by Paul O'Brien
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Blood Red Turns Dollar Green Volume 3
By
Paul O’Brien
By Paul O’Brien
Copyright © 2014 Paul O’Brien
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition
#
Lavie, thank you for everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Fergal Devitt and Jim Ross for answering my questions, describing their experiences and for helping make this novel as authentic as it could be.
CHAPTER ONE
“Let me smarten you up.”
In wrestling, this phrase meant everything. A veteran saying those words was like a magician telling a rookie all of his tricks. It involved a lot of trust—a lot of faith that the person learning would take on the old traditions, the proper way of doing things.
They would have to protect the secrets of the wrestling business.
On this night, the rookie was a young, handsome wrestler named Kid Devine. The ‘magician’ was sitting about twenty rows back, covered by darkness in The World’s Most Famous Arena.
“Can we let the people in? They’re starting to go crazy out there,” the front-of-house manager shouted.
“No,” the man in the stands said, “A few more minutes.”
Madison Square Garden was lit for wrestling, which simply meant that, except for the twenty by twenty red, white, and blue ring, everything was dark.
Kid tried to look beyond the lights. “Why don’t you come in here and show me something, old man? It’s been a while.”
The man in the stands struck a match for his cigarette, and Kid caught a glimpse of his pained, pale face.
“You okay?” Kid asked.
The man took a pull from his cigarette, and began, “There are four basic parts to a wrestling match: the Shine, the Heat, the Comeback, and the Finish. The Shine is where our hero starts off well, and wins a couple of small, early victories to get the crowd excited. They paid good money, so give them what they want.”
He took another pull.
“To start with.”
New York.
1984.
Six hours after Lenny got out of prison.
“Go home,” Lenny Long shouted, as he tentatively set foot upon the huge building site.
Babu didn’t listen.
He stayed in the driver’s seat of his VW Kombi van; he knew something wasn’t right. The building site’s parking lot was mostly empty, save for a few rental cars and a couple of sparkling white vans. Before Babu became the biggest star in all of wrestling, he had worked on enough large-scale projects to know that this wasn’t normal by any means. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday in Manhattan: builds like this one didn’t just stop.
Unless something else was going on.
Babu rolled down his window, and could hear the tinny sound of music coming from the back of the building. It was too far-reaching to be a radio or a boombox; way too loud to ignore.
He waited for another minute or two until he could no longer stop himself from getting out of his van. Babu was over seven feet tall, but at this stage, he was heading toward five hundred pounds. His back, knees, neck and left shoulder were shot, which made walking toward the gaping raw brick entrance a struggle.
Most days everything was a struggle.
He peered inside to see the layout: the site looked like the brick bones of a hotel, or something. The ground floor was huge with a large alcove marked out for the reception area. Everything was bare and unfinished. Just the shapes of where things were going to go as the build advanced.
He plodded slowly along the concrete floor, and kept a tuned ear for anyone that might approach him from behind. The closer he got to the back of the building, however, the more his tuned ear became filled with blaring music.
Babu didn’t know whether calling Lenny’s name was a good or a bad idea. Should he let the people that Lenny was there to meet know he was here, too?
The fitted glass exit door that led to the back of the building was open. There were mountains of sand and abandoned heavy machinery outside; stationary cement mixers stood alongside overturned wheelbarrows.
It wasn’t the lack of workers that seemed strange to Babu anymore; it was the bunch of oiled, half-naked buffed men who were in various positions around the site. The fact that they were dancing and miming the lyrics of the song tipped it from strange to bizarre.
Babu knew by the spandex, fanny packs, crop-tops, and fingerless gloves that they were indeed his people. They were wrestlers, and probably Southern, judging by the mullet haircuts and suede cowboy boots.
These guys weren’t wrestlers as Babu knew them—they were a different breed. These guys were 80’s wrestlers.
The new school.
A camera crew was filming one wrestler in particular, as two others flexed their muscles down the camera lens from the sides.
All the pieces started to fall into place: it was a music video.
When life is slammin’ you down/And you ain’t got no-one around
You gotta be a man/You gotta clothesline what you can
Look great/grind your teeth/clench your fists/you can’t be beat
You’re a maaaaan/
Grrrrr.
Huge men in tassels and bandanas were breaking planks of wood, swinging sledgehammers, and bending bars for the camera. The bad guys were full of menace and attitude, and the good guys smiled and flexed any time that they sensed the camera was near.
“What the fuck?” Babu mumbled to himself as he backed away.
This is what his business—the business of professional wrestling—had become.
Amongst these men, however, was no sign of Lenny Long. Babu made his way back to his van, where he heard a dull bang from above. He looked up to see a cloud of hundred dollar bills pour from the top window of the building, and float down below.
“What the fuck are you doing?” shouted a voice upstairs.
Babu instinctively knew that Lenny was in the thick of this altercation.
One floor down, he saw what he thought was Lenny running past a window. Thirty seconds later, he saw a Lenny-shaped blur rush past a third floor window.
Lenny was coming down, and he was coming down fast.
In the second floor’s open window, Lenny stopped. He looked down, and then tentatively threw his leg out. The window opening above him suddenly darkened as a couple of huge bodies filled it.
Lenny lowered himself as far as he could before he dropped into the corner of the building site’s parking lot. He knew he only had seconds before his pursuers would catch up to him.
Sixty thousand dollars was blowing gently around him: his ticket home. He wanted more time to collect every dollar—time to scoop it all up and make right his dream. He just wanted to go home.
“Hey,” Babu shouted.
Lenny could stay and take his chance with the money, or he could escape through the break in the fence straight ahead.
“Hey,” Babu roared again.
Lenny snapped back to reality, and looked back toward the familiar voice. He couldn’t believe that Babu had waited—not after what Lenny had
just tried to do.
The break in the fence and away on his own, or, try and make it to Babu and back to the wrestling business?
“Start the engine,” Lenny called.
Babu could see that Lenny’s face was swollen, and that blood was dripping from a stab wound in his shoulder.
“Drive!” Lenny was only a few feet away, now.
Babu didn’t run from nothing or no-one—not even the two huge men who were running from the building site, also toward his van. As Lenny dove into the safety of the van, Babu slapped the first attacker into the nearest wall, and cold-cocked the second with a head-butt. He had knocked two three hundred pound men out cold in a couple of seconds.
Lenny started the van, and Babu made his way around to the driver’s seat.
“You’re not the driver, anymore,” Babu said.
“Hurry up.” Lenny slid into the passenger’s seat.
Babu’s weight made his side of the van bow down to his other foot. He sat in position, and threw his ride into reverse.
Lenny Long and Babu found themselves twelve years later in different seats, both literally and figuratively, as they raced around Manhattan again in a VW Kombi van.
“What did you do?” Babu asked.
Lenny didn’t want to answer.
“What did you do?” Babu shouted.
“Something... very bad.”
New York.
1972.
Twelve years before Lenny got out of prison.
Danno Garland, the boss of the New York territory, grabbed a soft and terrified Lenny Long by his collar, and slapped him hard. Both men were locked forehead to forehead, and Danno’s face was red and contorted with fury.
“Do it,” Danno ordered.
Danno wasn’t going to jail—not at his age. There was no way.
“Do it.”
Time was running out; the sirens had arrived outside Lenny’s parent’s house, and a cop was now pounding on the door.
“Danno? Police,” called a voice from outside.
Lenny was shaking with fear.
“I will find her. And kill her,” Danno said.
If Lenny didn’t pull the trigger, Danno would spend his days looking for Lenny’s wife to kill her. He had warned Lenny that he would pick up the phone and have it ordered right there and then, and Lenny knew that Danno was a man of his word.
Danno threw Lenny back into the seat, and walked for the phone.
“3...” Danno counted. He picked up the receiver and looked back. “2...”
Lenny stood. “Don’t.”
“Danno,” the cop shouted once more before he kicked in the door.
“1...” Danno said.
Lenny fired a single shot at Danno’s head, which killed him instantly. His body fell to the floor as Lenny dropped the gun. The cop broke through the door, saw the scene, and fired a round that hit Lenny in the chest. The impact lifted him back into the seat.
Lenny was alive, but he was choking on his own blood.
The cop entered the house with his gun still raised, and shouted, “We need a medic…”
Lenny tried desperately to tell him that his kids were hiding, terrified, in the garage, but he couldn’t speak through the blood that was filling up his mouth. He didn’t even know of the perilous danger that they were in. He did, however, sense that something wasn’t right out there.
Inside the screaming ambulance, Lenny couldn’t make it all out, but he presumed that the shrieking siren was for him. His blood was everywhere, but his body wasn’t yet finished hemorrhaging.
“Pressure,” a voice shouted.
Lenny was totally calm; he knew he was dying.
Then, all he knew was darkness.
A couple of days later, after the chaos was contained, Lenny was in a hospital room. He had been left alone and handcuffed to the bed—not that he really noticed. He hadn’t come around enough to take in the severity of his life-changing decision.
“I have to get home,” he weakly mouthed, but no-one was listening. His frail words made his oxygen mask fog up a little. His eyes were too heavy to open and his chest was too sore to move, but he tried to do both. In his head, all Lenny could see were the distressed faces of his two little boys. Both were screaming for their father to help them. They were lost, and he couldn’t get to them.
“Home,” he gargled.
Lenny wanted to rip the tubes from his body, run to his boys, and make sure that they were safe. His drug-induced paralysis wouldn’t allow him to even raise a finger, though.
This vision tormented him over and over, until he finally regained full consciousness in that same hospital bed a few weeks later.
What was awaiting him in the real world, however, was even more agonizing.
“I want to go home.”
London, England.
1972.
Five days after Lenny was shot.
Joe Lapine walked behind a bellhop who knocked his knuckles off the hallway walls every ten or so steps. The carpet under their feet was soft, and the general feeling of the place was quiet and reserved.
“How long is your stay in London, sir?” the bellhop asked.
“Forty-eight hours,” Joe replied.
“A flying visit, then?”
“No, I walked here.”
“Pardon me?”
“Listen,” Joe said as he removed a ten from his pocket. “There’s a Mister Tanner Blackwell here, too. You need to wake him. He practically dies after flying anywhere.”
“Yes, sir.”
Joe trailed off enough to let the help know that he didn’t want to talk, anymore—especially after traveling for a day, and thinking about what was about to happen.
Once his door closed, Joe immediately took a seat at his room’s desk. He laid out his watch and a couple of phone numbers that he had written down on a slip of paper. This was it: this was all he had to make things right.
The wrestling world was being turned over, and it was up to him, as chairman of the National Wrestling Council, to change it back.
Danno’s death had made the spotlight on the wrestling business too intense. It had dragged an operation that thrived on secrecy into the public discourse, and Joe knew that the legitimacy of wrestling wouldn’t survive long under that kind of scrutiny. This meant that the wrestling business would receive less money, and that just wasn’t acceptable.
Joe wasn’t directly responsible for any of the incidents that had turned the law onto them in such an intense way. All of them were, due to a series of side deals and take-over attempts in New York.
He wasn’t the one who had broken the wrestling business, but Joe was sure going to try to fix it.
The simple fact was that the investigation in New York had made everyone’s money harder to earn. The fallout was deep and far-reaching. Every boss from the other territories did what they always did: separated themselves from controversy or inquiry. No-one had seen or heard anything—that was the wrestling way.
Laying low wasn’t going to make anyone any real money, though, and the one reason that these men breathed air was to generate cash.
Since 1948, all of the bosses of all the territories had met under the umbrella of the National Wrestling Council, or the NWC, as it was known. They used it to crush any likely competitors, discuss wrestler trades and match endings, and, most importantly, decide who was going to be their world champion.
On the ground, the NYPD didn’t give a fuck about wrestling, or the fact that some wrestling guys were taking each other out. What really got them animated was the fact that one of their senators had been attacked in the bedlam.
His name was Senator Hilary J. Tenenbaum, and he was raising a bill to ban professional wrestling in New York State. He was assaulted and stabbed in both legs the night before the hearings. Such a situation left the wrestling business looking more than suspect.
It didn’t look good for anyone—not the bosses in the wrestling business, nor the police chiefs who ran the city. Every badge
and uniform in New York grabbed the wrestling business by the throat, and it still hadn’t let up, when Joe touched down in London.
The only saving grace was that Danno’s right hand man, Ricky Plick, burned Danno’s office to the ground before anyone got to it. Someone like Joe just couldn’t risk assuming that Ricky had destroyed everything, though.
In all their years of existence, the National Wrestling Council had never faced anything like this before. New York, their crown jewel, was now a toxic city to them, and that was very bad for business. Joe ran over the plan in his head again. He was going to use the Royal Horseguards Hotel in London to try to stem the rot that was starting in New York. Before he could begin to attempt to influence other matters, though, he had to get his own people in order.
The phone rang, and Joe answered it to hear the receptionist. “They’re ready for you downstairs, sir.”
Atlanta.
The same day.
About four thousand miles away, Joe had already set another arm of his plan in place. He didn’t know the details, and didn’t want to, but he did know that a large part of his problem was about to be dealt with.
Donta Veal was the kind of man that the wrestling bosses loved: he was loyal, tough, and enjoyed hurting people. He had grown up with Joe, which meant he could be trusted when the call needed to be made.
Donta and Joe were chalk and cheese; one was calculating and thoughtful, and the other was calculating and thoughtful as to how he might hurt you.
Joe had tried Donta in the ring about a decade before, but he quickly had to fire him. Potential moneymaker after potential moneymaker came and went as Donta incapacitated the roster. His hunger for causing pain wasn’t satisfied there, either: his bar fights were more legendary than anything else. Donta would bite, break, and maim anyone who tried him—or anyone who didn’t. He didn’t really give a fuck who it was; he just seemed to enjoy making people scream in agony. If he could help it, he would make sure to take his time as he dragged people toward their suffering and trauma.
