by Jack Tunney
The friendly desk clerk was easy prey for Tonda the Jungle Queen, who got the key to the boys’ room claiming she had left her perfume on the big boy’s nightstand.
Once inside, Vicky found the satchel hidden in the same vent through which she’d heard Mammoth and Dick’s plan. After checking to make sure it was still brimming with money, she snuck it out the hotel’s back door.
She managed to run into exactly no one as she made her way back around to the front of the hotel, where Mammoth’s car had been parked since they’d arrived. She took the spare key from under the rear passenger wheel well. She knew it was there because she’d seen Mammoth get it when he locked the keys in the car while they were stopped to use the bathroom in Springfield. She locked the satchel in the trunk and pulled the car around to the back of the hotel.
The car and the money would be waiting to help her, and hopefully Ben, get to Chicago and George.
If neither of them made it, it might just confound Mammoth and Dick long enough to get them caught by the police, or killed by Senor Gonzales.
She locked the car and slipped the key into her overcoat. A cop on the beat gave her the look over as she hurried away from the car. However, a few wide strides and a look at Tonda’s legs gave him a smile and a reason to forget anything he was thinking.
Everything was in place. Everything except an idea of how to warn Ben, or get either of them out of Arena Mexico alive when she did.
The answer to one of those things came to her as she slipped in one of the arena’s side doors.
In the ring, Mammoth went for his big clothesline, but Ben ducked it and threw a forearm shiver to the side of Mammoth’s head that drove the big caveman into the corner.
Ben, it turned out, was a much better wrestler than he’d shown that first night. Things can get understandably sloppy when the woman you had an affair with in Mamaroneck turns up at ringside, three years later, dressed as a jungle queen while you’re lying low as a champion wrestler in Mexico City.
Ben’s movements were crisp and his power was obvious in everything he did in the ring. Vicky shook her head. It was a terrible shame this was almost certainly Ben’s last match, one way or the other.
Ben battered Mammoth in the corner with a series of forearm smashes, each getting a bigger cheer from the crowd than the last. On the outside, Dick, in his referee stripes, screamed for him to let Mammoth out. The inside ref, a short, round, bald man, counted toward the disqualification.
Ben stepped back at the count of four. Mammoth charged out of the corner, attempting another clothesline, but Ben ducked. Mammoth turned around, his face a mask of surprise, and Ben scooped him up for a big body slam in the middle of the ring.
There it is. This is it.
She looked through the ropes to the other side of the ring.
Dick met her gaze and smiled.
Tonda hopped up on the apron, pulled herself to her feet and waved at Aguila Gigante. “Yoo-hoo. Over here, champ.”
Ben, playing his role perfectly, looked up at her quizzically, his masked head cocked to one side.
Mammoth rolled over to the ropes where Dick waited.
The inside referee moved toward Tonda, trying to warn her off the apron.
Tonda motioned the champion to her. “C’mere, big boy. I got to tell you something.”
Ben, with actual question in his eyes, gave her a tiny shrug.
He’s not going to come over. And who the hell could blame him after everything you put him through?
Vicky opened her mouth to call out to Ben, but the crowd around them erupted in a cacophonous rage.
Mammoth had the blade.
Which is all it appeared to be; a straight razor wrapped in tape.
More than enough.
The inside referee was right next to her yelling, but Vicky couldn’t hear him. She snaked her arm out in a come-hither gesture at Aguila Gigante, as Tonda would, but she caught Ben’s eye with hers and captured his attention.
Just like she had done that first night in Mamaroneck.
Mammoth was getting to his feet. A glint of light flashed off the blade in his hand.
The crowd was screaming its outrage and warnings to its champion, who couldn’t hear anything.
But he didn’t have to.
Vicky pulled the top rope up, put Tonda’s thigh along the middle rope and drew up the jungle queen’s leopard print skirt.
Across her upper thigh, in black ink from a marker she’d stolen from the matchmaking board, were the only words she’d had time to scrawl.
Blade is real. Kill you.
Behind his mask, Ben’s eyes went wide. He turned around just in time to take a deep cut across his forearm from an overhand swipe meant for his spine.
Chaos.
Ben’s blood and members of the crowd soaked the ring in equal measure within seconds. Vicky dropped to the floor, unsteady on her slingbacks, and pushed her way toward a side aisle. A fat man in a cheap suit and a little girl bowled into her and she hit the concrete. She managed to scramble under the ring before the she could be trampled.
The noise penetrated her skull as feet and bodies pounded the mat right above her head. She crawled over wood beams and extra chairs to the adjacent side of the ring. She whipped up the ring skirt and, seeing an opening between the legs of two security guards, she dashed out from under the ring.
The guards, it turned out, were standing over Ben, trying to get him to the main aisle.
His mask was half torn away from his head and his forearm was covered with thick, dark blood, but Ben was on one knee, trying to get to his feet.
Vicky rushed around him, shouldering a thin man in a blue t-shirt aside, and grabbed Ben’s uninjured arm.
“Senorita!”
Vicky looked up and locked eyes with one of the security guards trying to protect Ben. It was Jose, who nodded past her. “Go!” He looked at Ben, then back at her. “Go now!”
Vicky looked over her shoulder. There was an emergency exit up a short aisle behind them.
“C’mon.” She pulled Ben’s good arm. “This way.”
He looked up, saw where she was leading him and nodded, though he couldn’t quite get to his feet. He looked gray.
Mammoth, whipping the taped blade every which way, careened into Jose and the other security guard and start cutting.
Vicky dragged the stumbling Ben over a fallen old man and under the arch created by two tall men trying to choke each other. They got to the metal emergency exit door and Vicky shouldered it open on the third try.
A pitch black hallway lay on the other side. Both were laboring to breathe, but Ben was mostly moving under his own power. They got far enough down the hall to see another door in the distance.
“C’mon. C’mon, it’s here.” Vicky, leading Ben by the elbow, rammed the other door with her hip and the two of them spilled out of Arena Mexico and toppled into trash cans in a back alley.
Vicky scrambled to look at Ben’s arm. “Let me see.”
The wound wasn’t long, only an inch or two, but it was very deep and had obviously opened a vessel. Ben cradled his arm against his stomach as he got to his feet. “It’s alright. Let’s just get out of here.” He pulled the remainder of Aguila Gigante’s mask from his head.
“Well, well, well. What do you know?”
Vicky and Ben both stood ramrod straight.
A man they both knew, flanked by two others, stood between them and the mouth of the alley. He had a scar like Vicky’s, which ran from the corner of his mouth to his eye. He held his left shoulder and elbow at an odd angle. There were a pair of pointed hooks strapped to a harness over his left hand.
Vicky backed away from the man, stepping closer to Ben as she did. “No…oh, no.”
It was Sharp.
A close associate of the Mamaroneck gangster Joe Barney, Sharp was the reason Vicky had her scar.
In return, Ben was the reason for Sharp’s scar and for the way Sharp had to hold his left arm. The men at Sha
rp’s shoulders held pistols. Sharp held a knife.
The knife.
The one that tore through Vicky’s face when Joe found out she was skimming from his prostitution ring in the hopes of making a getaway with George.
Sharp, who had a face like scissors even before the scar, took a step forward. “I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. In fact, I didn’t believe it when Jimmy here told me.”
“I told you,” the man over Sharp’s left shoulder said.
“I didn’t believe until just now. We’ve not only found old Ben Harman, but the queen slut who started it all. And both of you rasslers?” He threw his head back with a crackle. “What’re the odds?”
Ben took a step toward Vicky, reaching across her with his good arm.
Sharp shook his head. “You see this, boys? Painfully reminiscent of the last time we were all together. You remember that Harman? Slut, you remember? The night I got all this?” He gestured at his face and arm with the tip of the knife.
Vicky drew closer to Ben. His ragged, heavy breathing rattled in her chest.
“I gotta say.” Sharp shook his head. “The story of how you two scumbags became rasslers in Mexico has got to be a good one, but I been on the road too long and I wanna go home. Guess some things are gonna be left unsaid. I’ll tell you one thing though, Harman.” He smiled at the knife in his hand. “There’s a reason these spic rasslers never take off their masks in public. In your case, it’s so nobody will see you carrying this pig to the car.” He pointed the knife at Vicky. “Took me four days to get here, but I feel like this is gonna be worth it.”
Sharp flipped the knife in his hand, pinched the tip and cocked it back over his head.
***
“What the hell?”
Sharp and his men looking past Vicky and Ben to find Mammoth and Dick, both with scrapes and bruises, standing in front of the emergency exit door. Mammoth pointed at Sharp. “Who the hell are these guys?”
“Unimportant.” Sharp shook his head. “What is important is I came a long way to kill these two particular people for ruining my former boss’s operation and killing him, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He motioned at Mammoth with four fingers. “So get lost, sideshow.”
Mammoth, still holding the taped blade, shook his hairy head. “The girl you can have, but this guy is worth ten G’s to us. We’re not gonna just stand here and let you—”
Sharp rolled his eyes. “Jimmy.”
Jimmy stepped forward. Vicky and Ben dropped to the pavement.
“Now wait a minute,” Mammoth said, holding up his hands. The taped blade clattered to the pavement.
Jimmy shot Mammoth through the lungs and throat. The big wrestler snapped back against Arena Mexico and sputtered and gurgled his way to the ground.
Dick screamed and reached for the metal door, but there was no outside handle. Jimmy shot Dick in the back three times and he fell into a pile of flattened cardboard boxes.
Vicky and Ben stood up, grabbing at each other’s arms. Ben swallowed, shook his big, ridged head. “No matter what happens, you know I…”
Sharp hoisted the knife again. “Here we go.”
Sharp whipped the knife at Vicky’s face, but Ben pulled her to his chest and rolled his back toward Sharp.
The knife slid easily between Ben’s ribs and lodged in his back up to the hilt.
Ben grunted and lurched forward, shoving Vicky to the pavement between his legs.
Jimmy leveled his pistol, but Ben flung a trash can lid, which hit the gun and then Jimmy’s face. The shot ricocheted off Arena Mexico somewhere over everyone’s head, and Jimmy collapsed to the pavement.
Sharp moved in on Ben, putting himself between him and the other gunman.
Vicky crab-walked back toward the building.
Sharp swung his hooks in a big arch and buried them in Ben’s chest, but they were stuck there and he couldn’t pull them out. Ben grabbed Sharp around the throat with his left hand and broke Sharp’s orbital bone with a bloody overhand right.
The force of the blow drove Sharp back so hard the straps on the harness broke and he toppled into a storage crate with his hooks still in Ben’s bare chest. Sharp’s head bounced off the edge of the crate and he didn’t get up.
The second gunman watched Sharp fall, then looked up to take his shot.
Ben closed the distance between them and threw two big left hooks and a right into the man’s ribs, doubling him over. Ben wrenched Sharp’s hooks from his chest and, screaming, buried them in the back of the man’s skull. The gunman hit the pavement face-first and quivered a few times, then laid still.
Ben, bleeding from his arm, chest and back, staggered back away from his fallen enemies and collapsed.
“Ben? Ben!” Vicky pushed to her feet near Dick’s body and stumbled to Ben’s side.
He was on his side and tried to roll to his back to face her. “Are you okay?” he said.
“Yes. Oh, Ben. Just hold on.” She took the knife hilt protruding from his back in her fingertips and tested it for movement. There wasn’t any. Her eyes flooded. “I don’t think I can take this out, baby.”
“I don’t think…” He sort of smiled. “It matters if you do.”
“No.” She grabbed at his shoulders. “There is no way. We didn’t come this far to lose each other now.” Her grip became a gentle squeeze.
One of Ben’s bony, gnarled hands, the one not covered in his own blood, found its way to hers and patted it. The broken bones inside it ground against each other with the movement. “Just go. Go now.”
“I’m sorry.” She clawed her way up to bring herself face-to face with him. “I’m so sorry for everything. Please, Ben. I’m so sorry.” She pressed her head to his chest and covered the hook wounds with her hand.
“Get George.” His broken hand stroked the back of her head. “If you get George, we win.”
She pulled her head out from under his hand and looked into his eyes.
There were open, but he was gone.
***
Vicky stood up, her chest tight and heaving, and considered the alley of dead men around her. She staggered back away from Ben’s body and looked around at the others.
“Tonda?”
She wheeled around, hands clasped to her chest.
Daniel braced the metal door open with a garbage can and crept into the alley. He looked at the bodies of Mammoth and Dick as he passed them. He shook his head at Vicky. “Dios mio, Tonda. What happened?”
“I did this.” She gestured at the blood and death around her. “I did all of this.”
He scratched his head. “I don’t see how…get down!”
There was still five feet of space between them. Daniel closed it in two steps, then used a third to jump up onto a crate and launch himself from it.
He sailed past Vicky’s shoulder and tackled Jimmy, who managed to get a shot off before they both hit the ground.
Vicky took a step toward the pile of Daniel and Jimmy, but Sharp lurched forward from his position in front of the storage crate and grabbed her ankle.
Daniel, a small trench the width of a bullet dug through his triceps, pulled Jimmy up by the collar and buried a fist in his face.
Vicky pivoted her hips and smashed Sharp across his already broken face with her slingback. He fell back against the crate, but immediately tried to regain his feet.
“Go!” Daniel pulled Jimmy up by the collar again only to slam the back of his head into the pavement. “I got this one. Run!”
Vicky retreated toward the open door as Sharp used the crate to push himself to his feet. He lumbered toward her. “Dead…so dead.”
With no time to push the trash can away from the door, Vicky ran through it and, by the glow of the streetlights outside, saw the hallway through which she and Ben escaped was now clogged with people falling over each other trying to escape the riot in Arena Mexico.
There was another passage to her right.
Vicky followe
d it with Sharp’s heavy steps thudding behind her.
She reached the end of the dark hallway. Dead end.
Groping around in the darkness at the end of the hallway, Vicky’s hands closed over a metal bar. She tried to pull it off the wall but it wouldn’t budge. She took one hand from the bar and kept feeling. There was another bar above it and another above that.
Rungs. A ladder.
Vicky cleared the tenth rung as Sharp arrived at the end of the hall. He reached up and tried to grab at the sound of her hands and shoes on the rungs, but came up empty and started climbing.
Thirty or forty rungs later, Vicky’s head hit a metal plate. She felt around it with one hand and there was a latch to one side. She unhooked it and pushed up on the plate. It swung open.
Vicky climbed out of the hatch before Sharp could get to her, but she didn’t have enough time to close it before he started to emerge. She scrambled to her feet and glanced around.
A catwalk, maybe three feet wide, with rails on both sides and a 50-foot drop beyond. She peered over the railing.
Throngs of people, and some wrestlers, still teemed all over Arena Mexico. Most battering and clawing at whomever was next to them, everyone screaming. They were everywhere.
Everywhere except the ring.
The ring stained with Ben Harman’s blood.
“Nowhere else to go, pig.” Sharp steadied himself against the catwalk railing. “Nowhere else to run.”
Vicky glanced over her shoulder. There may have been a door at the far end of the catwalk, but it was too dark to tell.
Also, it didn’t matter whether there was a door there or not.
Sharp lunged for her arm, but Vicky sidestepped him and brought her elbow down on the back of his head.
“George,” she said.
With Sharp on his hands and knees in front of her, Vicky raised her foot and drove the heel of her slingback between his shoulder blades. It broke off and stayed buried.
“Daniel.”
Sharp let out a guttural moan. Vicky grabbed him up by the back of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. She grabbed her right wrist with her left and locked her right hand in a claw around Sharp’s windpipe.
He slapped her hand away.
“Who are you kidding with this crap?” He straightened up. “I’ll tell you. Once a dumb whore, always a—”