Eden by Candice Fox Page A

were next. Heinrich watched the money pass hands all around him, names and notes scribbled on notepads buried in palms, men shouting across the pit and holding up fingers.
    Two cages were lowered into the pit. The dogs were snapping, throwing themselves at the wire. Heinrich saw Sunday on the other side of the ring, talking to two men. One whispered in her ear, bent low, smiling. She was laughing in an odd, heavy way. Lopsided. She was still wearing that yellow dress but now it was higher than it used to be on her long gold legs and was caught up in a black wool sweater. She was barefoot on the beer-soaked floor. She hooted at the dogs, cheered. Bear’s hand fell on the boy’s shoulder and he jerked at the feel of the man’s beard on his cheek.
    “Listen here.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’m gonna say this once, and you don’t repeat it. See that man up there with Caesar? Don’t look just yet. Guy in the leather jacket. Blond. You don’t go anywhere near him, you understand?”
    “Huh?”
    “Don’t go near him. Don’t talk to him, don’t look at him. Don’t go anywhere with him, even if he tells you it’s okay with me. Get me, boy?”
    “Why?”
    “You know not to say ‘why’ to me.”
    “All right. All right.”
    “Good man.” The Bear squeezed his shoulder, thumped him too hard, made him wobble. Heinrich felt a strange shift in his stomach, a flush in his cheeks. Bear never spoke like that, like he felt something.
    He snuck a look across the pit to where Caesar was standing on the stairs with a thick-headed blond man in a brown leather jacket. The two were talking, holding short glasses, looking at the crowd. Heinrich didn’t see anything especially threatening or interesting about the forbidden man. There was white and gray in his temples, smile lines cutting deep into the corners of his eyes. The man put his hand on his hip. A revolver. A cop. Heinrich tugged at Bear’s sleeve.
    “He a cop?”
    Bear gave him a look. Heinrich scratched his neck and turned back to the fight. He knew there were cops in the crowd. There were cops who passed things to Caesar sometimes, met him in the early hours in uniform, rode in the back of the car in plain clothes. Heinrich had never been afraid of cops. He knew to be polite to them, take their coats and hats when they arrived at the house, send the women to them straight away, bring them drinks. You don’t talk nothing but the weather, Bear had said. Sunny day, isn’t it? Cold out there, isn’t it? Warming up, isn’t it? That’s it. Get me? Heinrich wondered why this cop was different. But he didn’t wonder long. The cage doors were lifted and the dogs began to dance.
    There was always a clear favorite. It was usually size, but tonight it was attitude—one of the dogs was obviously more afraid, and the fearful one is the one who fights harder, that doesn’t want to die. A dog that isn’t quiet and trembling before the door goes up, piss running down its back legs, bashing its head on the cage walls in terror at the sound of the other animal, isn’t a dog worth betting on. The one that makes the noise, makes the threats, gives a performance—that’s the one distracted, the one that doesn’t believe he can be taken down.
    The raging beast tonight was the smaller one, a caramel mix with a black snout, waxed up all over to make it hard to pin, two perfect pink scars where they’d clipped it long ago, a tail docked from birth. It wasn’t a new fighter and didn’t move like one. The other, some kind of charcoal thoroughbred, came out of the cage and was immediately driven back against it. Glances snatched from the corners of eyes, puffed chests, exposed gums, bouncing strides and thrusts of legs, and then the lunge, the roll, the frantic scratch of claws with no grip on wet cement as one backed the other into the corner, scrambled out, rushed up against another wall. The crowd was howling. First blood in three seconds.
    Heinrich looked across the pit at the man