Santa Olivia (Santa Olivia #1)

Tommy’s heart contracted. He laid one hand on Loup’s shoulder, drawing courage from its small sturdiness. “I’d like to stay, sir.”

White brows rose. “And do what?”

He took another deep breath, tasting the air of the place. “Learn.” Tommy squared his shoulders. “I’ll work for whatever you can teach me. I’ll haul your garbage, clean your bathrooms. I don’t care.”

The pale eyes blinked. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Tommy lied.

Floyd Roberts snorted. “Start as you mean to go on, boy. I don’t work with liars.”

“Fourteen,” he lied.

“Show me what you’ve got.” He put up his hands. Tommy jabbed at them the way he’d seen it done, shuffling his feet in an exaggerated fashion. The old coach snorted and began to lower his hands. Feeling his chance slipping away, Tommy threw an instinctive left, finding it barely deflected at the last instant.

Floyd Roberts blinked thoughtfully. “That’s a funny left hook, boy. I knew an army fighter, once, threw that punch.”

“Tom Almquist?”

His pallid brow wrinkled. “That’s the one.”

Tommy’s heart swelled. “He was my father.”

“Oh, well.” The pale eyes peered at him. Long, strong fingers prodded his muscles. “You’re well built for fourteen. You say you’ll clean bathrooms?”

“Anything!” Tommy breathed.

“And leave the little one at home?” Floyd pressed.

Tommy glanced at Loup, his heart sinking again. “I can’t, sir. I’m responsible for her.”

“Ah.” Floyd bent lower and peered more closely at Loup. She looked back at him with her odd, fearless stare. “Why isn’t the child in school? Is she simpleminded?”

“No!” Tommy said in a defensive tone, then dropped his voice to a mumble. “She got kicked out.”

Another slow blink. “This mite? For what?”

Tommy opened his mouth to lie, but something in the old man’s watery gaze killed the lie on his tongue. He’d gotten away with one. He didn’t think he’d get away with another. “Mr. Ketterling hit me with a yardstick, and Loup grabbed it from him. Then he chased her and got mad when he couldn’t catch her. She’s really quick.”

The coach’s long, wrinkled mouth curved upward like a lizard’s. “Oh, indeed?”

“She won’t be any trouble, sir,” Tommy said desperately. He gave Loup’s shoulder a shake—or tried to. It didn’t move much. “Will you, Loup?”

“No, Tommy,” she agreed.

“See?” Tommy held his breath.

In the sparring ring, Miguel Garza’s opponent called for a halt, his nose bleeding from an unlucky punch.

“Ice it,” Floyd Roberts said briefly.

Miguel came to hang over the ropes. “Floyd, don’t do it, man! I don’t care if you want to hire the kid, but we don’t want some weird punk-ass brat hanging around the place.”

The coach turned his pale stare on Miguel for a long moment. “That’s three times the young man’s called me sir, Mr. Garza,” he said slowly. “I like his manners. If he says the little girl will be no trouble, I choose to believe him.”

Miguel shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Come back tomorrow,” Floyd said to Tommy. “Be prepared to work hard. I’ll give you a month’s trial. If you stick it out, I’ll start teaching you. If you don’t work as hard as you say, if the little girl’s a problem…” He shrugged. “Come back when you’re sixteen.”

“Yes, sir!” Tommy said excitedly.

“Good.” The old man pointed at the door. “Tomorrow.”

Outside, Tommy took long, deep breaths, his heart pounding. Loup regarded him. “Mommy’s going to be mad,” she said in a pragmatic tone.

“Yeah.” He swallowed, his excitement fading a bit. “Loup… what if we don’t tell her? She’ll think we’re going to school every day, and she won’t have to worry. We don’t want her to worry, do we?” He searched her face. “Okay?”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

It was the beginning of a new life for both of them.

Carmen didn’t know. Tommy begged Grady to loan him Sonia’s books, then hid them in a locker at the gym. Every day, he and Loup left for school, each of them carrying a book. Every few days, he switched them around. Exhausted from work, Carmen never noticed.

“How was school, mijo?” she asked.

“Good,” he lied.

Between the two of them, Tommy had a better imagination, but Loup was a better liar because she had no fear of getting caught. They invented stories together about their days at school, and while it was always Tommy who made up the best stories, it was Loup who told them.

Meanwhile, Tommy worked.

He scrubbed toilets and scoured shower tiles, ignoring the mocking derision of the young men who used them. He sprayed and wiped sweat-slick weights and equipment with assiduous care. He sprinkled the bloodstained canvas with a special powder that Floyd Roberts got from the army, then scrubbed it clean. He ran and fetched whatever the coach wanted: boxing tape, petroleum jelly, lunch from the torta vendor.

Loup helped him, except in the locker room and showers. She was quiet and unobtrusive and after the first week, the boxers-in-training quit complaining and ignored them both.

Together, they learned the gym.

There were two sparring rings, and access to them was a thing to be coveted. Only the serious contenders were allowed to spar. There were four heavy bags and six speed bags. There were free weights to be pressed and benches to be wiped. Coach insisted everything be kept clean. There were a few machines from the old days that worked muscles the free weights didn’t. There were treadmills that went dead when the power faltered.

It was a world unto itself with its own caste system. Miguel Garza and his coterie of friends ranked at the top. There were only three of them in training, but a dozen other young men swaggered in and out at any given hour, placing bets and making crude jokes. Floyd Roberts tolerated them because the politics of Outpost demanded it and they gave him grudging respect, in part because he was the general’s man and could summon the authority of the army if he wanted to, and in part because he was the coach, and no matter what else was true, the coach commanded respect.

After the Garza gang came the men Tommy called the Real Men. They were older, in their later twenties and thirties—working men, men with families. They were reservoir workers, greens-keepers, odd-jobs men. They came later in the day and trained hard in silence. They were the men who’d trained for years, who’d fought actual bouts against the general’s boxers.

None of them had ever won, of course. They kept trying because it paid; the general rewarded even the losers with a generous purse. But anyone could see that they’d long since given up hope of winning the fabled ticket out of Outpost. They trained to keep from getting hurt worse than they would otherwise, suffered their broken noses and cauliflower ears in silence, took the money, and went home. When Floyd Roberts thought they were getting close to taking one punch too many, he turned them gently away.

In between, there were the independent young hopefuls, too poor or proud to toady to the Garza gang. They had hope and hunger in their eyes. Two or three of them showed real promise, and Floyd was bringing them along slowly. This Tommy knew because when the trial month ended, the old coach dropped his first tidbit of information.

“See that?” He nodded at Kevin McArdle, a thickset redhead with pale, freckled skin. McArdle was working the skipping rope so fast it was a blur, though his feet scarcely seemed to leave the ground. “Learn it. That’s your first lesson.”

“Yes, sir.” Tommy hesitated.

The old coach’s mouth wrinkled. “You want to learn to punch.”

“Yes, sir.”

Floyd’s gaze drifted toward Miguel Garza. “Don’t they all. But it starts with footwork and conditioning. That’s the key.” He turned his gaze on Tommy. “I had to bring the first generation on too fast. Bill wanted his prizefighters. Well, he got ’em. But I’m not rushing the rest. You, either.”

“Yes, sir,” Tommy said.

The coach jerked his chin at Loup, her brother’s silent shadow.

“I bet the little one can show you how. You like to jump rope, missy?”

“Don’t know, sir,” she said thoughtfully. “I never had one.”

Something flickered behind the old man’s watery eyes. He muttered under his breath, then jabbed his thumb. “Storeroom,” he said to Tommy. “Get yourself a rope and find a short one for the little girl. There’s some old kiddie equipment in the back.”

Tommy ran to do his bidding. Loup watched Kevin McArdle with a fixed gaze. He grinned at her and stepped up his pace, doing double-unders and whipping the rope under his feet twice on one hop, first with both feet, then hopping from one to the next. And then he switched to a complicated crisscrossing motion, the blurred rope whistling. Loup cocked her head.

“Here!” Tommy returned panting, two ropes in hand.

Floyd nodded. “On the mat. Keep it low.”

McArdle stopped and beckoned to them. He’d always been one of the nicer ones. “Just like this.” He swung his rope in a slow, easy arc, hopping over it. “One, two, three.”

They emulated him.

“A little faster now.” McArdle bounced at a deliberate, steady pace. “Okay, now we’re gonna run in place.”

Tommy got tangled.

Loup didn’t.

“Yeah?” Kevin McArdle’s copper-red brows rose. “Okay, here we go!”

His rope whistled. He did double-unders, two-footed and one-footed. He did crisscrosses, arms and rope whipping with fluid precision, his feet skipping through the loops. Loup imitated him perfectly. Faster and faster, until McArdle stopped, a sheen of sweat on his freckled skin.