Suckerpunch: (2011) Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Ellen.

  Published 2011 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2011 by Jeremy Brown

  Cover design by James Tampa

  Edited by Helen A Rosburg and Lorie Popp

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro

  Title font set in Impact

  ISBN 978-1-60542-225-1 pbk

  ISBN 978-1-60542-983-0 pdf

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my agent, Margaret O’Connor, for believing and to the fighters for doing what they were born to do.

  CONTENTS

  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

  CHAPTER 1

  No head butts, groin strikes, eye gouges, or fishhooks.

  The Nevada State Athletic Commission was taking all the fun out of no-holds-barred fighting.

  The referee jabbered on, and my opponent, Glenn “The Specimen” Porter, stared at me from less than two inches away, so close I had to go cross-eyed to keep him in focus. I thought, Why bother? He was an ugly bastard, and I didn’t want to look at him anyway.

  But I couldn’t drop my gaze. Not because it would show weakness or give him the sense I was worried. No, it was because fans love a good stare down, and I could hear them working themselves into a frenzy, higher and higher like a turbine cycling up for takeoff. Besides, if things went well for me, it was going to be the longest part of the fight, and I didn’t want the crowd to feel cheated on the ticket price.

  Porter huffed out through his mouthpiece, emitting an odor of onions and sour milk that crept up my face and threatened to wilt my eyes. Who ate those two things before a fight? It couldn’t be healthy, and to me, it was downright discourteous.

  The ref finished his spiel and told us to touch gloves, which we did. It was the lightest hit either of us would get for a while. I backed up into my corner of the cage and watched Porter do the same. Specimen was tattooed across the top of his stomach. The thing about getting your nickname printed permanently on your skin: you’d better live up to the name as long as you have the skin.

  Porter had gained about fifty pounds since the last time I’d seen him fight overseas, possibly due to a knee injury, but most likely because of the drawer of hypodermic needles and closet of HGH the cops had found when they went to his house on a domestic assault charge. Now that he was off the juice, his genetics were allowed to blossom, and his nickname stretched across his pooch with enough space between the letters to make it look like an acronym.

  We were both heavyweights, but with a sixty-pound window for us to squeeze through, the label didn’t mean much. I was thirty pounds over the minimum bracket of two hundred six, weighing in at two thirty-six the day before. Porter tipped it at two sixty-two, and he looked like he’d stepped off the scale and up to a Vegas buffet. I carried the weight well with six feet and three inches to spread it over. Porter, at a hair over six, looked like a bobber.

  The ref checked with Porter. “You ready?”

  Porter nodded.

  The ref looked at me. “You ready?”

  Double thumbs-up.

  “Fight!”

  I walked to the center of the eight-sided cage, in no hurry but not wanting Porter to get there first and make me orbit him.

  He came out slower, his hands down and head tipped back. I guess he didn’t watch my tapes.

  I was on my toes with my left side slightly back. When Porter came into range, I flicked my left foot forward in a low kick to get his attention. It did. He looked and flinched. My foot hadn’t even touched him when I brought the whole leg back at the hip and pivoted forward and sent a Superman punch on a slightly downward angle straight into his mouth. He stumbled backward, and his legs threatened to give out before they knew they were in a fight. I closed the distance and missed with a hook and an uppercut; then he stepped forward and reached out with both hands to try and clinch, make me hold his fat ass up while he recovered.

  I pushed his hands off to my left and sent a right cross into his face, which he didn’t like and let me know by grunting and bleeding from the nose. The four-ounce gloves laced and taped to my hands were meant to protect my metacarpals, not his head.

  I heard the crowd, voicing their primal roars to see someone from another tribe, village, state, country, planet get his skull caved in.

  I could do that.

  I followed the right cross with a series of left hooks to the body that got Porter to bend over a little, his hands trying to decide which area was more important to guard. If he went with the body, he was going to need more hands.

  I have good left hooks. Knockout power from just about any angle, moving in any direction. I train at my cornerman Gil’s gym—The Fight House—and the bags there are all slightly curved to the right from the stuffing getting shifted and compressed. Gil bitches about it, but he’s the one who makes me work the punches every day. The power comes from the torque in my hips, something I developed a long time ago from constantly looking over my shoulder.

  I heard Gil over the crowd, yelling something about clinch and knees.

  When Porter’s head came down from the hooks, I shot my hands behind his head, wrapped the left over the right on his crown, and pressed my elbows together over his collarbones, pulling his head toward my chest in a Thai clinch.

  Porter started walking backward toward his corner, trying to get his arms inside mine so he could lever them away from his head. I held on like a drowning man with a big fat life preserver and drove knees into his belly with each step, switching from left to right, skipping after him until he hit the cage with his back and couldn’t run anymore.

  You know what they say about cornered animals: elbow them in the face and knee them in the guts.

  I’ve heard it somewhere.

  The knees had Porter hunched over, his forearms crossed in front of his abdomen to intercept the next volley. It was a decent defense against the knees, but we weren’t in a knee fight. I brought my right elbow in a downward angle across his temple, snapping his head over and opening a nice cut at the edge of his forehead. Blood welled in the opening, a sight sweeter than water in the desert, and coursed down the side of his face.

  If I could get it to run into his eye, the ref might stop the fight. It would be a W for me, but the natives wouldn’t like it one bit. To the fans, the only thing worse than a judge’s decision is an early stoppage due to a cut, like someone taking your candy bar away when you’re halfway done because it’s too delicious.

  Porter started
to turtle on me, curling into a ball with legs to protect himself. As soon as he was “unable to intelligently defend himself,” the ref would stop the fight. It was a funny term, assuming we started out intelligent. I tried a few uppercuts to see if they would get through, but Porter’s arms were pressed in tight, covering him from eyes to belly button. I snuck a wicked left hook into the side, catching him with a good liver shot that acted like a short-fused time bomb.

  The liver’s great. It’s the largest internal organ and gland in the human body, helps with metabolism, plasma protein synthesis, and detoxification. In a fight, however, it’s a giant bull’s-eye and a traitorous bastard. You get hit with a good liver shot, your legs turn into noodles and all you want to do is roll around and try not to shit yourself.

  Porter went that route, his knees buckling and head slumping. He made a sound like a dying buffalo. But instead of dropping all the way down and calling it a night, he decided to impress someone and shoot for my legs. He probably figured if he laid on top of me for the rest of the round, he could throw a punch every thirty seconds or so, get his wind back, and work on rearranging his innards.

  It might have worked if he hadn’t stuck his head into my left armpit when he drove forward out of the corner. I snaked my left forearm under his chin, grabbed my right hand in front of my stomach, and squeezed, putting his bull neck into a space about the size of a DVD. He drove me backward, trying to find a gap to pry the guillotine choke off, but I squeezed tighter, doing my best to pop his head off his shoulders.

  After three seconds I felt a tap on my right arm, the only way a guy in Porter’s position can say uncle. The ref was watching for it and yanked on my arm. I released the choke and Porter sagged to the canvas, then flopped onto his back while his cornermen rushed out with towels and water, the two things you need for births and ass kickings.

  Everyone from my corner—so, Gil—came in and hugged me. He checked to make sure none of the blood was mine. I have lumps of scar tissue around my eyes and across my forehead tender enough to bust open from a vigorous frown.

  “All clear,” he said.

  We were both relieved. Surgery was somewhere down the line to get the scars cleaned out, but that would limit my training and keep me out of the cage for months.

  The ref held my arm up in victory while the announcer bellowed my record, “Twenty-four and three!”

  I looked around the place, a few thousand people in the arena attached to the casino, spilling beer on each other and pumping their fists under a dome of smoke, cheering and booing, their night made or ruined because I walked out while Porter limped.

  I got paid the same either way.

  CHAPTER 2

  Back in the locker room Gil got my gloves off and tilted water into my mouth until I could hold the bottle myself, my hands free of all the tape and gauze. I sat on the only training table, a solid thing bolted to the floor with clear packaging tape on the corners to keep the leather from cracking any further.

  Gil’s built like a keg and usually has stubble over most of his face and head, the salt starting to overwhelm the pepper. He’s a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. His body shape and short arms and legs make him horrible to grapple with; there aren’t any angles to hook, and once he gets hold of you with his gator-bite grip, it’s only a matter of time before he bends something important the wrong way. He usually wears an expression of mild amusement during the whole thing, which doesn’t help.

  Ten years older than me and eons wiser, he’s smart enough to train other MMA fighters instead of getting into the cage himself. He has me on the right track, much better than the downhill straightaway to a cliff I’d been on before he found me.

  I’ve been fighting—in one sense of the word or another—pretty much my whole life. The day I took my first step, some jackass asked me to step outside. Trace the scars and dents on my head, you got yourself a pretty good topographical map of Trouble, USA. I moved from playground tussles to brutal street fights to illegal pit fighting before I graduated high school. The pit fighting exposed me to some people with money, and they needed people without it to make sure they kept it. So I did some bodyguard work at clubs and casinos, walking around giving people the stink eye and making paths when I wasn’t even old enough to get through the door. I added some side work here and there, delivering important things to dangerous people and keeping my mouth shut about it.

  It didn’t take long for someone to try to make money off me. One of the VIPs I handled sponsored me in a sanctioned cage fight at a strip club, and I made him ten grand in thirty-seven seconds after I broke my opponent’s orbital bone with an elbow. After that I saw an opportunity to make some money doing something I was fairly good at. It wasn’t a tough decision; there’s no 401(k) plan in undocumented close-quarters bodyguard work, unless you count somebody paying for your funeral.

  Gil found me when I was twenty-three, strutting around after my fifth cage fight with a two-and-three record. He said my grappling and jiu jitsu sucked and I ought to train with him. He was right, but I was an asshole. My blood was up from another quick KO, and I had some energy to get rid of. He offered a free lesson right then and there and choked me out inside a minute.

  I went to his gym the next day and pretty much haven’t left since. Now here we were, still on the undercard at a straight-to-video event. I didn’t want the spotlight in my eyes, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it drop a little brightness into my pockets.

  When they brought Porter back, I hopped off the table so they could sit him down. I gave him a half hug. “Good fight.”

  “Yeah, right.” He held an ice pack to his forehead where I’d cut him. The bleeding had stopped, but he had a goose egg that looked like a third eye. “Did I even hit you once?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No,” one of his cornermen said.

  I looked at him and he shrugged.

  Porter groaned as he eased onto his back. “I think that’s it for me.”

  “Give it a few days,” I said. “Don’t make any decisions in a locker room.”

  “I was gonna call it quits for sure if I won, retire happy. But I think this is better proof I’m done.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I patted him on the shoulder and shook hands with his guys and walked away.

  “That’s rough,” Gil said when we were through the open doorway into our prep space, cinder-block walls painted white with a drop ceiling, the yellow water stains on the panels looking like rotten fireworks. There was a droopy green couch along one wall in case you wanted to sit down before a fight or had to lie down after it. If you turned around fast enough, you could smell urine, but the source was elusive. Maybe they mixed it with the paint.

  “He shouldn’t have taken the fight. Credit to him for not ducking me, but it was a bad matchup for him.” I sat down on the couch and felt the fight ease out of me. It was a good feeling, knowing the training was worth it and things had come together.

  Gil started putting our warm-up gear in his giant duffel bag, which was starting to smell like a bum’s shoe. “I was glad to see you go for the choke at the end. Instead of pounding away until he gave up or you wore yourself out.”

  I shrugged. “It works in just about every other area of my life.”

  “Idiot,” Gil said.

  There was a hubbub outside our room, and I leaned back into the couch to get a better view. Three guys in suits were talking to Porter, who was still on the training table. Porter smiled at something and nodded in my direction. The suit in the middle shook Porter’s hand and turned around.

  I said, “Holy shit.”

  Banzai Eddie Takanori walked into the room with the two other guys following close behind. One of them was texting with one hand and keeping his suit from touching the wall with the other. Eddie filled the room at five and a half feet of lean Japanese with his hands in the pockets of a black Armani suit, wraparound shades, a neon blue faux hawk, and a chip on his shoulder that caused an eclipse when
he stood on his tippy toes. He was about thirty-five but looked five years younger. He was also the president of Warrior Incorporated, the biggest professional mixed martial arts organization in the Western Hemisphere.

  The company had been around for ten years but didn’t elbow its way to the top of the food chain until Eddie took over five years ago. Each event got bigger than the previous one, more celebrities were shown in the crowds, and better sponsors showed up on the cage padding and canvas.

  And here he was. Eddie in the prep room at this event was like Bill Gates stopping by a RadioShack clearance sale.