“One wouldn’t happen to be Jimmy Radmon, would it?” I said.

“You mean the boy hasn’t told you?”

“Told me what?” I said feeling a rise in my heart rate and blood pressure.

“I ain’t talked to him for a couple weeks,” Brutus said as he walked the floor-flush treadmill under his desk. “Wasn’t nothin’ left I could teach him in karate. That boy just took it all in. Took it all in right to his bones. Never seen anything like it! Since this place is a full-service fitness club and not just a dojo, me and my staff could only take him up to his second-degree black. He’s been over at the Detroit Martial Arts Academy on Michigan Avenue for a while now. Sifu Yang ain’t taken an apprentice in five years!”

“I had no idea—”

“Okay, enough stalling, August,” Brutus said. “You tell me what’s going on, or swear to my loving Lord Jesus, I will boot you through the uprights.”

For fifteen minutes I told Brutus what I was involved with, what I knew and what I didn’t know. I told him about Vic Bronson, the mysterious Mr. Sloane and the thirty million dollars in missing dirty money, my tête-à-tête with City Council President Lincoln Quinn and a young gun Aussie named Xiang. I chose not to tell him about my dark partnership with another assassin called the Cleaner. Or my conflicted relationship with a man who had chosen the moniker Albino.

When I finished, Brutus brought the treadmill to a stop and gave me a hard look. He picked up the receiver of his desk phone and said through the club’s PA system, “Abby and K to my office, please.”

Ten seconds later, Abby Cosi and K were standing in Brutus’s office. K looked fit, happy and dashing in his blue-and-gold Club Brutus sweats, shoes and jacket. We shook hands and I refrained from saying, “Ow!” from his grip. Abby looked healthy, happy and beautiful in short pink shorts, CrossFit athletic shoes and a fashionably ripped T-shirt that read, “Fight Like A Girl.” We embraced.

“Doggone it, Abby,” Brutus said. “How many times I got to remind you of the dress code?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “There’s a dress code here?”

K stifled a laugh.

Brutus lowered and shook his head before he got to business. “K? I need you to put ten, twelve pounds of furious muscle on this man.” He pointed to me. “Abby? I know you got your day job and everything, but I need you to up this man’s boxing game—speed and dexterity. Don’t worry about his footing. Footing’s good. And I need all this in short order. Can we do this?”

Abby and K agreed they could.

Brutus dismissed the two.