Griffin said, “Oh, bullshit. He’s lying, Virgil. The boxes camehere, not to the next trailer. They had Anderson’s address on them. She’s still around here someplace.”
“It’s a ‘manufactured home,’ not a ‘trailer,’” Anderson said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but there’s only one address here. None of these lots are legal addresses—it’s all one lot, and one address.”
“You’re still lying about Jesse,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you, Joe. I may have to come back out here and take your ass to jail. You don’t look like a bad guy, and I’d hate to do it—but, not to put too fine a point on it, Mattel has asked the governor to stop this crime and the governor has agreed.”
“The fuckin’ governor? Why would he give a stinkin’ wet shit about this deal?”
Virgil looked to his left, to his right, then back at Anderson, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know the details.”
Anderson said, “Oh, I see.Somebody paid the little prick, didn’t they?Donated to his campaign, or whatever they call it now.”
“That’s entirely unwarranted speculation,” Griffin said.
Anderson said, “Well, maybe we both have warrants in our future—me and the governor. Come and get me when you’ve got mine.”
He stepped back inside and closed the door.
Griffin, her arms akimbo, asked, “Well, what are you going to do, Virgil?”
Virgil said, “If you can come up with enough for me to get a search warrant, I’ll come back, like I said. We’re not there yet.”
—
They’d turned back to their vehicles when a door slammed down the way and they both looked, and a large woman in a parka was standing on her stoop, her back to them, locking the door of her mobile home. The mobile home with the assault wagon parked outside.
Virgil went that way. “Hey.”
The woman turned, looked at him, and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers.” She came down off the steps and added, “How about I kick your ass again?”
Virgil opened his mouth to reply—something soothing and noncombative—but that apparently wasn’t how they did it in L.A. Margaret Griffin, standing next to him, flicked her hand, and a two-foot-long steel wand snapped open.
Griffin said, “Come and get us, bitch.”
Something about Griffin caused the woman to step sideways, circling to her left, which gave her a clear shot at Virgil, and suddenly she was moving more quickly than her size would have suggested, with newly painted and pointed fingernails flashing with Dior’s Victoire 758 right at Virgil’s face.
Virgil had his feet set, and he punched her.
—
Alot of great punches were thrown in the twentieth century. One of the most famous was captured in the painter George Bellows’s iconic workDempsey and Firpo, also known asDempseyThrough the Ropes, in which Luis Ángel Firpo, the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocked Jack Dempsey entirely out of the ring in the first round of their 1923 fight.
Then there was Rocky Marciano’s 1952 knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth round of their heavyweight fight, called a one-punch knockout by everyone, though there were really two; to say nothing of Muhammad Ali’s 1974 knockout of George Foreman in what some people call the greatest boxing match ever.
Virgil’s punch, though nearly a century after Firpo’s, was on that scale. The woman came straight at him, talons flashing, the brightest thing around under the sullen winter sky, but Virgil had five inches’ reach on her and had had time to set his feet.
He focused the punch two inchesbehindher nose, and she walked straight into it. The punch was so clean, straight, and pure, with Virgil’s wrist and elbow locked up tight, a perfect line of bone between his shoulder and his knuckles, that the woman went down on her back like a wet sack of fertilizer.
Off to the side, Griffin said approvingly, “Whoa!”
The woman on the ground was swinging her arms back and forth as though she were making a snow angel while spraying blood from her nose all over the snow wings; a bloody angel, and making loud gasping and crying sounds. Virgil said, “Keep an eye on her, I’ve got some cuffs in the truck.”
When he got back, the woman had flopped over onto her stomach, bleeding heavily into the snow. Virgil grabbed one wrist, and she tried to push up with her other hand, but Griffin stepped over, put her heel on the woman’s cheekbone, and pushed down. The woman squealed, and Virgil said, “Don’t hurt her,” and Griffin asked, “Why not?”
Virgil said, “She’s hurt bad enough already.” Virgil got the woman’s other wrist and locked it up, and said to Griffin, “Help me get her into the backseat of my truck.”
They lifted the woman to her feet, and Virgil said, “Hold on a second—keep her steady,” and he went back to the truck and got a large-wound bandage from his first aid kit, which looked like an old-fashioned Kotex pad but twice as large, and pressed it against the woman’s nose. The woman screamed and said, “Hurts,” and Virgil said, “Yeah, I know. That’s why I got a blue squid on my face. Remember that?”
“I’d do it again, fucker,” the woman mumbled through the pad.
