Because of His Name (8 page)

Beans pulled away protectively.
 
“Oh, shit, man.
 
My fucking hand feels like it’s
busted.”
 
He grimaced and then
slowly let Liam have a closer look.

Grace was watching over Liam’s shoulder
and saw instantly that the other man’s hand was about three sizes bigger than
it should’ve been, and he’d only just injured it.
 
The swelling was rapid and it looked
painful.

“It’s broken all right,” Liam sad,
shaking his head.
 
“You’re all done,
man.”

Beans looked up at him with a pained
expression.
 
“I can take this guy,
bro.
 
People fight with broken hands
all the time.”

“If it was during the fight, that would
be one thing.
 
But I can’t let you
start
a fight with a busted hand,
dude.”
 
Liam turned to the large
baldheaded announcer.
 
“He’s not
going to be able to fight.”

The crowd went crazy, and now it really
was becoming frightening in the club.
 
People were shouting, pushing and yelling.

Mack Truck stood like a statue amidst all
the carrying on, head down, ear buds stuffed in his nubby little ears, as focused
as ever.
 
One of
the men who was in his posse stepped forward.
 
He had a handlebar mustache and the
tattoo of an eagle carrying a rabbit in its mouth on the side of his neck.
 

“What’s going on here?” the mustachioed
man said.

“Who are you?” Liam asked him.

“I’m Mack’s manager.
 
My name’s Viggy.”

“Well, Viggy, I never spoke with
you.
 
I think I spoke with—“

“Look buddy,” Viggy said, pointing at
Liam.
 
“I’m Mack’s manager now.
 
That other dude got kicked to the curb,
so now you deal with
me and my people
.
 
And we don’t fuck around.”

Liam didn’t seem too concerned.
 
“Okay.
 
The deal is, my guy’s hurt.
 
He just busted his hand on the pads
while we were warming up.
 
Freak
accident.”

Viggy sneered at him.
 
“You owe us five g’s buddy.”

“How do you figure that?” Liam asked him.

“Because,” Viggy said.
 
“You forfeited the match.
 
That means you lost and we had a bet.”

“The bet wasn’t for that much,” Liam
said, his shoulders tensing.
 
“And I
never made any agreement with you.
 
I made an agreement with his old manager.
 
If there was a forfeit, I was to pay him
fifteen hundred.
 
That’s it.”

The crowd was getting louder and a
scuffle broke out nearby.
 
Grace
turned to see a couple of skinny shirtless men pummeling one another as the
crowd cheered them on.

One of them fell to the ground and the
other man kicked him right in the face.

The injured combatant fell to his back,
unconscious, and the crowd broke the fight up.

Grace was shaken from the sudden
brutality of it all.
 
She turned her
attention back to Liam and Viggy.
 
Viggy’s crew had surrounded Liam and Beansy.
 
Beans was still gripping his broken hand
and moaning.

“Five thousand, rich boy,” Viggy told
Liam.
 
“Either that, or put your man
in the ring.”

“He can’t fight,” Liam said.
 
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Viggy stepped forward, chest puffed
out.
 
“How about me and my boys
stomp your ass right here and now?” he said.

Liam looked at the manager and then his
posse.
 
They were jeering at him,
calling him names.
 
One of them spit
near his feet.

“Who told you I’m rich?” Liam said.

“Doesn’t matter, rich boy.
 
We know you got the money.”

Grace went closer to Liam and whispered
in his ear.
 
“Just pay them and
let’s get out of here.
 
It’s too
dangerous.
 
This crowd’s out of
control.”

Liam looked around and seemed to see the
crowd for the first time.
 
“They’ll
calm down once the fight starts,” he told her.

“What fight?” she asked, confused.
 
Was he really going to let his friend
get beaten up just to save five thousand dollars—an amount of money that
was probably trivial for him?

But then Liam turned to Viggy and his
crew.
 
“Okay, the fight’s on, then,”
he said.

Viggy pointed at Beans.
 
“Your boy can barely stand up
straight.
 
Look at him.
 
Mack’s going to kill him in under a
minute.”

“No, not Beans.
 
I’ll step in.”
 
Liam suddenly stripped his shirt off.

The announcer heard him and waved his
arms wildly to get the crowd’s attention.
 
“Whoa, folks!
 
We have a huge
change of plans here!
 
But Beansy’s
manager is going to step in at the last minute to fight Mack Truck.
 
That’s right, the manager is fighting as
a substitution.
 
I don’t think we’ve
ever seen that before!”

The crowd started cheering, although
there was a smattering of boos and some pieces of garbage thrown in their
general direction.

Viggy folded his arms and gave Liam an
incredulous look.
 
“You’re going to
fight my guy?”

“I’m not paying you five grand.
 
I’ll beat him myself and then you can
pay me, asshole.”

There were more taunts from Mack’s crew,
while the fighter himself seemed unaware of everything around him.

Liam stripped off his pants and grabbed a
pair of shorts from Beansy’s gear bag.
 
He put them on while the crowd became increasingly raucous.
 
The room was shaking, and numerous
people were holding up phones to film the scene.

More money exchanged hands as the odds
came in at fifty-to-one in favor of Liam getting knocked out within the first
two minutes and a hundred to one against him winning.

Grace went over to Liam as he tied his
shorts and then started loosening up.

“Liam, what are you doing?” she said, her
belly in knots.
 
“This is insane.”

He looked at her.
 
“I train all the time.
 
So at least I’ll put on a show, and then
if I lose, I don’t mind paying them off.”
 
He started dancing in place, jumping on his toes.

“Have you ever fought in a real fight?”

“Other than a couple of bar room brawls
back in college?” he smiled.
 
“Nope.”

She glanced at his opponent, the
aforementioned ‘Mack Truck’.
 
“That
guy looks serious, Liam.
 
He’s a
trained killer.
 
I have a terrible
feeling about this.”

“Me too,” he told her.
 
“But I’m doing it.”
 
He threw a few punches at the air.

Mack Truck’s posse backed away and gave
space, as they started to clear the crowd into a large circle to allow the
fighters some room to fight.

The bald announcer seemed that he was
going to also play referee.
 
“Okay,
everyone,” he shouted.
 
“This fight
has no time limit—it consists of one continuous round.
 
The only rules are no biting, picking up
anything to use as a weapon, or eye gouging.
 
If the fighters get too close, you need
to step back and let them continue.
 
No separating them or interfering in any way until one fighter is either
knocked out or submitted.
 
A fighter
can say he quits, or he can visibly tap out by tapping his hand on any surface
to indicate that he quits.”

Liam was wearing green shorts that came
down to his knees, and that was it.
 
He looked a little pale and not nearly as ready as Mack Truck, who’d
taken out his ear buds now and was staring at Liam with the intense look of a madman.

Grace felt like she should do something
to stop this, but what?
 
If Liam got
badly hurt, she wouldn’t have done anything to save him.

Still, there was nothing she could
do.
 
Instead she stepped closer
along with the crowd, as Liam and Mack met in the center of the open circle.

The crowd finally died down, and the big
referee stood between them with his hands out.
 
“Timer ready?” he called.

“Ready!” someone shouted.

Why they were timing the fight when it
had no time limit, Grace couldn’t imagine.
 
Nothing made any sense in this strange new world.

“In three, two, one, let’s settle it
now!” the ref yelled and then backed off.

Liam’s opponent suddenly ran forward,
head ducked down, and tackled him to the hard floor of the nightclub, as the
crowd surged and cheered.

Liam’s head struck the floor and bounced,
and Grace shrieked, but nobody could hear her above the din.

Mack was on top of him, throwing hard
punches as Liam covered up.
 

Liam blocked a couple of punches but then
one hit him in the ribs and another punch landed squarely on his eye, and he
grimaced.
 
Finally, Liam clutched
Mack’s torso, wrapping his legs around him to keep him from doing more damage.

Mack struggled to get free, and then
finally, out of frustration, he pulled away from Liam’s grasp and got to his
feet, waving Liam to stand back up.
 

Liam hesitantly got to his feet, and Mack
threw a hard kick that smashed into his ribcage as he was just standing.
 

The crowd went wild.

Mack unloaded a three-punch combination,
all of them landing.
 
One hit Liam
in the jaw, another to the sternum, and one to his kidney.
 
Liam backed away, as Mack stalked him.

The crowd was like one living
organism—a hateful amoeba, following wherever the fight went.

Grace hated every one of these vicious,
bloodthirsty idiots who were cheering every time Liam got hurt.

Why did they want to see Liam get hurt
when they didn’t even know a thing about him?
 
It wasn’t as if he’d done anything to
wrong these people.

But they didn’t care.
 
They just wanted blood at all costs, and
now they were getting it.

Liam, for his part, looked surprisingly
calm for someone in his first fight.
 
He had his guard up and he was trying to withstand the storm of
aggression coming at him.

Grace could hardly watch.
 
She just wanted it to be over, without
Liam getting hurt.

But as his opponent came forward winging
punches, she knew it was impossible for Liam to come out of this unharmed.

His head snapped back again and again as
Mack landed hard blows.

The crowd went nuts, jumping and
shouting, surging forward and then moving out of the way as Mack was able to
pin Liam against the wall and pummel him.

One uppercut smashed into Liam’s jaw as
he was trying to cover up and avoid the punches, and his legs buckled.

“Oh shit, it’s lights out baby!” someone
screamed from nearby in her ear.

She turned to whoever said it.
 
“Fuck you!” she shouted.
 
If they heard her, she had no idea.

When she turned quickly back to the
fight, she saw Mack unloading more and more powerful punches, many of them
landing, as Liam was pinned and trapped against the wall.

It’s
over,
she thought.

But maybe sooner was better.
 
Liam never really stood a chance.

And yet she admired him for the fact that
he’d at least tried.
 
He wasn’t
supposed to be doing this.
 
He’d
only stepped in because those men had threatened him and he didn’t want to be a
coward and pay them off.

Grace felt a swell of respect and
admiration overwhelm her, as she watched Liam being battered by this animal,
punched in the face and body, kicked and kneed with such force that you could
hear it over the roars of the crowd.

Everyone could tell the fight was about
to be over.
 
It was just a question
of when.
 
Seconds, to be sure.