Caged Warrior (9781423186595)

by Sitomer, Alan Lawrence

  He tried three times for an RNC in Round Two, but each time I somehow managed to avoid getting caught. After I’d broken out of his third attempt and ended up in his half guard, Seizure smiled at me as if I were a puzzle he’d already figured out.

  “Problem is,” Seizure said, my blood speckled across his chest and shoulders, “you ain’t tenderized enough yet.”

  He punched me in the face with a stinging left and then wagged his tongue, sensing I was running out of gas. And even if I wasn’t running out of gas, he knew it was inevitable that at some point soon I would.

  To his way of thinking, maybe the RNC he so desperately wanted would come in Round Four? Or Round Eight? Time, he knew, was on his side, so Seizure became content to toy with me and play it up for the crowd. He waggled his head then did a little Muhammad Ali–style windmill with his right before shuffling his feet. I felt like a mouse being dropped as food into the tank of a boa constrictor. Boas never strike when their food is served to them; they let the mouse sweat, get nervous, and worry. Only when the snake is ready to eat does it make its final move.

  But once it does, the mouse gets devoured. Always.

  My bottom lip bled, I’m sure he’d cracked one of my ribs, and there was a ringing in my left ear which wouldn’t go away. Yet still I pressed on, jabbing, seeking safety in clinches, and most importantly, doing everything I could to avoid being trapped in a rear naked choke hold.

  When the bell rang for the end of the second round every fan in the arena could see I was being destroyed. I even got the sense a few of my own die-hard fans felt bad for me. Watching their favorite fighter get chopped down and diced up was a hard, ugly, brutal thing.

  “You’re taking too much abuse,” Klowner said as I sat in my corner.

  “I can take more.”

  “But why would you?” he asked.

  “Because I have to.”

  “B-b-b-be smart, M.D.,” Nate-Neck said. “Walk away from this before you c-c-c-can’t.”

  I thought carefully about my answer before responding. I hadn’t told either of them about the situation with my sister because I didn’t want to get them mixed up with the Priests in any way just for being associated with me. The less they knew, the better. And safer, I figured.

  “What you guys don’t realize is,” I said to Nate-Neck and Klowner, “is that my strategy is actually working.”

  I took a deep drink from a bottle of high-electrolyte water as they thought about what I’d just told them. A moment later all three of us broke out in a laugh.

  “This is your f-f-f-fuckin’ strategy?”

  “Oh, now it’s the kid with all the jokes, huh?” Klowner said shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

  Suddenly, Mr. Freedman appeared at the side of the cage and my eyes lit up.

  “You find her?”

  “This ain’t television, son,” he said. “When the FBI wants to find someone, they do.”

  “So that’s a yes?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s a yes.”

  I could tell by his tone that she was safe, too, and my eyes began to swell with tears. Fact is, it felt as if a boulder had just been lifted off my chest, and I could actually breathe once again.

  “Detroit just ain’t that big of a city,” he continued. “In fact, we found them both.”

  “Both?” I said.

  “Yep, we found Gemma and we found your mother. They’re out of harm’s way now, son. And they’re together.”

  My mother? Mr. Freedman must have seen the confused look on my face.

  “She didn’t run away, McCutcheon. He forced her to leave. Said he’d kill her if she got in the way of his championship lottery ticket. Literally, kill her.”

  I looked over at my dad. He held up three fingers for Round Three and then mouthed the word NOW to me.

  “She never wanted him to use you like this, son,” Mr. Freedman said as his eyes scanned the mayhem surrounding us. “And when she threatened to take you away, he threatened her life. Threatened Gemma’s life, too. Not knowing what else to do, having no one to call for help, she just ran.”

  Klowner poured some water over the back of my neck and then wiped my face with a towel. I rose from my chair, feeling a newfound determination in my fists.

  “It’s over, McCutcheon,” Mr. Freedman said. “Time to end this. You don’t have to go back out there, son. It’s all over.”

  My eyes narrowed and I shot a laser-beam stare across the cage at Seizure.

  “Time to end this, indeed.”

  The bell rang to begin Round Three, and before Mr. Freedman or Klowner or Nate-Neck could say another word, I bolted into the center of the cage like a cheetah attacking a gazelle.

  Bam-bam-bam! Three straight left-right-left combinations followed by a flying knee smash to Seizure’s chest stunned him. He wasn’t ready for a tornado to assault him at the top of the round, and for the first time in the match, Seizure was taking the big shots instead of delivering them.

  I blistered him with a forearm shiver that caught him flush in the teeth and followed with a leg kick to the knee that landed with the ferociousness of a tire iron. Blood began to flow from Seizure’s mouth, and the crowd erupted.

  “Holy shit,” yelled Weasel jumping to his feet. “Now we got a fucking fight!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was war. Back-’n-forth, back-’n-forth, back-’n-forth. Seizure was bigger than me, in better shape than I was, and also, he’d landed more shots, absorbed fewer blows, and had positioned himself so that almost any smart gambler would have been wise to pick him over me to eventually win the bout.

  But Seizure would have had to be willing to die to take me out that night. And though he was a great fighter, he wasn’t.

  People call it lots of things. Guts. Heart. Balls. Whatever the word, it was my absolute refusal to back down that opened up the window I needed to find the fatal flaw in Seizure’s defense. Having spied it, I rotated my shoulder and launched a missile, blistering him with the same straight right hand I’d hit him with six months ago back at Loco’z, the one that had nailed him right on the button.

  My fist hit his chin with the force of everything I had in my tank, and Seizure went down.

  “Get on him, M.D.,” Klowner yelled. “Get on him!”

  Seeing him stunned, eyes glazed, flat on his ass, I pounced, and with four minutes gone in Round Three, I locked Seizure in a guillotine choke hold, one of MMA’s most aggressive moves.

  Tracheal compression is downright nasty. Makes your head spin. Makes your heart race. Sets off an internal panic alarm that can’t be easily dealt with because it’s instinctual, the fear of losing access to oxygen being part of our innate survival instincts.

  Knowing I was right on the doorstep of the end of all this, I began to squeeze. No mercy.

  The crowd went wild. Seizure desperately tried to bring his arm up and dig it between my body and my leg to break the guard, but I knew it would take an elephant gun to get me off of him now.

  Nate-Neck and Klowner jumped in the air and banged on the side of the cage, exploding with excitement. People shot out of their chairs, craning their necks to see the turn of events. Everyone in the crowd stood, screamed, and strained to see the final climactic moments. I could feel Seizure begin to weaken. Tap out or lights-out would be his only options.

  I yanked on Seizure’s neck with every last fiber of strength I had inside of me. Then I saw my father.

  No one was cheering louder. No one was more exhilarated. No one would benefit more from my victory.

  “Finish that bitch, M.D.,” he screamed. “Killa instinct time!!”

  I paused and considered all the angles.

  Then, a moment later, I slightly lifted my finger.

  Not much, just sorta released my ring and pinkie finger, and though it might not sound like
a lot, it was enough to give Seizure the ability to break my grip and dismantle the guillotine choke hold in which he’d been trapped.

  Freed, he rolled away gasping for air, and a moment later we were once again on our feet, toe-to-toe.

  My father’s jaw dropped.

  “WHAT DA FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?”

  Yeah, I coulda ended it, but I realized that if I did end it then it would never end. At least for me, it wouldn’t. With my dad now hooked in with the Priests and me now being the biggest draw on the circuit, would they ever really let me just walk away? Wouldn’t they come after me again and again?

  Would Gem ever really be safe?

  No, only one way existed for me to get out from under their grip and get out for good. I knew exactly what had to be done.

  Seventy-five seconds later I found myself snared in an RNC, a rear naked choke hold.

  And Seizure began to squeeze.

  I didn’t tap. There was no point to tapping out. Seizure was gonna block the blood flow to my brain no matter what I did, regardless of whether I slapped the mat or not.

  My father ran to the side of the cage, panicked. “What are you doing?” he screamed. “What are you doing, M.D.?”

  My oxygen supply limited, the noise from the crowd dimming, my head feeling lighter and lighter, I uttered a final, last phrase to my dad before Seizure completely turned out my lights.

  “Applying leverage,” I said.

  He processed the information. My loss would mean my father would have to cover debts he had no way to pay, and the Priests certainly weren’t going to listen to any of his jawing about how he was good for it.

  Yep, it was lights-out for me, but that also meant it would be lights-out for Damien “Demon” Daniels, too.

  A small smile came to my lips, and a moment later I lost consciousness.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  My eyes blinked open.

  “It’s over, son,” Mr. Freedman said. “It’s all over.”

  In a daze, I raised my head, looked down and saw my toes. Somebody had stretched me out on a table in the back locker room, where only the fighters and members of their team were permitted.

  My body hurt all over. I was battered like I’d never been beaten before. But to my surprise, I was still alive. Had I suffered brain damage? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t feel like it.

  Nate-Neck and Klowner crowded around me.

  “You got h-h-h-heart, kid. More heart than any f-f-f-fighter I ever seen.”

  “Personally, I woulda liked to see a Round Four,” Klowner said. “I mean, in my opinion that fight coulda used a bit more action.”

  I smiled, but it hurt to laugh.

  “I just have one question.”

  Not sure whose voice it was, I turned my head and saw Seizure. He wore a white robe and held a blue ice bag up against a swollen left eye. His face puffed, he spoke softly.

  “Why?” Seizure asked me.

  I knew what he was talking about. Only we fighters inside the cage ever really know the truth about what goes on in a war. While not a soul in the arena knew I’d released my finger when I had Seizure trapped in the guillotine, he knew what I’d done and now he wanted to know why I didn’t finish him off when I had my chance.

  My guess was that this was the reason why Seizure didn’t go all the way and send me into convulsions. To do so woulda broken the warrior’s code.

  I struggled to sit up.

  “You’re gonna be a world champ, Seize,” I told him. “One day, you’re gonna be the world champ.”

  He nodded. This was the end of the line for me when it came to cage fighting. I was still a kid, and kids, if they have any brains in their head, should go to school.

  “Maybe I will be a world champ one day,” Seizure said. “But pound for pound, we’ll always know who was the best.”

  Seizure set down an envelope on the table beside me. Inside it were the night’s winnings. Between the gigantic payout from the largest crowd ever assembled at the Sat Nite Fights and the extra side money Seizure had bet on himself to win, the total cash in the envelope he passed me came to seventy thousand dollars.

  “That honor,” he said, “will always belong to Bam Bam.”

  Seizure extended his arm. I wasn’t sure if he could really afford to part with all the money he’d just given to me, but to mention anything about maybe me givin’ him some of it back would have been a sign of disrespect. Seizure was a big boy, and I could tell it meant a lot to him to handle his business as he saw fit, like it was a way of being honorable and respecting the sport or something.

  We slapped hands. Without another word Seizure walked out of the locker room, plans in his heart to train harder, work longer, become more disciplined, and one day win himself a belt.

  I showered, changed clothes, and soon found myself alone with Mr. Freedman in his car. The first thing I did was ask how he’d found Gemma and my mom, but he didn’t want to go there other than telling me, “I told you, son, I was FBI.”

  “Okay, but still,” I said. “Like how do I know the Priests won’t one day come after me again? Or Gem?”

  “They won’t,” he said.

  “But how do you know?”

  “’Cause I struck a deal,” he told me. “I told them I wouldn’t get the Feds involved in any investigation of their activities like the drug dealing, gambling, extortion, or prostitution in exchange for a guarantee that they’d leave both you and your sister alone.” Mr. Freedman scanned his eyes looking for a parking spot in midtown, but the streets were pretty busy. “Pretty simple when you think about it,” he continued. “Makes no sense to risk an entire criminal enterprise over two measly kids, now does it?”

  “And they agreed to this?” I said.

  “Not at first. They wanted one more thing. Something I think they felt entitled to get whether we struck a deal or not.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your father,” he said to me. “You kids, they told me, would be free, but Demon, once they caught up with him, was theirs to do with as they wished. These terms, I was informed, were nonnegotiable.”

  Mr. Freedman suddenly spied a spot on Woodward, made an illegal U-turn, and began to angle his car into the open parking space.

  “He snuck out of the arena in the chaos after the fight but with the way the Priests rule D-town, well…I suspect they’ve already caught up with him. I mean where could he possibly go?” He looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry for your loss, son.”

  My loss? Hmm, I’d have to think ’bout that. The idea that my father’s life had already been taken didn’t seem real. He was just here last night, and now today he wasn’t? Just hard to get my head around it all at the moment. But like every kid who grows up round East Seven Mile, I’d heard lots of stories about how the Priests deal with folks stupid enough to cross them. Urban legends and stuff. With the Priests, it was never death by gunshot. Never death by stabbing or drowning, either. Dying was never quick. The Priests went for long, slow, drawn-out pain where the victim could feel, could see, could taste their life oozing away. Mr. Freedman seemed to think my dad was already dead, though I had a feeling he wasn’t.

  But soon would be.

  “You got guts negotiating with them,” I said.

  “Aw, it’s not so hard,” he told me. “Not when you have leverage.”

  Having parked, Mr. Freedman unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out of the car. Me, I could hardly move. Butterflies the size of dragons fluttered in my stomach.

  I looked up at the tall condominium. It seemed like the kind of place where everyone used the elevators and no one walked the stairs, a nice place to live, with air conditioning, maybe a fountain in the lobby.

  I breathed in deep. It’d been years since I’d seen her, and the thought of now doing so had me scared.

  I opened the door and dragged my
self out of the car. Immediately I was smothered in a bear hug.

  “My little Doc.”

  Mom was crying, yet she looked more beautiful than I remembered.

  “God,” she said as she looked to the heavens and squeezed me even tighter. “Thank you for answering my prayers.”

  Two weeks later Kaitlyn Cummings won the Archer Award. I was there to see it. We all were.

  She iced it with the conferre ad communitas, the Latin part of her application that had asked about what her “contribution to the community” would be. Kaitlyn said, should the committee award her the prize, she’d transfer the entire scholarship to another student, keeping not a dime of it for herself. It would go to a younger kid who was only just beginning her education but someone who, with the help of a free ride to a top-tier school, would most certainly one day make, Kaitlyn felt, a great difference to the betterment of Detroit.

  “Because one person at a time is the only way to change anything anyway,” Kaitlyn had said.

  And that’s how Gemma became a student at Radiance.

  “So, like, I get to go to this school with my brother?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Kaitlyn answered. “You and me both.”

  My heart melted.

  “You look handsome, McCutcheon,” Mrs. Notley said to me. “This uniform, if you don’t mind me saying, fits you well.”

  Like a doting grandmother, she adjusted my collar.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Notley.”

  “Of course.” She removed her hand from my shirtsleeve, but I reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. Mrs. Notley paused, the strength of my grip surprising her.

  “No, thank you,” I repeated. “Thank you for being persnickety.”