Takedown Teague (Caged #1) (2 page)

“Don’t put that on,” Yolanda said with another exaggerated sigh.

“Why not?”

“Well, for one, you’ve got a lot of female fans out there tonight,” she explained.  “You know they want you half naked, and you also know you love to show off the ink.  Besides, you just pulled that nasty, wrinkled thing out of your gym bag.”

“So?”

“So, it smells like a dead dog.”

“Nice.”  I tossed the shirt back in the bag and zipped it up.  “Let’s do this.”

Back inside the bar, it was a madhouse.  I shoved my way through, using my bulk and notoriety to get myself through the crowd and up to the bar.  I maneuvered up to the very end to keep from being completely surrounded and stood next to a big poster on the wall.  It depicted an old guy with a long, white beard holding up a rat.  At the bottom it read:

“Feet first, Arthur.  It’s the only way out of here!”

I had no fucking clue what it was supposed to mean, but Dordy, the owner of the bar, thought it was hysterical.  He was a short, lanky guy with black hair and eyes.  He was from the Philippines or maybe Malaysia; I could never remember exactly.  He was behind the bar nearly every night and apparently bought the place because he liked talking to drunk people though he never had a drink himself.  He used to work on a cruise ship and made killer frozen drinks.

About fifteen people tried to buy me drinks, holding out long neck domestic beers and other shit I wouldn’t touch.  I did hand two of them to my now bandaged opponent, who seemed to need them more than I did anyway.  I politely declined the rest of the drinks until Dordy placed a rocks glass with a single malt scotch in front of me—neat.  When I looked up at him, Dordy motioned to a guy at the end of the bar, sitting there with a similar drink.  His neatly styled dark hair was slicked back over his temples, and as our eyes met, he raised his glass.

I copied his motion and sipped at the whiskey.  It was top shelf—well, for this place, anyway—and went down pretty smooth.  I raised an eyebrow at him before turning away and smiling seductively at a young woman in leather shorts and a tank top.  When I had enough of being pawed at by various women and barraged with enough questions about my fighting style from various men, I snuck out back for a smoke.

I climbed up the half dozen stairs that brought me level to the street, jumped over the side rail at the top and into the enclosed area behind the bar.  It was well past two in the morning, and the street was completely devoid of traffic.  Most people in this neighborhood didn’t have cars, and those who might have been passing through had done so in the safer hours of daylight.  There wasn’t much of anyone around except a small group of guys sitting on the steps of an abandoned warehouse on the other side of the street, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag back and forth between them.

Subtle
, I thought with a snort and lit up my cigarette.

The back part of the bar was supposed to be used just for deliveries and taking plastic bags brimming over with bottles to the dumpster, but since it also connected to the locker room, I found it convenient to come out here to smoke, away from the crowds that gathered outside the front doors.  The area was surrounded by a chain-link fence, which was not unlike the one that made up the fighting cage inside.  There was a large poster on it, displaying a picture of me advertising fights twice a week.

Takedown Teague

Cage Fights

Tuesdays and Fridays 10PM

I leaned against the chain-link fence next to the poster and wrapped the fingers of one hand through the holes.  I pulled against it a couple of times and listened to the rattling sound it made while I watched the fight run through my head again.  I inhaled smoke and blew it out my nose, trying to mask the heavy scent of garbage, vomit, and urine in the street.

The smells brought back memories, and they weren’t pleasant ones.  At the time, I didn’t care.  I had other ways of masking the odors.  Now I had to make do with the cigarette, and it wasn’t nearly as effective.

My earlier thought of needing to get laid came back again, but I dismissed it.  I hadn’t hooked up with anyone in months, and even though my cock was starting to cringe from my hand out of sheer boredom, I really didn’t want to just randomly fuck another fangirl.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“A C-note, maybe,” I responded to the man with the sleek black hair.  I forced my muscles to relax.  I was not going to let him get to me, not this time.  I glanced at him briefly and then looked back to the street.  The bare bulb hanging just outside the door to the bar glinted off the silver earrings in his left ear.  “What brings you here, Michael?”

“Just checking up on my favorite nephew.”

“I’m your only nephew.”

“Technicalities.”

I took another long draw on my cigarette and focused on the four guys across the street with their cheap bottle of booze and ratty clothes.  One of them laughed loudly and shoved the guy next to him on the shoulder, which toppled the drunk over and onto the sidewalk.  They all laughed as he tried to right himself again.

“Always loved this neighborhood,” Michael said.  His voice was completely flat and emotionless, but I still recognized sarcasm when I heard it.

“Well, housing is cheap,” I said with a shrug.

“You still in that dump down the block?”

“It’s convenient to work,” I retorted.  “Don’t play games, Michael—what the fuck do you want?”

“Just your yearly reminder that you don’t have to live like this.”  My uncle walked up behind me and placed his hand on my bare shoulder.  “Just talk to him, Liam.”

“No.”

“It’s been almost ten years.”

“Fuck him,” I replied.  I could feel all my muscles tense from top to bottom—my shoulders, my arms, my back, my legs—all in a ripple down my body.

“You were a kid then.”

“Old enough to be thrown out on the street, apparently.”

“He regrets that,” Michael stated.

“My ass,” I growled.  “He’s pissed off he couldn’t see into the future.  That’s his only regret.”

Michael went silent, but I could hear his breath as he huffed it out through his nose.

“Your mother misses you.”

That was a low blow, but I swallowed hard and clenched my fingers through the chain-link, refusing to respond.  It didn’t stop her face from popping up in my head, of course.  Wavy brown hair covered her shoulders, and her bright smile made me feel loved and wanted.

Ultimately, she still took
his
side.

Michael stepped a few feet away from me and smoothed out his hair.

“Fuck her, too,” I muttered under my breath.  I didn’t think Michael actually heard me, though.  Even after all this time, I felt like shit for saying it and wanted to take it back.

“Ryan says hello.”  It was a slightly better topic.

“Haven’t seen him in a while.”  My cousin was a big-ass motherfucker.  He would have made a great fighter, but he went into the family business with the rest of them.  No room for that kind of shit in his life.  Michael wasn’t actually his father.  He had married a woman about fifteen years older than he was, and she came with a son.  It was cool though, because up until then, I had been the only kid my age in the family.

Ryan and Michael were the only ones I still talked to at all.

“He’s been pretty busy,” Michael said.  “Did he tell you he was going to marry Amanda?”

“I figured,” I said, feeling myself tense up a bit.

“Well, she’s planning the wedding to end all weddings, apparently.”

“There’s a shock,” I snorted.

Michael laughed, which quickly turned into a sigh.

“Not going to change your mind?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Not this year,” I replied.  “I don’t see ‘daddy dearest’ making the trek down here to talk to me.  What makes him think I’m going to take the fucking subway all the way over to his office?  He can park the fucking Porsche back here and come have a beer if he cares so much.”

“Liam…”

“You done?” I snapped.

“I guess so,” he said.  He let out another long breath.  “It was good to see you.”

“You, too.”  I didn’t turn around and watch him walk back inside.  His appearance brought up too many shitty memories, and though I did love my uncle, his presence left me feeling uneasy.

After a few more cigarettes, I tossed the last butt toward the street and headed back inside for a bit.  It wasn’t long before I determined getting laid was not going to happen, given my mood and the general lack of teeth in the mouths of some of the patrons still left at Feet First come closing time.  I untangled myself from one of the hornier ones by telling her I had to take a piss, went back to the locker room to grab my gym bag, and headed out the back door.  Once outside, I dropped the bag, fished around for my pack of Marlboros, and lit one.

A lone car crawled by, momentarily obscuring my view of the drunk-fest that was still going on across the street.  They were pretty fucking loud, which was disturbing my final smoke of the evening before walking home.  Usually this was my peaceful time, the only real quiet of the night I would get before returning home and trying to sleep through the car alarms and gunshots.  At least the idiots who used to fight at all hours of the night in the apartment below me finally moved out.  Maybe they were evicted.  Whatever it was, I didn’t have to listen to that shit anymore.

A chilly breeze blew down the street, bringing some of the more glorious scents up into the air and cooling my skin.  I tossed the cigarette butt through the holes in the fence and into the gutter with the rest of the trash and then went back to the door to retrieve my shirt from my gym bag.

The trip-trapping sound of women’s shoes on pavement caused me to look up, and I watched a young woman come into view as she passed the dumpsters at the back of the bar.  She walked quickly with her head down and a purse with a lengthy strap over her shoulder.  Her long, brown hair was tied up in a ponytail at the top of her head, and she wore a pair of short-shorts, which showed off her long legs, and a tight T-shirt with the name across her chest of the bar and grill a few blocks down.  I figured she was maybe five-foot-four and a hundred and fifteen pounds because I tended to size people up that way.  Nice build, nice tits.  She didn’t look over at me at all, just kept up her quick pace down the street with her eyes on her feet.

My first thought was
fucking gorgeous
.

My second thought was
fucking stupid
.

Who walked around this area of town in the middle of the night by themselves?  I mean, yeah—I did—but I wasn’t a very easy target.  She might as well have had a sign on her back that said “mug me”.  I shook my head and went back to rummaging around in my bag.  When I looked up again, the sound of her shoes was beginning to fade, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.

The guys across the street who had been sitting and drinking had gone quiet and were now all standing up with their heads close to one another.  The guy with greasy, shoulder length, black hair turned his head to look down the street in the direction the girl was walking and then nodded before he and a guy with a backwards baseball cap took off down the side alley that ran perpendicular to the street they were on.

I’d lived in that area a couple of years, and I knew that alley intersected with another alley, which then met up with a walkway between two of the abandoned warehouses, and dumped out onto this street a couple blocks down.  The last two guys in the group were heavyset with unkempt dirty blond hair.  They looked like they might have been brothers.  They quickly abandoned the bottle-in-a-bag and started walking quietly but quickly in the same direction the girl was going, pulling the hoodies up over their heads as they walked.

Their intent was obvious.

“Fuck,” I mumbled.  I grabbed my bag, ignoring the shirt that fell out of it and onto the ground and heaved at the heavy gate that enclosed the area behind Feet First.  For once, the damn thing was padlocked.  I growled before flinging my bag up and over the fence, grabbing onto the links with my fingers, and hauling myself over it, too.  I had to move pretty quickly if I was going to catch up with the drunks and their would-be victim.

I was never one to play the hero, but some things you just didn’t let slide.

Stepping lightly but quickly, I moved down the quiet, empty street.  There was a bend just a couple of blocks ahead of me, and both the girl and the guys pursuing her must have already passed it.  I couldn’t see anyone else on the street at all though someone could certainly have been hiding in the shadows.  More than half the streetlights were out here—no one ever seemed to bother replacing them—and you couldn’t see the moon or any stars.  The light pollution from deeper in the city was the only thing keeping the streets from being completely dark.

I moved a little faster, making my way around the curve in the street.

I saw them then, and I was correct in my initial assessment of their plans.  They had already caught up to her—two in the front, two in the back.  The one with the baseball cap and the greasy one were behind her with their arms held out a little to keep her in place while the two brothers shifted back and forth in front of her.  They had her surrounded and were moving slowly, herding her toward the walkway between two buildings.

“Hey, baby,” the blond brother with the darker colored hoodie purred.  I was pretty sure it was the one who had shoved his buddy down in the street earlier.  “Relax.  We just want to have a little fun.”

“Yeah, you know,” the kid in the backwards baseball cap said, “invite you to our little
par-tay
.”

I couldn’t stand it when people talked like that.  It didn’t make them sound cool; it made them sound like morons.

“Leave me alone!”  The girl slung her bag off her shoulder and held it in both hands, as if she might try to use it as a weapon.

The group laughed and closed in on her.  One of them reached out and grabbed the large bag, wrenching it from her hands and spilling the significant contents all over the street.  The guy with greasy black hair reached for her then, grabbing her by the tops of both arms and pulling her backwards as she cried out.

As if anyone around here would even notice or care if they did hear her screaming.

The guy in the hoodie stepped forward and began to reach for her.  I dropped my own bag, no longer concerned with a silent approach, and raced down the street.  They were far too occupied with their captive to notice me anyway, and I managed to get right behind the one grabbing for her.

My hand grasped the top of his head, clenching the material of his sweatshirt and his hair as well.  I yanked him backwards and off balance and then released him as he fell on his ass with a thud.  Changing my stance, I leaned over and let my foot fly out, catching another one in the side.  I heard a distinctive crack as my booted heel came into contact with his ribs.

I turned my eyes to the greasy black-haired guy who was taking a few steps backwards, still holding the girl tightly and shaking her, as if threatening her would keep me away from him.

“Hey, man!”  They were all the words I allowed to leave his mouth.

I stepped forward quickly and grabbed the girl by her ponytail.  She cried out again, but I couldn’t pay attention to that as I pulled her face toward my chest and punched at the space over her head to land three knuckles right against Greasy’s trachea.

He released her arms immediately and grasped at his throat.

Spinning to my left, I kept the girl close to me for a moment and then shoved her off to one side before turning to the next guy who was coming at me.  She cried out in surprise, stumbled, and ended up dropping to the street, but I couldn’t really think about that.  I knew she wasn’t seriously hurt and was out of the way; that was all I needed.

The asshole with the backwards cap and the moronic ghetto-speak took a swing at me, which I easily ducked.  He was still drunk enough that he almost knocked himself right over onto the street, but I caught him.  I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up close enough to slam my palm into his nose.  I heard a snap just before I dropped him to the asphalt.

I quickly looked around me and saw two of the guys running off down the alley.  The one I had just dropped to the ground was whining and moaning about his nose, and the last one—the one I had grabbed first—was heading in my direction.

He was, without a doubt, the instigator of all of this.  My eyes narrowed as he approached and swung out wildly as if he didn’t even know where I was.  I sidestepped and backed up—letting him come at me again.  After a couple more swings, he seemed to be pretty much out of breath.  That’s when I pounced.

Before I even touched him, I was in the zone though I never felt disconnected like some guys said they did during a fight.  I was always completely focused; I just felt
different
at the same time.  Everything seemed brighter even in the dim light coming from the one streetlamp at the end of the block, in sharper focus, and alive.  Every muscle was poised, ready for my command.  Every synapse was prepared to fire at my will.

Spinning around, my boot connected with the side of his head.  Before he had the chance to fall backwards, I reached out and gripped his hoodie in my fist, twisting the fabric right under his neck around in my fingers.  I could feel the string for the hood against my thumb as I pulled him up closer to me and slammed my other fist into his gut.

The air rushed out of him in a fragrant gust.  He slumped toward me, but I held him out so I had better access to punch his kidney next.  Then his face.  Then the top of his arm.  Then his face again.

He was screaming and crying at this point, begging me to let him go.  For a minute I couldn’t understand why he didn’t tap out, but then I realized he didn’t know the rules.  I released my grip with some effort—the knuckles had tightened up and ached when I straightened my fingers—and he dropped to the ground in front of me.

A moment later he was up again, turning and fleeing down the street with sideways-slouched, stumbling steps.

For a second I was confused.  There wasn’t any cheering, and no one was grabbing my wrist to hold my hand in the air.  I was just standing in a deserted street with my heart pounding in my chest and my breaths coming out in heavy pants into the night air.  The cool September breeze no longer chilled my skin even as it collided with the sweat covering my chest and back.  Then I remembered what I was doing and that the street wasn’t completely deserted.

I turned to the girl on the ground.

She was staring down the street in the direction the last of the attackers had run.  A few feet away from her was the discarded purse—if you could really call it that—lying on the ground with the contents all over the asphalt.  Whatever it was, it was too damn big to be a purse.  Yolanda always carried those tiny little things that fit in your hand, but this one looked like you could fit a whole Butterball turkey in it.

My hands were still a little shaky.  The fight hadn’t lasted more than about a minute and a half, and I had way too much built-up adrenaline.  All my muscles were tight, and my hands were still clenched into fists.  The desire to beat the shit out of something hadn’t ebbed nearly enough in such a short amount of time, and all the energy from my arms and legs seemed to back up into my brain.

I had an instant headache and wished there were a twenty-four hour gym somewhere close-by.  As it was, there was only one place for me to vent my building energy.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I heard myself shout.  My hands continued to tighten into fists as the girl startled and gasped, and her wide eyes focused on me.

“I was just walking home…”

“In this neighborhood?  At this time of night?  Do you have a fucking death wish?”

I really had no idea why I was shouting at her. I just couldn’t believe how fucking stupid she was.  Everyone knew how dangerous this area was in the daytime, and now it was past two in the morning.  The fact that this obviously young, attractive girl—well, far more than just
attractive—
was wandering around this area in the middle of the night pissed me off.

“You know, if I had come out of the bar two minutes later or happened to have my back turned when those guys started after you, you’d be getting double-teamed in the alley about now!”

Her face went pale in the light of the distant streetlamp, and she looked a little sick.  That didn’t seem to stop my mouth, though.

“Are you just stupid?” I probably would have gone on, but she wrapped her arms around herself and glared up at me.

“Stop yelling at me!” she screamed.  She turned away, but I saw her reach up with the back of her hand to swoop underneath her eyes.

Shit.

I turned slightly away from her and practically bit down on my tongue to keep myself from saying anything else.  I brought my fisted hands up against my stomach and tried to pull the tension inside of myself, work through it, and calm down.  I could hear her crying combined with choked breaths and sniffles.

“Fuck,” I mumbled under my breath.  I was starting to come off the fighting high I had been on—the tears might have helped with that—and my stomach felt tight.

After three long, deep breaths, I looked back to the girl on the ground and saw her frantically rubbing at her eyes and cheeks.  She didn’t look at me as she reached out and pulled her mostly empty bag close to her.  She looked inside and then looked around her at all her things on the ground.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.  I wasn’t all that great at apologies, and I figured now wasn’t going to be much different.  I’d obviously upset her with all my shitty comments, though.  “I didn’t mean to…I just…”

I stopped talking.  I didn’t know what to say, and I felt bad about yelling at her.  She looked at me all red-eyed with tears staining her cheeks.

“Just don’t do that shit anymore.”  I let out a big sigh.

She nodded once and then reached out to grab something off the ground near her and shoved it back into the bag.  From the amount of stuff scattered all over the street, my estimate on the size of the so-called purse wasn’t too far off.  There was an umbrella, a little flashlight, a bunch of tubes and bottles, and at least a half dozen pens.  As I looked around some more, I saw a small notebook, a paperback book, keys, a bottle of hand lotion that was nowhere near travel sized, a stack of tissues wrapped up in a Ziploc bag, two sets of earbuds, and a checkbook.  There was also a whole pile of ponytail holders, bobby pins, and those little hair-holder-things that looked like teeth.

There was shit from her bag from one side of the fucking street to the other.

She started crawling around, gathering it all up, and cramming it back inside, which gave me a fabulous view of her ass in the short-shorts style waitress uniform the place up the street usually demanded.  I could kind of see how she might have thought she could use the bag as a weapon—there had been more stuff in there than really should have been able to fit.  I looked around on the ground to see if there was an actual kitchen sink, or at least part of one, but I didn’t see anything metal.  There was something that looked like a small rock, though.

“How do you even carry that thing around?” I asked.

“What?”

“That…that purse-bag-thingy there,” I said, pointing and shaking my finger at it.  I wouldn’t have admitted it, but the whole idea of the thing scared me, and I wasn’t sure why.  I felt like if I got too close to it I might get sucked in, never to be seen again.  “It’s insane.”

Her eyes became little slits as she looked up to me.

“There is nothing wrong with my purse!” she growled.

“It’s huge,” I said.

“It has everything I need in it.”

“It has everything you and ten of your friends could need for a week,” I replied with a laugh.  “I know there are people who carry Chihuahuas in their purse, but you could fit a Dane in there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Okay, a decent-sized schnauzer, then.”

I got another glare, but this time it sort of made me smile.  As the corners of my mouth turned up, I couldn’t help but take it further.

“A pair of poodles?” I asked.  “They could sit under the umbrella and read to each other from the book.”

“Not really.”  She seemed to be actively trying to keep her frown on her face now, and her tone had definitely changed.

“I bet there are lost works of art in there,” I teased.  She just shook her head.  “Undiscovered sonnets.”

“You are very strange,” she said, but she had cracked a bit of a smile.

“I could be a lot worse,” I said.  She went silent as she looked back down the street and a shudder ran through her body.  “I’m gonna get you home, okay?”

“Home?”

“You live around here, right?”

“Um...well, yeah,” she stammered.  She looked in the direction she had originally been walking.

“I could walk you home,” I suggested.  “Make sure…well, just get you home.”

“How can I trust you?” she said cautiously.

“Trust me?”  I asked, trying to decide if I was offended by the very notion that I was somehow not trustworthy.  I mean, I had certainly just saved her from a rough night, and most likely a whole lot worse than a little pushing and shoving.  I raised both brows at her.  “Well, if I was going to rape you and kill you—which was probably their plan—I would have just insisted on going
first
, not chase the other guys away.”