Suckerpunch: (2011) (14 page)

He let go with his left hand, produced a business card from somewhere, and held it out between two fingers above our clasped right hands.

I took the card and we let go and I put the card in my pocket without looking at it.

He held my eyes for a moment longer before turning to Marcela. “Marcy, is it?”

“Marcela,” she said.

“I wondered, because you don’t look like a Marcy. But a
Marcela,
yes indeed. Can I get you two anything? We got some sweet rolls they finished just before they left, some early catering thing, and doggone if they won’t fill you up ‘til next Tuesday.”

“They said on the way out,” Jake said.

“Good enough. But don’t let ‘em leave without something to drink. We don’t want anybody choking to death.” Kendall put his hands on his hips and worked his gum. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Lance hesitated, then said, “You know. The money?”

Kendall snapped his fingers.
“That’s
right. Aw, man.” He waved at the TV screens. “I get caught up. Business. So how we looking?”

Lance crossed his arms, then raised a thumb so he could chew the nail. He was still riding on whatever he’d popped, something with a long plateau and, I assumed, a steep drop-off. He pulled the thumb away and stuffed it under the other arm and said, “Well, I don’t have all of it yet. But I have some.”

“Some,” Kendall said. He winked at me and Marcela. “Well, some is better than none, just about always, right? ‘Cept with gunshots and STDs. So how much is
some?”

“Five thousand.”

Kendall whistled. “Five thousand. Okay, so you brought that, but you owe fifteen.”

Marcela put her hand over her mouth.

I stared at Lance. Some people thought fifteen thousand was enough to kill three people over. Kendall didn’t seem the type, but we’d just met.

Kendall said, “That’s about what, 33 percent?”

Lance said, “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.”

“It is. A third,” said Kendall. “Huh. Okay. Jake, why’nt you go ahead and punch Lance in the guts.”

Jake stepped in front of me and sank a fist underneath Lance’s crossed arms deep into his belly.

Marcela grabbed my right arm and dug her fingertips in.

Lance dropped to the floor, curling into a ball in the little space he had, and the room turned into a fighting pit.

Jake stood over Lance and put his left foot on Lance’s left knee, tucked near his chin. Jake put some weight on it and started to grind the joint against the tiled floor. Lance didn’t have the breath to whimper over it, but his face screwed up and his mouth opened to let out a scream that didn’t come.

I leaned to my right around Jake to look at Kendall, at the same time trying to slide Marcela behind me.

She shoved my right arm away and started doing something with her hair, getting it all into her fist and tucking it into a loose knot. She kicked her shoes off and started breathing in deeply through her nose.

This was getting out of hand. I said to Kendall, “Call him off.”

He gave me that smile and took his time. “That’ll do, Jake.”

The big man backed toward the door, his eyes on me. He stepped on one of Marcela’s shoes and peered down at it, then kicked it out into the bakery.

“Hey,” Marcela said.

Kendall said, “Jake here played left tackle at UNLV. He showed up on the first day of practice—from Iowa, of all places—never played a snap before, and started throwing all their scholarship boys around. Played all four years and got his degree in business marketing.”

We all looked at Jake.

“Yessir,” Kendall said. “We did some business while he was playing, and when he was done and graduated, he comes to me in a suit and tie and markets himself as—what was it? Policy assurance. How do you like that?”

Jake’s mouth was open a bit. His pupils were dilated but his gaze was steady, locked in on me. His feet were spread the width of the doorway, and his hands looked like two baseball gloves dangling there.

The two guys at the table had stopped working the phones and keyboards and smartphones and were watching me. They were wiry and pale and caffeinated and seemed upset about the disruption.

Kendall noticed the quiet in the room and said over his shoulder, “You boys keep at it. We can handle playtime over here.”

They gave me a hard look for a few beats, then returned to work.

Kendall said, “I can’t imagine Lance paid you to come with him; he only has the five grand for me. You don’t look like you work for smack or sex—pardon my language, Marcela. So that makes you a friend of his.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, friend, this can go two ways.” He held up a finger. “You and the lovely lady can walk out now with cinnamon rolls and enjoy the glamorous nightlife and forget all about little old me and Big Jake and Lance here. We’ll take care of the business that needs taking care of.”

“Or”—the next finger sprang up—”you can situate yourself between Big Jake and his policy assurance duties over a friend who’s worth less than a sack of used rubbers. Marcela, again, my apologies.” He held the two fingers out. “Okay. Which one?”

I looked at the two fingers. Two was at least as many pieces Banzai Eddie would tear my contract into if he knew I was in this room with these people. All he’d asked was that I stay out of trouble, not sully the good name of cage fighting. And here I was in a closet with bookies and muscle about to get bloody over a deadbeat drug addict who’d taken a bullet for me a long time ago.

I almost wished that guy had been a better shot.

Gil always talked about de-escalation in his self-defense classes, about letting the other person save face so everyone could walk away with some dignity. Kendall had given me options, but they were really the same thing. He was telling me I was going to back down, and I had the thinnest sliver of control over whether I did it with my tail between my legs or shoved up my ass.

Then there was Marcela. Jairo and his brothers liked me, but those Brazilians took family seriously. I’d probably insulted the Arcoverde name just by introducing her to Kendall, and all over Brazil people were getting on planes to challenge me to a fight to the death in the street. They were wasting their time. If something happened to Marcela, Jairo wouldn’t even leave my stain for them to spit on.

Still looking at the two fingers, I said, “I’ll pay his debt.”

Kendall frowned and examined the fingers to make sure they were the same ones he’d always had. “That’s not on the table.”

“It is now. And that’s what’s going to happen. I can get five grand right now on top of Lance’s. The rest I can get first thing tomorrow morning, and I’ll drop it off wherever you want.”

“This is tempting, I gotta tell you. As a business owner, money is money, right? I don’t care if it comes from hard work or some old lady’s purse, as long as it crosses my palm.” Kendall wagged a finger at me. “But as a businessman, that’s different. I have a brand to consider, a reputation among my peers and clients. Word gets out that someone who owes me can show up with no cash and a tough guy who promises to cover, and I let it happen . . . Guess what? Suddenly everybody’s got a tough guy with a fat wallet. Then those tough guys have to find their
own
tough guys, and on and on until I got Bruce Lee, the ultimate badass risen from his grave, in here telling me how it’s gonna go down.”

He jutted his head toward me, making the cords on his neck stand out. He swallowed and blinked a few times, then laughed and shook himself loose. “So I’m afraid I have to pass on your generous offer. We’re back to the two options I gave you. And, friend—Marcela, I’m going to apologize in advance for this one—let’s stop wasting my motherfucking time and get a move on with this horseshit.”

I punched Jake in the neck almost as hard as I could.

I didn’t want to melt my hand against his jaw, and I didn’t want to put one into his belly like he’d done to Lance and have him take it and smile at me.

So I went for his neck.

The neck is a tricky place to hit someone. You put everything into a strike on the trachea with your knuckles, ridge hand, or elbow, the guy chokes to death trying to wheeze through a crushed windpipe. Just give his Adam’s apple a good tap, his eyes will bug out and he’ll be gulping for days.

Get him on the back of the neck, along or to the side of the spine, and you’re into paralysis territory, though it isn’t easy. None of that twisting crap. Put him on his knees and grab his forehead from behind and drive your knee against the base of his skull. Or jump on his back and wrap your legs around his waist, get an arm under his chin, and try to turn his vertebrae into a Slinky.

Then there’s the vagus nerve, which starts in the brain stem, goes down through the neck near the jugular, and branches out into the chest and abdomen. One of its jobs is to regulate heart contractions, and if you apply enough pressure to the neck and stimulate the nerve, the guy’s heart could shut down.

But I didn’t want to do any of that to Big Jake. What I wanted to do was tag him hard enough on the carotid artery to halt blood flow to his brain for a fraction of a second, just enough to hit the reboot button and make him drop.

A short right hook into the side of the neck, and that’s what he did.

Jake fell to his knees in the doorway and started to tip forward. He was still technically out, but it wouldn’t last long, and I wanted his wind knocked out and his equilibrium shot when he started to come around. I drove my knee into his solar plexus to tip him back up, put another one into his nose and heard a snap, and slapped my palms against both of his ears. I shoved him, and he flopped over his feet into the bakery and landed with his knees bent at bad angles. His hands were still at his sides.

The two guys at the table were frozen in mid-type, their eyebrows almost in their hairlines.

Kendall was staring at Jake, and I could see the gum resting on his back teeth like a little white tumor. He smiled at me. “Jesus Christ in a rickshaw, Lance, where’d you find this guy?”

Lance was still coiled up and indifferent to the world.

Kendall said, “You’ve been in this kind of room before.”

“Plenty,” I said. “We’re leaving. I’ll pay what Lance owes. You forget about him, and if he comes back to do business with you again, you refuse him. Politely.”

“You want a job?”

“I have a job. Marcela, can you get Lance up?” I still wanted both arms free.

Marcela slipped behind me and grunted Lance to his feet and got his right arm around her shoulders. He draped off her like his strings had been cut. “He stinks,” she said.

“I’ll take him when we get outside,” I said.

Jake coughed and rolled onto his right side. Even on edge he filled the whole doorway, and I wasn’t thrilled about having to step over him.

I asked Marcela, “Can you get through?”

“Yes,” she said.

I had to move toward Kendall so she could squeeze Lance behind me.

Kendall didn’t give any ground, just stood there with his hands on his hips and that smile. Marcela was almost to the door when he said, “Well, dang it,” and turned to the rack of electronics on his left and came back with a flat black automatic pistol that he pointed at my face. “Everybody, sit tight.”

Marcela cursed in Portuguese.

“Yeah, I know,” Kendall said. “What’s your name?”

“Woody.”

“Last name Woodpecker? Come on.”

I said, “Aaron Wallace.”

There was a flurry of clacking from the table. The guy against the far wall read off his screen. “Aaron Woodshed Wallace. Professional mixed martial arts fighter out of Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Twenty-four and three record.” He looked at me and nodded. He was impressed. Hooray.

Kendall took one step back but kept the gun in my face and said, “I knew it sounded familiar, but damn if I could remember where I’d heard that nickname before. You’re all over the marquee down there at the—shit, which one?”