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“Be right back,” I said, stepping out into the hall and answering the call. “Hey. What’s up?”
Dalton’s voice was gruff. “Spanner’s in the hospital.”
“Hospital? For what?” I demanded. I thought back to the fight last Friday, our first of the year. “He won, right? Wasn’t roughed up much either.”
“Not injured, sick. Some start-of-the-semester virus. But I don’t like this shit, Elliot. You get a bunch of overly concerned doctors worried about a bruise on the guy’s ribs, and suddenly, he’s telling ’em his fucking life story.”
It had taken me two years to learn the patterns of my uncle’s anxiety. He was always skittish at the beginning of a new school year.
“Spanner’s not gonna talk. He’s in debt to a bookie in Vegas from a trip over summer break. If his dad finds out, he’ll pull him out of school and beat his ass. Trust me.”
“I do, kid.” Dalton sighed, sounding way older than his thirty-five years. “But of all the times for this shit to happen… I got people coming tonight to place bets.”
“What kind of people?” I demanded.
“People, Ells,” he retorted. “Don’t worry about it.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Right.”
My uncle had owned his own garage for ten years, and no matter what the bullshit rumors said, his business was legit. Nobody knew custom cars and motorcycles like Dalton did, and he’d taught me everything he knew.
But raising kids—especially unexpectedly becoming guardian to your older sister’s twin teenagers—was fucking expensive. That was why he’d started the damn fight club in the first place.
And even though Dalton tried to keep Gracie in the dark, and to keep me out of the worst of the stuff he was involved in, I knew some of his contacts weren’t the type you’d bring to family dinner.
“I need a full room tonight,” he went on.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been busting my ass promoting,” I assured him. “And fuck Spanner, ’cause I’m gonna be fighting tonight. When’s the last time we didn’t fill the damn room with me in the ring?”
“Full of yourself, aren’t you?” Dalton snorted, but I could hear the pride in his voice. “Gonna win tonight?”
I snorted because the answer was obvious. “Don’t I always?”
“Sure, before,” he teased. “Now you’ve spent a week living on campus, rooming with Georgia royalty. Maybe you’ve gone soft.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said, lowering my voice as a couple of girls walked by. One of them looked familiar, and I wondered idly if I’d fucked her before.
“Heyyyy, Vaughn,” she said with a grin.
I lifted my chin in response and watched her giggle behind her hand. She and her friend glanced over their shoulders at me before continuing down the hall.
“Hey,” I called out to them without thinking. “You girls interested in watching a fight tonight?”
They turned. The girl who looked more familiar reached out and squeezed my bicep, shooting me an easy grin. “Are you gonna be the one in the cage?”
“Sure will.”
“Atta boy,” Dalton said low in my ear. “See you tonight.”
The call ended, and I pulled out a preprinted card with a QR code to hand to the girls. “Tell your friends. My buddy Lou sells beer, shots, and drink specials if you get there early. Tell him I sent you, and he’ll hook you up.”
After they walked away, I took a breath before I returned to Grace’s room. I spent the next half hour helping her hang posters and a Demere pennant she’d picked up at the campus club fair. Her roommate came in and asked for my help moving her bed and dresser around. After I finished at their dorm, I contacted her wrestler friend, Wes, and told him to meet me at the Pit tonight so I could introduce him around. I headed to fraternity row to hype up tonight’s fight. Then I started my shitty-ass Friday night fight routine.
By the time I got there, the Pit was packed. The time I’d spent this week cruising the gym, talking up the ladies and the gym bros, had paid off.
My uncle’s failed attempt at a biker bar called the Tar Pit was now the perfect venue for illegal fights. You had to drive down a half mile of gravel drive on a private wooded lot behind Vaughn Automotive to even see the place, and even then, it didn’t look like more than a big metal storage building with a gravel parking lot out front and a faded, half-broken sign that just read The Pit now that the word Tar had fallen off.
Inside, however, was a long bar against one wall, a makeshift cage lined with MMA mats taking up most of the center of the otherwise cracked concrete floor, and a ridiculous jukebox stolen out of a Waffle House.
