Love Game (21 page)

My eyes locked with Remington’s, and my uterus fluttered.

“I’ll take your ticket, Bridget,” Spencer said. “And I’ll take you, Pinkie, so you don’t have to go alone.”

“I don’t mind going alone.”

“I’m taking you,” Spencer said. “If you take a shower.”

“Can you give us a ride home?” Bridget asked. “The bear ate my front seat.”

SPENCER INSISTED
we sit in the backseat of his car with the windows open. It wasn’t until he saw Bridget’s car that he realized that when she said “bear,” she really meant bear. He dropped her at her townhouse, where I picked up my car, and then he followed me home, insisting on staying until we went to the fight in the evening.

Grandma was delighted to see him, especially since the house was so unusually quiet lately. “You’re lucky the bear was in a good mood,” she said, taking one look at me. “Take a shower, and I’ll get dinner ready.”

Grandma getting dinner ready meant a call for delivery. Even though I didn’t smell a thing, I stuffed my clothes in a plastic bag and jumped into the shower.

Downstairs, Spencer was deep in conversation with Grandma at the kitchen table.

“She’s a fraud,” Grandma was saying as I walked in. “A phony. That Harold Chow business was her fault. Harold needs sensitivity and the right woman.”

“Don’t we all,” Spencer said, swigging a can of root beer.

“You? You don’t know what to do with the right woman, tateleh. You have fear, like my granddaughter. The scaredy-cat twins, you two.”

I took a seat at the table, and Spencer popped the top of a can of root beer for me. “I’m not a scaredy cat. I took on a bear.”

“You mean the one who ate Bridget’s car or the one with the tattoos you brought home last night?” Grandma asked.

Spencer choked on his root beer, and I slapped him on the back.

“Has Luanda shown up?” I asked, while Spencer continued to choke, turning the conversation from my night with Remington.

“Last I heard, she was telling the world how she found Rellik and how invisible people were telling her interesting things,” Grandma said.

Spencer gasped for air and wiped his mouth. “You know,” he said when he recovered, “it might not be safe for her to publicize the fact she’s psychic when there’s a murderer around. He might see her as a threat.”

“She
is
a threat,” Grandma insisted. “A threat to love.”

THE FIGHT
venue was an hour outside Cannes. Spencer was strangely quiet during the ride. I wanted
to ask him more about Rellik, about how he died and about his past and the possibility that he had a partner, but I didn’t want to be the first to break the silence in the car. I didn’t want to be the first to need to talk.

I turned down the visor and applied lipstick in the mirror. I carefully outlined my lips and colored them in with a glossy bright red. I caught Spencer watching me, but he still said nothing.

The outside of the arena was a hive of activity. All sorts of people came and went, excited by the night’s show. A large neon sign in front advertised a series of fights. Remington, aka Junior Clay, was just one of the many fighters set to enter the cage tonight.

The parking lot was filled with fighters, too, but the amateur kind, already drunk and fighting over parking spaces, girlfriends, and whatever else caught their fancy. Spencer parked in the loading zone again, right in front of the entrance. Sometimes it was good being a cop, I supposed, if only for the parking.

Spencer escorted me inside with his hand on the small of my back. It was nice to walk in like that with a handsome man who gave me attention, not to mention made my toes curl when he said my name.

The noise was off the charts inside the arena. Rock music blasted through speakers, building the rowdy atmosphere to violence and whetting the appetite for blood.

I was about to ask Spencer to take me home. Despite my recent experiences with dead people, violence and blood made me sick at best, but more often
it made me pass out. I changed my mind, however, when I saw the banners with photos of fighters posing in their shorts. There in all his muscular glory, in a fighter’s stance with a scowl on his face, was Remington Cumberbatch, the silent naked guy from my bedroom only the night before.

I giggled like a schoolgirl, my voice at least two octaves higher than normal. My giggles were totally involuntary and came out of nowhere, and I tried to push them back to wherever they had begun in my body.

Spencer was horrified. He still wasn’t talking, but he was wringing the program and looking from my hysterical self to Remington’s picture and back again, as if he was going to kill one of us. The wise money was on me.

“You want a hot dog?” I asked. I took out a ten-dollar bill and waved it at him. He grimaced and grabbed my arm.

Spencer yanked me down the hall, flashed his badge to security, and walked me through a door and down a floor. He flashed his badge again.

“Junior Clay,” he said, and was directed through another door.

The room was small, with cinder-block walls, a table in the center, and two folding chairs. Remington was in there warming up, punching at a flat-nosed man, who held up a cushion to protect himself.

“Boss,” he said, surprised when he saw us. “What are you doing here?”

Spencer waved the program at him and read out loud. “ ‘Junior Clay will fight a guest contender chosen
from the audience in his second bout of the evening.’ I’m the guest contender.”

“What?” Remington asked.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Spencer smirked his annoying smirk. “It means I’m going to fight Probie.”

“YOU SHOULDN’T
go in the ring, boss,” Remington said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll kill you.”

Spencer puffed up his chest. “Maybe not.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure, boss. You’re going to die, and it’s going to hurt before you stop breathing.”

Remington wasn’t threatening Spencer. He was speaking as if he was stating a fact. What’s more, he
was showing concern for Spencer. Concern tinged with something else: impatience.

Spencer was big, about six foot two, with wide shoulders, six-pack abs, and arms like tree trunks. But Remington was massive and moved like a professional athlete, light on his feet and completely in command of his body.

“Spencer,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I can hold my own,” Spencer said to Remington, ignoring me.

“Are you really going to kill him?” I asked Remington.

“If he doesn’t die, he’ll wish he had.”

IT TURNED
out it wasn’t that easy to get “chosen” to be a guest contender. Spencer had to go up the ladder to senior management, flashing his badge as he climbed the rungs. We met with the president of the fight organization and his managers in a suite, which had a bird’s-eye view of the arena.

They were busy eating steak and smoking cigars, stereotypical characters from every fight movie come to life in front of me. In the end, it wasn’t Spencer’s credentials that got him in but their attraction to the idea of a boss taking on his subordinate and, by all odds, getting killed or permanently maimed.

“You got balls,” the president of the organization told Spencer. “Elephant balls. Kiss those balls goodbye, by the way.”

“Saw a man get his balls punched up into his pelvis once,” said one of the managers. “Seven-hour surgery,
and he still was never the same. Never interested in you-know-what again.”

“You sure you want your boyfriend to do this?” the president asked me.

“Well—” I started, but he wasn’t interested in my answer. They were busy with the start of their event, and we were quickly ushered downstairs into a small room, where Spencer was supposed to warm up and get changed. A small monitor hung from the ceiling in the corner, with a view of the cage.

Another flat-nosed man handed me a pile of clothes and gloves. “Here you go. You’re on in ninety minutes. You need anything else? A medical bag?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“You’re his corner man, right?”

“She’s just a spectator,” Spencer explained.

“You need a corner man or you can’t fight,” he said.

That’s how I became a corner man in a UFC mixed-martial-arts cage fight, which was a first for me. The closest I had ever come to working a fight before that was as a clerk at the biyearly women’s shoe sale at Bloomingdale’s in Jersey City.

“Spencer, I have a tendency to pass out at the sight of blood or someone … you know, someone being beaten to death,” I said, after the flat-nosed man left the room.

“You’ll do fine,” he assured me. I handed him the clothes, and he stripped down. He was a beautiful man. It would be a pity to see him permanently maimed.

“Stop ogling me and tape up my hands.”

We sat facing each other, with his hands in my lap.
It took me six tries before I got the tape right. On the monitor, girls in bikinis were holding up signs and jiggling their lady parts. “This isn’t bad,” Spencer said. “I could get into this.”

The blaring rock music reached us in our closed room. So did the cheers of the crowds.

“It’s like
Thunderdome
. It’s
Gladiator
. What if they have lions?”

“I’m the lion, baby,” Spencer said with a smirk.

The first bout started, and our attention was glued to the monitor. The two men went at it, beating each other across the head. Blood squirted out of one of the men’s noses, and he went down to the ground, where the other man squeezed the life out of him with his legs, all the while punching him in the stomach.

My eyes locked with Spencer’s, and I felt a tingling in the back of my throat, as if I was going to cry or vomit or something equally embarrassing.

“What if you die?” I breathed.

“Die? I don’t care if I die, Pinkie. I never thought I’d live this long, anyway.”

His eyes never left mine, as if he was searching for something but unable to find it.

“I care if you die.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. One dead person this week is enough for me,” I said, sniffling.

The music got louder again, and we watched as the man with the bloody nose was carried out of the cage, unconscious. The jiggly girls returned, danced around, and then it was time for another bout.

This time Remington entered the ring. He hopped in place and focused on his opponent, a man who looked like he had escaped from prison by chewing through the fence. Again, the two men went after each other. Remington punched him twice and quickly got him down on the ground.

“He’s not that good,” Spencer said.

“Are you kidding? He’s a machine. A killing machine, Spencer.”

“I think I can take him.”

“Take him where?” I asked. “To the movies? To task? To town?”

“He’s strong, but so am I,” he said. “Pinkie, are you worried about me?”

I was worried, worried that he would die, worried he wouldn’t be as pretty anymore, worried that Remington would break his leg in some horrible way where the bone pokes out of the skin, like the poor Louisville college basketball player. I shuddered.

“Of course I’m not worried,” I said. “You’re a grown man. What do I care if you make a fool out of yourself?”

Spencer flinched. “I won’t make a fool out of myself,” he insisted.

I took a breath. “Why are you doing this?”

Spencer shrugged. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

Remington made quick work of his opponent, winning in only a few minutes. Our door opened, and the flat-nosed man reappeared.

“All right,” he said. “You’re in the holding bay. Let’s go.”

The holding bay was two benches in a tunnel that
led out to the floor of the arena. The noise was so loud, it pounded in my chest.

“Can they turn the music down?” I asked the flat-nosed man. “Just a little? I have some inner-ear damage from an infection when I was twelve.”

Spencer grabbed me by the front of my shirt and sat me down on one of the benches, next to a man with a
FUCK YOU
tattoo on his forehead.

“Hi,” I told the
FUCK YOU
man. “I’m Gladie. Nice to meet you. Don’t you think the music is too loud?”

“Pinkie, shut up,” Spencer said.

“I don’t understand why it needs to be quite so loud,” I whined. “How about you all?” I asked the row of fighters, who sat facing us on the other bench.

“It gives me a migraine,” one of the fighters agreed. He had only one eye, and the top of his left ear was missing.