Swamp Walloper (Fight Card)

by Jack Tunney

  Mickey Cohen was a man who did not suffer setbacks lightly. After I’d taken out his fighter, Solomon Kane, in the ring, Cohen had completely lost his foothold in the fight game. It had not been the most profitable of Cohen’s mob businesses by a long shot, but having been a professional fighter himself, it was a particular favorite. Losing it had been a very rough and publicly embarrassing pill for him to choke on.

  There was no doubt, if something caught in Mickey Cohen’s throat, he was going to spit it out – and then stomp on it. He might not be able to take on the whole of the LAPD, but he had apparently been able to target one particular detective – me.

  If Mickey Cohen had asked Trask for a favor to feed his psychotic need for revenge to even the score for my destruction of his fighter Solomon Kane, Trask would have been more than willing to accommodate him. It would have been an easy undertaking for Trask, buying him much goodwill and a solid friend in Cohen.

  I wasn’t sure how this was all supposed to play out, but I had no doubt it wouldn’t be pleasant. However, I also knew my feelings of positive inevitability had little to do with Cohen’s plotting.

  The week I had been promised to find out what happened to Marcus and find a way to get to the Adrieux brothers, was now a moot point. That week was based on Trask not knowing who I really was or my true mission. The whole situation had been a set up from the start. I didn’t have a week – I had a handful of hours.

  My only hope was Tombstone’s instinct for trouble. He always seemed to know things in an investigation before anyone else. He was always a step ahead when things turned ugly – and a single step could mean the difference between death and survival. I hoped his skills were working overtime ...

  Back in Los Angeles, it would have been easy to scoff at the thoughts of voodoo and all its supernatural trappings, but here, deep in the swamp, it was a different story. The rules were different – the veil between normal reality and mystical reality was very thin.

  This was far bigger than a punk mobster’s desire for revenge.

  As every muscle in my body swelled with power, I felt the knowledge of another much more epic battle grow within me. When I had first seen Trask, I knew him for what he was. He knew me for what I had become.

  Soon, one of us would destroy the other.

  ***

  A siren blared briefly, waking me from the comfortable trance into which I’d fallen. There was the sound of the cell block door opening and boot heels on the walkway. Cell doors were being unlocked, prisoners exiting to stand just outside their bars. I saw a guard move purposely past my cell without even looking in, then heard the cell door next to mine open and the guard call, “Get out here, Omar.” A second later another cell door was opened down the line.

  I stayed lying on my hard bunk with my arm propped behind my head. I saw the black arm of Omar, the man from the cell next to mine, slip between my bars and signal to me.

  I was wary. Again I wondered if these hardened cons actually knew I was a cop. If they did, it wouldn’t matter to them that I was as much a prisoner as they were ... or would it? I had heard the clapping make the rounds of the cells when I’d first been thrust into eighty-one. In that moment, I had felt rebellion was as ripe as the heavy smell of caged men. Maybe a cop, determined to take Trask down, was just what these men needed.

  I slipped off my bunk and went to stand in the front corner of my cell, where the bars across the front met the wall separating me from the cell to my right. I knew Omar was standing just out of sight, having pulled his arm back. I made sure not to get close enough for him to grab.

  “Who you bring?” His whisper was low and guttural.

  It was an odd question, but I heard the underlying superstition and knew the right answer. “Legba.”

  “We have been waiting for you,” Omar said. “But Kalfu is strong.” There was desperation in the whisper now.

  I remembered what the channeled spirit of Mademoiselle Charlotte had said. “I am stronger. Do what your heart has told you to do.” My voice and my words were not my own. They came from inside.

  “We are ready. The Trasks have held us down too long. We were told you would come. When you fight in the cage, the gates will be unlocked.”

  The voice of a guard rang loud. “File out!”

  The cons outside their cells began to walk toward the exit to the cell block. Omar didn’t look into my cell as he passed, but I heard him whisper one last sentence, “Keep fighting until the explosion.” Then he was gone.

  I returned to my bunk and reclined again. I was right about the prison being ripe for rebellion. Even caged men will only be treated as animals for so long. Tombstone had told me about the swamp music – the noises and sounds used from the outside to communicate with those on the inside – had told me those inside who needed to know would be ready for me.

  The prisoners were all murderous thugs. They had been sent to the Sauvage because they were the worst of the worst, or because Trask and his minions wanted men like the Adrieux brothers out of the way. But now these men had become a dangerous powder keg – and I was going to be the spark.

  I would be ready.

  Legba would be ready.

  ROUND SIXTEEN

  Trask would come for me in his own time.

  The wait was designed to drive up my anxiety, to make me sweat, to fatigue my mind with all the possibilities – real and imagined – of what might happen to me next. Torturers use the anxiety of waiting for pain to torment their victims, to prime them for the main event.

  Cops knew all about making suspects sweat. Leave a guilty suspect sitting in an interrogation room, where every minute seems like an hour, and they can’t stop thinking about their guilt. They become like a pump, primed to spill their guts.

  However, I knew how to wait. If a boxer doesn’t learn how to wait, he can leave his fight in the locker room, defeated before the bell for the first round rings. No punches have been thrown, but the fight is lost.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t get anxious. Under stress, the brain automatically releases chemicals into the body to deal with the pressure. However, those chemicals need physical action to do their job. If there is no action, only waiting, then those chemicals turn sour, forming the gnawing feeling in the gut we call anxiety.

  Normally, the body treats anxiety as an enemy. If restrained from either fight or flight, anxiety builds up and overloads the body’s normal responses – breathing becomes high and tight, cold sweat breaks through the pours, thinking becomes cloudy. Anxiety can exhaust you physically and mentally unless you recognize what is happening and find a way to positively channel the body’s natural responses.

  For me, anxiety becomes the scent of the chase, the taste of my enemy’s blood, the pristine edge of a well-stropped straight razor poised to cut. I embrace my anxiety as a lover, becoming still and deadly calm – internalizing every tantalizing drop of energy, building pressure, building pressure, storing it away, savoring it ... waiting, waiting, waiting ... to explode.

  When they finally came for me there were four of them. It was Deke and Calvin, of course, both holding ax handles, and two others who couldn’t be anything else than branches on the Trask family tree.

  “Put them manacles on ‘im, Bo,” Deke ordered, after opening my cell door.

  Bo stepped inside, treating me like I was a snake about to strike. I stood up and he jumped back a foot.

  “Get in there,” the other guard shouted. He was a big boy whose once barrel chest had slipped down to his belly. He put a boot on Bo’s backside and shoved.

  “Stop it, Ferg,” Bo yelped, staggering forward, eyes going wide.

  I reached out and caught him as he came crashing into my arms. “Easy,” I said, quietly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Bo pulled back sharply, relaxing only slightly when I held my hands out in front of me to let him snap the manacles around my wrists. There was a chain leash attached to the middle of the chain running between the manacles. Bo tugged on it ten
tatively and I followed him out of the cell.

  As I started following Bo down the walkway, Deke and the other guards moved in behind me. Deke took great pleasure in poking me in the back with his ax handle on every third step. He guffawed every time he did it.

  I was beginning to feel like a baited bear.

  At the end of the walkway, in front of the closed cell block exit door, stood the big man himself – Lucas Trask. His pose was straddle-legged, cavalry pants bloused perfectly over those shiny, knee-high, leather boots, black leather gloves on his hands. His long black hair fell back over his shoulders, the beads and leather gris-gris pouches around his neck seeming to writhe like intertwining snakes. I could feel evil emanating from him.

  “You figure things out yet, boy?” Trask asked.

  “It appears you were expecting me.”

  Trask nodded. “You think I stay in control of this prison, of this swamp, of this state by not knowing who enters these walls?”

  Inside, I could feel a throbbing beginning to feed off my pulse. My heart was pounding, yet it was not my heart. I was something more than I had ever been before.

  “I didn’t think you would come,” Trask said. “Why would you risk your life for a man like de Trod?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Trask let loose with his high pitched laugh. “And now?”

  I shrugged. “Now, it seems a lot of bother just to squash one cop,” I said. “Guess Mickey Cohen wasn’t man enough to take me on himself.”

  Trask stifled his chuckle. “East coast told Cohen to do things this way – didn’t want him dealing with the heat a cop killing would bring in Los Angeles.” Trask gave me what I assumed was a smile, a predatory parting of the lips. “So, you and Cohen are both just trained lap dogs?”

  Trasks’ lips tightened again. “You do got a mouth on you, boy,” he said. “I enjoyed beating de Trod to death to lure you here. Now, I will enjoy beating you to death.”

  “It’s going to take a lot more than a bunch of inbred, crackers to do the job,” I said.

  The words were barely past my lips before the ham hock of Trask’s right fist lashed out at me.

  I move my head out of the way and shuffled to the right, pulling the leash chain out of Bo’s hand. I moved again, ducking, knowing Deke would be making use of his axe handle.

  Deke staggered off balance as the ax handle missed me and crashed into a concrete wall. His stumble put him directly in the path of Trask’s follow up left. It was a looping roundhouse, landing squarely on the side of Deke’s head. He fell like a logged tree.

  Trask backed off, seeming to gather himself. I stood still, letting Bo grab up the chain leash hanging from my manacles. Trask looked down at Deke and then up at me. Calvin and Ferg were rooted in place.

  I looked at Trask’s left hand, remembering it only had three fingers and shouldn’t have been able to deliver such a stunning punch. Trask saw me looking and opened his gloved palm to reveal the short length of metal dowel concealed within.

  “I guess you’re gonna need some softening up, you being a challenger for the light-heavyweight championship and all.”

  Trask’s dead eyes held mine and, for the first time, I felt the strength of the power within him. It was malevolent, unfeeling, deep and dark.

  Recognition dawned – He was as filled with Kalfu as I was with Legba.

  “I’m going to help you do what you came here to do,” Trask said.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “I listen to the swamp music ...”

  “Swamp music?”

  Trask sneered. “I grew up in these backwaters. I know every noise the swamp makes and every swamp noise a man makes to communicate – swamp music. Charlotte Adrieux sent you to get her sons ...”

  I gave Trask a questioning look. He stared right back.

  “I’ve told them they can go free ... All they got to do is beat you in the cage.”

  Trask cut his eyes to Bo.

  “Bring him.”

  Outside, I could see the other prisoners from the cell block gathered on the benches around the cage in the middle of the compound. They were restive, looking around, talking in low voices. The uniformed guards surrounding them were on alert. Ax handles and shotguns were much in evidence.

  When I came clearly into view all conversation stopped. Even the night sounds of the swamp muted, like a radio being turned way down. As Bo led me toward the benches and the cage beyond, a single hand clapped slowly. Two seconds later another hand joined in. Then another, and another. Gradually, all the cons began to clap together, slowly, deliberately, two seconds between each clap.

  Bo led me to the path between the benches and I got my first clear view of who was in the cage. The Adrieux brothers, clearly twins, were built like Spanish moss covered oaks. They were both over seven feet tall, built sturdy through the torso leading up to the spread branches of their bare, black-skinned, heavily muscled, chests. Their hair was a wild profusion of matted and bushy curls. They were born and bred in the swamp, and it had made monsters out of them.

  They both waited at the far side of the cage, wearing tattered boxing gloves, as I was marched up to the cage door opposite them. The barred door was opened by Omar, the black con who had been in the cell next to mine.

  Before pushing me through, Bo unlocked my manacles. I still wore prison grays – too short pants and an oversized shirt, the cuffs extending over my hands. On my feet were a pair of heavy, but surprisingly comfortable boots.

  The prisoners seemed to begin whipping themselves into a frenzy. Trask would use this spectacle, and all the previous ones, as a way to difuse the tension that built up in the prison setting. Men like these had to have an outlet for their violence, and Trask would not want their fury turned on his guards. However, by being able to witness the cage boxing bouts, the inmates blood lust could be cooled.

  The bouts would also work as a threat to maintain discipline – violations of the rules would not only lead to the sweat box and beatings, but to the terror of facing the Adrieux brothers in the cage where there was nowhere to hide.

  I turned my head and caught a glimpse of Trask stepping up a back bench between a phlanax of his guards – every one of them a kin to him.

  As I stepped into the cage, I felt Omar, who was holding the cage door open, press something into my hands – a pair of rough leather workman’s gloves. I looked at him. He nodded and whispered, “Edmond is the slightly bigger twin,” he said. “But Canray is the most dangerous.”

  I quickly slipped the gloves on my hands, realizing somebody had painstakingly sewn ridges of packed sand into the palms to provide extra punching power. They weren’t quite as good as the sap gloves I’d worn when walking a beat, but they would have to do.

  There was no preamble. The second the cage gate closed behind me, Edmond Adrieux let out a bellow and charged. I immediately remembered the lion keeper in the circus cage I’d seen as a kid. He’d had a whip and a chair to fend off his charges. He’d even had a gun on his hip should the situation turn deadly. I had none of those things ... But I did have my fists ... And I had Legba inside me.

  I stopped Edmond with a straight right, staggering him when the blow hit him squarely in the forehead. There was a sharp crack and the pain in my wrist was immediate and shattering – driving me to my knees. I had thrown the punch without thinking, without remembering the weakness I still felt in the wrist.

  Now it felt as if I had shattered the bone, however, there was a far worse pain. My entire arm was suddenly ablaze as if there was a raging fire in my blood. I was rolling on the ground in agony, but this did little to stop Canray from taking advantage of my weakness.

  He reached down and grabbed the ragged front of my shirt and simply lifted me until my feet were off the ground. I could do nothing to stop his fist crashing into my face.

  I had just enough presence of mind to turn my head just as the blow connected, but the power was still stunning. There was a tearin
g sound as the material of my worn prison shirt simply shredded in Canray’s hand.

  I staggered back, my shirt in tatters around me. All I could do as Canray swung at me again, was to drop to one knee. His roundhouse passed over my head and I drove my left fist into his groin. He grunted and bent over. From my position below him, I launched a left uppercut into the point of his exposed chin. His head snapped back, eyes rolling up in his head.

  A club-like fist smashed into the side of my head and I rolled away realizing Edmond was back in the fight. The pain in my right arm felt as if I was burning from the inside out. My wrist was on fire, the pain so intense I was on the verge of passing out.

  Edmond swung a clumsy roundhouse right. I instinctively threw up my right arm to deflect the punch. Sparks exploded behind my eyes as Edmond’s punch made contact with my arm, but it was Edmond who reacted in shocked pain and surprise, as if he had been burned by the heat from inside me.

  The fire in my right arm flowed into my torso taking with it all the pain. There was a searing intensity centered in the small wound Charlotte Adrieux’s fingernail had gouged in my chest, as if all the pain I’d ever experience in life was being sucked inside. There was a moment of numbness and then a blast of energy flowed back out of the wound and through my body.

  And then the night exploded with noise and flame ...

  ROUND SEVENTEEN

  The first sound was the roar of airboat engines as three of the flat bottomed swamp runners raced toward the prison’s dock. Within seconds there was a series of escalating explosions as bound sticks of dynamite were hurled into Trask’s industrial distillery.

  The noise of the explosions battered my ears with the force of a brutal punch. Outside the fighting cage prisoners were running amok, charging into the prison guards surrounding the benches.