A Better Goodbye by John Schulian

counting the money. He straightened up and climbed behind the wheel of George’s MDX, checking everywhere he could think of for more to steal. The glove compartment contributed a vial of pills and there was another, smaller roll of bills under the passenger seat. The only other thing of interest he found was a CD with “Britney Demo” written on it with a girlish star over the “i.” Britney Spears? What self-respecting musician would have anything to do with her? Was George doing session work? Auditioning for her band? He couldn’t be a fan, could he? All that cracker bitch was good for was bending over, and DuPree was positive he’d had better white pussy at Uni High, those little rich girls giving it up so nice for the football hero.
    He pulled the CD from its diamond case and snapped it in half. Then he got out of the MDX, took a look at George on the ground, blood still oozing from his head and nose, and kicked the motherfucker in the ribs hard enough to hear one of them breaking. Then he kicked him again, trying for another. Fuck Britney Spears.

5
    Kill someone and he never really goes away, not if you have a conscience. Alonzo Burgess had haunted Nick since that night in Oakland, toppled by one last four-punch combination and doomed to hit his head on the bottom rope. The result was the worst kind of whiplash, his brain stem snapping and the lights going out on his life.
    Fourteen years later Burgess still ghosted through Nick’s dreams and shadowed his waking hours, and the only time Nick got to come up for air was when trouble found him. He’d lost his bloodlust, and yet he had felt whole there in that parking lot, the gangbanger in a post-knockout fog and Eddie the shopkeeper pressing a hundred-dollar bill into Nick’s hand and telling him to take his wife or girlfriend out to dinner. “Both if you got ’em,” Eddie said. For just a few minutes, Nick embraced the return of his capacity for violence. But soon enough he was alone again, alone except for the specter of Alonzo Burgess.
    Sometimes Nick would swear it was Burgess’s voice in his ear, though he didn’t remember hearing him speak even at the weigh-in, when boxing protocol smiles like a death’s head at fighters with big mouths. Nick didn’t remember saying anything either. They were just two warriors out to make seventy-five hundred apiece, him on his way up, a fight away from Las Vegas, thinking he’d be a champion someday—promoters would cut off body parts for a good white fighter—and Burgess the old campaigner, who had to sweat and spit and starve to make one-sixty. A human stepping stone, that’s all Burgess was supposed to be, a middleweight education for a kid with eleven knockouts in eleven pro fights. But this was the thing Nick never told anyone, the thing he had a hard time admitting to himself even now: Until he saw Burgess’s leg start twitching, he’d wanted to kill him.
    Boxing could do that to you, make you forget everything nice you ever did outside the ring and turn you into a treacherous motherfucker. The man in the ring with you was intent on destroying you, and you had to destroy him first. Forget just beating him, even if you respected the guy. You wanted that son of a bitch on his back and the referee counting ten over him.
    Alonzo Burgess sure as hell had that in mind for Nick, though you wouldn’t have known it from the way he pawed and shuffled through the first four rounds. Then, not quite a minute into the fifth, as Nick peppered him with punches that puffed up his eyes and impressed the judges, Burgess dug a right hand into Nick’s liver. Everybody in the arena must have heard him grunt with pain. But nobody except another fighter could have imagined the instant paralysis he felt or the breath he was gasping for and not getting.
    To the half-filled house that was suddenly on its feet and howling, the next punch Burgess threw