them a competitive edge over guys who trained at more glitzy, upscale places.
Petyr liked East Harlem because it was one of the few places left in the world where he could still get a little respect. The guys at Ortega’s had no idea his tattoos were fake. Here, he was a bona fide ex-con from some brutal Russian gulag they’d seen on the Discovery Channel, one of the Thieves, an Eastern Bloc badass, the real deal. This was one of the few places he could still grab a workout with no shirt on and not have to worry about some guy with a spider tattooed on his neck shivving him in the liver.
Petyr often used the time he spent skipping rope to try and sort out difficult problems — like these stupid tats. Damned Nikka and her bright ideas. Mr. Anikin wanted him dead. The guys who showed up to kill him at his apartment had made that obvious. Beating them to death had been self-defense, but who was going to believe that? Now he had a murder rap to figure out piled on top of everything. He made a mental note to give Nikka an extra smack when he saw her again, for talking him into getting the ink. And then there was the shit at Cheekie’s. What was that all about anyway? He couldn’t quite get his head wrapped around the big southern dude and his mean-ass little friend with the battered face. They’d apparently taken over the place from Gug. They acted like cops, but seemed more interested in his father than him — until he’d popped off to the steamy little sweetmeat dancing on the stage. Then they’d gotten all up on him, focusing their self-righteous rage at his behavior. Petyr sped up his rope work, letting the whir and slap console him as he pondered over the situation. Last he checked, Cheekie’s was a titty bar where you were supposed to go to watch naked girls dance. Kicking him in the nuts like that was a bitch move. They’d caught him by surprise, that’s all. Given the chance at a fair fight, he’d mop the ring with either one of those guys. And then their bootylicious girlfriend would be all alone and with no protection from whatever pimp racket they had going. Then Petyr the Wolf would show her what a real man was like.
The throbbing rattle of a speed bag brought Petyr back to reality. Maxim, one of the two Ortega brothers who owned the gym, stood at the front counter. He tried to fix a broken credit-card machine by prying off the back with a screwdriver. Maxim, also known as Maxim the Minimum, was the smaller of the two Ortegas at just under five and a half feet tall. He had a neck like an ox with shoulders to match. It was common knowledge that he was not the smarter of the two brothers. The screwdriver had him baffled so there was not much hope for the credit-card machine.
It didn’t take long for Maxim to lose patience and drive the screwdriver through the card reader, as if trying to stab it through the heart. He threw the whole broken mess under the counter and scrawled a sign on the back of a cardboard protein supplement box that said “CASH ONLY.”
Cash. That was exactly what Petyr needed. He had to get his hands on some money one way or another. Unfortunately, his talent for making money was no better than Maxim Ortega’s handyman skills. The bastards at Cheekie’s had kept him from getting to the emergency stash he kept hidden at Nikka’s place.
All he really knew how to do was fight.
Good fights took time to set up, the ones with decent purses anyway, and Petyr found himself in a bad spot professionally. He’d lost too many bouts to get a shot at moving out of the mid-level ranks without beating one of the big names. And he’d won too many for a big name to want to meet him in the ring. If a ranked fighter beat Petyr, he would not move up in the rankings, but if he lost, he could certainly move down.
That left few options — at least any that let him retain his dignity. Petyr quit skipping with a flourish of rope swings on either side of his body, just in case another fighter happened to be watching. He grabbed a towel off a peg along the wall and replaced it with the jump rope. Wiping the sweat off his face, he caught Maxim’s eye. The brothers ran a little side business that could make him some money if The Wolf didn’t mind sacrificing a little bit of his integrity. He shot a glance at his yellow duffle on the floor below the rope pegs. Integrity. That was a joke. His girlfriend was a junkie stripper, and he juiced regularly on Russian ’roids his chemist father sent him. He didn’t have much integrity to lose — and anyway, integrity was a hell of a lot easier to sell when you needed some cash. He picked up the duffle and carried it with him when he went up front to work out the specifics with Maxim. The stuff his father sent was hard to come by. He had to stretch it out. Make it last.
Where he was going, he’d need all the help he could get.
Chapter 37
It was still dark when Quinn shoved the last of the gear into his drybag and zipped it closed. Beaudine was already packed and had borrowed the toilet paper to head into the brush one last time before they hit the trail.
Quinn’s pack wasn’t particularly large, and he had to tie the sleeping bag on the outside, horseshoe style over the top. Quinn’s old man was known to venture into the woods with nothing more than a hatchet and an attitude.
Garcia had a tendency to surf the web at night to wind down after a stressful day. Such browsing only made Quinn angry so he usually read or studied Chinese or Arabic flashcards. Still, if Ronnie stayed away from political rants, she sometimes found the odd kernel of interest and shared it with him. She’d once shown him a site with the laughable array of what people put in a go-bag, popularly called the SHTF bag because it was supposed to contain the gear vital to survival when the proverbial “Shit Hit The Fan.” Many such bags looked as if they were kits prepared for all-out war — but included few of the necessities for the inevitable lull between battles. Some had a couple of axes, a folding saw, three or four handguns, multiple pocket knives, push daggers, machetes, road flares — all of it useful gear in the right situation. Quinn could hardly judge. He was rarely without two guns and two blades — but a good go-bag had to contain some beans and Band-Aids to go with the bullets. Quinn found himself amazed at how few bags contained toilet paper.
He started any kit with his EDC, his everyday carry. Unless he happened to be swimming, it was a rare moment that found Quinn without at least three things: a knife, a light source, and something to make fire. In this case, he had his Zero Tolerance folding knife, an orange zippo lighter — less tacticool but harder to misplace, the Leatherman Squirt, and a SureFire Titan flashlight. Smaller than his little finger, the light ran on a single AAA battery. The satellite phone was somewhere underwater inside the airplane. Quinn and Beaudine both had cellphones, but they would do them no good until they reached a village, almost all of which had a cellular tower. His custom Kimber 10mm rested in a leather Askins Avenger holster on his strong side, balanced by a spare magazine and the thick piggish blade of his Riot sheath knife. The hot 10mm round gave him similar ballistics to a .41 Magnum, but he was still happy to have his Aunt Abbey’s AR-10. Quinn was certainly not against handguns — having used them to great effect, but if things devolved into chaos in the woods as in an urban environment, a handgun of any kind was merely the weapon used to fight his way to a rifle.