Going Fast Read Free Page A

helping with a few up-and-comers and dreaming, as only an old man could, of having one real fighter.
    Being a top trainer without a
real
fighter was like being a jockey without a mount. How could he ever prove, Ownie pondered, in the time he had left, how great he really was?
    Getting on his feet, Ownie opened the door to the backyard and muttered, “C’mon in. I’m the only one around here who looks after you,” as a dog scampered in. Ownie patted the comely mongrel with a copper coat and a wounded heart worn on one sleeve. Arguello, Ownie had named the dog, after the handsome Nicaraguan with the shattering right and three world titles, a five-ten feather with class. Like Alexis, who’dbeen born into poverty and war, the dog had had a rough start in life, beaten and abandoned on the side of a road.
    Before long, Ownie realized that the dog was, in fact, female, but he kept the name because it was foreign and none of the morons he associated with would know the difference. Jumpy, with the bad nerves of a hard beginning, Arguello had chewed up Ownie’s false teeth when he left them on a table. Ownie fixed the teeth with Krazy Glue but, like most things in life broken or bruised by carelessness, they never felt quite right.
    Arguello hid under a chair as Ownie stared at one of Hildred’s knick-knacks, a leggy ballerina with a blonde chignon. The ballerina smiled an empathetic smile as though she’d known him when the game was different, when Halifax was pumped up from the war, full of troopships and Russian brown squirrel stoles, crazy with the hope that life could start again. Back when Ownie had A Fighter with a capital
A
, a prince named Tommy Coogan.
    Louie, the mole, had informed him that Johnny wasn’t doing his roadwork as ordered. “Keep the reports coming,” Ownie urged the fireman. “I’ll like you better that way.” LeBlanc’s career was going nowhere, Ownie believed, and guys like Louie were nothing but tourists, helping Tootsy keep the gym lights on.
    Maybe you get
that
kind of chance only once, in that extraordinary time and place, Ownie thought. Maybe, that’s
it
.
    Arguello whimpered as the phone rang, and Hildred shouted, louder this time: “It’s for you. Some man sounding businesslike.”
    Ownie patted the dog’s back as he shuffled to the kitchen. “It’s all right,” he assured her, pleased that he had kept the name Arguello, a classy name that sounded as strong and fearless as the photogenic champ, a warrior who had KO’d Boom Boom Mancini in the fourteenth round. “It’s all right.”

3
    Sports had five phones and six computer terminals in the back of the
Standard
’s newsroom, which sprawled open and endless like a gymnasium. The newsroom was on the second floor of a nondescript building in an industrial park.
    Scott MacDonald was on the phone conducting an interview, one ear plugged to block out the invading noise. Scott, who had worked at the
Standard
for fifteen years, was back reporting after a decade on the desk. Three weeks earlier, he had driven to Moncton for the four-fight Maritime Extravaganza, his first road trip in years, prompted by the presence of one local, Johnny LeBlanc.
    Scott liked LeBlanc, who didn’t look like a punk, a hood, or a two-bit pimp. At five-nine, Scott decided, Johnny could pass for a junior hockey player, intact, with only the rumour of scar tissue, only a sniff of desperation. When Johnny walked into a bar, he carried himself erect like a ballroom dancer in pressed jeans and a crisp T-shirt. He greeted the doorman, shook hands with the barkeep, and nodded charitably to patrons who had no idea who he was.
    Johnny was smaller than Scott, who in his day had been a sprint kayak paddler. Not just any paddler, he liked to remind himself, but a good one: a 185-pound paddling machine, a cardiovascular genius with a resting pulse rate of thirty-eight.
    It was noon,