DARE: A Bad Boy Romance (2 page)

“Again,” Manny Valdez growled, as he spun away from Dare, as usual revealing his impatience through body language more than words. He was coiled tight this morning. Nothing Dare did seemed good enough. They’d gone through this same arm-bar escape maneuver umpteen times now, and Manny just wasn’t happy with Dare’s speed or technique.

The next attempt was even worse. Dare didn’t even complete the move; he broke off and said “Fuck” under his breath. It didn’t help that the gym’s thermostat was on the blink again. Sure, it was chilly outside, but that didn’t mean Scallion’s had to be hotter than a goddamn foundry. The other guys didn’t seem to mind as they worked the bags, skipped, sparred, and generally dug deep to perfect whatever they were doing. Dare, on the other hand, could not get it together today. He
was
in tremendous shape, probably the most ripped and certainly the fittest, in terms of stamina, he’d ever been in his life, including his time in the United States Marine Corps. But his head was not on straight. Manny knew it, too.

“Again. Concentrate.” Dare’s longtime sparring partner, whom he’d known since his early days in the Marines, Manny, was an expert in Brazilian Jujitsu, one of the best anywhere. He’d shown Dare all his tricks, and in turn, Dare had shown Manny everything he knew about Aikido and Tae Kwon Do. Combining those three disciplines, plus the rudiments of others like professional wrestling, karate, and Muay Thai, had seen them attain second-degree black belts, side by side, and they’d even spent time as instructors in the Marine Corps martial arts program.

They knew each other’s fighting styles inside out, but this was the first time they’d trained together in over a year. Whereas Dare had left the Corps after eight years, Manny wanted to be a lifer; he’d serve for the full twenty years. So sessions like this were few and far between, and those old, subtle calibrating influences they’d had on each other’s psychologies during training now seemed rusty, even awkward. They’d never been best friends exactly, but they’d always understood and respected each other as fighters and as soldiers, their competitive instincts kindred. Together in the ring, or in the field, they’d always relied on their techniques and their instincts to see them through to victory, or at least to make it back in one piece. But life had gotten between them. And in civilian circles, those techniques and instincts did not always apply. In fact, more often than not they got in the way because ordinary people didn’t think in those terms. They didn’t need them.

Here in the world, you still fought for what you wanted, but you did it with emails and memos and mostly behind a cloak of anonymity. You didn’t risk yourself out here. Dare had found that out the hard way last night, when he’d stepped in to save a man’s life in the ring and gotten his nuts kicked in by the public
and
the International Mixed Martial Arts Federation. No, out here you didn’t do the right thing; you did the proper thing. There was a big difference.

“What’s distracting you, bud?” Manny asked him. “Seriously, you’re miles away. What gives?”

Dare stood up straight and ran a hand over his damp buzz cut. “Nothing that can’t wait. Come on, I wanna nail this thing.”

Manny shook his head. “Not until you tell me what’s up. Those gremlins in your head, they got something to do with last night?”

“Could be.”

“Why? You did the right thing.”

“Not according to every other asshole who was there. I stopped their fun, and they hated my guts for it.”

Manny cocked his head to one side. “Come on, you can blank that shit out. You know how it works. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, that ref—”

“The ref was a piece of shit. Bought and paid for. Someone, somewhere didn’t want the fight to end early. It had to be a KO or a tap-out or else big bucks would be lost.”

“Exactly.”

Manny squinted at him. “And we’ve seen
that
shit before. So tell me, what’s
really
knocked you out of joint?”

“I don’t know. Things.” In Dare’s clammy fist, a layer of dampening chalk dust; in his mind, a look of horror he couldn’t get over. Trey Oregon’s missus, ringside, alone among a crowd of rich pricks and their trophy wives, alone in what she saw happening to her man in the ring. Dare had seen desperation like that before, written on the faces of brothers-in-arms in the direst combat situations, certain that something bad was about to happen and equally certain there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to prevent it. Sure, he knew that look well. A person was most alive behind a look like that. And something about Holly Watkins had struck him deep in that moment…he’d seen her at her most desperate.

The whole arena, the whole world had been against her. Against her man in the ring. She’d loved and she’d hated and she’d blazed in that moment. Through her pain, Dare had seen what she’d seen, understood what she knew and what no one else had cottoned onto: that something was wrong with Trey Oregon. Not the fact he was losing the match. No, it was more than that. Something only a person who was intimate with him would know about him. His fighting and his behavior had been erratic, as though he’d been struggling to stay in control of himself. Dare, probably like everyone else, had assumed it was adrenaline or maybe steroids pumping him up, but when he’d observed Holly, not just worried but furious and terrified at the same time, he’d understood what was wrong.

The ref should have stopped the fight. He was right there, he could see that Oregon had lost his coordination, that he wasn’t responding to the vicious blows, that he wasn’t going to tap out inside that sleeper hold. And when Dare had seen her face, he’d reacted the exact same way he’d have reacted if one of his brothers-in-arms had been close to death in the field.

Well, it wasn’t exactly the same if he was honest. The fact that Holly Watkins was one of the most intriguing and beautiful women he’d ever seen, had made him not just react to her pain, but well and truly overreact. In his own way, he’d protected her in the ring last night, not just her clueless boyfriend.

“Don’t feel like talking, huh?” Manny began to unfasten his hand wraps.

“Not really, bud. Just some stuff I need to get straight in my head. You know how it is. Back in the world, things can get…complicated.”

“Tell me about it. But you should really focus on this, on being the best. You are, you know, as much as I hate to admit it.”

“What?”

“The toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever fought. Don’t let all this other bullshit get to you. Just remember what it was like over there and stay in that zone. You’ll go all the way. None of these pricks will get anywhere near you.” He paused. “Finn still around?”

“In and out. Last time I spoke to him he was getting ready to enroll in that famous course he was always telling us about.”

“No shit. Engineer?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s the stuff right there,” said Manny. “Fresh out of the clinic and already dreaming big.”

“Yeah. But he’s not fully out yet.”

“Planning ahead though, right?”

“I guess.”

Manny chuckled to himself as they made their way to the locker room. “You two always did have it all worked out.”

“Yeah, we always said we’d take over the world
somehow.
One builds bridges, the other knocks people down for a living. We’ve got it
all
worked out.”

“Think he’d want me to swing by?” asked Manny. “I don’t fly back east for another few days.”

“Probably not a good idea,” Dare replied. “It’s not you,
muchacho.
Finn’s had a hard time letting go, that’s all. He’s good for a while, then something will trigger him and he’ll either bounce off the walls or shut himself off completely. Seeing you might put him right back in that place he doesn’t want to be.”

“But he sees you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Any other guys from the unit?”

“None that I know of. We never talk about it. I think that’s why he can put up with me—because we got out at the same time and he knows I’m never going back. Moving on—that’s been his problem. A part of him is still there, back in the shit.”

“He just needs time, though, right? To adjust? He’s not a head case or anything?”

Dare didn’t answer that. He didn’t know how to. Wasn’t it all a question of degrees? His own readjustment hadn’t exactly been a picnic. In fact, the jury was still out on whether he—or Finn, or any of the guys for that matter—would ever recognize the people they’d been before joining up. It just wasn’t something you could quantify. Not even in fighting terms. The strongest guy in the world could go to pieces under fire, or he could take anything combat could dish and then still go to pieces when he returned home—for reasons too personal and too insidious to predict.

Every man in the unit was different. And yet they all had this in common: they’d experienced things that no one in civilian life could ever understand. For that reason, Dare knew, it was important that he spent time with his old friend, Finn—the best friend he’d ever had—for both their sakes. Adapting to the world would always be a struggle, but at least in each other’s company they could take on the world together, and take it slow, with one foot on safe ground. Maybe Manny didn’t understand that yet, still tied to the Corps as he was. He hadn’t had the rug pulled out from under him yet; he hadn’t tried to lower his combative guard and let the world in only to find that, in doing so, you let more things out than in—things that should never see the light of day. Things that didn’t belong in this emptier world of vague threats you couldn’t fend off with training or adrenaline in the heat of combat. A soldier
needed
thick skin, he needed that ability to disconnect parts of himself, to let his training and his survival instincts take over. But here, you were supposed to shed that skin, to reconnect those parts that had been shut off for so long, and to forget that training and leave those survival instincts behind.

The suck was behind them now. But it still clung to Finn, just like it did to Dare and the others, and like it would to Manny when he finished his twenty.

“I don’t know about head cases,” he said, “but that ref from last night wants his head
busting,
that’s for damn sure.”

“You going to follow up on that?” asked Manny.

“Dunno. You reckon I should?”

“I’ve never seen you back down from anything,
muchacho.
And they’re probably going to come after you with everything they’ve got. The IMMAF, I mean. You showed up one of their own on live TV.” Manny snorted a laugh. “You’ll be a freaking legend in the unit. That clip will be all over YouTube by now.”

“The idiot should’ve stepped in before it got to that.”

“You threw the sucker away like an old burrito. Legend.”

But Dare wasn’t thinking of the rat-faced ref or the TV cameras or anything else. He just couldn’t get over that look of horror on Holly Watkins’ face when she saw her man lose his hold on reality in the ring.

It was the look of a woman who couldn’t possibly know what that unreality of combat was like, yet she’d glimpsed it nonetheless. In those fleeting, agonizing moments, she’d seen a great fighter, the man she loved, crumble to nothing. But more than that, much more, she’d raged against it.

The only question now was…where could Dare find a woman like that?

While Dare and Manny had been inside, a city bus had broken down across the street from Scallion’s Gym. Not the best spot in L.A. for that to happen. The neighborhood wasn’t the crummiest Dare had seen—not by a longshot—howdy there, Helmand—but there was a definite air of turn-up-this-alley-at-your-own-peril to most of the side streets. The obese bus driver, guarding his vehicle like the captain of a stranded ship in pirate waters, was engaged in a colorful slanging match with a couple of hookers who desperately wanted to catch a bus to Echo Park.

Dare shook hands with his old sparring buddy, and they both promised to keep in touch. While Manny made his way toward the corner of Main Street to hail a cab, Dare slung his gym bag over his shoulder and headed in the opposite direction, to the parking lot shared by the auto parts store and the 7-Eleven—where Scallion’s gym members were allowed to leave their cars for up to three hours, provided they left a member’s badge clearly visible in their windshields.

The cold wind began to bite, so Dare dug into his bag for his hoodie. No sooner had he fished it out than a hard, sweeping blow knocked his legs out from under him. He went down onto his side, scraped his ass on the edge of the curb. Someone kicked his ribs from behind, then stomped on his shoulder when he struggled to get up.

Instinctively he made himself small, covering up as best he could while this evil fucker rained kicks and fists down on him. The guy was big, broad-shouldered, and wore a tracksuit. Under his purple Lakers beanie, his head was bandaged. An intense blankness in the bruised and bloodied face told Dare that he might be dealing with a nut job, maybe just escaped from the psych ward of some hospital. But his blows were ferocious. They hurt like hell. This guy knew how to hurt, and if Dare didn’t do something quick, this would not end well.

“Get the fuck away from me!” He planted a vicious boot on the psycho’s kneecap, staggering him back. Dare got to his feet and, despite nursing a splintering pain in his right side, rushed his opponent as though his life depended on it. He’d never lost a fight in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now, outside his own gym, at the hands of some Loony Tunes out on a homicidal day pass.

The man saw him coming, sidestepped, and threw Dare off his feet with a perfectly executed hip toss.

Jesus, who was this guy?

Again Dare got to his feet, trying not to display how much his ribs hurt. “Who the hell
are
you?”

“Don’t remember me, huh?” Section Eight spat onto the sidewalk. “You will. You fucking will after this.”

Dare widened his stance. “Come at me again and I’ll break you in half.”

“Yeah. You’re ten men when it’s someone else’s fight you’re pissing on. Out here you’re nothing. You make me fucking sick.”

“Oregon? Trey Oregon? But I—”

“You what?”

“I saved your life last night. What are you doing out—”

Oregon marched up to him and swung a punch. Dare blocked it, jabbed his bandaged opponent in the nose, rupturing what had to have been barely healed cartilage. Blood ran down to his mouth. Oregon didn’t seem to care. He just spat the blood away and swung again. This time Dare caught the man’s arm and jammed it up behind his back.

“You need to stop this shit,” said Dare. “Cool it, okay?”

Oregon replied with a sneaky elbow as he escaped the arm lock. It caught Dare in the temple and left him seeing stars. Three or four hard blows to the face knocked Dare into the road, where he had to steady himself on a fire hydrant before he spilled into an onrushing Buick.

“I’ve had enough of this shit.”

“We’re just getting started,” said Oregon. “
Nobody
humiliates me in front of my fans like that.”

“You were dead in your feet, Oregon. That ref would have let you choke out before he stopped it. Do you hear me? You could have
died
last night.”

“Bullshit. I had it under control, and you pissed it away.”

Furious, Dare grabbed hold of the fire hydrant with both hands and wrenched it as hard as he could. The metal squealed, carked. Then he marched right up to his opponent, ducked a haymaker and slapped an inescapable, vise-like headlock on him. “I’m done trying to convince you. You’ll just have to pick up where you left off last night. Lights out for real this time.”

“Screw you!”

“And next time you come after me, one of us dies.”

“Get off me!”

“No more favors. Last night, that was your one-off.”

With all his freaky psychotic strength Oregon tried to pry Dare’s fingers loose, but he couldn’t get enough leverage. He just didn’t get it. Once a Marine got the upper hand in a combat situation, you’d have more luck taking a bone from a bulldog than you would at getting the best of him. And Dare was pissed off to boot. He’d risked his reputation last night, risked the ire of the IMMAF, and this ungrateful piece of shit wanted
payback
? Against someone who’d saved his life?

He should just snap the bastard’s neck and call it a day.

But damn it, he wasn’t that guy anymore. He didn’t know what the hell he was, but those days of thinking swiftly in terms of life and death were behind him now. They
had
to be. His soldier’s instincts were not wanted here, either inside the ring or out of it. Last night had proved that. Those stupid, bloodthirsty assholes. No, using force to do the right thing here was not treated kindly.

Maybe he should have stayed in the Corps after all. At least there, in the suck, no one had pretended any of it made sense. Everyone kind of knew, even if they didn’t say so, that things had been FUBAR all along and would not be changing anytime soon. But here, the insanity was that no one could see how deluded they were. They had rights with a capital R, and that was good enough for them. It didn’t matter that they no clue what to do with those rights, when corruption was all around them and the best they could do was hate on a guy who thought challenging a referee to save a fighter’s life was more important than watching that fighter take more punishment.

A part of him wished he hadn’t lifted a finger last night. It would have saved all this. But the stronger part of him, that part he’d clearly brought back, undimmed, from Afghanistan, told him to be himself, to fight the fights that needed fighting, and to never back down.

So he squeezed until Oregon passed out. Then he dragged the idiot to his car and drove to the nearest hospital.

He checked them both in.