The lot had a big old cement wall all the way around it, maybe ten or twelve feet high, and there was only one way in or out – a large iron gate, which would be swung shut and locked when one of the fights was about to take place. It kept the fighters and the bettors in, and the staff and the police out; not that most of the staff minded, as they saw it as an outlet for pent-up aggression that might otherwise spill out inside the factory. They’d rather things were handled in the parking lot, where their multi-billion-dollar business wouldn’t be disrupted.
I still remembered my first fight there. It had been for a hundred dollars, and I knew I was getting a raw deal; the guys running the show were surely pocketing thousands from the massive gambling racket that went hand-in-hand with it.
My opponent was called Dusty Reeves, and I knew him from the factory; we sometimes pulled the same shifts, and I’d shared a beer or two with him over the past few months. He was a decent kid, but he fancied himself as something of a tough guy, and was using this set-up to prove himself.
He was fairly big, and definitely looked the part; he had a solid foundation of strength from the manual labor he’d been involved in most of his life, chiseled into shape by heavy gym work. He supposedly had a rep as a bit of a bad boy, was constantly getting into trouble in the local saloons, but I knew he was still just a kid, and out of his depth.
We were both ushered into the cement parking lot, into a space cleared between the cars; all around us were guys from the factory, sitting in cars, sitting on cars, or else standing in the crowd, straining to get a look. I could feel the excitement in the air, the bloodlust.
To be fair, I experienced it too; I’d been out of action for too long, and it was only then that I realized I’d missed the thrill of action, the buzz of adrenaline. Reeves was strutting around just a few feet away from me, playing to the crowd, shirt off, flexing his muscles, sounding his war-cries.
But I knew the man didn’t have the first idea what war really was.
By the time the organizer – there wasn’t a referee – told us to go, I’d worked myself up into a frenzy of anger and misplaced rage. Inside, at least. On the outside I seemed calm and unfazed, but the adrenaline was raging within me, heating me up, making me ready.
He rushed in, and I met him with a thrusting front kick to the gut that dropped him to his knees, his eyes wide; he couldn’t get the breath back into his body and he started to panic, to clutch at his gut, his throat. And then I moved in fast and caught him flush with a solid uppercut that threatened to take his head clean off those muscular shoulders.
Dusty Reeves fell unconscious to the floor, the crowd roared its approval, and I picked up my hundred bucks. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing; and as I took on more and more fights, I was able to send more money to Tom’s family, while also saving up a little.
I hoped to visit my godson when I had enough put aside; he was getting worse, and I desperately wanted to see him.
But it wasn’t to be; the trailer I was renting was burglarized, and they took the thousand dollars I’d put aside, every last cent of it.
I went on the rampage after that, found out who’d stolen the money, and beat it back out of them, but by the time I’d got it back, it was too late. My godson was dead, and I’d failed in my promise to my dead friend. I didn’t protect his family, hadn’t been there for them.
I’d failed.
But that failure made me stronger, possessed me to change my life, to change my path. I knew what I was made for, and it changed me into who I am today. And I still charge one thousand dollars a job, in memory of that boy.
The guys fighting behind the steel mesh brought those times – long hidden in the depths of memory – back to me in vivid Technicolor.
But I knew I had to be in the present, and my eyes were on the fighters now, quickly analyzing them.
One of the fighters was a Latino, youthful muscle turned to fat in his middle age, but he was fast, with a boxer’s movement, slick and efficient.
The other guy was black, still young, and strong as a bull, his neck at least nineteen inches around. He was strong, but slower than his opponent.
“Latino guy inside two minutes,” I said, and Bush raised an eyebrow, and turned back to the fight.
“We’ll see,” Bush said. “Jackson looks strong, to me.”
As Bush finished the sentence, the Latino slipped a heavy right hand from the guy who must have been Jackson, and unleashed a sweet shovel hook into the liver.
Jackson crumpled, but didn’t go down; he was too tough for that. Instead, he used the pain to spur him on and swung again at the Latino, even more wild this time. The Latino dodged it, then moved slickly again and again as the shots came thick and heavy. And then – when he was backed up against the cage with nowhere to go – he slipped one last punch and launched one of his own, a big overhand right that connected perfectly on Jackson’s jaw. He was out before he hit the floor.
“I don’t have a watch,” I said to Bush, “but I think that was under two minutes.”
Bush tutted as he turned to me. “There you go with that mouth of yours again. Hasn’t it got you into enough trouble already?”
“So what happens now?” I asked him.
“Just wait there a second,” Bush instructed me, then banged on the mesh. “We’ll use Gutierrez,” he shouted to one of the other guards. “Take care of him. And put Jackson in segregation, make sure he doesn’t talk to anyone for a while.”
“Okay,” the guard shouted back.
“And bring out Dafoe,” Bush shouted next, patting me on the shoulder with what seemed almost like pride. “I’ve got his opponent right here.”
Ten minutes passed, and then I was behind the steel mesh myself, stripped to the waist and squaring off against the man called Dafoe.
Another black guy, this one wasn’t as big as Collins, but still heavier – and a lot younger – than me. His hands were big, the knuckles thick, and his jaw looked solid.
We’d just have to see about that.
I’d asked Bush what the rules were, and he’d looked at me in amusement. “It’s an illegal, unlicensed fight hidden in the basement of a maximum-security prison,” he’d said. “You figure them out.”
In hindsight, I supposed it was a stupid question.
But at the same time, fights like this could be problematic. It wasn’t a combat sport as such, and yet it wasn’t a full-blown street fight either. In the real thing, you had to deal with the possibility that weapons might be involved, along with other people – some of them trying to break it up, others trying to stab you in the back when you weren’t looking. I’d been dealing with the real thing for years now, and it required a constant awareness of your surroundings, a very wide focus of attention; if you just concentrated on the threat in front of you, the guy to the side of you would stab you, and you’d be dead.
In a fight like this – brutal though it was – it had a demarcated area, a level floor, there were no weapons involved, and no other people. If I didn’t focus my attention fully on this guy, he could still beat me, despite my years of “street” experience.
But then again, alongside the realistic training in systems such as Krav Maga that I engaged in during my travels across the US, I’d also spent time in gyms and dojo doing various combat sports. Karate, judo, Russian sambo, Brazilian jiujitsu, freestyle wrestling, boxing, taekwondo, MMA, I’d trained in all of them at one stage or another.
That had to help, right?
“Okay guys,” said one of the guards, armed with an assault rifle. “Fight!”
So, it looked like the time for thinking was over.
This was it.
Game on.
Chapter Ten
Dafoe came toward me like a bat out of hell, throwing punch after punch, hoping to catch me quickly. I dodged the blows, wondering if he was a boxer like Gutierrez; but then he changed level and went for a double-leg takedown, arms trying to grab my legs and pull me down to the gro
und in the classic wrestling maneuver.
It caught me off-guard, but I managed to get my hips back just in time and sprawl out on top of him, pushing him to the ground beneath me. But he persisted, and kept trying to grab my legs, until he latched onto one of them and wouldn’t let go; he twisted and pulled it, trying to roll me over into a better position.
Dafoe was definitely a wrestler; he’d maybe messed around with MMA too, but from the way he clamped hold of that leg and wouldn’t let go, I knew wrestling was his core.
He was good at it too, and I felt myself getting rolled; and so I let go of his body with one arm and sent an elbow crashing down into his spine. He grunted but held on, and I slammed the elbow into his spine again, then tried to reach further down his body and gave him the good news in the kidneys, smashing the bony point straight down into the unprotected organs, first one side, then the other.
Finally, I felt the grip give on my leg, and I immediately ripped it further back, pushed Dafoe’s head down, and then sent my knee forward into the top of his skull. It hurt my knee like a sonofabitch, but I knew it would have hurt Dafoe’s head a whole lot more. I let the knee drop back and crash into his head again, but it was a mistake; the wresting skills were so ingrained that – even as disoriented as he was from the first blow to the skull – Dafoe managed to grab hold of the incoming leg, and it was a proper grip this time.
Dafoe pulled it toward him hard, unbalancing me, and he arched and rolled; and once he was on top, back on my chest, he squirmed around in a fraction of a second until we were chest to chest, in the north-and-south position.
The big man didn’t waste any time and started to rain hammer-fist blows down onto my face, and I knew I was in a bad position. I snaked my hand up between his arms and jabbed him in the eye with my thumb, and as he flinched, I swiveled around beneath him until we were facing the same way, my feet digging into his hips to keep him at bay.
He started throwing straight punches down at me, but that was a mistake; I latched onto one of the incoming arms, securing it into my chest, cinching it tight. I took a hard shot to the face with his free hand at the same time, but just the one; in the next instant, I pivoted on my hips and swung my legs up, hooking one over the guy’s neck, the other across his chest, my body now making a cross with his. Using the momentum of my leg swing, I managed to spin him over, until his back was on the ground, his arm between my legs, elbow braced on the inside of one thigh.
In a sport competition, this move – known in judo and jujitsu as juji gatame, or the rolling armbar – would be applied just firmly enough to elicit a tap from the opponent, at which point the lock would be released, and no damage would be done. But I remembered what Bush had said about rules, and I was more than happy to figure them out for myself, as he’d suggested. And so I didn’t stop the movement; as soon as I was in the right position, I pulled down hard on his wrist and popped my hips hard off the floor; the crack of his elbow snapping rang out around the basement, and his agonized screams followed an instant later.
I paused, but nobody stepped in to stop the contest, and I could feel that Dafoe still had a bit of fight left in him; he was already starting to turn, to try and get me off.
I hauled the broken arm in toward me, pinning him down with my right leg while my left lifted up and came crashing back down, my heel slamming into his face, coming away sticky with blood. I let it come down again and again, and although he got his other hand to it, there was no resistance there, and I knew I was doing damage; and then the hand was no longer there at all, and I felt the weight of his body sag. I knew he was out of it, but gave him one more unanswered heel kick, just to be on the safe side.
Slowly, I rolled off his unconscious body, surveying my handiwork; but the battered and broken man that lay on the ground, blood pooling around his head, wasn’t a pretty picture and I turned away, eyes on Bush.
“Good enough?” I asked him, and Bush smiled in return.
“Good enough,” he agreed, nodding his head. “Yeah, Delaney, that’s good enough.”
Chapter Eleven
“So, this is how things work,” Officer Herbert L. Bush said to me.
We were outside now, taking a turn around the yard, and the searing daylight made me squint hard; after being in that poorly-lit basement for the last few hours, it was taking a while for my eyes to adjust.
But it was nice to be outside at last – I’d barely seen the sun since I’d come here, and for a man used to wandering free under the open skies, the past few days had been difficult. I’d been trying to suppress how much I missed it, to help me survive in there, but now I was here in the open, basking in the warmth of daylight, I knew I’d just been kidding myself.
The yard was filled with orange-jumpsuited cons, all segregated into racial groups, and I could see Bush and I were catching the attention of all of them. Bush didn’t seem to care, but I wondered if it was going to cause problems. Would they wonder what I was talking to him about? Or would they already know? How widely known was this whole fight-club thing?
Maybe Bush was about to tell me.
“There’s a lot of violence here, you’ve already seen that,” he began. “All the different groups, the gangs, they hate each other, okay? It’s no secret, it’s the same across America. So, one day I came up with an idea – what if I start to organize fights between them? Let’s say the Aryans have a problem with a black gang; well, they both pick their top fighters, and I sort out a bout for them. Problem solved, no more getting shivved in the showers, right? Whoever wins, wins. Plus, I make a little money on the side, but it’s all in a good cause, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“But then people start betting on this shit, word starts to get out a bit, you know? Lot of money to be made, so I gotta make things a bit more professional, give the audience a show, right? Well, I’ve got a slick little operation going now, I don’t mind telling you. And you’re gonna be in on it, okay? Now, I know we didn’t start out on the right foot, but we’re gonna be working together now, so we best kiss and make up, you get me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what’s in it for me?”
“What’s in it for you is, I don’t make your life here into a living hell. And I could do it, you know.” He turned to the whites and waved; and one of the men waved back. Somewhere between fifty and sixty years old, short and heavily-built, he had a neatly-trimmed beard and a cleanly-shaved head, tattoos covering much of his exposed skin. “Trent Michaels,” Bush explained. “Head of the Aryan Brotherhood here. He’s got a real hard-on for you since you disrespected Mankell and busted up one of his boys back in reception.” He sniffed the air, looked thoughtfully around before turning to face me directly. “You ever sucked a man’s dick? Ever been fucked in the ass?”
“Why, are you making an offer?” I asked.
“That mouth,” Bush said, wagging a finger at me and tutting loudly. “I keep telling you, it’ll get you in trouble.” He gestured with his head back toward Michaels. “But it’s not me you should be worried about. It’s him. He’d get his boys to pin you down, and then he’d fuck you four ways from Friday, just to teach you a lesson.” Bush turned, and pointed to a large group of blacks. “And you’ve got problems there, too,” he said. “You busted up four of their guys in the shower, and they want to get back at you.”
“But you organized that,” I said.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but it doesn’t really matter; you messed some of their boys up, and they want revenge. And trust me, you do not want to get your white ass raped by those black guys, man. I mean it.”
“That’s not experience talking, is it?” I said with a raised eyebrow.
“Damn, you need to get that mouth under control, son, you really do. It ain’t personal experience you understand, but I’ve seen enough bleeding assholes getting patched up in the infirmary, guys have to keep tampons up there to keep everything in, right? And I know you don’t want to go down that road.” He smiled. “Or maybe
you do?” he teased, his turn for a joke.
“No,” I decided, “I think you’re right. I prefer my asshole to be of the non-bleeding variety.”
“Good decision. Now, I can keep these boys off your back; they know me, and the gangs are all involved in the fights. They make suggestions for fighters, money gets kicked back to them, you know the score.” I did; and I knew he’d turn me over to them if I didn’t keep being valuable to him.
“Anyway,” he continued, “now we’ve got ourselves a professional kind of thing goin’ on, we’re havin’ ourselves a little tournament here at San Quentin. Some high-rollers are gonna be here, there’s a lot of money riding on it.”
“Who watches these things?” I asked. “Who makes these bets?” I wondered if it was just carefully selected staff members and the prison godfathers, or if it was open to outsiders.
“That’s my business, son,” Bush warned. “You just have to fight, and fight well. That way, you make money for us, and I keep all that shit off your back.”
“How many fighters?” I asked, still enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin.
“Eight,” Bush said, “that’s three fights to win the thing.” He smiled, sunlight glinting off his badge. “Think you can do it?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“I like the confidence,” Bush said approvingly. “It’s what a fighter needs. But I gotta tell you, some of these sons of bitches are tough, man. Tough. Dafoe, the guy you beat earlier, he wasn’t worth shit compared to some of these guys.” He sniffed the air again, looked around the yard, then back to me. “How old are you anyway, son?”
“You’ve got my file,” I replied.
“Yeah, I do. And I think you’re just too old for this kind of shit. To win, anyway. But I think you’ve got that brass set of balls, and you’ll put on a show, and that’s sometimes more valuable than winning.”
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR BREAKOUT: Colt Ryder Uncovers A Deadly Fight Club At San Quentin State Prison . . . Will He Escape With His Life? Page 6
