Crave fa-2

by J. R. Ward

  “Okay,” Isaac said. “You hold my shit while I fight. We can start there.”

  Well, didn’t that call out the fuck-no in the guy’s face. “You can’t get in that ring. Between the flyer I saw and the arrest, you might as well have a GPS tracker shoved up your ass.”

  “I need the money.”

  “I have cash.”

  Isaac glanced over by the exit and realized that there were two big men hanging by the door. When they raised their hands in greeting, he asked, “They with you?”

  Jim seemed surprised. “Ah, yeah. They are.”

  “You starting your own crew? Going freelance?”

  “You could say that. But we were talking about you and how you’re not fighting.”

  To piss with that. He wasn’t stiffing that attorney for twenty-five grand, and the two thousand dollars he had left after that wasn’t going to get him far. And although Matthias could send a guy into the ring who could kill him in front of a hundred witnesses and still make it look like an accident, what choice did he have? He was no one’s charity case—he’d learned that long ago—and he wasn’t about to be in debt to Jim, either, just to settle an old score.

  In ten minutes, he could earn another a grand or two. And if he got shanked by Matthias’s second in command, the one who’d showed up last night? It didn’t really matter. He’d known the moment he bolted from the team that a funeral was waiting for him, except he was like someone with a mortal disease: The cure for going AWOL was a bitch and likely to kill him, but at least he was putting up a fight and dying on his own terms.

  Staying in XOps? Shit, he was dead even though he had a heartbeat.

  He was so hollow at this point he might as well be in his grave.

  “I’m fighting,” he said. “And I’ll give you my stuff to hold while I’m in the octagon. That’s as much help as I’ll accept tonight.”

  No reason to tell the guy how much cash was in the windbreaker. And Heron already knew about the guns—but clearly wasn’t of a mind to use them.

  “This is a huge mistake.”

  Isaac frowned. “Lot of people would have told you to leave Matthias out in that desert to die, but you brought him back because you had to—and you wouldn’t have let anyone talk you out of it. Same thing here. Either get on board or get out of my way.”

  A curse word. Then another. Finally, Jim took a last inhale on the cigarette and ground the butt out on the bottom of his combat boot. “Fine. But I will intercede—are we clear? You get in the ring with the wrong asswipe, I’m going to shut the fight down.”

  “Why the hell are you doing this?” Isaac said hoarsely.

  “Why the hell did you go out to find me and Matthias that night?”

  Memories of two years ago bubbled up and Isaac went back to the desert, back to the moment when the encrypted radio had squawked and he’d picked it up and heard Jim’s thready voice.

  Ten minutes was all it took to make the arrangements: medic to their tent, airlift out waiting, and a trauma team over the border, boom, boom, boom. And then he’d sat there and waited for about a minute and a half.

  The Land Rover he’d found had been parked with the keys in it and Isaac had gotten behind the wheel and gone gunning. What Jim hadn’t known was that when Matthias and he had left, Isaac had hung back and watched the direction they’d headed.

  Something just hadn’t seemed right about the trip out into the dunes: Nobody went anywhere alone with Matthias. It was like asking an Ebola patient to cough on you.

  Making big fat sweeps out from camp, he’d found them an hour later a good five miles away from where he’d started: In his night-vision goggles, he’d zeroed in on something moving slowly across a rise, and considering that trolls didn’t really exist, he could only assume it was a man hefting another man through the sand.

  As he’d driven over to them, he’d thought about how funny deserts were: Like their polar opposite, the ocean, at night they melded into the sky at the far distance, and it wasn’t until you had a reference point, like a shrub or a ship—or a dumb-ass idea like Jim’s savior shit—that you had visual confirmation the earth was in fact round, and not square.

  And that Heaven was not where you were.

  He’d been traveling without headlights and he didn’t turn them on. Instead, he took a white undershirt and held the thing out of the window, knowing that Jim would see it and hopefully not think it was the enemy. Fucker had been armed like a tank battalion when he’d left camp.

  As Isaac had eased to a halt, he’d gotten out with both hands fully visible and allowed Jim to approach. The guy had looked exhausted, but then he’d been carrying Matthias’s deadweight across his back for God only knew how many miles through the shifting sand.

  It had not been a surprise that Jim had glared at the knight-in-shining routine—in spite of their boss’s condition, which was clearly critical.

  Just passing through, Isaac had said. Thought I’d take you to dinner.

  With a shake, he came back to this night, here in . . . Where was he? Malden?

  His voice held the same exhaustion Jim’s had had way back when. “Don’t get yourself killed because of me, okay?”

  Jim muttered something that sounded like, A little late for that. But clearly, that hadn’t been the words.

  Forcing his head back into the game, Isaac left the past and his emotions in the dust, his focus shifting to the present as he turned away and started walking into the entrance to the building.

  As he stepped inside, Jim and the guy’s two buddies were tight on him and he had to wonder why Heron wasn’t wearing a hat to hide his face or anything to disguise who he was. Dumb son of a bitch. Gets free . . . only to come back in.

  Crazy.

  Fucking nuts.

  But he had his own problems to worry about, and God knew, Jim was an adult and therefore allowed to be a moron when it came to his own life.

  While Isaac went along, the rear hallway of the abandoned office building was an obstacle course, thanks to countless empty drywall buckets and a thousand half-drunk bottles of Mountain Dew and Coke. But it had been a while since anyone had lifted a finger here—there was dust all over the debris.

  Clearly, the money had run out just as the screwdriver-and-monkey-wrench crowd had come in: Naked electrical wires snaked across the unhung ceiling, along with partially completed HVAC ducts and plumbing pipes. Illumination came from battery-operated lanterns placed every five feet on the floor, and the air was cool to the point of being cold. At least until they got into the huge lobby of the place. In spite of the cathedral ceiling, the fifty or so guys milling around on the raw concrete floor kicked up the temp, thanks to body heat.

  It was clear why this was a perfect place to fight: The architects had planned some kind of glass extravaganza for the front entrance, but like so much else, it hadn’t been completed. Instead of a whole lot of see-through panes, there were plywood sheets nailed onto the girders.

  So the lighting and the crowd were hidden.

  The octagon had been set up in the center of the space, and as soon as Isaac walked into the crowd, the cheering started. As strangers slapped him on the back and congratulated him for getting out of jail, cell phones flipped up to all kinds of ears, the network going to town, with news that he was good to go even after the bust.

  The promoter rushed up to him. “Holy fuck, they’re going wild already! This rocks . . . !”

  Blah, blah, blah.

  Isaac scanned the faces as he went over to the far corner and settled in to wait. As Jim eased into a lean beside him, he found himself saying, “Last night, an old friend of ours showed up.”

  “Who.”

  “And what do you know,” Isaac said grimly, “he’s back.”

  Over where the bouncers were taking the gambling money and the fighting fees, Matthias’s number two was getting a wallet out of his pocket. As cash changed hands, the guy looked over and smiled like a crocodile.

  Then he pointed right at
Isaac’s chest.

  “You’re not getting in that ring,” Jim bit out, stepping in front and blocking the sight line.

  Isaac stared over Heron’s heavy shoulder, right into the face of the man who’d been sent to kill him. “Yeah. I am.”

  CHAPTER 10

  It was past ten o’clock when Grier parked her Audi out in Malden and cut the engine. She’d manuevered the sedan around on the packed dirt so that it was facing out and was away from most of the other cars—although it wasn’t as if the “parking lot” had any dedicated exit or entrance or spaces.

  As she’d driven by the address Louie had given her over the phone, she hadn’t been sure she was in the right place. The office park had been empty as far as she could tell, the dozen or so matching five-stories spiraling off from an unlit main drive like schoolchildren lined up for a head count. Evidently, the development had been intended for high-tech companies, at least according to the sign that read, MALDEN TECHNOLOGICAL PARK. Instead, it was a ghost town.

  Louie never steered her wrong, though, so she’d turned in and gone all the way to the back . . . and found about twenty-five trucks and cars behind the building farthest from the main road. Made sense. If she were trespassing to put on an illegal cage fight, she’d have made sure she was as hidden as possible, too.

  Getting out of her car, she went over to the fire door that was propped open by a cinder block, and walked in. The deep, buzzing growl of a crowd of men boiled down the hallway, the testosterone forming a wall she practically had to push through. As she headed toward the sound, she wasn’t worried about the meathead quotient—which was clearly going to be high. She had Mace in one pocket and a stun gun in the other: The former was legal in the state of Massachusetts if you had a valid firearm identification card and she did. The latter . . . well, she’d pay the five-hundred-dollar fine, assuming she ever had to use the thing.

  If she could walk into a crack house in New Bedford at midnight, she could handle this.

  As she emerged into an atrium of sorts and got a gander at the six-foot-high, chain-link walls of the fighting octagon, she was well aware she could have just called the cops on the match tonight—but then Isaac, assuming he showed up, would either be arrested again or take off. And in either of those cases, she might not have a chance to get to him. Her goal was to have him stop and think long enough to see what he was doing. Running away was never the solution, and if he went that route, he’d have a warrant out for his arrest, more charges against him, and the beginnings of a record.

  Assuming he didn’t already have one: That murder in Mississippi worried her—but it was, like all of his other stuff, something for the proper authorities to deal with. As his defense attorney, she had to try to get him to stay and face the music on his current charges. It was the right thing for society—the right thing for him as well.

  And if she couldn’t get him to see the light? Then she was going to resign from the case and tell the authorities everything she knew about him. Including the guns and the details of that security system. She wasn’t going to become an accessory to crime in her pursuit of doing the right thing—

  She froze as she saw her client, her hand coming up to the base of her throat.

  Isaac Rothe was standing alone in the far corner, and though the chain links of the cage separated them, there was no mistaking who it was . . . and no diminishing the effect of him: He was a menace, his size and the hard expression on his face turning the other men into little boys. And whereas she’d been struck by his politeness back at the jail, now she got a true picture of who he was.

  The man was a killer.

  Her heart beat fast, but she didn’t falter. She was here to do a job of sorts, and damn it, she was going to talk with him.

  Just as she stepped forward, some smarmy guy with gold teeth monkeyed up one side of the cage. “And now . . . what you’re waitin’ for!”

  Isaac took off his sweatshirt and his combats, leaving them on the floor, and then he prowled the ring, his chin down, his eyes glaring out from under his brows. His shirt stretched tightly across his pecs, and his arms were carved with power even as they hung loosely at his sides. Heading into the fight, he was all muscle and bone and vein, his shoulders so wide he looked like he could bench-press the damn building.

  As he clawed up the cage and landed on bare feet inside, the roar of the crowd rang her head like a bell and turned her spine into an adrenaline conductor. In the glow of the eight camping lanterns that hung off the support poles, her client was part gladiator, part animal, a deadly package ready to do what he’d clearly been trained for.

  Unfortunately, the opponent who swung over the top and landed across from him was nearly a mirror image of him: same brutal build, same height, same deadly look—even dressed the same way, his muscle shirt showing plenty of the snake tattoo that wound its way around his shoulders and neck. And while the audience hollered and closed in, the two circled each other, looking for an opportunity, arms and chests and thighs tensed.

  Isaac went in first, his body swinging around, his foot snapping out and catching the other man in the side with a blow so vicious, she was willing to bet his target’s ancestors felt it in their graves.

  It all happened so fast. The two fell into a rhythm of strikes and dodges, their muscle shirts quickly dampening around the neck and down the back, the buttery yellow lamplight making it seem as if they were fighting in a ring of fire. The contacts, when made, were the kind that sounded like gunshots, the hard, resonant impacts carrying over the churning, restless crowd. Blood flew—from the cut on Isaac’s head that was quickly reopened and then from a split in the opponent’s lip. Neither fighter seemed to care, but the kibitzers loved it sure as if they were vampires—

  A hand on her ass whipped her head around.

  Moving back sharply, she glared at the guy with the wandering palm. “I beg your pardon.”

  He seemed momentarily surprised, and then his bouncing stare narrowed. “Hey . . . what you doing here?”

  The question was posed as if he’d recognized her.

  Then again, he could have been talking to Santa Claus and taking it seriously—his face was slick with sweat and half of it twitched like he had an electrical short in his cheek. He was obviously tweaking—and God knew she was an expert in making that diagnosis.

  “Excuse me,” she said, walking away.

  He followed. Just her luck, the one idiot in the place who was more interested in hitting on her than in the fight he’d come to see.

  He grabbed her arm, pulling at her. “I know you—”

  “Get your hand off me—”

  “What’s your name—”

  Grier snapped herself free. “None of your business.”

  He jumped at her in the space between one heartbeat and the next: The three feet between them abruptly became three inches. “You’re wicked touchy. You think you’re better than me, bitch?”

  Grier didn’t budge her body, but took the stun gun out and slipped the safety pin into the grip. Putting the weapon within striking distance of the front of his jeans, she bit out, “If you don’t get the hell away from me, I’m going to shoot six hundred and twenty-five thousand volts through your jewels. On three. One . . . two . . .”

  Before she got to trigger time, he shuffled back and held quaky hands up. “I didn’t mean . . . I just thought I knew you. . . .”

  As he wandered away, she kept the stun gun out and took a deep breath. Maybe she had met him during her searches for Daniel—but he was clearly out of his mind and she was in enough hot water already.

  Refocusing on the ring, she looked up—

  Just in time to see Isaac go down like a stone.

  Fighting Matthias’s second in command was a pleasure. Isaac had never trusted or liked the guy, and having a shot at the bastard had been an unspoken career goal.

  Ah, the irony. Just as he was getting out, he got his chance—

  Wham!

  As right hooks went, the fu
cking thing was a bulldozer, and it caught Isaac square in the jaw, kicking his skull back and causing all kinds of trouble: Given that the brain was nothing but a loose sponge in a snow globe, his mental matter went haywire, banging around its hard bone home and rendering him senseless and off balance.

  All things considered, he’d been more worried about a weapon of the metal variety, but knuckles worked. Fuckin’ hell, they worked—

  That was the last thought he had as the floor of the octagon leaped up to greet him, its hi-how’re-ya just as much a rocket as his former comrade’s fist.

  Good thing he was the Energizer Bunny.

  He was up a second after he back-flatted—even though his legs were numb and loose and his vision was like a TV that needed its knobs adjusted. Lunging, he was all instinct and will, proof that the mind could override the body’s pain receptors—at least for a little while. He tackled his opponent around the waist and drove him into the ground; then flipped him over onto his stomach and wrenched his arm back, pulling the thing like it was rope.

  On a crack, something gave out and Isaac abruptly had to catch himself from falling.

  The crowd went nuts, all kinds of fuckin’ A ricocheting around the half-finished lobby until a shrill whistle cut through the roar. At first, he assumed the sound was just an extension of the chaos in his head, but then he realized that someone had stepped into the ring. It was the promoter, and for once, the bastard’s face was a little pasty.

  “I’m calling the fight,” he yelled as he grabbed Isaac’s wrist and yanked it into the air. “Winner!” Leaning in, he hissed, “Let go of him.”

  Isaac couldn’t figure out what the guy’s problem was—

  His eyes finally focused properly, and well, what do you know. Matthias’s number two needed an X-ray, a cast, and maybe a couple of screws: His humerus protruded out of his skin like a snapped-off, bloodied stick, the arm broken and then some.

  Isaac jumped off and backed up against the chain link, his breath pumping in and out of his mouth. His opponent was on his feet nearly as quickly and he held the hand that flopped casually, like he had nothing more exciting than a bug bite wrong with him.