Omar snarls, moves fast. The smaller dog gets up under Orion, clamps down on the animal’s throat. The crowd gasps. The skinheads go nuts—banging and kicking the plywood, screaming every racial epithet they can muster; Atlanta’s from the South and even she hasn’t heard some of them before today.

It’s over fast.

Orion rolls onto his back, and Omar bites down, head shaking like he’s trying to clear his head of an infection. And then it’s done. Game over.

The worst part is, a little voice inside Atlanta had chosen a side. She wanted to see Omar win. Which means she wanted to see Orion lose—Orion the bully, Orion the beast, Orion who gets what’s coming to him. But he’s just a dog, a dog who didn’t want this, a dog who was made into this . . .

It’s then that everything goes nuts. Karl comes at Deshawn with fists out, the tendons in the skinhead’s neck popping out like bridge cables. Deshawn backpedals, laughing like a donkey, egging the Nazi on. The ref gets between them before the two human beasts clash, pushes them apart. Atlanta can’t watch anymore. She turns and flees the ring, trying hard to find her breath and failing.

“Rough and tumble stuff, isn’t it?”

She runs into a wall, and the wall speaks.

The man is huge. Six-six. Wide shoulders, long gray hair, and a big snarly beard are just the top of the mountain, a mountain formed of the remarkable bedrock of his barrel chest and the round granite of his massive gut. His beard is the kind that birds might use for a nest, and the tangled salt-and-pepper carpet parts as he smiles.

“I . . .”

“First dogfight, then.”

Behind her, she hears the ref call a winner—“Orion is the cur. Omar is the champ!”—and the crowd surges forth on a tide of victory and hate, of adrenaline and dopamine. The human mountain laughs again.

“That fight was a quick one,” he says. “They can go for hours. Depends on the dogs and their handlers. I run some dogs now and again. Beautiful animals, these beasts.”

“Yeah.” She’s in his shadow and even that feels like it has weight. She thinks, this guy could give Orly Erickson—who is himself a big sonofabitch—a run for his money. For a moment she’s lost in the minimovie of those two fighting in the plywood ring, beating the piss out of each other like a couple of Kodiak bears.

“You from the high school?” he asks her.

She doesn’t know why she’s honest, but she is. “Yeah.”

“Uh-huh. You place any bets yet?”

“No, I . . . no.”

He winks. “Shame. Seems if you had money on Omar you’d be rolling around in cash right about now.”

Money. Cash. Foreclosure. One bet on the right animal—