Chapter 98: Goodbye, Burton
Jennifer was looking out the window.
She'd been doing it since Andrew got on at 72nd Street — not pointedly, not performing it, just genuinely oriented away from him with the specific body language of someone who had decided the window was more interesting than the person across from her.
Andrew recognized what this was. The coffee shop in November — he'd been mid-conversation with someone when Jennifer had come in, and he'd done the thing where you acknowledge someone and then return to what you were doing. Reasonable in isolation. Apparently filed as a slight.
He opened the copy of Sports Illustrated he'd picked up at the newsstand and read it.
The train ran express. Not many people on a Thursday afternoon — a few commuters, a woman with a stroller, two guys in construction gear who got off at Fordham. The car was quiet.
At some point Jennifer shifted, and Andrew became aware she was going to say something.
"Remy lives in New Jersey," she said, to the window. "My boyfriend. That's where I'm going."
"Got it," Andrew said.
She didn't say anything else. Neither did he. The magazine had a piece on the '94 World Cup legacy that he found genuinely interesting.
They reached Newark Penn Station without further conversation.
Andrew stood, stretched, and registered with mild surprise that Jennifer was also standing.
He followed her off the train.
Outside the station, a guy was waiting on the sidewalk — late twenties, decent jacket, the specific posture of someone who'd been watching the exit. His face when he saw Andrew was readable from twenty feet away.
"Who's this?" the guy said.
"Remy," Jennifer said, with a specific tone. "Don't."
Andrew was already at the curb with his hand up for a cab. He gave the driver the address from Burton's business card and got in without looking back.
The driver — a heavyset guy with a Yankees cap and a very specific energy — glanced in the rearview mirror and said, "You sure about this address?"
"Yes," Andrew said.
The driver looked at him again in the mirror, clocked whatever he saw, and turned the radio on. Rap, mid-volume. Andrew said nothing. The driver turned it off.
They drove in silence.
The address was in a residential neighborhood in the outer reaches of Essex County — the kind of area that was technically suburban but felt like it hadn't decided yet. Wide lots, older houses, large trees. The kind of street where you could do things in a garage and the neighbors wouldn't necessarily notice.
The driver pulled up, took the fare, and was gone before Andrew had fully gotten out.
The property was a ranch house on a double lot with a detached garage set back from the street. Large yard. Two men sitting under an oak tree near the garage, both shirtless, both extensively tattooed, talking about something that stopped when Andrew came through the gate.
One of them stood up.
"Help you?"
"I'm looking for Burton," Andrew said. "He invited me." He held up the business card.
The man looked at the card, looked at Andrew, ran some calculation behind his eyes, and said, "Follow me."
He led Andrew around the side of the house to the detached garage. There was a padlock on the side door, which the man opened with a key from his pocket. Inside, the garage looked like a garage — workbench, old shelving, the ghost of oil stains on the concrete floor.
Then the man pulled back a steel floor plate in the center.
Beneath it: stairs, descending, lit by bare bulbs at intervals. The kind of construction that had taken real time and real money, which told Andrew something about how seriously the people running this operation took it.
"Down," the man said.
Andrew went down.
The space at the bottom was larger than the footprint of the garage above — they'd dug out, reinforced the walls with steel framing, poured a proper floor. Maybe a hundred square meters, low ceiling, fluorescent lighting. It smelled like blood and chalk and old sweat.
Exercise equipment along the walls. A cleared space in the center — not a ring, just space, with tape marks on the floor. Folding cots along one side, a few of them occupied. Men in various states of post-fight recovery: one getting his hand wrapped, one lying with a bag of ice on his face, one sitting against the wall eating a sandwich with the methodical focus of someone refueling.
Several of them looked up when Andrew came down the stairs.
The man who'd led him down said "Burton — your guy," to the room, and went back up.
Andrew stood at the bottom of the stairs and took in the space with the unhurried attention he brought to rooms he hadn't been in before.
He'd expected a viewing area. Spectators, some kind of seating, the setup you'd associate with watching a fight. This was not that. This was the back of house — the fighters' space, the recovery room. He'd been led to entirely the wrong area, which meant either the guy upstairs had made a mistake or someone had made a decision.
He noted the exits: stairs behind him, a door in the far wall that probably led to the fight space itself, and nothing else.
He noted who was carrying. The man who'd brought him down had a holster under his jacket — he'd caught it when the man reached for the padlock. Nobody in the room below appeared to be armed, which was consistent with the logic of an underground fight space: you don't want guns near an active crowd.
His panel, idling at the edge of his attention, offered its own assessment:
Martial Arts (Mastered): 23/100 Boxing (Mastered): 4/100 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (Proficient): 91/100
Unarmed, in a confined space, against the men currently in this room: manageable. The one armed man was upstairs. The math was clear enough that Andrew felt his shoulders settle.
Footsteps from the far side of the room.
Burton.
He looked worse than Andrew had expected, and Andrew hadn't expected good.
Burton had always been a big man — the kind of size that filled a doorway, that made people move slightly when he walked through a gym. That was still there, structurally. But something had gone out of it. He was moving wrong. His left leg wasn't tracking the way it should, a hitch in the gait that spoke to something that had healed badly or hadn't fully healed at all.
His face, when he saw Andrew, did something complicated.
"Andrew." He kept his voice down, crossed the room quickly. "Why are you here?"
"You said I could come watch," Andrew said.
A man in a black tank top, sitting near the base of the stairs, looked over at this. Andrew registered him peripherally — big, the specific kind of big that came from lifting rather than athletic training, currently doing nothing but had the attention of someone who had just decided to pay attention.
"Not now," Burton said, low and tight. He reached out and put a hand on Andrew's arm. "Come on. Let's go back up."
"Burton." The tank-top man's voice was casual. He didn't move from where he was sitting. "You're not thinking about leaving, are you?"
Burton's hand on Andrew's arm stopped moving.
Andrew looked at Burton.
Burton looked at the floor. When he looked back up, his expression had the specific quality of a man who had made a series of decisions that had led, with internal logic, to exactly this room and this moment.
"If you'd come a month ago," he said quietly. "It would've been different."
"What happened?"
Burton's jaw worked. "I borrowed money. To bet on myself. Last bout." He didn't gesture at his leg, but his eyes went there briefly. "I lost. The leg, and the bet."
"How much?"
"A hundred thousand."
Andrew looked at him steadily. He felt no particular impulse to soften this assessment: Burton had been fighting underground matches — which meant accepting the risk of permanent injury as a condition of participation — and had then borrowed money from the people running the operation to bet on himself. The compounded recklessness of it was its own complete statement.
He pulled what cash he had from his jacket pocket. Two twenties and some ones. He held it out.
Burton looked at it.
"It's not the money," Andrew said. It wasn't a rebuke — just accurate. "But it's what I've got."
Burton took it. His hand was shaking slightly.
Andrew turned toward the stairs.
"Hey."
The tank-top man was standing up now. He'd moved without Andrew noticing, which was a data point worth filing — faster than he looked.
He was positioned between Andrew and the stairs, not quite blocking them but close enough.
"You a friend of Burton's?"
"Not really," Andrew said. "Not anymore."
"Then you came down here for a reason." The man's tone had the practiced easiness of someone who used casual as a pressure tactic. "Way I see it, you want to leave, you're going to make it worth our while."
Andrew stopped.
"Or," the man continued, with a slight smile, "you could just stay. We can always use fresh blood in the rotation."
The room had gone quiet. The men on the cots were watching. The guy with the sandwich had stopped eating.
Andrew looked at the man in the tank top for a moment.
"I'm going to ask you to move," Andrew said. Evenly, without escalation.
The man smiled wider. "Or what, pretty boy—"
Andrew's jab was not a large movement. It didn't need to be. Three years of Boxing (Mastered) — even at 4/100 into that tier — meant that the mechanics were clean, the weight transfer was correct, and the point of contact was exactly where it needed to be.
The man's head snapped back. His legs didn't get the message for about half a second, which was enough time for the rest of him to hit the floor.
The room was very quiet.
Andrew stood at the base of the stairs and looked at the room.
Nobody moved.
"I'm going to go upstairs," Andrew said. "I'd like to do that without any further conversation."
He went upstairs.
The man who'd brought him down was still outside, leaning against the garage wall with a cigarette. He looked at Andrew, looked at the stairs Andrew had just come up, looked back at Andrew.
Andrew handed him back the business card.
"I think I'm done here," Andrew said.
The man took the card, looked at it, shrugged with the specific shrug of someone who had seen enough variations of this situation to not be particularly surprised by one more.
Andrew walked back through the yard, out the gate, and down the street to find a cab.
He caught one on the main road heading back toward the highway.
The driver had the radio on — classic rock, low volume. Andrew didn't object.
He thought about Burton during the ride back. The leg. The hundred thousand. The room.
Burton had been, at the gym, a genuinely decent man — the kind of person who was good to be around because he was direct and didn't waste your time. Andrew had liked him straightforwardly. That was still true.
But the decisions that had produced that room were Burton's decisions. The borrowed money, the bet, the situation he'd created and then couldn't get out of. Andrew could feel bad about it and be clear-eyed about it simultaneously.
He'd given him the cash. That was what he'd had.
Some situations, he thought, watching the New Jersey suburbs give way to the highway, don't have a version where you fix them from the outside.
He thought about the panel numbers. Boxing (Mastered): 4/100. The jab had been clean. He'd barely felt the impact — which meant his form was right, which was the whole point of drilling form.
He hadn't wanted to hit anyone today.
But he was glad, in a calm and practical way, that when it had been necessary, he'd been capable of ending it in one.
The cab crossed back into Manhattan as the sun was getting low.
Andrew paid the driver, walked to the nearest subway entrance, and went home.
[Boxing (Mastered): 5/100]
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