I was older.
“At least it will be quick,” I said.
“Good. Confidence is good,” Fedorov replied. “You will give a good fight. It is all about motivation.”
“Going to make me paddle home?”
Fedorov beckoned with two fingers and Anatoly produced a full-sized tablet from under his jacket. Probably had a shotgun and a pot roast under there too.
“Threatening a warrior is useless. They do not fear pain. They defy death. You must employ other methods,” Fedorov said.
He swiped the tablet to show a sharp, clear image of a private room. Everything was green because of the lowlight lens, but the booth said nightclub. It sat six people comfortably. None of the four men were Russian and all of them were the right type of harmless handsome. The two women were co-eds.
One was Dina Calabria’s youngest daughter, Diana. The other was her fine-boned friend, the one who was cozied up to Dean.
“You should have visited the discotheque,” Fedorov said. “I had what I am told is called a ‘meet-cute’ planned. Very natural.”
“She’s not old enough to drink.”
“Here she is old enough for everything,” Fedorov replied.
I started to threaten him but caught myself before I made that mistake. I’d have better luck intimidating a blizzard. All of the losers and half of the winners had left the pit with injuries it would take weeks, if not months to heal. If the same happened to me, my days of tilting at windmills were over. “The fighters bet on themselves?”
“Themselves only,” Fedorov answered.
I emptied my pockets, splashing the chips across the table.
“I’m all in,” I said.
13
Fedorov’s people were kind enough to escort me around back to the service entrance. Couldn’t have me getting lost. The room they stuck me in would have violated the Geneva Conventions if it was a prison cell. A pipe fitting which opened right into the sea served as a bathroom. I didn’t bring my cup or mouthpiece and there weren’t any extras lying around. They did provide shorts, however. The fact mine were salmon was not lost on me.
Neither my watch nor my phone had reception. Those and my harness went into a sheet-metal locker. I hung my jacket, shirt, and pants all on the one hanger and pulled the shorts on. With Jove Brand removed, Ken Allen alone was reflected in the streaked, full-length mirror. He looked terrified.
There was no way of knowing who I was matched up with. Fedorov probably figured having it narrowed down from “anyone in the world” to “three” was already polluting the purity of the event. I couldn’t prepare for my opponent, but I could prepare myself.
I warmed up doing jumping-jacks, then moved into a stretch routine, taking an honest toll of my condition. The surprising thing about this whole insane adventure was how little damage I’d taken. Besides skinned knuckles and some stiffness from being kicked at the Shishi Opera House, I was the solid 90 percent where guys who trained all the time hovered. You never hit the fabled hundred, because in pushing yourself toward it, you wore something or other down.
I shadowboxed next, feeling the movement, letting my hands and feet flow. I didn’t think about the future. I didn’t think about any opponent except the one imagined before me, reacting to the threats my subconscious created. You learned to listen to your inner voice. It spoke of your strengths and weaknesses. Right now it was exposing my fear. I was moving away a lot, countering the younger, stronger guy about to manhandle me.
Don’t create the situation you fear, I told myself. Instead, stop it from starting.
When I was loose but beginning to breathe hard, I slowed down and moved through techniques with measured precision, timing my strikes to land perfectly with my body mechanics. I slipped away from time and place, quieting myself. It worked, until my handler wrenched the door open and made my vitals spike all over again.
I took deep, measured breaths. Anxiety made for hollow breathing, which was the opposite of what your body needed to perform.
Fedorov’s backstage guys were different from the workers who interacted with the guests. They moved with the lazy predator pace, saving their energy until it was time to kill. I was led down a tunnel of supply lines and conduit, past caged bulbs, feeling the steel grid under my bare feet. The rooms weren’t finished out down here. They probably cleaned with a firehose. As I got close, a guy unscrewed the door leading into the pit by its wheel. He kept his weapon covered as I squeezed past him.
The first step out under the lights blinded me. The canvas was pulled tight and had good traction, without any sponsor logos slippery from sweat. I bounced a few times to get a sense of the springiness. There wasn’t any. If you went down, you were going to feel it. If you were slammed down, the fight was over.
My sight returned enough for me to get a look at who I was facing. Either I got lucky or Fedorov had a finger on the scale, because it was Broken Hand. He was eyeballing me while unconsciously shaking his damaged paw.
As the announcer began doing his thing, I shuffled to the center before sliding laterally, measuring the space. When I hit a wall it didn’t give anything back. My guess was canvas-covered sheetrock on top of a repurposed metal framework. There was a reason for ropes or a fence, beyond visibility. Ropes and fencing could be used defensively, to lean away or soak momentum. Not these walls. These walls were weapons.
I backed toward where my door was, wiping my feet to dry them off. I took slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm. It was hot from the lights and would only get hotter. All I’d had to drink in the last six hours was maybe twenty ounces of club soda. I should have asked for water, but if I was going to start should’ve-ing I was going to pass should’ve let Stern do her job on the way back to should’ve said no to an appearance on Beautiful Downtown Burbank, stopping at should’ve told Kit Calabria thanks but no thanks.
I tuned back in to the announcer singing our praises. Broken Hand was first. I wished I had watched his fight more closely. He was right-hand dominant and while his best weapon was damaged, it wasn’t going to stop him from using it if he had to.
Not everybody fights for their body type, but at the professional level you tended to make the most of your natural gifts. Broken Hand had long reach for his height. He stood tall, which told me he liked to kick. He was thin for his frame. Twenty pounds would have helped his chances with the ladies, which meant he wanted to be thin. He was standing with his left foot forward, bowing to instinct and keeping his wounds as far from me as possible.
In return, I did my best to give him nothing. My biggest advantage was being an unknown, though the announcer was working on that.
“Hailing from This Town, California, standing at an even six feet, the Sensei to the Stars, Jove Brand himself . . . Ken Allen!”
I didn’t acknowledge the crowd in any way while the announcer stretched out my name. Not only were the lights up there, but the sooner I forgot about being on display the better. I had enough problems as it was without concerning myself with public humiliation.
The announcer disappeared into the wall. I took a southpaw stance, opposite my opponent, resting the edge of my rear foot against the wall for reference. My lead arm was low, deliberately leaving an opening to tempt him into using his wounded hand.
I wasn’t listening for the bell. I didn’t care about the bell. Timers only mattered when there was a time limit. My attention was entirely on Broken Hand. Not his eyes or his shoulders or his hips, but everything. It was the opposite of focusing: taking the wide-view instead of zooming in.
He looked European, lacking all the mutt features us Americans don’t realize we’ve acquired. I needed to know if he fought in the ring or in the cage. Overseas they preferred the ring. The cage was an American innovation—I blamed professional wrestling. From what I recalled of his first bout, Broken Hand kept well off the walls and counterfought, making his jousting passes when his opponent closed on him. Wall phobia said ring guy.
It took a while, but eventu
ally Broken Hand came forward, closing a stride at a time until he was a lunge outside of reach. He wasn’t sure what to do because I hadn’t given him any information. You either liked to lead or counter. Broken Hand liked to counter, so I would force him to lead. I wanted him out of his comfort zone.
Broken Hand feinted a jab, pawing as he inched in, trying to draw an attack out of me so he could counter. I didn’t budge. Next was a snap kick, long and quick but another noncommittal tester. I soaked it, keeping my arm loose rather than bracing.
Broken Hand used the kick as a bridge to enter the pocket and bring more options into play. His right hand wanted in but he squashed the instinct before it got away from him. I stayed in my phone booth and waited. I was going to have to make a guess soon and guessing meant you could get it wrong.
He tried a rear round kick, keeping it low. There were two ways to go with a low kick. One was to be like Dean and use the kick as a feeler to set up your offense. The other was to go for it the way I did with Street Justice and blast off full tilt, maybe catch your foe sleeping and land a crushing blow out of the gate. Seeing as Broken Hand had already tested the water twice, I suspected he was going to go for it. I drove my knee forward to meet him halfway, my shin down and toes pointed.
I guessed right. He put everything into it, turning his hip over for maximum power to chop my base away.
My shin caught him on the knee like a slicing blade. All the force he had generated fueled the collision. I felt his kneecap clank out of place. Broken Hand staggered away, eyes on me in case I chased after him. But I didn’t move. I stayed right where I was, gaze unfocused, in no hurry at all.
It was all by design. I was worming into his head through a crack created by a legitimate fear. He already had a busted paw and now he was worried his knee was torn up. It was the same tactic I used on Dean, except I took it easy on the kid. This guy, I needed to crush.
Broken Hand hopped around, testing his leg. He thought about switching leads, trying out both stances to discover he didn’t like either. It was a no-win situation. Use the damaged knee as your back leg and you had to drive off it. Use it as your front and it was out there, exposed. The less he had to move the better, so he took a page out of my book and stood in place, waiting for me to take the lead. I didn’t oblige him. I had all night. I wasn’t the one with the rapidly swelling appendages.
The crowd started booing and hissing. Screw them. Like I cared what they thought. People had been doing a lot worse to me both online and in person for years. Broken Hand cared though. He was a professional. He had been conditioned to please the crowd. Such was the cost of maintaining a reputation as an exciting fighter.
Fighters were paid based on how many asses they put in seats. How many pay-per-view buys they drew. There were thousands of guys out there slurring their speech from waging wars in the name of entertainment. If you went digging, you’d find skeletons under the coliseum scored up with trident marks caused by falling prey to the same temptation.
Broken Hand gave up and shuffled back in. I lowered my lead, creating an inviting opening for his left. He was running out of options he considered safe and I wanted to help his decision along.
He came with the left jab. I rolled my elbow up and over, putting my hip into it. I wasn’t aiming for anything in particular, just sending my elbow out on an intercepting path. Even if I caught nothing, the rotation of my upper body had still moved my head out of line. In boxing it was called the shoulder roll. Kung Fu guys named it wing arm, because of the way it looked with your elbow rotated up higher than your shoulder. It was the same thing. A rose by any other name and all that.
My rising elbow caught Broken Hand right on the bare knuckles. I felt one of his fingers—probably the pinkie—pop. I heard him react more than saw it, his whimper scaling into a frustrated growl. He was a tough bastard. He’d proved it, coming back for the semifinals.
He went for the follow-up body hook, circling his punch under my raised arm. He was aiming for my liver, one of those magic spots that ended a fight if you tapped it right. Getting hit in the liver was worse than a kick in the nuts. There were a lot of nerves surrounding it and all your blood passed through it. You couldn’t work out your liver to toughen it up. There was a reason why boxers hiked their shorts up to their rib cages.
I snapped my arm down, simultaneously dropping with my shoulder and hip. The point of my elbow caught him on the top of his wrist, two cars hitting head on. Maybe it was enough to snap a bone, maybe not. That was for the X-ray technician to work out.
As I executed, I let my rear hand drop, leaving my jaw exposed. You’d have to erase years of training to ignore the opening, busted paw or not. And that was without being frustrated and desperate.
The temptation was too much. Broken Hand swung for the fences, putting everything he had into the punch, betting it all on a knockout. His rear cross was a picture-perfect blur, fast and on track. I would have been put to sleep, if I hadn’t drawn the attack out purposely.
I slipped underneath it, stepping out nice and low, sweeping my foot up as I went, like I was kicking a field goal. With his damaged knee, Broken Hand was already light on his injured leg, on top of having shifted his weight to his front in launching the big right bomb.
My kick sent Broken Hand’s base leg into the air, which made the rest of him lurch forward. His cracked hand crashed into the weaponized wall at full speed. He screamed in involuntary horror as he sank to his knees.
It only worked because he was a ring guy. He wasn’t used to worrying about checking his punches. It was all air on the far side of the ropes. He sank to his knees, exposing his back as he cradled his hand. When my shadow fell over him, Broken Hand extended his good arm toward me, a begging gesture more than a defensive one.
I knelt next to him and rested a hand on his shoulder.
Broken Hand nodded surrender. We waited for medical together. The life-or-death moment over, I tuned back in to the spectators.
There wasn’t much to hear. The sequence of events had stunned them into silence. There was a sprinkling of excited shouts mixed with sour grumbles, the former from those who had bet the dark horse and the latter from the ones who had played it safe. As if there was such a thing as a safe bet in the fight game. Applause akin to golf clapping issued from a group of Japanese in a show of appreciation for my calculated execution.
Then a girl yelled out “Gooooo Jooooove!”
I squinted up into the lights, accidentally looking tough. Dina Calabria’s youngest daughter, the mermaid who’d greeted me at Calabria Cove, had her hands cupped over her mouth to form a bullhorn. She was in a booth with Dean’s girlfriend and two of the harmless-looking guys.
Coyotes looked harmless too. One would call out to your dog, scamper around, invite him to play. When the pooch followed, that lone coyote led them into the brush where the rest of his pack were waiting to tear old Rover apart.
As much as I wanted to tell Diana all that, I just waved. Even if she could have heard me, the parable would have been lost on her. She was sure the wall her grandfather built kept the wolves at bay.
I asked everyone I passed on the way back to the “locker room” for water, the whole time trying to remember the Russian word for water. The fact I only knew the word for good-bye struck ominous.
I sat on the grill-top bench and worked to ease myself down, regulating my breath and wrestling my heart rate back to normal. I escaped my first bout unscathed, but let’s face it: the odds were stacked in my favor and I had survived through sheer trickery. The room was suddenly freezing. I started to shiver as the sweat dried on my skin. What good was winning a fight if you ended up dying of hypothermia after? The door unscrewed to reveal either another Russian or someone doing a bang-up job in their character acting class.
“Bring your things,” he said.
I bundled everything up inside my blazer. My guide led me into a communal shower with a fixed temperature perfect for poaching eggs. It would get me clean, bu
t I wasn’t about to drink it. A rough, used bar of soap was provided for my grooming needs. Good thing my hair was short.
I listened to the next bout unfold through the skeletal ceiling as two sets of feet drummed out an intimate tune. The crowd’s cheers rolled in like waves before climaxing in an eruption.
I dried off with a rag you’d normally use to wipe the grass off your lawnmower and got dressed. The multi-tool and grenades were missing but at least they left my watch. I didn’t bother putting the Bluetooth in. Fedorov himself was forced to use a walkie-talkie out here. The guard reappeared as I was working my way back into my blazer.
“Come,” he said.
He led me out to the boardwalk toward the ferry dock, then up to the helipad. I wondered where we were going with one fight yet to be fought. There was no one to replace me in the finals. My opponent was done, both physically and mentally, and the crowd knew it. There was no selling I had withdrawn—I didn’t take any damage—and from what I heard from the showers, the fight after me had a definitive ending.
I didn’t have long to ponder what Fedorov was up to. He came bounding up the stairs, arms swinging like the world kept handing him everything he wanted.
“Ken Allen you do not disappoint me.”
Anatoly wasn’t as fast on the stairs but they relented to his assault. He rumbled past and opened the helicopter door for us.
“It is better to get in before the rotors start,” Fedorov said. He put a hand on the back of my arm, gesturing for me to precede him into the passenger area.
I got in as if I went on helicopter rides all the time. There were four places to sit, making every seat a window seat. I picked the one I figured would be the hardest to shove me out of the doors from. Might as well make Anatoly work for all those pic-a-nic baskets.
Fedorov sat next to me. Anatoly got a side all to himself, to keep us from rolling. As soon as he closed the door, the rotors started up. Fedorov pointed to the hanging headsets and we all put them on. Anatoly didn’t bother to adjust his mouthpiece.
Jove Brand is Near Death Page 18