Lionel Kane’s coconut was cracked last night and he was turned into one done darkie by the flying fists of Rebel Jake McCloskey. This jungle bunny found out that in the square circle there’s no place to run. He was big and he was strong, but he had never seen anything like the sledgehammer left hook that sent him to cloud-cuckoo-land. So what’s it going to be, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom? Are you world champ or world chump? Are you going to climb into the ring with Jake McCloskey and see if you can block the punches that felled the mighty King Kane? Or will you go on hiding from the best light-heavy west of the Mississippi?

Jake knew what Ed Floate would write, almost word for word. Friday evenings, Floate turned up at Moe Spitzer’s joint on Larimer Street at eight o’clock sharp. Floate always sat at Moe’s table, where Moe would treat him to a sixteen-ounce steak and a quart of good bourbon. After dinner there would be Cuban cigars a yard long. Moe would snap his fingers, a blond floozy would waltz over to their table, sit thigh to thigh with Ed Floate, let him hear the hiss of silk stockings, draw her long fingernails up his fly. Moe would blow smoke rings and watch them curl into the air over the bourbon and the broad. Then he would lean forward, explain how it was going to be.

“Listen, you dumb fuck. This is what you’re gonna say. Jake McCloskey is the best light-heavy you’ve ever seen. Speed, power, the whole shebang. How you write it, I don’t give a fuck. You’re the fuckin Shakespeare. Write it backward, all I care. Write it in fuckin Swahili. Put in all them fancy words you wants. Just make sure it’s loud and clear when your fuckin rag hits the streets. My man Jake McCloskey ought to be light-heavyweight champ. Tell that Hebe bastard Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom to give my guy a shot.”

“But you’re a Hebe bastard yourself, Max.”

“I am, you goy fuck. That’s why I can say it. You say it again, I’ll get a nigger to saw off your nuts with a rusty razor blade.”

Jake pumped a gloved fist Floate’s way. The trouble with a hack like Floate, you had to hope he was sober enough to write the story when the fight was done. Some nights, he’d be so far into the sauce that he was facedown in his typewriter before the undercard bouts were over. The snot-nosed kid who ran the pages back to the telegrapher would have to finish Ed’s story and there was no telling what a kid like that would say.