The man by the bed was only two inches taller than X, but wide and rawboned and forty pounds heavier. Raised hard in the Georgia mountains, he’d run away young and grown up a thief and a killer, a bare-knuckle, fight-for-cash brawler on the streets of Atlanta. He’d been inside for less than five weeks, but every guard told the same story, that the kid could take a beating, spit blood, and come back for more, that he was a serious, determined, no-bullshit kind of fighter.

“Don’t move,” X said. “You’re moving.” X was not a great painter, but he wasn’t bad, either. He made a few more strokes with the brush, then said, “It’s strange. I know.”

“It’s a freak show, is what it is.”

The kid talked tough, but the doubt was in his eyes. He’d heard the stories. He was, in fact, having his portrait painted in a subbasement beneath death row. X enjoyed the young man’s doubt, but didn’t let the pleasure show. That would be weakness, and X despised weakness in all its forms. After a final stroke, he turned the painting so the young man could see it, a hyper-contextualized impression of violence and its aftermath: the broken stance, the bruising, and the blood. “You understand what comes next?”

“They told me, yeah.”

“Good.”

X put down the painting and stripped off his shirt, revealing a narrow torso corded with muscle. Even at forty-nine, there was nothing soft, not anywhere.

“I’m not afraid of you,” the young man said. “I think the stories are only stories.”

X smiled, but it was not a nice smile. Backing through the open door, he moved from the cell to a narrow corridor that ran the length of a halfdozen other cells, all devoid of prisoners. The corridor ceiling was twenty feet high, the light fixtures rusted where old water stains discolored the concrete and stone. A guard sat near a metal door, but knew better than to watch.

Trailing X from the cell, the young man said, “Why me?”

“Was it four men you killed, or five?”

“Six. Bare-handed.”

“Is that not reason enough?”

“I don’t fight for the fun of it.”

“For what, then?”

“Cash money. Or if someone needs killing.”

“And today?”

“They say the warden is in your pocket. That you own the guards, too.”

“You fear retaliation.”

“Yeah, well. Busting up random convicts is one thing…”

He left the thought unfinished, so X pulled a sheaf of cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and dropped them on the floor. “A thousand dollars for the fight. That’s a hundred a minute for the next ten minutes of your life.”

The young man stared at the money like a dog would stare at meat. “I’ll take your money, old man, but you’re not going to last any ten minutes.”