Devine didn’t waste an ounce of breath replying to this babble, because that was all it was. There were guys who could talk a good fight, and there were those who remained quiet and just put your lights out.

  As they walked forward he walked forward. Like two trains on the same track, the crash would be inevitable.

  His attention was diverted for only a moment as he saw Stamos peer around the corner, her eyes wide and her face tense. This had gone far past what she had intended, he could read that in her nervous features. And she was wondering how she could defuse things.

  She gave him a pleading look. It affected him more than he would have thought.

  “Okay, last chance, guys,” he said. “Walk away now or I can guarantee it will not end well for any of you.”

  “One against three, and we’re all bigger than you,” said WASP. “So what exactly are you smoking?”

  “I was Army. A Ranger. Just so you know.”

  “Big shit,” said Rick. “I eat fucking Rangers for breakfast.”

  Okay, that was the wrong thing to say, thought Devine. Really wrong.

  WASP charged forward, his fists held high, too high. Devine landed a sharp punch to his gut, which doubled him over, and then that blow was followed up with a fully stretched-out kick by Devine to his opponent’s downward-looking face. The force lifted WASP off the ground, revealing that the rough and rugged motorcycle boot had battered the man’s delicately handsome features. Then Devine grabbed him by the shirt front and hurled him at the Dumpster. He hit the metal side and dropped to the asphalt unconscious.

  Doug the wrestler roared and punched Devine twice in the head. They were damn hard shots, but that was all. He felt some blood on his skin and in his mouth, some snot on his face, but his senses were intact. The guy tried to pin his arms to his sides, but Devine broke that hold by slamming the top of his head into Doug’s chin and gouging him in the eye with his thumb. Then he hooked him around the ankle with his foot and laid a thunderous elbow into the man’s oblique. This caused the man to stagger back, breathing hard, and bloody from the chin and mouth. Devine pivoted, went behind Doug in a flash of choreographed movement that he had done a thousand times in close-quarter drills, and for real in combat, and came up behind the far larger man. A vicious elbow strike to the left kidney, a rock-hard fist to the right one, and Doug dropped to his knees, howling in pain, because that area of the body was unprotected and sensitive as shit, which made it the perfect target.

  Devine planted his left foot firmly on the ground as his fulcrum. Doug’s head was lined up like a ball on a stand for an eager T-baller to bang a home run off. He let loose a ferocious roundhouse kick that impacted the left side of Doug’s head with both power and velocity. The man’s head kissed his right shoulder and his eyes rolled back in his head, as his brain checked out. A moment later he joined WASP on the ground for a long sleep and a painful awakening. This had all taken seconds.

  Rick grabbed Devine from behind, lifted him off the ground, and threw him face-first against the brick wall. He struck it hard, painfully so. His shoulder howled, and his face bled and swelled with the impact with the rough brick. Then Rick slammed against him, driving him into the brick wall another centimeter, and cutting his skin below both eyes. Then he landed a trio of hard punches to Devine’s back, which was stupid. Head shots would have been far more effective, particularly against unyielding brick. That was what Devine would have done. You couldn’t fight back if you were unconscious.

  The man stepped back to view his handiwork. However, if Rick thought his opponent was down and done, he was seriously mistaken. That might cut it in college football, but not in Devine’s world. And poor Rick was about to realize the consequences of his misjudgment. Devine levered off the wall and used that momentum to boomerang back on the former Ivy League lineman.

  He gripped the man’s throat with one hand while he hit him with two uppercuts straight into the diaphragm with the other. Then he landed a bruising hook into the oblique. And one more on top of it. Rick moaned and staggered back, with Devine still holding on to his throat. In combat, with a serrated Ranger knife in hand, Devine would have gutted the guy in the midsection area, upward slash and then side to side, to get to the intestines and aorta, and the fight would be over.

  Devine once more glanced at Stamos, who was looking terrified and stunned into silence at what she was seeing. In response, Devine let go of his neck grip and pushed Rick violently back against the wall, where he slumped down holding his gut and his throat. Devine had never not finished a fight, and he was unsure about this time. Maybe he was mellowing in his early thirties.

  Still looking at Stamos, Devine turned and started to walk toward her.

  “Look out!” she screamed.

  He pivoted and put up a blocking arm. The trash can lid wielded by Rick hit him on the forearm. It hurt like a bitch, but broke nothing, only bending the flimsy metal nearly in half. But if it had hit him in the head, it would have been a different story. Devine planted a fist into Rick’s chest right at the heart, which fired off messages of cardiac panic to his brain. He then leapt forward and used the crown of his head to deliver a staggering blow to the man’s chin. Rick’s lower teeth jammed into his upper teeth and blood shot out as gums and hardened calcium collided violently.

  Rick screamed and slumped to the ground sobbing, his hands pressed against his mangled mouth.

  Devine glanced over at Stamos, who looked stunned in the face of this carnage.

  He turned and walked toward her. She backed away, looking fearful.

  He wiped the blood and snot off his face and onto his sleeve. “Thanks for the warning. And call an ambulance for those guys.” He paused and added, “And I’ll see you at the office, sweet cheeks.”

  He walked down the street, put on his helmet, cranked his bike, and blew past as she stood outside an alley where three large and disappointed young men lay with the city’s trash.

  CHAPTER

  13

  DEVINE SLEPT FOR A COUPLE hours, with an ice pack around his arm and another on his shoulder and a third bag on his face. He’d applied ointment to the cuts and brick rash. He rose, put on his workout clothes, jogged over to the high school football field that was right behind his neighborhood, and started his daily workout.

  A tractor tire lay on the football field. The football players used it to build up the thrust strength of their arms and legs. Devine flipped it down to one end, turned around and flipped it back to the other, until he was drenched in sweat. With every flip he had a new thought about Sara Ewes and her death, and Cowl and Comely. Then there were regular car tires that he threw like discuses to build up his obliques. As he did so, Devine thought about his new gig with Emerson Campbell.

  Next, Devine ran the bleacher steps until he was soaked in even more sweat. He did pull-ups and chin-ups on a pull-up bar. One hundred of each. Twenty at a time followed by twenty seconds of rest. Two hundred push-ups, fifty at a time. With each rep he imagined Sara swinging on the end of that cord.

  Ab crunches followed, both flat on his back and then hanging from the pull-up bar. Squats, lunges, army crawls, high-kickers, then plyometric jumps on and off wooden boxes of varying heights the school kept here for the athletic teams. Followed by burpees. Every one he performed was now accompanied by images of the battle in the alley. His wounds howled in protest of the workout, which made him push himself even harder. When the going got tough, you just kicked your own ass even harder. That was the Army way.

  Sprints down the field, and, on the return, he did the run backward. He went faster each time, working off his frustration at the hard left turn off a cliff his life had taken.

  Lieutenant Roy Blankenship and Captain Kenneth Hawkins. Names he had heard every day for years, and then no more. Both men dead. Both struck down violently. One with an assist by him.

  How many times had he seen those faces in his sleep? It was always the same. They were staring at him, waiting for him to say something. To Blankenship, maybe something about avenging him. To Hawkins, maybe angry words, venting. But Devine never said a damn thing back. Not one damn thing while two dead men stared at him.

  He finished off with a series of isometric routines, holding the poses until his body shook violently with the effort of simply standing still.

  He jogged back to his place, cooling down and stretching along the way. He showered, shaved, dressed, and left his room. Valentine was on the couch dead asleep, having failed to make it up to his room the previous night. Apparently tapping keys on a laptop could be exhausting. He had heard Tapshaw softly snoring and probably dreaming of new deals and happy couples from the Hummingbird empire she’d created.

  He had seen the light on in Helen Speers’s room. She was no doubt studying. She had the belly fire, that was for sure. Being Black and a woman were two strikes against you already, Devine knew. It sure as hell had been that way in the Army.

  Quite a few of his comrades in uniform resented women being in the ranks. Sure, the guys said all the right things in public so their records and promotion trajectories wouldn’t get ripped, but the private mutterings among the men were a whole different story. This pattern of misogyny came from some of the enlisted grunts all the way up to a number of the bars and stars. And the petty shit these men would do to screw with the women was legendary in its cruelty. Nothing wounded a female soldier more than knowing the guy in uniform next to her didn’t have her back, and, more insulting, didn’t even want her there. Didn’t think she would ever be good enough. When all the ladies wanted was to simply be allowed to do their jobs and serve their country. And maybe Devine would have looked down on the ladies in uniform too, except a newbie enlisted had saved his life near Kandahar, losing a hand in the process.

  The soldier’s name was Alice.

  He got to the station and boarded the train. One more working day until his only day off.

  The train was empty except for Devine until a woman in a warm-up suit and carrying a large canvas bag got on four stations later. She eyed his mangled face and immediately sat far away from him.

  By the time they got to Brad Cowl’s palace the train was barely a quarter full. All the others, except the warm-up suit lady, were dressed as he was. But it was Saturday and the numbers were going to be lower. Not every business in New York worked the Wall Street way. Some people did get two days off out of seven.

  Devine stretched out his arm and shoulder, touched his injured face, and tensed a bit as the train slowed. There it was. The pool, the backyard with the string of lights still up and still on; some servant must have forgotten to pull the plug. Cowl would probably ding their paycheck.

  He had looked up the property online. The place was twenty-seven thousand square feet, a dozen bedrooms, seventeen baths, two kitchens, servant quarters in an adjacent cottage, a large guesthouse in case the twelve bedrooms weren’t enough, along with the resort-sized pool and eight exquisitely landscaped and private acres. There were no pictures of the interior online, which told Devine the place had been built by Cowl and had never been on the market for resale. It was tax-assessed at a figure that was less than half of what it would cost to buy or build.

  But the bikini princess of the palace was not there today.

  The train picked that moment to hurry up its pace and the landscape changed.

  He took out his phone and brought up the pics of Cowl and Stamos. And then he watched the video with the sound turned off. He held the phone in his lap and sat hunched over so that no one around him could possibly see the screen.

  Yet something was nagging at him. Like he’d screwed up somehow.

  He looked out the window as the train chugged along, taking him to where he needed to go, and where he now didn’t want to go. Unfortunately for Devine, they were the exact same place.

  CHAPTER

  14

  DEVINE SAT IN HIS SLIVER of a cubicle with his twin big-ass Mac screens. The somehow jarring sound of intense silence except for the quickened breaths of the highly intelligent and intensely motivated sitting all around him. It was a humbling experience to be in the presence of that much brainpower and drive to succeed. And it didn’t help that Devine’s arm ached and so did his shoulder where the brick wall had said hello. And his back from where Rick had popped him. But what the hell was pain anyway? It was life; you had to deal with it. He couldn’t do anything about it except swallow some Aleve.

  No one had noticed his facial injuries or how stiff he held his arm and shoulder because no one bothered to look at him when they walked in. This was purposeful, because he was almost always the first one to arrive at work, and he knew that pissed them off. Their response was to ignore the early interloper. And then grind him into the dust with their own inspired labor. And all to make Brad Cowl even more money than he already had. But hey, when you had two jets and two yachts, another one of each certainly couldn’t hurt.

  He hadn’t seen Stamos today, though he didn’t expect to. They were on different floors. He had her business email, though, and his finger had hovered over it on his computer, wondering if he should send her some message. Only he wasn’t sure what he would say.

  He decided to just let it rest for now.

  Devine had scanned the news but had seen nothing about three young men being found in an alley with the proverbial shit beaten out of them. WASP and his friends might have called the police and concocted some story about his having mugged them at gun-point or something. Only they didn’t know who he was, unless Stamos had hung around and told them.

  He crunched numbers and composed reports and sent them to bits and pieces of the Cowl universe so other people could tear them apart and send them back and tell him what a moron he was, and to do a better job if he wanted to really dance with the big boys. And these salvos would go back and forth seemingly forever until the deal was done, or the market had closed, or the deal was scrapped, or someone important wet their pants and wanted to redo everything, or a better offer came in the door.

  It’s not like it’s my money.

  He looked at his watch. One o’clock. There was a dining hall on the third floor. It had great food, everything from tofu, plant-based burgers, sushi, couscous of every flavor and description, to grilled fish, all varieties of pasta, and veggie, vegan, and pescatarian offerings, along with meats for carnivores, and delectable desserts, all free, with cooks and eager servers just waiting to help you. And none of the Burners ever went there, because, one, they were afraid to get out of their seats, and, two, they were even more afraid that some executive would see them on the third floor in a place meant for people to eat, actually placing food in their mouths.

  Almost all brought their lunch and ate it at their desks, getting crumbs in their keyboards and crap smeared over their screens. That could be disastrous if a smudge made a decimal point disappear, or turned a dollar sign into the mark of the euro, or the pound sterling. But they were apparently less afraid of that than appearing in the dining hall and losing a shot at the big time simply because they were hungry. And that was good news for the people who had cleared newbie status. They had the food all to themselves.

  And before yesterday Devine would never have even thought about going to eat there. But yesterday had changed pretty much everything for him. His job was to act as a scout and to find important things. And to do that scouts had to keep on the move and go to places other people never would.

  Devine rose and called out, “Anybody want to grab some chow with me on the third floor?”

  They all looked up at him as though he had just suffered a stroke. Then they eyed each other to see if perhaps other people thought he was joking. Then they finally noted his facial injuries and several men and women stiffened. Perhaps they thought he had been in a car accident and was now hallucinating.

  With no takers, Devine left the room and headed to the elevator.

  I’m going to have a nice meal, while you wipe your candy bar and Cheez-It fingers over the whole of the NASDAQ futures.

  He rode the car down to three, turned left, and entered the dining hall that looked one narrow step down from the Ritz, or the Plaza, or whatever was to die for these days. He didn’t know because that was not his world. He was just a workingman in the pay of the feudal lord.

  He got his piled-up plate and his glass of fancy seltzer water and found an empty table, keenly aware that people were staring at him. Devine knew he was the only Burner in here. It usually took people four years to work up the courage to eat in here unless escorted by a superior. What an effed-up world.

  He sat down, his back to the wall, and suddenly noticed that none other than Brad Cowl and part of his entourage were here. The boss was dressed in a sharp suit, white shirt, and no tie, a nod, Devine supposed, to it being the weekend. He said something and everyone at the table laughed like the guy was the greatest comedian ever. This audience clearly wanted to keep their place in the inner circle, and that meant busting a gut at the boss’s lame jokes.

  Cowl’s gaze roamed the room. As it did so, he was waving, nodding, grinning, scowling, growing serious, then laughing and waving again.

  It was as if to say, Look everybody, your king is here on a Saturday in the summer instead of on my yacht or at my country club playing golf . . . or banging my employee on a cheap desk, while I have an even better-looking lady skinny-dipping in my Olympicsize pool.

  And then Cowl’s X-ray beam came lurching over to Devine. And the man’s features became unreadable. He lingered, one, two, three beats. He took in the injuries and the man himself. Probing, digging, creeping into unopened pathways that Devine might unknowingly have, like back doors on firewalls. Cowl had built a serious empire. To do that, you had to be smart and ruthless, more of the latter than the former, actually, because you essentially had to take what someone else had and not give a crap when they financially croaked.