Smart kid. Careful kid. The kind who planned ahead, kept records, and spread his secrets across multiple locations so no single person could find everything at once.
Not smart enough, in the end. But smart.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We didn’t make it out of the Fit24 parking lot before I had the notebook open.
Jack slid the evidence bag across to me, and I worked the seal open carefully, holding the small spiral-bound book by its edges. Daniels would process it properly once we got it back to the station—dust for prints, photograph every page, catalog it into evidence. But right now, sitting in the passenger seat with the afternoon sun slanting through the windshield, I wanted to see what Dre had been so careful to hide.
“What’s your impression?” Jack asked.
“First page is a list of initials.” I turned the notebook toward the light, studying Dre’s careful handwriting. The kid had been meticulous—every entry in neat block letters, every number lined up in columns as precise as a military ledger. “V.C. is at the top. Then a dollar amount—five thousand. Then a percentage—twenty percent. Then W and L.”
“V.C.,” Jack said. “Victor Caruso.”
“It makes sense.” I moved to the next entry on the same page. “Below that, there’s R.M.—three thousand, fifteen percent, W. Then D.H.—two thousand, fifteen percent, L. Then T.J.—fifteen hundred, ten percent, W.”
“That’s a betting ledger.”
“Or a fight record. The W and L could be wins and losses.” I kept turning pages. “There are pages of this, Jack. Dozens of entries going back a couple of years. The V.C. entries are the most frequent and the dollar amounts are the highest. Some of them go up to ten thousand.”
“Twenty percent,” Jack said, his jaw tight. “That’s a manager’s cut. Vic was taking twenty percent off the top of every fight.”
“And from the looks of it, there were other fighters too.” I flipped through more pages. “Some of these initials show up over and over. T.J. appears a lot—lower amounts, but consistent. M.R., same thing. And then there are some that only appear once or twice.”
“The regulars versus the one-offs.”
“Right. And look at this.” I found a page near the back that was different from the others. Instead of the neat columns, Dre had written what looked like a schedule. Dates, times, and numbers I could decipher. “There’s a pattern to the dates. They’re almost always on Saturday nights, roughly every two to three weeks.”
“Underground fights,” he said. “Scheduled bouts, with a betting operation running alongside. Vic takes his cut as manager, the house takes a cut from the bets, and the fighters get whatever’s left.”
“Which for Dre was apparently enough to stash thirty thousand in his closet.”
“Kid was a moneymaker. Top of the card.”
I stared at the notebook in my hands, thinking about the young man on my autopsy table. The military precision of his apartment. The protein powder and meal prep containers. The discipline of someone who treated his body like an instrument.
He hadn’t been training for a legitimate boxing career. He’d been training for underground fights where the money was real but the rules weren’t.
“We need to go back to Iron House,” I said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
I sealed the notebook back in the evidence bag and set it on the console between us. We’d drop it at the station on our way. Daniels could work her magic with it while we worked ours with Vic.
Iron House looked different in the late afternoon light. Harsher, somehow. The corrugated-steel walls caught the sun and threw it back like a challenge, and the gravel lot was fuller than it had been this morning—trucks and sedans crowding the spaces, a motorcycle propped on its kickstand near the entrance. The sounds of the gym carried through the open bay door—the rhythmic thud of fists against leather, the staccato rattle of a speed bag, the sharp exhale of men pushing their bodies to the edge.
Jack pulled the Tahoe into a spot near the entrance and killed the engine. Through the bay door, I could see bodies moving inside—shadows and shapes working heavy bags, a pair of men circling each other in one of the two rings.
We got out and headed for the entrance. The warmth of the late May afternoon followed us inside, where the industrial fans mounted in the rafters pushed the air around without doing much to cool it.
The same young guy from this morning appeared almost immediately—lean, muscular, broken nose, thickened brows. He’d been working a heavy bag near the entrance, and he peeled off his gloves as he approached, his expression wary.
“Help you?” he asked, though his tone suggested he’d rather not.
“We need to talk to Vic again,” Jack said.
The kid’s eyes flicked at Jack’s gun. “He’s in the middle of a session right now. Training one of his guys.” He jerked his chin toward the far ring, where two figures were moving—one tall and rangy, the other shorter and thicker, circling each other with the deliberate precision of men who knew what they were doing. “Could be a while.”
