“But Johnny keeps being denied coverage by this fund. You know anyone around here that has gotten money from it?”

  “Not around here, but like I told you, it’s mostly young guys in the gym. The ones still with stars in their eyes. But I gotta be honest, now you mention it, I can’t think of anyone who’s gotten a payout from that fund. But if anyone did, they’d be old-timers.”

  Harv picked up a spray bottle and rag. “You wanna talk to old-timers, you best try the Pugilists’ Club.”

  “Pugilists’ Club?” I looked at Mick and he nodded.

  “Yeah,” said Harv. “You go see Maxine. She’ll know about that.”

  As we made for the door, I asked Harv if he had any thoughts on where we might find Johnny, if not at the gym.

  “You try the car wash?”

  “Which car wash?”

  “The dinosaur, down near the Walmart. He works there sometimes for cash money.”

  “The dinosaur. Thanks, Harv.”

  He walked us out into the sunshine. The rat-faced guy, still loitering against the wall, spotted Harv and spat on the concrete then walked away.

  “You know that guy?” I asked.

  “Ricky the Fudge.”

  “Ricky the Fudge? What kind of name is that?”

  “I know. He used to work out a little here, but he’s banned now.”

  “Banned? Why?”

  “He’s a dealer. A minor-league thug with just enough brains to be dangerous. To himself mostly.”

  “He deals in the gym?”

  “He tries. It’s not like the old days. Old Stone woulda busted his face for dealing anything, but guys like Steamtrain will put up with the minor stuff like steroids and painkillers and whatnot, but he draws the line at the hard stuff. And that’s where Ricky the Fudge went wrong. A gym owner doesn’t need that kind of attention.”

  Harv twirled his spray bottle around his finger as Samson had done with his keys. “Anyway, boys. I've got work to do. Best of luck to you with all you’re doing for Tina.”

  “Appreciate your help, Harv.”

  He waved the bottle as he walked inside, and I looked at Mick. “Who is Old Stone?”

  “Previous gym owner. Stone Mitchell.”

  “And what does ‘guys like Steamtrain’ mean?” asked Ron.

  “Steamtrain, that’s Samson.”

  “The current gym owner?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is that like a nickname?”

  “Fightin’ name.”

  We got in the Jeep, and I asked Mick if he had to be back at Longboard’s immediately.

  “Nup. Before customers.”

  “What customers?”

  “You, knucklehead.”

  I smiled and pulled out onto Forest Hill Boulevard, looking for a dinosaur.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It didn’t take more than three minutes to find the car wash with a dinosaur on the sign. It was one of those places where you could go through the automatic wash and have your car dried by hand or you could up the ante and get the full-service job: hand wash, interior vacuum, and even a wax if you had more vanity than sense.

  I pulled into a full-service bay under a sunshade.

  “You want the full wash?” asked the guy.

  “Is Johnny around?”

  “No.”

  “Johnny did my car last time. I’d like him again.”

  “He’s not here. This is my bay. You wanna wash or what?”

  “So where would Johnny’s bay be? In theory.”

  He shrugged like it was above his pay grade, then held out a hand. I’m a PI, not a priest, so I’m not above using cash to facilitate the transfer of information. But I also know when I’m being had. There weren’t that many bays in the place, and there were many more sources of information, so the supply-and-demand equation didn’t fall his way, but mostly I just didn’t like that he was playing me. I understood that guys washing European sports cars didn’t earn the kind of dough that saw them rolling around town in one, but attitude counted for something. Someone was going to benefit from my largesse today, but I’d be damned if it was going to be this joker.

  “See if you can spot Johnny, will ya?” I asked Mick. He got out and walked away.

  The car wash guy put a hand on his hip. “You don’t want a wash, you gotta move.”

  “And I will, just as soon as I know where I’m moving to.”

  “I need this bay. I got more customers.”

  “Then perhaps next time you’ll be a little more friendly.”

  “MJ, down here,” called Mick from across the lot. I winked at my man, backed out, and followed Mick down to the end of the concourse. Mick pointed me into a slot at the end that didn’t look like it was seeing much action, and Ron and I got out.

  Mick led us over to the end of the automatic car wash, where a man in overalls stood waiting for a soap-covered car to get rinsed off and roll out of the wash. He was yet another variation on a theme: a good three or four inches shorter than my six two but powerfully built.

  Mick called to him, and the man looked up without breaking into a smile. They bumped fists.

  Mick turned to me. “Johnny, Miami. He’s getting your fund money.”

  Johnny had a small head and large neck, which seemed like a good combo for a boxer. He held a chamois in his hand, so I didn’t offer to shake it. Instead, I just took him in. He didn’t look good. Besides his thick belly, his papery face seemed as if it had been torn and mended a thousand times, with broken blood vessels visible on his flat nose, the hallmark of a man who hit the bottle a little too hard a little too often.

  “Thanks, man,” he said in a voice that sounded like he had spent the previous night screaming at a football game.

  “Sure, no problem. Listen, have you got time to chat?”

  “Let me finish this one.” He moved toward an Acura that was coming out of the car wash. He chamoised the windshield first, then worked his way down the hood and around the car with quick feet. He finished the job at the driver’s side window and the occupant handed him a dollar like he was passing over a fifty. Johnny thanked the driver as they pulled away, then waved to an old guy who was sitting in a plastic chair at the exit. The man nodded without enthusiasm.

  Johnny led us over to a wooden bench that might have been where customers waited for their cars back in the days before every place became a coffee shop. We sat, four of us in a row, like a backgammon group looking for a table. Mick asked Johnny to tell me about what was going on. Johnny spoke in a soft, raspy voice.

  “So you know I’m a boxer, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

  “Done it all my life, you know? Started training when I was a kid.” He looked at Mick. “We all did, right? It kept us off the streets and taught us a thing or two. Some guys did their fighting on the street, and some did it in the squared circle. Those first guys mostly ended up in the pen. Training kept us from going off the rails, didn’t it?”

  Mick nodded and Johnny continued.

  “It’s all I’ve known. I’ve always been a boxer. And was okay at it.”

  “Better than okay,” said Mick.

  “Yeah, I had my chances. I was crafty, quick on my feet, I suppose. Good, but not good enough. I had a decent amateur record, and then I went pro and got ranked and got my shot. After that, the shots dried up.”

  “But your record says you had a lot of fights.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Were you paid to lose?”

  “No, no, don’t get the wrong idea. I was a journeyman, the away guy. And crowds don’t pay to see the away guy win. I never threw no matches, but when the judges made their decisions, they usually favored the other guy. The guy selling tickets.”

  “And you did this for twenty years?”

  “As a pro, yeah. I ain’t retired though. I could get fit for a fight in a month if something came along. You never know.”

  “So what happened to the money?”

  “What money?” Johnny shook his head. “The opponent doesn’t get what the home guy gets, and most of my career was undercard, you know. The big bucks are in the main event, and if you can get onto TV or pay-per-view, whoa boy, that’s when you make some green. I was on HBO once. That was a good payday. And TV a few times, but mostly not. So after the manager took his thirty percent and the promotor took his twenty-five and the trainer got his ten, there’s not a lot left over. Some nights I fought for gas money.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Because it’s what I do.”

  “I get that. When was your last fight, Johnny?”

  He frowned at Mick and shrugged.

  “Ten years ago,” said Mick.

  “Not that long,” said Johnny.

  “A while.”

  “So tell me about the fund,” I said. “You paid into it after every fight?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’ve been in the GBC my whole career, so I paid in every time.”

  “How much. Do you know?”

  “Over the years? No idea. It was twenty percent off my cut.”

  “A good chunk.”

  “After taxes, I probably put as much into that damn fund as I ever earned.”

  “And now they won’t give any of it back,” I said.

  Johnny clenched his jaw. “Yeah. Their doctor says I don’t have nothing wrong with me. No busted bones or bad knees or whatever. And the stuff up here”—he pointed at his head—“he says there’s nothing proven. You know he actually told me it was all in my head. All in my head! I said, ‘No kidding, Doc.’ But nothing from him.”

  “What about the other doctor?”

  “Abe?” He pronounced it like the president, and I didn’t correct him.

  “Yeah.”

  “He said it was my brain. He said I took too many hits. I didn’t need no doctor to tell me that. He said every time I got punched, my brain bounced around inside my skull and it got damaged. Over time the damage got worse. He said the right uppercut was the worst. Dunno why.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Today? Okay. I mean I hurt. I’m a boxer, so I’m used to that, you know. Aches and pains are part of the game. The body I can handle. But the head? That’s something else. Some days my head’s like a splitting watermelon, like the whole thing’s gonna crack open.”

  Johnny shook his head and stared at his feet for a moment. “And there’s the moods, you know. Sometimes I get so angry and I don’t even know why, and I can’t do nothing to stop it. Like if a guy cuts you off on the highway, you got a reason to lose it, right? But I can be sitting at home, watching a movie with my girls, and then bam! Suddenly I’m so angry I want to punch something. It just comes from nowhere, and I can’t stop it.”

  I could see the veins tensing in his neck. He took a deep breath. “The doc gave me some pills, you know. They help a bit, but they turn everything into a funk. It’s hard to work, hard to do anything. And I need to work, right. I gotta have money for Tina and the girls.”

  Johnny rubbed his face with his gossamer hands. “I’m no good to ’em now. No use around the house. I can see they’re always walking on eggshells around me, trying not to set me off, but I can’t explain that it ain’t about them. The fuse gets lit inside my head. So I need this money, Miami. They need it. ’Cause I just ain’t no use to them otherwise.”

  “Hey, you working today, Cabrini, or what!” I looked up to see a man in a shirt covered in vintage cars holding his hands out near the automatic wash. The old guy had resumed his position in the plastic chair.

  “My boss,” said Johnny. “I gotta go.”

  I stood and walked over to the boss man. “Just getting the deep clean.”

  “He don’t do cleaning, he does drying.”

  I stuffed a twenty in the guy’s shirt pocket. “Five minutes.”

  “I ought to fire his—”

  “I have a question: how much you pay these guys?”

  “What?”

  “How much do you pay them? Minimum wage, right?”

  “They’re drying cars.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure for minimum wage, not just for tips. That would be illegal.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the patron saint of car washers, and if I hear of anything bad happening to Johnny, like losing his job or getting his hours cut, well then I might have to come back with my team of attorneys and have the state go through your books. Make sure everyone’s getting what they’re due by law. You get me?”

  He didn’t look happy about it. “Five minutes.”

  “Not even. And by the way, having the grumpiest guy in your crew as the first face your customers see probably isn’t doing you any favors.”

  “It’s my brother-in-law,” he said, defeated.

  “Well, forget that, then.”

  I turned back and found the others walking toward me.

  “I should get back to work,” said Johnny.

  “Yeah. Listen, Johnny, we’ll do our best, okay? We know how this system operates. We’ll work these guys over and get something for Tina.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Johnny walked back to the car wash as a sun-faded pickup came out. He flicked out his chamois and got to work.

  “You sounded like a gangster just then,” said Ron as we turned toward the Jeep. “‘We’ll work these guys over.’”

  “You think?”

  “Like Joe Pesci.”

  “What do you think, Mick?”

  “Dreamin’.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next morning I made poached eggs and lox with sourdough toast while Danielle sat at the breakfast bar and watched. Our old kitchen had been destroyed in a fire, and although the rebuilt version lacked the seventies kitsch that I loved so much, it gained in functionality. The cooktop now burned hot, and the fridge produced ice cubes by the pound.

  “How are you settling in?” I asked. Danielle had recently transferred from the Miami office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to the West Palm Beach branch. It wasn’t exactly a career move. In her business, careers got made in Miami or Tallahassee, not the Palm Beaches, but she had decided to trade up in terms of lifestyle.

  “It’s a good crew. I like it.”

  “You miss Miami?”

  “The city?”

  “Yes. I haven’t taken to referring to myself in the third person.”

  “No, I don’t miss it. Do you?”

  “Nice place to visit. Glad I live here.”

  “It was never you,” she said, scooping up some egg.

  “And too much confusion with my name.”

  “You could use your real name.”

  “That is my real name.”

  “I mean the one on your birth certificate.”

  “Nah, I’m like an actor with a stage name now. Like Reggie Dwight. If I change it, no one will know who the hell they’re talking about.” I bit some toast and pointed the remainder at her. “Do you think I should change it?”

  “Hell no. So what’s on your plate today?”

  “Going to see the doctor.”

  She stopped chewing and frowned.

  “Not my doctor. Johnny Cabrini’s doctor.”

  “Why does Johnny have a doctor and you don’t?”

  “He’s sick.”

  “And how do you know what your status is?”

  “I listen for a cough.”

  Danielle shook her head and resumed eating. She didn’t wear a uniform anymore, but she leaned over the plate to make sure her blouse didn’t get egg bombed.

  “You think you can get some money for him?”

  “I think so. Ron just needs to track down the right person to speak with.”

  “And you?”

  “I gather up the ammo so that when we do, they’ll think twice about playing games again.”

  We polished off breakfast, and I put the dishes into the dishwasher while Danielle finished getting ready. She always looked like a million dollars to me, but I supposed there was professional million dollars and lying around at home making me think about how I got so lucky million dollars. When she came out of the bathroom, she was both.

  I stopped at the sliding doors and looked across the back lawn toward the Intracoastal. It was cool for Florida and still early, so I didn’t see any boats, but the water sparkled and filled up my energy reserves like a video game character.

  I kissed Danielle goodbye and followed her off Singer Island, then along Blue Heron until we got to the freeway, where she headed south to Boynton Beach and I cut north to Jupiter.

  I found the South Florida Neurology and Spinal Institute in a building of medical suites not far from the Jupiter campus of Florida Atlantic University. I parked in the large lot as far from the building as I could get and walked over. Then I followed the suite number signage that seemed to be some kind of bastard child of the Dewey decimal system and hieroglyphics, before resorting to asking a security guard where I was supposed to go.

  Dr. Cameron Abe was listed at the top of the principals of the institute, so I figured Johnny was in the right hands. The reception was larger than most emergency rooms but held only two other people, so I checked in with the receptionist and took a seat.

  I waited an hour and a half, which would have been longer than necessary had I been an insurance case, but Lizzy had made it clear to the doctor’s assistant that I was not a patient likely to make him any money, nor a test subject likely to garner him any fame, so she was told I would be seen as and when. I was almost to the end of a Sports Illustrated article about a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball when I was called in.

  Perhaps it was years of conditioning, but I had expected to meet a doctor in an exam room, so I was surprised to be ushered into a large office with a view of a man-made lagoon.

  “Dr. Abe,” said the medical assistant. She pronounced it Ah-bay, so that case was definitely closed. “Mr. Jones.”

  Dr. Abe looked like a doctor on television. I didn’t own a TV, and when I happened to be seated near one it was usually tuned to some kind of sport rather than any kind of hospital drama, but I figured he had the right look. He was about six foot and wore a white coat over a blue shirt, no tie. He had dark hair and intelligent eyes—a good-looking guy. I was sure Danielle would have agreed.