The Death Match (2 page)

Matt figured that if he couldn’t get a job with DS&T, he could still hobnob with their employees when they were off duty, drunk, and feeling chatty.

As he walked past the bars, wondering which one would be the best place to start, he noticed an older woman struggling to board up a broken window in front of a dive called the Block and Tackle.

The woman was probably in her late sixties and was extensively tattooed. Both wobbly, wrinkled arms were fully sleeved, and her leathery cleavage was crowded with fading butterflies and skulls and cursive script that hadn’t been legible since 1981. Her cottony, frazzled hair had been dyed safety-cone orange and sprayed up into a spiky style that resembled a toilet brush. She was wearing distressingly tight leather pants, clear plastic stripper heels, and enough makeup to keep a clown college in business for a year.
Matt watched her struggling with a battered old nail gun, shaking it and swearing at it until it went off, firing a random nail into the scarred brick hide of the building.

“Ma’am,” Matt said. “You look like you could use a hand there.”

She gave him a suspicious squint.

“What are you supposed to be,” she asked, gesturing with her wattled chin at the ax strapped to his rucksack. “A lumberjack?”

“Jack-of-all-trades, I guess you could say,” Matt replied. “I was looking for work over on the docks and not having any luck. I saw your window and I thought maybe…”

“You thought maybe you could rip me off just because I’m a woman?” She spat. “Fuck off. I don’t need help from you or any other man.”

She waved the nail gun at him and it went off again, driving a nail into the concrete between Matt’s boots. He swore and leapt back.

“Whoa, take it easy, lady!” Matt put up both hands like she had a pistol. “I don’t want to rip anybody off. I just thought you could use some help—that’s all. You’re gonna hurt yourself with that thing.”

She looked down at the nail gun in her hand. A strip of vintage duct tape that had been wrapped around the grip was coming unstuck, flapping against her wrist.

“Sorry,” she said with an embarrassed grin. She let the nail gun drop to her side. “I get kinda snippy sometimes, but don’t take it personal. It’s just that this here is the third broken window this month. My late husband, Chuco, God rest his soul…” She crossed herself and kissed her thumb, raising her mascara-smeared eyes to the smoggy sky. “He passed away last June. Heart attack. He was a no-account, skirt-chasing boozehound and pretty much useless in the sack, but he did know how to fix things.”

She shrugged like it didn’t matter, but her eyes flashed raw and wet with grief for half a second before she was able to batten down her emotional hatches. She looked away, fuchsia lips set in a hard, grim line as she tried to wrap the old duct tape back around the cracked grip of the nail gun.

“Let me help you with this window,” Matt said softly. “If you’re happy with the job I do, maybe there might be a few other things that need fixing around here. Just pay me whatever you can spare. Okay?”

“I can’t spare much right now,” she told him. “But I can give you food and beer, and there’s an old sofa bed in the storeroom for you to crash on if you got nowhere else.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That would be just fine.”

Her name turned out to be Flame Melendez. She was a tough old broad with a sailor’s mouth and a shotgun under the bar, but once you got to know her, she was warm, decent, and as loyal as a pit bull. Her crumbling old joint had enough problems to keep Matt busy for months, but in the end, he didn’t need that much time. In the end, trouble found him. Like it always did.

It was a Friday night, unseasonably hot and sticky long after the sun had gone down. Matt had spent the majority of the day engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the ancient ice maker. He’d been ready to take his ax to the ornery machine and put the damn thing out of its misery when it had inexplicably decided to start working again. He was celebrating this questionable victory with one of Flame’s surprisingly better-than-decent hamburgers and a cold beer.

In the past few days, he’d been able to glean very little solid info about the late Oscar Amezuita. Rumors, mostly, picked up from fellow dockworkers who came in every night to drink their paychecks. No one seemed to know much about his life, but everyone had a theory about his death. He was an exotic reptile smuggler who’d been offed by the competition. His wife did it for the insurance money. His buddy did it because he was nailing the buddy’s wife. Nothing that really stuck with Matt until he met a sour old-timer named Lenny who claimed that Amezuita was involved in “bad things.” The old man told Matt seven or eight times in as many minutes that he was retiring in twenty-four days from his job with DS&T and “didn’t want no trouble.”

It took three shots and three beers to finally get the old man talking. He told Matt that Amezuita made extra money on the side as hired muscle and was supposedly involved in some kind of underground bare-knuckle fights. According to Lenny, there was some speculation that Amezuita may have died from head injuries sustained in a fight and then been dumped by fellow fighters who didn’t want their little hobby
investigated by police. Or maybe one of his muscle jobs had gone south and left him floating in the bay. Of course, neither of those options explained the eviscerated torso.

“Sea creatures, maybe?” Lenny said, peering into his shot glass like he was shocked to find it empty. “Sure, it could have been sea creatures. Only you’d think sharks and things would eat the arms and legs first, not just the innards. Seems like those bits would be harder to get to.” He shrugged and pushed the empty glass away. “Anyway, what do I care? I got only—”

“Twenty-four days left,” Matt finished for him. “Right.”

Illegal fighting and strong-arming were both pretty bad, but not Matt’s kind of bad. Not Mr. Dark’s kind of bad. There had to be more to it, but the old man had swiftly gone from unwilling to talk to unable. Matt eventually left him snoring on the bar.

Matt knew he should be patient, but the antsy conviction that whatever he needed to know was just on the other side of that locked gate across the street was starting to get to him. He’d never really been the wait-and-see type.

From what he’d discovered in the past few days, DS&T was very serious about security. He’d been over it and over it, and breaking in was pretty much out of the question. What he needed was an invitation. An opportunity. The opportunity came on this hot Friday night when he was least expecting it.

It was just after 10:00 p.m. when the lanky foreman with the pustules under his eyes came in for a drink with two other men. One was a gray-haired gorilla with the suspicious, hostile expression of a man trying to figure out if a word he didn’t understand was an insult. The other was lean and angular, with a broken nose under a wool watch cap that seemed like a really terrible idea in that kind of heat. They had very little in
common, except for a mild case of a certain skin condition that only Matt could see. Nothing showy or blatant, just a few small, crusty sores on the gorilla’s hands and face and some dime-sized bluish splotches like livor mortis around the chicken-bone neck of the skinny guy. Not big-league evil, just enough to let Matt know that they were assholes. Which, to tell the truth, would have been obvious to anyone.

Matt bellied up to the bar beside them, nursing a beer and trying not to look like he was eavesdropping. Conversation between the men was minimal, limited to speculation on when “those goofy broads” were going to arrive and whether or not said broads were going to put out. The broads in question showed up about twenty minutes later.

The three women were all variations on the same theme: bottle blondes with bloated Budweiser physiques and cheap heels. Two of them were manifesting the same minor sores and corruption as their dates, but the third was clear-skinned and innocent. A little younger, sweet-faced and clueless, with way too much muffin top spilling over the waistband of her unflattering skinny jeans and the wide-eyed, anxious look of a kid on her first day at a new school. It was obvious that she had been dragged into this outing by her more aggressive friends and had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. She wound up paired with the gorilla, who greeted her by squeezing her breasts and telling her that they’d better be real. Her solution to the obvious lack of romantic chemistry between her and her date was to become utterly annihilated as rapidly as possible. She had seven tequila shots in the time it took Matt to finish his beer and nearly had to be carried out of the bar. Matt followed close behind them.

They steered the tottering girl across the street to join a large crowd filing through the open gate onto the DS&T dock. Mostly men, with a few hard-bitten women mixed in. Nearly everyone in the crowd had that same low-level corruption visible in their eager faces.

There was a young black woman taking people’s money as they entered. She seemed normal at first, but as Matt got closer, he noticed that her scalp had gone ashy and necrotic along the hairline, oozing a thin yellow pus from the roots of her tight braids.

The group Matt had followed from the bar was still mostly silent, but a pair of men behind Matt were a little more talkative. He listened without turning to look at them.

“Who do you like?”

“Considine. Hands down.”

“No way, man. Considine’s a vicious striker, I’ll give you that, but Lopez’s got a helluva chin, and if it goes to the ground, it’s all over.”

“I don’t give a fuck. I just want to see somebody’s nose get broke.”

Okay, so they were headed for a fight of some kind. Clearly this had something to do with the rumored underground fighting that Oscar Amezuita had been involved in before his untimely death.

Matt couldn’t see how much people were paying to get in, but he sincerely hoped that the lonely pair of fives currently residing in his battered wallet would be enough. When it was his turn to pay the woman with the infected-looking braids, he was relieved to discover that she required only one of the two bills. When he got inside the large aluminum building where the fight was scheduled to take place, he realized why it was so cheap.

A long plastic folding table had been set up beside the large roll-up door. Behind it, a trio of older men were doing brisk business taking bets on the upcoming fight. From the posted odds, it looked like Considine was heavily favored, at –245 on the money line. That meant that for every $2.45 someone bet on Considine, they would win $1 if he won the fight. So a $245 bet could bring a profit of $100 on a win.

The crowd around the table was so thick that Matt couldn’t get anywhere near it, so he walked down to the currently empty chain-link cage that had been set up in the center of the huge, echoey space.

It seemed to Matt that the atmosphere for a fight like this should be grittier, more cinematic. Bloody sawdust on the warped wooden floor. Dim, yellowy bar lighting. Sweaty, desperate men squinting through their own blood and trading punch-drunk haymakers. But this hollow, soulless warehouse space was disturbingly clean and generic. Brightly lit and stacked full of pristine, shrink-wrapped cargo, like a brand-new Costco.

Still, Matt knew something evil was going on inside this building. Something that lingered in the air like a noxious odor. As the crowd entered the warehouse, whatever small sores they walked in with seemed to swell and radiate a feverish heat. Pustules bloomed like mushrooms, nurtured by greedy anticipation of what the crowd was about to witness.

As he approached the empty cage, he found the one thing in the room that wasn’t perfectly clean, though not for lack of trying. The mat that covered the cage floor had been scrubbed and bleached and scrubbed some more, but there were still several old brown stains and smears on its pockmarked hide. Remnants of earlier fights, reminding
everyone of what they had come to see. Not athletic prowess or sportsmanship or the sweet science.

Blood. They were there to see blood.

A thin, cadaverous Asian man in a dandruffy black suit opened the door to the cage and climbed in, thumbing on a wireless microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his deep, mellifluous voice completely at odds with his ninety-eight-pound-weakling exterior. “Please take your seats. This unlimited, no-holds-barred battle will now begin.”

The crowd began to fill the cheap plastic folding chairs that had been set up around the cage. Matt moved back and took a seat close to the exit.

“Fighting out of Irvine, California, weighing in at one hundred thirty-five and one-half pounds, currently ten and one with eight of those wins coming by way of knockout, please welcome to the cage
Molly ‘Manslaughter’ Considine
!”

Molly? That seemed like kind of a strange nickname for a bare-knuckle fighter, until Matt turned around to look.

The fighter was a woman. And she was a knockout.

Her thick golden-blond hair was woven into unflattering cornrows, but she had mesmerizing green eyes and a haughty movie-star profile. She was clearly a great striker, since after eleven fights that proud nose had yet to be broken. But as beautiful as her face was, her body was even more stunning. It was impossible not to stare at all that tanned, flawless perfection. Muscular but still curvy and feminine. Legs for days. Her white spandex shorts were so thin and tight they might as well not have existed. Ditto her matching barely there sports bra.

“And her opponent, fighting out of San Antonio, Texas, weighing in at one hundred and thirty-five pounds, four and oh with all four wins coming by way of submission,
Olivia ‘La Viuda’ Lopez
.”

Lopez wasn’t nearly as glamorous as her opponent. She was both thinner and taller than Considine and had an odd, lanky build, with long, sinewy arms and legs covered with intricate tattoos. Her acne-scarred face was like a chainsaw sculpture, rough-hewn and emotionless. Her nose had been broken, probably more than once. She was also, like the eager spectators, just a little bit corrupt. Tiny sores clustered around the corners of her mouth and nostrils. Her dark eyes were stone-cold.