by Jack Tunney
I turned to amble back to the boardwalk because I had things to do and I knew the cap’n wasn’t one for tolerating goldbrickers. The cap’n had taken me on because I was a war veteran, but he kept me on because I was a hard worker.
“Nobody said you could leave.” One of them dropped his hand on my shoulder and pulled to turn me around.
I went with the pull, came around, and stepped inside the tall guy’s reach. I gripped his left wrist in my right hand, then closed my left hand around his throat. I squeezed hard enough to make his bloodshot eyes bulge and I saw the surprise and fear dawn on his sallow face.
I put my face into his, almost nose to nose. “I don’t know who you think you are, mister, but you’d better keep your meat hooks off me or you’re gonna draw back a nub.”
That was when Shorty reached under his jacket and pulled out a pistol.
THE CUTMAN
Fight Card #1
By
Jack Tunney
FIGHT CARD: THE CUTMAN
e-Book edition © 2011 Mel Odom
Cover: Keith Birdsong
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part
by any means without permission
ROUND 1
Havana, Cuba 1954
I was tying Wide Bertha to the mooring cleats when the two mooks swaggered toward me like they owned the dock. I wasn’t in no mood for a scrap, but things didn’t turn out that way.
The last three days at sea before we made portage at Havana, we’d fought hurricane weather, and I felt like I was about stove in. All I wanted was a hot meal, a bellyful of beer, and a nice, soft rack to sleep it off. Someplace where I could wash the stink of the ship off me and not have to worry about a dog watch.
’Course, since we’d sailed into port in early afternoon, Cap’n Slidell figured we still had four or five hours of daylight left and he’d make sure he got every minute of those before he cut us loose. He was a fair man, but he liked getting his money’s worth.
Them mooks was trouble and I knew it. I could read trouble the way a con man on Halsted Street hustling three-card Monte in my old Bridgeport, Chicago, neighborhood could read a mark. I ignored them, though, figuring I’d let them make their play and see what was what.
It was easy to see them two was known along the docks ’cause sailors and fishermen got out of their way as they came over. The docks was busy then. I supposed a lot of ships must have come in or put in while the squall churned the ocean white and deadly. The smell of fish and the salt of the sea blew over me and dragged some of the teeth out of the hot sun burning down on me. Lines popped against masts as the wind clawed at the furled sails. Men’s voices – shouting orders or yelling at each other, or singing – rolled over the port.
Them two looked like they was about my age, and I’d turned twenty-seven back in December. They wore suits, but they didn’t look like no port authority I’d ever laid eyes on. Both of them was American, judging from their color and their clothing.
I’d almost got to Havana before I signed on with the Marines for the Korean War in 1950. I’d put in three hard years there, saw a lot of friends get killed or shot up, or freeze to death in the winter along the Chosin Reservoir after the Chinese joined up. I’d spent my twenty-third birthday fighting on bloody ground too frozen to dig proper graves in.
Major General Oliver P. Smith had led us through that battle, and we’d been outnumbered more than two to one by the Chinese. I’d landed with the Big Red One, the 1st Marine Division, and stayed through the thick of it. I’d never been one to walk away from a fight, which was why I usually ended up in trouble when I was a kid, and why I’d ended up with the Marines for that nasty bit of business.
Major General Smith wasn’t a man to quit on a fight neither. Even in the worst of it, when we was fighting for our lives with bayonets and rifle butts ’cause we was outta ammo, when we was chewing boot leather ’cause we was outta rations, we remembered what he said there at that battle when someone asked him if we was gonna retreat.
“Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”
We’d been surrounded and there wasn’t no way to get out of it. Just had to go through it.
I respected that. Getting through something, not running away from it, had been one of the first things Father Tim had taught us at St. Vincent’s Asylum for Boys. ’Course, most of us boys called the church Our Lady of the Glass Jaw. The nuns hated us for it, and they didn’t care for Father Tim much neither ‘cause he let us get away with it.
While I continued straightening the rope like I had nothing better to do, them two mooks stood there and tried to stare holes in my back. I ignored them, but I noticed that nearby local fishermen, cargo handlers, and sailors fought shy of us when they’d been coming around for gossip only minutes ago. I just concentrated on making sure that hawser was knotted right to the mooring cleat. The rope had clean lines and was wound tight. Wide Bertha was settled in snug against the dock.
Eventually, them two got bored. I would have too. I didn’t like standing around while other people was working. Always made me feel like I had to do something too.
“Hey.”
I stood and turned around, and them boys took a big step back. I was six feet tall, and both of them was taller than me. But I worked off-the-books as a longshoreman down at the Chicago River bridges from the time I was fourteen. The bridges was too low for cargo ships to get through and cargo got unloaded and disbursed at the bridges. Times was hard then, and I worked long days. I got broad shoulders and a build like an ape out of it.
Some of that was my old man’s fault, though. He’d been built the same way. My younger brother Patrick looks better in a suit than I do. As best I could remember, Pat favored Mom, in her looks and in her book smarts, but she wasn’t with us long enough for me to remember much of her.
I was shirtless because of the heat. I wore stained dungarees I’d patched myself. I kept my hair short so it wouldn’t get infested with vermin sharing rack space on Wide Bertha with us, and I hadn’t shaved in about a week. So I probably looked like I was worth about two cents. Maybe less.
I looked at the two men. “Something I can do for you gents?”
The shorter one was the mouthpiece of the pair. He gave me the hairy eyeball like that was supposed to make me curl up in a dead faint right there on the dock. I figured he didn’t know I’d been fighting wind and water for the last three days during a storm that had seemed determined to kill ever’ man of us.
Even if he’d looked like something I didn’t want to tangle with, I was just plumb worn out and didn’t have it in me to be afraid of nothing. Yes sir, I was tuckered and there wasn’t nothing I was gonna let get between me and the evening I had planned.
So the short guy yanked his thumb at Wide Bertha and sneered. “Yeah, mac, you can do something for us. You can move your boat.”
I looked at him for about a minute, then shook my head. “That ain’t no boat. She’s a ship.”
“Don’t matter.” The look on his face got harder and I guessed I was supposed to be impressed.
I wasn’t. I grew up around nuns at St. Vincent’s who could glare paint off a wall and raise welts the size and color of strawberries with a ruler.
The taller man spoke up then. “Maybe you should go check it out with your boss. Let him know Mr. Falcone says he should move this scow.”
Okay, I knew then that the tall guy knew more about sailing, but he didn’t know me. Scow was a hurtful term, a
nd any sailor worth his salt was proud of his ship. I was proud of Wide Bertha. She’d just braved everything the Atlantic and the Caribbean could throw at her to make sure I got to sleep in a bed tonight.
“You don’t talk bad about a man’s ship. Especially not to his face.” I spoke in a low, soft voice, not trying to rile anybody yet. But them two took another step back and that was fine with me.
Around us, several sailors, fishermen, and folks walking through the market area at the docks had stopped to watch. I didn’t know what all the interest was and didn’t particularly care for all the stares. It wasn’t good to draw attention while you was in a port. Sailors ain’t always real welcome in most places. Locals wanted to shake a ship’s crew loose of every nickel they got, then kick them right back into the sea.
The tall man tried throwing his weight around again. “This here’s private parking, swabbie. Mr. Falcone does his business here.”
I put my fists on my hands and took a deep breath. I run short on patience on good days, and there hadn’t been any good days for over a week. “This is a public portage. First come, first serve. Cap’n Slidell already checked with the harbor master.”
“The harbor master’s wrong.”
“Then you take that up with the harbor master. Not me.”
“Maybe we should take it up with your captain.”
“It’s a free country, bud.” I laughed at the thought of them two mooks bracing Cap’n Slidell.
The cap’n was sixty years old, was meaner than a gutshot alligator, and had a wooden leg he picked up after losing the real one in World War II. I’d already seen him take that leg off in a bar fight in Singapore and whale the tar out of three German sailors that thought they was gonna buffalo an old man. That evening the cap’n cleaned house with that leg and them beat-up Germans carried each other outta that bar. Me and the rest of the crew just watched because the cap’n would have had our heads if we’d tried to interfere.
“Hey, Mick.”
I looked up and Sandbag Pete was hanging over Wide Bertha’s rail. Sandbag was a skinny redhead with a head that looked too big on him and arms and legs that looked like pipe cleaners. He was older than me, gray bearded, but he could climb a ship’s rigging faster than any monkey I’d ever heard tell of. He wore dungarees too, and a sleeveless shirt, but his skin had already pinked up something fierce from the sun.
Sandbag nodded at the two mooks. “You having trouble down there?”
I waved him off. “No trouble.”
“Mick?” The big one squinted at me.
“Mickey Flynn.” I didn’t see any harm in them knowing my name.
“You Irish?”
“Irish as St. Paddy’s Day.” A lot of people still didn’t care for us Irish. I’d grown up with that dislike all my life in the old neighborhood where we fought with the Italians and the Poles.
Maybe that was another reason I didn’t care for them two men. I’d figured them for Italian, especially with the mob moving into Havana and buddying up with Fulgenico Batista the way they was. I guess probably I liked the Italians about as much as the Italians liked the Irish. Hearing the name Falcone had just sealed the deal.
I turned to amble back to the boardwalk because I had things to do and I knew the cap’n wasn’t one for tolerating goldbrickers. The cap’n had taken me on because I was a war veteran, but he kept me on because I was a hard worker.
“Nobody said you could leave.” One of them dropped his hand on my shoulder and pulled to turn me around.
I went with the pull, came around, and stepped inside the tall guy’s reach. I gripped his left wrist in my right hand, then closed my left hand around his throat. I squeezed hard enough to make his bloodshot eyes bulge and I saw the surprise and fear dawn on his sallow face.
I put my face into his, almost nose to nose. “I don’t know who you think you are, mister, but you’d better keep your meat hooks off me or you’re gonna draw back a nub.”
That was when Shorty reached under his jacket and pulled out a pistol.
ROUND 2
The pistol caught my eye at once because it was a Colt Model 1911 .45 capable of blowing a fist-sized hole in a man. I’d used pistols like it when I’d been on security details in Chosin Reservoir. The .45 was a fine weapon, but I’d preferred the M1 Garand .30 cal I’d been issued. ’Course you couldn’t stick an M1 in a shoulder holster under your jacket, so I could see why Shorty carried that Colt.
I didn’t say nothing. You talk to a man shoving a gun in your face, you’re probably wasting the last breath you ever drew. Even if that man didn’t plan to kill you outright, he might pull the trigger by accident and kill you anyway. One of the guys in the old neighborhood died just that way, and nobody thought it was gonna happen till it was done.
So, while I was saying nothing, I was also taking that pistol away from Shorty. I flicked my right hand out quick as quick can be, closed my hand on the butt of it so the webbing between my thumb and forefinger slid down against the hammer, closed my hand over the barrel and slide, and yanked and twisted. Hard.
Shorty pulled the trigger, either because he was going to or because I’d startled him. The hammer dropped on that webbing between my thumb and forefinger and pinched like the Devil hisownself, but it didn’t touch the firing pin. I’d made sure to turn the barrel away from me anyway, because I didn’t want to patch no holes in Wide Bertha neither.
Shorty’s finger broke like dry kindling and he bellowed like a stuck hog. He still hung onto that pistol, though, so I had to give him some credit. I also had to shove that .45 back into his face hard enough to shatter his teeth and split his cheek. Then I pulled again and got the pistol free. Before he could step back or raise his hands to his busted mouth, I slapped him in the face with the pistol.
Well, that played hob with my hand. I felt the hammer bite into my hand and hot blood streamed across my palm and fingers. With a curse, I threw the pistol into the water between the dock and Wide Bertha and focused on the tall guy ’cause High Pockets had come alive by then. I only had him by the throat at that point and he busted himself free by dropping his arm on my elbow.
I surrendered the hold. Wasn’t no way I was gonna hang onto it no how. He must have expected me to back up to get away from him, but instead of backing up, I took a step toward him and raised my hands to block the way Father Tim taught me at Our Lady of the Glass Jaw.
My right fist was bloody as all heck and throbbing to beat the band, but I loaded it up while I jabbed High Pockets in the snoot. Twice. Both times his head rocked back like it was on a swivel. He was quick to tuck his chin back into his chest and not leave it out there for target practice, though.
I circled to his left, staying away from his power, while I figured out what he had. Somebody had taught him a little bit about fisticuffs, but it wasn’t enough to handle me. I batted away a couple of his jabs, staying light on my feet and moving. I also had to keep an eye on Shorty in case he decided to wade back in.
High Pockets figured to paste me with a haymaker, gambling he could drive a punch through my defense. I slipped the punch, let his fist sail past my left ear, then stepped in again and drove a hard right deep into his ribs. The wind whooshed out of him and blew hot against my left shoulder.
Stumbling back, fighting to get his breath back and stay on his feet, High Pockets looked like he was gonna be sick. I didn’t give him a chance. I jabbed him in the face again, knocking his head back, and he was slower tucking his chin. I planted my feet, twisted my hips to get my weight into it, and connected with a hook to his jaw just below his ear that came up from my toes.
Something popped and sounded pretty bad. Then High Pockets stood a little straighter and tried to hold up his hands. His eyes glazed and his legs turned to rubber. He sank to the ground and landed on his knees before falling forward onto his face.
Shorty swore at me, lisping a little on account of his battered mouth. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. The business end of the
knife came open in a twinkle of reflected sunlight. He waved the switchblade easily, and I surmised he was maybe a better knifeman than he was a pistoleer. Or maybe he was just past hesitating about how far to take the fracas.
I grinned at him in spite of the fact that guys with knives that know how to use them have always give me the willies. Blocking a knifeman with your arms would just get you cut to pieces. I’d seen men gutted and left to die, and that was before I got to Chosin and saw what bayonets could do in the hands of a trained soldier.
“I’m gonna kill you, Irish.” The knife danced in his hand and I gave him a step as he moved toward me. Blood dripped from his chin and soaked into his shirt. “Gonna carve my name in your chest and watch you bleed out.”
“You sure you know how to spell it?”
I just waited a bit, getting his stride and his timing. Fist fighting was all about getting the measure of the other guy. And knowing what you was ready and able to give and take. If I was gonna get cut, I was gonna take him down in one shot so that was all the cutting that would be done.
A shot blasted and split the air over the docks.
“Hold it right there or I’m gonna cut you in half!”
I recognized the cap’n’s voice right off so I knew he’d be standing there at Wide Bertha’s rail and didn’t need to look. Shorty, though, he looked. And after he did, he stepped back and snarled an oath.
“You’re making a mistake, old man.” Shorty tried to remain fierce, but I could see he was shaking.
Cap’n Slidell was a tough old bird by any count. He was wide and hard, looking like he ran to fat, but it was all hard muscle meant to lift and tote. A black cap’n’s hat slouched over his gray head. His face was seamed from fighting the sea and battling men. A knife scar bisected one of the wooly gray eyebrows that looked like caterpillars hanging from his thick forehead. He wore dungarees and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves hacked off. Smoke trailed from the stubby cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth.