He walks in and right up to Rich, shoving his fingers deep on either side of his Adam’s apple, pushing the back of his head against the window. It’s so quick and silent most of the patrons don’t even turn to look. Marshall gasps for air. In my dad’s softest voice he says, “Marshall, I’ve got you on tape three times calling our house, which is a direct breach of the no-contact order. I’m not sure how many times you have to hear this to believe it, and I can barely believe I’m giving you one more chance. About forty-five seconds before I left the house, your stepdaughter came out of the bathroom with her forearm bleeding because she tried to change the color of her skin with a Brillo pad. You told her it would work.”

Barbour moves toward Dad and so do I, shaking my head. “You should be home resting for your swim competition.”

“Fuck you, Jones.”

We glare, but he stays put, and Dad finishes his proposition. “Now, I can run these pictures over to the police and let you have a few days more in the slammer, or you and I can make an agreement right here and now that you have called my house, and stalked your family, for the last time.”

“This is assault,” Rich squeaks through a partially closed windpipe.

“Yes, it is,” Dad says.

“Fuck you,” Rich says. He sounds like Donald Duck, and Dad pinches harder.

“That’s not the right answer.”

Rich’s face is bright red, headed through the rainbow toward darker colors. He can’t talk, so he nods his head in panic, and Dad loosens his grip. By now patrons are noticing something is wrong, and the night manager starts around the counter. “Is there a problem here?”

Dad looks at Rich. “Is there a problem here, Rich?”

Rich’s mouth is pinched, moving toward a sneer, but he says, “No. No problem.”

“Good,” Dad says, and looks at the manager. “No problem, Sam. I’m sorry if I stirred things up. We’ll be going,” and he moves toward the door.

I back out behind him because I don’t trust either Marshall or Barbour any further than I could punt them. Rich stands massaging his throat and glaring at Dad, and then me, with pure hatred.

CHAPTER 15

The next morning what little slack there is between Barbour and me is drawn tighter than a bowstring. He stands around with his blockers watching my every move, as if somehow that will intimidate me. What he doesn’t know is I’m visualizing his muscular body sinking to the bottom of the pool at All Night when skinny little Chris Coughlin swims him into submission. He has no idea how badly I want a clean shot at him myself, a little self-defense action to render him infirm. Under normal circumstances I could bait him in front of his friends and bring him right at me, but Dad was clear that he doesn’t want any escalation with Marshall or Barbour. The connection between Rich and Mike is unclear, but it’s definitely there, and the bottom line is that Heidi and the twins have to be kept safe at all costs and, of course, if we can pull Alicia back under the umbrella, hooray for us.

Georgia was there when we got back last night, working through Heidi’s stuff with her, and before she left, she stopped in my room.

“Don’t want you getting into a bunch of mess over this,” she said. “You got to be a professional. You work for me.”

“But as a professional,” I said back, “you’ve got no problem with my defending myself.”

“No, but I have a problem with you creating a situation where you have to defend yourself.” Georgia knows me like a well-read book. She said, “You listen to me, and I told your daddy the same thing. The way Rich Marshall is acting right now tells us he’s less rational than usual, which means he’s not rational at all. And it wouldn’t be all that hard to get that Barbour boy cranked up right with him. They may not be brothers, but they came out from under the same rock, which means if you mess with one of ’em, you’re messing with the other. If you want to kick somebody’s ass, you get some gloves and do it in the ring.” I told her I had an even better plan than that. I had somebody lined up to do the ass kicking for me.

The scenario at All Night Fitness is almost surreal. Several coaches and a couple of athletes from the Athletic Council are there, along with football players to cheer Barbour on. Icko runs the workout to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, while Benson and Simet watch from the pool deck. Simet was quick to agree to that; he knows the story about Icko bending rebar for Barbour’s benefit back when Barbour was still threatening Chris about wearing his brother’s jacket.

Chris is big-time pissed at me. “Why I gots to do it?” he says. “Why not somebody with muscles like Tay-Roy?”

“’Cause you’re the guy who can take him,” I say, “and because you’ve got a reason to get even. Remember how he scared you?”

“He scares me right this minute,” Chris says. “What if I beat him, and then he finds me alone by myself?”

Mott is behind us, listening. He leans forward and whispers into Chris’s ear. “If he finds you alone, I’ll beat him to death with my steel leg. And that’s a promise. And I’ll go over and tell him that right now if you want me to.”

“Like just take it off and whack him?” Chris says.

“Right across the side of his ugly head,” Mott says back.

That’s a good visual for Chris, but he’s still worried. The rest of the team gathers around him while Barbour steps out of his sweats. He’s pretty impressive physically, and that brings back Chris’s demons. I tell Tay-Roy to take off his shirt, which he does just to let Chris make the comparison.

“Okay,” I say. “So we got more muscles on our side, and a steel leg. All you have to do is get in the water and keep swimming until that scumbag quits. You don’t even have to swim faster than he does, just longer. Okay?”

Jackie steps forward and ruffles Chris’s hair. He says, “Kick his ass,” and Chris breaks into a big grin. Nobody has ever heard Jackie Craig say ass. Then Dan puts a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “It’s only about tenacity, Christopher. Tenacity will get the task completed here.”

Chris watches Barbour, stretching and hyperventilating, across the pool. Though his buddies are kidding and cheering him on, Barbour shows no signs of humor. And he isn’t looking over here at Chris. He’s looking at me.

I’m looking back.

Icko tells them both to get in and warm up. Chris takes a hundred yards at about three-quarter speed, ten or twelve deep breaths between, and repeats, warming up like he has every day for the past four months. He looks good in the water, comfortable. I’m proud of him.

Barbour takes a couple of laps and says he’s ready. Simet stands next to Benson with a big smile. This won’t take long.

Icko brings them up to the blocks. “You said you can take Chris in the short stuff, right, Mike?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I heard you say you could take him for a hundred yards. Do you still think that?”

“Hell, yes. What does it matter? This isn’t a race.”

“I know,” Icko says, “but we do interval training, and to keep it fair I want to be sure the intervals are equal. If you’re about the same speed, you get the same intervals between. So we’re doing ten one-hundred-yard swims, leaving the blocks every two minutes. The faster you swim, the more rest you get.”

Barbour says, “Let’s just do it.”

This poor bastard has no idea what he’s in for.

Icko starts them, and Barbour flies out over the water with a grunt. He swims ahead of Chris, but Chris catches him coming off the wall, having learned to flip at the deep end. Barbour touches him out, but he comes up gasping, where Chris is barely breathing hard.

Mott quickly organizes a lottery, and we each throw in a buck. We have Barbour dying anywhere from two hundred to seven hundred yards. I pick five.