While the mob on the floor went wild, Isaac took off his sweatshirt and hung it on the outside of the octagon. He always fought in a muscle shirt, loose track pants, and the requisite bare feet—but then again, that was his whole wardrobe.

As he went in through the octagon’s gate, he kept his back to the corner of the warehouse and waited calmly to see what tonight’s entrée was going to be.

Ah, yes. Another Mr. Tough Guy with delusions of the glandular variety: The instant the opponent ducked in, he started bouncing around like he had a pogo stick for a colon, and he capped off his pregame show by ripping his T-shirt in half and punching himself in the face.

Fucker kept it up and Isaac wasn’t going to have to do anything but blow on him to put his ass on the ground.

At the sound of the air horn, Isaac stepped forward, raising his fists to chest level, but keeping them tight to his torso. For a good minute or so, he let his opponent show off and throw air punches that snapped out with all the aim of a blind guy with a garden hose.

Piece of cake.

Except as the crowd pressed in, Isaac thought about how many copies a Xerox machine could make in sixty seconds and decided to get serious. Snapping out a left jab, he nailed the guy in the sternum, temporarily freezing the heart that beat behind that bone. Follow-up was a right hook that caught Pogo under the chin, clapping the man’s teeth together and knocking his head back on his spine.

Cue the tap-dancing: Mr. Tough Guy went Ginger Rogers and twinkle-toed it backward into the chicken wire. While the roar from the kibitzers filled the open space and echoed around, Isaac closed in and worked the poor bastard out so that he was Pogo no mo’, nothing but a staggering drunk whose head was spinning too fast to organize his body. And just when it looked as if there was a whole lot of dead faint coming on, Isaac backed off and let the man recover his breath.

To get an extra grand, he had to make sure they lasted more than three minutes.

Walking around, he counted in his head to five. Then he came back at—

The knife swung in a fat circle and sliced across Isaac’s forehead, catching him just at the hairline. Blood streamed out and effectively clouded his vision—the kind of thing he would have called strategic if the guy had had a clue what he was doing. Given the way those punches went, however, it was obviously just a lucky strike.