Jeremiah did not jump back. He did not brace. His hips turned about 8 in. His weight rolled onto the back foot. His left hand came down flat on the back of Cad's neck, the way a man sets down a coffee cup.
Cade went through the space where a body should have been and did not find one. He caught himself on his palms. The mop never left the floor. Nobody in that gym breathed. Cade came up grinning too fast.
Slippery, he said. Floor is slippery. It is vet. Jeremiah said, "I told you. " The producers laughed. The fighters did not.
Two of them had seen exactly what that was. One of them, a 23-year-old amateur named Jarvis Hollingsworth, stood frozen with his hands still in his wraps. Because that was not luck. Luck looks like flinching. That looked like filing.
Norman Hargus stood by the water fountain with a towel on his shoulder and did not move. Cade walked back to the cage, still smiling. The tips of his ears had gone the color of his hair. "Hey," he called out. "Kazu over his shoulder. " "What is your name? " Jeremiah kept mopping.
"Starn your first name. " Jeremiah looked up. First time he had looked directly at Cade Bochamp in three years of sharing a building. Does not matter. He said that was the wrong answer. It was the only answer in the world that could have started what came next.
Because Cade Boschamp had never in his life been in a room where somebody did not want him to know their name. Cade asked Stuart Leoo for the personnel file. The next morning, Stuart pulled it up while he ate an egg white omelette at his own juice bar. Starns Jeremiah custodial 6 years. No incidents, no emergency contact except a wife.
Under prior employment, there was one line typed by somebody in a hurry long ago. It said warehouse. That is it. Cade said that is it. He mops.
Cade. Nobody moves like that from mopping. Then he took a class once. Stuart closed the laptop. Let it go.
Here is the thing about a man like Cade Bochamp. He was not angry that a janitor had made him miss. He was angry that a janitor had made him miss and had not apologized for it. In Cad's world, every room had a ladder in it, and he stood on the top rung of everyone. A man who would not tell you his first name was a man who did not know the ladder existed.
So Cade decided to teach him where the rungs were. It started small. He began calling for the mop midsession. Hey boy, spill. There was no spill.