I heard muffled voices in the background. It sounded like Terrence had placed his hand over the receiver.

“Terrence?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied. “He with you now?”

“He is,” I said.

“Let me talk to him.”

I handed Arch the phone.

“Terrence,” he said. “Arch Creigh.”

Arch motioned for me to leave the room.

I walked out of the office and sat down next to Nick Averett.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Averett shrugged.

A few minutes later, Arch emerged, slipping his suit jacket over his shoulders. He handed me my BlackBerry.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Where are we going?” Averett asked.

“Bordeaux.”

We met Terrence at his gym, an old warehouse filled with aging workout equipment, in front of a lot with a miniature football field chalk-lined into the grass, where every weekday afternoon and for a few hours a day during summers and holidays Terrence ran skills drills and calisthenics and organized touch games for some three to four dozen boys from the neighborhood. At the end of each practice, they took a knee and listened to Terrence give motivational speeches on the importance of hard work, staying clean, paying attention in school, going to church, and giving their lives up to God, etc. He called the program Forward Progress.

We found Terrence inside, finishing up a set of shoulder shrugs, two enormous men in workout clothes spotting, a fourth in a white shirt and tie leaning up against the wall behind him. Terrence had the bar so loaded with forty-five-pound plates on both sides that it bent and rocked with each repetition. His trapezius muscles had become enormous, sinewy ridges of flesh. I felt certain he’d timed the set for the moment we came through the door.

“Damn, son,” Arch said, putting on the homespun-everyman act he pulled off so well at American Legion halls and church socials. “What’s that you got on there, five fifty?”

“Six seventy-five,” said one of the two men beside Terrence, sliding the weights off the ends of the bar.

Terrence rounded the rack and opened his arms to embrace me. “Good to see you, Charlie,” he said.

“You too.”

“Terrence,” Arch said, “thanks for letting us come over.”

“Thank you for coming all the way out here,” Terrence said. “Haven’t seen much sign of you or your people in Bordeaux.”

“I’ve been around a few times,” Arch said.

“Guess I missed you,” Terrence said.

Arch feigned interest in Forward Progress. Terrence humored him, walking us around the warehouse, pointing out its modest features, lamenting the lack of a suitable indoor facility, praising the kids he worked with and the good he felt the program was doing, both for them and himself.

“When you’ve been down and you get back up,” he said, “you want to keep as many of those kids like you from following that dark path too, you feel me?”