Suckerpunch: (2011) (15 page)

“Golden Pantheon.”

“That’s right. You’re fighting
tomorrow?”

I looked at the clock that was showing Vegas time. It was almost eleven. Tomorrow was getting close to becoming today. “Yeah.”

Kendall said, “What are you doing running around with this garbage? You should be resting.”

“That’s why we’re leaving.”

“Leaving?” Kendall laughed. “My boy, you just ceased to be a problem and became an opportunity. You ain’t going nowhere.”

My first thought was that Kendall was going to keep us here through the fight and put money on me to lose via disqualification. But it was worse than that.

“What are the odds on your fight?”

I shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“How’s that happen?”

“I don’t know anything about gambling. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter anyway. Take your pick.”

“Doesn’t matter? I can think of a few million people and many millions of dollars who think otherwise.”

I shrugged again.

“All right. Steve, get me the odds on this here fight, please.”

Steve was the guy who’d looked me up. He was skinny and slouched into his chair and had waxy skin and dark circles under his eyes but couldn’t have been older than thirty. His dry, purple lips were too dark for his face and made him look like he was near freezing. Scattered around his workstation were antistress toys—a squeeze ball shaped like a skull, a mini speed bag sticking upright from a weighted base, a tiny putting green he used as a coaster for his energy drink. He did some more pointing and clicking and clacking. “Plus three ten.”

Kendall whistled. “Who you fighting, King Kong?”

“Junior Burbank,” Steve corrected. “Pretty much the same thing from the looks of him. Except he’s white.”

Kendall said, “King Kong wasn’t black; he was a gorilla.”

“What’s the difference?” Steve asked.

“You know better than that. Give me some options.”

“Outright winner, plus three ten. Winner by knockout or ref stoppage, Woody is, wow, plus four hundred. Winner by submission, he’s plus four thirty.” Steve looked me over. “No jiu jitsu, huh?” He looked at the Arcoverde logo on my chest. “What’s with the shirt?”

“It’s from me,” Marcela said. She set Lance against the wall and he stayed there, able to hold himself up but obviously not thrilled about it. “He’s good at jiu jitsu.” I appreciated her lie.

Steve said, “Yeah? Can I get one?”

Marcela smiled. “Come down to the gym. I’ll give you one.”

Steve smiled back with those purple lips. His teeth were very white. Overall, it wasn’t nice. “I could take yours right now.”

The other guy at the table barked a laugh and checked to see how I liked it. He saw I didn’t like it at all and returned to his computer screen.

Kendall said, “Behave, Steve.” Like he was tired of saying it. To me, he said, “I’m gonna lower this gun because it’s getting heavy. Now don’t you try anything.” He dropped the gun to his side and waited for me to pounce. When I didn’t he nodded. “This is what’s going to happen. I’m taking Lance here’s money and putting it on you to win.”

He must have liked the look on my face. “That’s right,” he said. “You’re gonna win, and you’re gonna win by knockout. I don’t like the odds against you winning by submission, though the money’s better, and chances are you’d get floored if you spent the whole fight trying for one; am I right?”

He was, but I let him wonder.

“So I put Lance’s money on you to win by KO, and what’s the return on that? Anybody? The line is plus four hundred, so that’s four hundred dollars for every hundred I put down. That’s twenty grand, fella, minus the vig. I know he only owes me fifteen, but hey. For my troubles. And Jake’s hospital bill.”

Jake sat up in the doorway and let some blood drip onto the floor between his legs. He blew out each nostril and made the drips into a puddle. “I don’t need any hospital.” His voice was even thicker from the blood and mucus that were plugging his throat.

“We’ll see,” said Kendall. “I’m gonna put some personal funds down on you too, cuz this is about as close as you can get to a sure thing without buying a dive, but let me worry about that. Now here’s the rest, Mr. Woodshed. You lose, and Lance has to go.”

“Go?” I said.

Kendall fluttered the gun at his side. “You know what I mean.”

Lance sobbed against the wall. He hadn’t cried the time he got shot and almost died, but things had been different. We didn’t actually think we could die. A lot had happened to both of us since then.

“We’ll hang on to him,” Kendall said, “keep him nice and cozy. You and Marcela go get a good night’s sleep. You win the fight, we can all go out for champagne and nachos. You lose, well, Lance won’t bother any of us again. How’s that sound?”

It sounded like wet garbage. It made my fists clench and my feet want to slide into their comfortable stance. But it was the best deal we were going to get from the guy with the only gun in the room.

Anything could happen in the fight. With Lance’s life on the line, would I find some untapped level, explode with one more burst when I had nothing left, roll Burbank off me when all I wanted to do was lie down for two days?

I would do that anyway. Lance wouldn’t make a difference. I glanced at him. He was a sack against the wall, all the spirit gone out of him. He wasn’t even watching Kendall and me talk about his survival, just staring off somewhere between the ceiling and the floor, the curved cut on his forehead looking like a wick pushed down into moist wax. He probably wasn’t worth helping. He’d end up in another room just like this one—probably not attached to a bakery, but still—in the same bind but without anyone to back him.

And he’d get murdered.

But I owed him. I’d be giving everything I had in the cage no matter what, and if that kept him alive for the time being, so be it.

I’d preserve Lance.

But I knew I couldn’t save him.

“Deal,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” Kendall worked his gum behind tight lips. “Tell you what. Just to make sure you’re fully invested in this endeavor, you know—bump the juice for you—how about I hang on to Marcela too?”

The firearm instructors who come through Gil’s classes say an assailant twenty feet away can get to you and stab or grab before you can draw your pistol, aim, and fire. Kendall already had his gun out by his hip, but I was only five feet away.

I closed the distance in a lunge and seized his right wrist with my left hand and shoved and braced it against his ass. At the same time I put my right forearm across his throat and gathered a handful of collar and smacked my forehead into his nose. It crunched, and I felt something warm spray my face. Training for the cage made my muscle memory argue with that head butt and my desire to knee him in the groin, but I prevailed. My left knee lifted him off the floor, and while he was up there, I drove forward and dumped him on top of Steve, who had enough time to wince.

Tipping Kendall back like that had the gun pointing in my general area so I got both hands on it and twisted the barrel and yanked it away. Kendall sprawled over Steve’s workstation, desk clutter everywhere, and Steve’s head popped up in Kendall’s left armpit. I put an elbow across his ear, and his head bobbled around. He sucked air in through his teeth and glared at me sidelong, waiting for the next one.

I turned to Marcela and said, “Run.”

She pried Lance off the wall and shoved him through the door, both of them squeezing past Jake, who tried to block them with an arm until Marcela swung her shoe into his busted nose and he needed both hands to scream into. I heard a clatter as they went out in the bakery, then the sound of someone smacking a door open.

Kendall also had both hands cupping his face while he tried to blink the tears away. His knees were drawn up and he could have thrust both feet into me and sent me backward, but his ankles were crossed and all his legs cared about was protecting his balls. Steve was cozy between Kendall and the wall. I pulled the phone handset off its cradle and brought it over the lump of Kendall and wrapped it around Steve’s neck. Not to choke, just to tangle.

“Come on!” Steve said.

I looked at the other guy, close on my left. The laugher. His eyes were big enough to have moons. I plucked his headset off and said, “Am I done in here?”

He nodded.

I dropped the headset into his lap, put the gun on the shelf by the door and got two handfuls of Jake’s pant legs and heaved him into the room. I grabbed the gun and got through the door without him bothering me. I found a dishrag hanging off a rack in the bakery and used it to wipe Kendall’s blood off my face, then my fingerprints off the gun. I ejected the clip and the round in the chamber, all inside the rag, and dropped the whole pile into an industrial mixer filled with soapy water.

I pushed through the swinging doors and saw Marcela and Lance standing at the front door, Marcela on one foot to get her second shoe on. “Go,” I said and vaulted the counter and caught up to them before the front door could swing shut.

We ran.

There weren’t any cabs drifting along St. Louis so we ran some more. I briefly considered hiding in the construction site until it started to look like a graveyard. Lance possessed the drug user’s sprinting ability and outpaced Marcela and me, his shirttail snapping behind him and exposing the knobs of spine pushing against his skin. We followed him in the general direction we’d come from but not along the same route. I hoped he knew where he was going.

We flew into a motel parking lot lit up like a prison yard, our shadows dropping out in four directions to mark us as
Xs.
I waited for a shout from behind as Steve or Jake or the other guy spotted us—Kendall wasn’t going to be running anytime soon—but all I heard was the slapping of our shoes and air driving in and out through my nose.

Marcela had good form. She didn’t waste any motion and kept her elbows in tight and got her knees up. I ran like wasps were after me and was glad she couldn’t see it. We dipped into the sharp edge of shadow cast by a metal carport and almost tripped over Lance.

His burst had fizzled, and he was leaning into the crook of his arm against the corrugated metal wall of the carport. The wall was angled out at the bottom so he could have put his whole body against it, but he didn’t. Instead, he retched and brought up something that landed with force.

Marcela paced behind him with her hands laced together on top of her head and avoided looking in his direction.

“We have to keep going,” I said. “Let’s get around more people or find a cab.”

“Motel,” Lance managed.

“It’s too close. We need some distance. Come on. We can walk and talk.”

He peeled himself off the steel and shambled along beside Marcela and me. The carport’s shadow ended about fifty feet ahead in a dish of gravel, and beyond that was a broad alley that went the length of the block. Where the corners of buildings lined up it spread out into parking lots that would get us to Paradise Road on the left or Las Vegas Boulevard on the right, not technically the Strip this far north but close enough.

When we came to the end of the shadow, it was decision time. Straight down the alley all the way to Sahara and either mix in with whomever else was walking or hail a cab, or cut across the alley and hit the Strip and hope Kendall’s guys hadn’t fanned out already. We were still close to the bakery, and I wanted more room to move before we got out into the light, but we’d be near the Stratosphere, and enough people would be around to discourage misbehavior.

Hopefully.

“Follow me.” I stepped out of the shadow into the alley and started to cross when headlights popped on from the other end of the carport and I heard an engine roar like a blast furnace.

Things slowed down, and I saw the footprints.

It happened like it does in the cage when things are working, when I see the punches starting in the guy’s core, flowing up through his shoulder and into his fist. Head kicks take days.

Like that, but I was seeing my own mistakes instead of someone else’s. Not as fun.