The Death Match (3 page)

It had never occurred to Matt to cash in on his strange and unique power to see evil in the flesh, but if he’d been a betting man, he could have turned that five-dollar bill into a nice little payday. The pretty blonde had no idea what she was up against.

There was no ref inside the cage. No checking of gloves, no ritualistic recitation of rules or requests for a good, clean fight. The announcer just got lost and left the fighters to their fate.

For the first minute, the women just circled like cautious dogs. Considine threw a few test jabs, but Lopez easily stayed out of her reach. Matt could feel the crowd getting anxious and restless around him, booing and hissing and screaming for blood. Then something happened that was almost too quick for Matt to register. Considine had thrown a big, wild right and tried to follow up with a knee to the body, but Lopez somehow managed to sweep her opponent’s standing leg and take her down to the mat.

Everyone cheered and leapt to their feet. It was hard for Matt to see what was going on in the cage, and when he managed to catch a glimpse, all he could see was a
tangle of thrashing, straining limbs and flying braids. Considine’s sexy white bra and shorts went pink, then crimson, but from where he stood, Matt couldn’t see where the blood was coming from. Then the fighters broke apart and got back to their feet, and it was revealed that the blood was coming from a huge, gaping cut above Lopez’s left eye, which was swollen nearly shut. There didn’t seem to be any kind of clock or rounds or time-out to check injuries. They just kept on fighting, Considine throwing sharp combos and Lopez dodging and looking for the takedown.

Matt turned away from the action in the cage to scan the crowd. As the fight progressed, he began to notice a strange tide of corruption ebbing and flowing over the faces of the audience. Whenever anything particularly violent happened inside the cage, a knee to the face or a big, showy takedown, a peculiar ripple effect spread through the crowd, causing their sores to pulse and swell in response. When there was a lull, the infection would fade, pustules shrinking and sores closing like reluctant lips.

A particularly intense wave of loathsome glee washed over the audience, and Matt turned his attention back to the fighters. They were down again, and Lopez had one of Considine’s arms between her legs, hanging on to it like someone might try to take it away. Considine’s pretty face was bright red and contorted with agony as she tapped her fingers repeatedly against Lopez’s thigh. Lopez responded by cranking her hips upward as if in sexual ecstasy, and there was a loud, juicy crunch like someone biting into a carrot. Considine’s arm bent sharply backward against the joint, jagged edges of shattered bone straining upward against the purple skin.

Lopez let go of the hideously crooked arm and crawled away from her screaming opponent, head down, blood pattering from her black hair like rain. The skinny
announcer came forward to help Lopez up. He got her to her knees first and then to her feet. But she was smiling, fists held high in victory and sores gaping and multiplying across her cheekbones.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your winner by way of submission,
Olivia ‘La Viuda’ Lopez
!”

All around Matt, people were swearing and throwing their bets to the floor in disgust. The suppurating manifestations of evil that had swollen and spread across their faces during the match were fading away as they filed out. The victorious fighter staggered to her corner, where she was met by a pit crew of handlers who immediately went to work on her injuries.

Meanwhile “Manslaughter” Considine was being stretchered from the cage, still howling in agony and clutching her hideously twisted arm. Matt was distracted by the circus of fans surrounding Considine on her way out the roll-up door and almost missed what was going on with Lopez.

At first the white-haired man talking to the winner of the fight was indistinguishable from her other handlers. His back was to Matt and the only thing that made him stand out was the fact that he was wearing a suit instead of a cheap, bloodstained “La Viuda” T-shirt. But when he turned and revealed his shadowed profile, he had Matt’s full attention.

He had no nose.

Where the nose should have been was a raw, jagged hole filled with stealthy movement. His one visible eye was cloudy and bulging from its socket, ready to burst
like the barely cooked yolk of a soft-boiled egg. His face looked worse than the face of the battered fighter he was whispering to, but no one seemed to notice but Matt.

The white-haired man frowned at Matt, revealing a roiling nest of vigorous, glistening maggots in the hollow where his nose should have been. He put a proprietary arm around Lopez like a jealous boyfriend, turning her away from Matt and leading her out of the cage.

The second he stepped out of the chain-link ring, he was backed up by a trio of scarred, sore-encrusted bruisers. Fighters, all of them, as evidenced by their flattened profiles and crushed knuckles. They were like unimaginative variations of the same crudely molded action figure. Thinning ginger hair on one, a patchy black goatee on another, and the third with dark skin and a crusty bald head. They also had something else in common. Distinctive matching tattoos. The exact same sinister tattoo the dead dockworker had. The same image Matt had seen carved into that ancient stone. The Ouroboros and the image of Mr. Dark.

Matt pushed his way through the milling crowd, trying to reach the group and confront them. But by the time he reached the gate, the white-haired man was helping the victorious fighter into a waiting limo.

He was about to get in after her when a woman burst free from the crowd and lunged at him.

She was a strapping five foot nine and 150 pounds of pissed-off muscle. Big shoulders, big hands, and big natural breasts. Young, too, barely old enough to buy a legal drink. Her frizzy red hair was messy and coming loose from her ponytail. Her blue-flame eyes were hot and narrow, burning with passionate fury. She might have been pretty in a homespun, midwestern farm-girl kind of way if her freckled face weren’t flushed crimson and distorted with anger, a single thick vein pulsing in her forehead.

The tattooed, rotten-faced thugs grabbed her arms to haul her back, but to Matt’s surprise, she easily broke free from their grip, elbowing one in his substantial gut and stomping hard on another’s instep. While she was distracted, the bald-headed thug stepped up and let her have it with a ton-of-bricks fist that should have laid her out flat. She staggered back, shaking her head and spitting a mouthful of blood, but she didn’t go down. A blow like that would have knocked an ordinary woman into next week. She wobbled a little but managed to keep her feet under her and her wits about her.

“Where is she, Long?” she screamed at the white-haired man, bloody, pink-tinged saliva spraying from her snarling lips as she lunged forward again between the restraining shoulders of the bodyguards. “What have you done to her?”

The man got into the limo and slammed the door. The angry redhead slipped the thugs’ grip again and pounded on the tinted window.

“Long, you son of a bitch, if you hurt her, I’ll kill you. You hear me? I’ll find you, and I’ll fucking kill you!”

The crowd around them was cheering as if they’d just been rewarded with a free bonus match. The sores that had faded on the way out of the warehouse were back, uglier and more virulent than ever.

The bald-headed guy tried to grab the angry young woman around her waist and drag her back. She snarled and slammed her head backward into his face. His crooked nose split at the bridge, crushed cartilage clearly visible through the gash. Blood quickly filled the hole, splattering her red hair as she struggled against him.

The thug with the goatee stepped up, telegraphing a big right. The young woman tucked her chin and ducked to the left, and Goatee was unable to check his swing in time to avoid cracking his bald buddy in the chops. Baldy went down like a felled redwood, and while Goatee was gawking at what he’d done, the young woman stepped nimbly to one side, swinging a tight left hook with the thumb sticking out of her fist. She jabbed that rigid thumb right into Goatee’s eye. He howled and dropped to one knee, cupping his wounded eye.

While all this was going on, the ginger-haired guy who had taken the elbow to the liver was getting his breath back and fumbling in his pockets. He took out something that Matt first mistook for a cell phone, until he pointed it at the redhead.

It was a Taser.

The tiny electrodes shot out like angry hornets and buried themselves in the redhead’s belly. She immediately went rigid, lips skinned back and teeth clenched, and then collapsed, twitching, to the pavement.

Galvanized by her incapacitation, Goatee got his feet back under him and started putting his boot to her belly as she shuddered and tried to curl into a fetal ball. Baldy and Ginger joined in the fun, kicking the shit out of the helpless young woman like they were jumping her into a gang...beating her as an initiation.

Matt had seen enough.

He had the ax unstrapped and clenched in a solid, two-handed grip when he muscled through the crowd and stepped up to the sniggering thugs.

Ginger turned to Matt with a look of mild annoyance, like Matt was a salesman or Jehovah’s Witness interrupting a cool movie.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “Her boyfriend?”

“You want to back off.”

“Oh yeah? What are you gonna—”

Matt didn’t let the guy finish. He just let him have it in the temple with the flat side of the ax blade. Ginger went all wobbly-legged and then tumbled backward on his ass. Baldy was right behind his fallen pal, but Matt jammed the end of the ax handle into
his sternum, letting the thug’s own momentum triple the impact. When Baldy doubled over, gasping, Matt followed up with a crack under the chin that sent him staggering.

Goatee was the last man standing, still clutching his injured eye and looking like he was about to be hit by a train. Matt didn’t need to tell him to fuck off. He just did, and his limping buddies quickly followed.

Matt knelt beside the redhead, concerned hand on her arm. She flinched away from his touch with wild animal panic in her eyes.

“Hey,” Matt said softly. “It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you. Can you sit up?”

He helped her up slowly, first to a hunched sitting position and then to her shaky feet.

“I feel like I’m gonna puke,” she said with a rueful smirk. “Thanks for helping me.”

“No problem.” Matt strapped his ax back to his rucksack.

He helped the redhead limp across the street to Flame’s bar. The bar was closed, but the kitchen door was still open while Flame finished the nightly cleanup.

The kitchen was empty, but they found Flame behind the bar, putting away clean glasses. She looked the young redhead up and down, taking in her bruises and contusions and torn clothes.

“Jesus, Matt,” Flame said. “Tell me you didn’t do this, or I’ll kick your ass myself.”

“Of course not,” Matt replied. “A coupla jerks were roughing her up. I convinced them not to.”

“Is this how you normally pick up chicks?” Flame asked Matt. She turned to the young woman and gripped her chin, turning her battered face one way and then the other. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She shook her head and went behind the bar to pour a pair of shots.

“Thanks again for what you did back there,” the redhead said, easing herself onto a barstool. “What’s your name?”

“Matt Cahill.”

“Stacy Barnett,” she replied, offering her hand.

He took it. It felt like a man’s hand, tough, hard, and callused.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Matt asked. “Who is the guy with the white hair?”

“Gregory Long.” She threw back her shot and then used a bar napkin to blot the blood from her split lip. “He’s a rich pervert who gets off on chicks fighting. It’s like a fetish for him. I’m not talking cute fake-lingerie wrestling either. I’m talking real bare-knuckle brutality. The more violent the better. He’s a pig, but he’s loaded and he’s always sleazing around the gym looking for female fighters. When he finds one he likes, he offers her a bunch of money to compete in his private, invitation-only matches. The winners are supposedly sent off on whirlwind tours through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, fighting for other pervy millionaires. But that’s the last anyone ever sees of them.”

“How do you know?”

“My best friend, Tanya Caixao, took him up on his offer,” Stacy said, looking down at her clenched and shaking fists. “I told her the guy was a creep, but she wouldn’t listen. That was two weeks ago. I haven’t gotten a single text or call or e-mail since the day she left. The last time I tried to call, there was a message saying her cell phone
account had been canceled. Why would she cancel her phone? With all the money she was supposed to get from Long, it’s not like she’s too broke to pay her bills. Something’s not right. I just know it.”

She took her phone from one of the many pockets in her black cargo pants and handed it to Matt. On the screen was a photo of Stacy and another woman, an exotic beauty with warm caramel skin and thick, copper-streaked ringlets. Her face was a little mannish in the angles, particularly the chin and brow, but she had plush, inviting lips and flirty hazel eyes behind heavy black lashes.

“We met at the gym. She’s the only other female that fights at one forty-five, so we started rolling pretty regularly.”

“Rolling?”

“You know, grappling. Working on submissions.”

“Right.” He looked down at the photo one last time, then handed the phone back to Stacy.

“She was having problems with her visa, and her asshole boyfriend had just kicked her out of their apartment. She had a rough life, you know? Growing up on the street back in Brazil. Her own mom traded her only daughter’s virginity for crack. Tanya was eleven. Eleven. All she’s ever known is fighting. It was the only chance she had to get out of that kind of life. Anyway, she didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I suggested she stay at my place until she got back on her feet. That was over a year ago. We’ve been inseparable ever since. Like Siamese twins.” She shook her head and let out a small, nervous laugh. “That’s why I just don’t get this. This just isn’t like her.”