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thing wide
open.”
    “Not sure I follow,” Stanzer said.
    “Ever since Detroit went bankrupt, things have gone to hell. Crime is up, schools are down, and they keep slashing our police department budget in ways that make it impossible to function.
My guys’ cop cars,” he said, “they don’t get oil changes. Ain’t got no money. And what happens to a car that don’t get its oil changed? Fucking transmission
breaks down. Feels like we got more vehicles sitting in the shop than we do on the street, so my guys, they buy their own Quaker State. And they get pink-slipped anyway. R.I.F. notices come every
three months. You know, Reduction in Force. Whole thing is bullshit.”
    The passion of Puwolsky’s words turned his cheeks red. As the man in charge of overseeing a special forces unit whose primary goal was to keep the Motor City safe, the colonel’s team
had been through the ringer. Fewer officers meant fewer arrests, which meant more violent offenders on the streets, which meant more victims on the crime ledgers and more bodies in the morgue.
    “We’ve always felt like we’ve had to operate with our finger in a dam,” Puwolsky said. “Now we got our dicks in it, too.”
    Puwolsky sniffed his nose, rubbed a meaty paw over his chin and got to the real reason he’d traveled to New Jersey in the first place.
    “We want you,” Puwolsky said to McCutcheon, “to assassinate the High Priest.”
    Neither McCutcheon or Stanzer replied.
    “Like I said, it’s almost perfect,” the colonel continued. “They’re fucking asking for you, and this D’Marcus guy, he’s gotten too large, too big,
he’s in control of too much,” Puwolsky said, growing more and more animated. “We need to decentralize power. When the gangs war within themselves or war with one another,
it’s the soldiers who die. However, when they’re unified, it’s the civilians who pay.” Puwolsky flashed soft eyes. “Like your friends David Klowner and Nathan
Wachowski from your MMA gym. Like your girlfriend Kaitlyn Cummings. This guy, the High Priest, he’s like a fucking terrorist, and right now you’re the only one who can end his
reign.”
    “Might I remind you that murder is illegal?” Stanzer said.
    “Everything you’re doing is illegal, Colonel,” Puwolsky replied. “The question is, would it be immoral?”
    McCutcheon didn’t speak. Didn’t reveal any emotion. Didn’t touch his salad, either.
    “Just think about it a sec,” Puwolsky said. “You get to eliminate an enemy of the state, you get to avenge the murder of your friends, and you get to save the life of your
girl. Whaddya say?”
    “No,” he said.

P uwolsky spent the next twenty minutes firing below-the-belt shots saying anything he could to coerce McCutcheon into accepting
the mission.
    He appealed to M.D.’s sense of duty.
    “This is what agents like you do. They deliver justice to the dark corners of our country, where the courts can’t reach.”
    He appealed to his sense of guilt.
    “Why do you even think your friends Klowner and Nate-Neck are dead? Because of
you
!
’
Cause you never let ‘em know what was really going on with the
Priests the night of your last fight. You got
’
em to be your cornermen and they paid for their friendship and loyalty with their lives. And you just let that slide like some little
bitch? Own it, son. Their blood is on your head.”
    He appealed to McCutcheon’s sense of heroism.
    “Detroit needs a champion. Detroit needs someone who is willing to step up on behalf of all the good and decent people who are being terrorized in this city. Aren’t you a victim
of that terror? Didn’t you come from the ghetto, the belly of that beast? And now you’re going to turn your back on all those little kids, on all those helpless mothers, on all the
people who need someone to fight for them because they do not have the power or ability to fight for themselves? Kid, you may be one of the baddest mixed martial