Death Blow (13 page)

At work the next night, that big thing that Lila’d felt was
coming continued to dance in front of her eyes. Even worse, now, a stone had
formed in the pit of her stomach, heavy and unsettling. The first fight of the
night had gone badly, and one of the fighters had broken the other guy’s nose.
Blood was all over the ring, and trailed its way out, onto the floor, and all the
way to the bathrooms. A custodian was mopping it all up now, and the patrons
were getting restless and, for the first time, rude. Lila was still making good
money running drinks for Georgia, but people were taking an attitude with her
tonight, and she was unaccustomed to that. Lyle and Cassandra sat, agitated, at
the bar, and they, too, were responding to whatever mercurial retrograde
floated through the air that night.

“Need to pick up the pace, girly,” Cassandra scolded Lila
when she returned from a round of deliveries. “I can see people tappin’ their
toes, waiting for ya to come over and get ‘em something.” Lila just nodded—she
didn’t have time to deal with the bosses being right there and micromanaging
tonight. Lyle just kept his arms crossed and
tsked
every once in awhile,
but Cassandra was letting the comments rip tonight. She’d already told Georgia
she needed to rethink her wardrobe, because she’d let her clothes slip the last
few weeks.

The bell rang for the next start to fight. The janitor had
finished cleaning up, thankfully, and out came Jackson and the big black guy
Barrett had beaten the week before.

“All right,” Lyle cooed, rubbing his hands together. “Here
we go.” He put a hand on Cassandra’s shoulder, and she gripped it with her own.
The trainers took last minute precautions on their guys, and the match had to
start—they were running behind schedule with all the cleaning from the last
one.

Jackson and the man squared up, both in guards, and began to
circle around each other slowly. They seemed well matched. But Lila couldn’t
help it: she felt like something was going to go wrong here. Write it off as
her bizarre connection to Jackson, but she had a bad feeling about this match.
However, she had drinks to run, so she loaded a tray and started off. She
dropped off two mojitos to an elderly couple sitting towards the back when she
heard the first thwack of a punch. The crowd gasped and she caught a quick
glance of the ring. The man had wacked Jackson good, right across the jaw. He
reeled a bit, then staggered back into guard. Jackson’s usual supporters were
booing, or shouting for him to get it back. Jackson had a strange look in his
eyes.

Next Lila had to run three vodka rocks to a group of young
friends who came once in awhile and always got wasted. As she handed off the
third one, a horrible sound came from the ring and the guy she was handing it
to nearly knocked it out of her hand.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” he shouted, jumping to his
feet. Lila turned, and Jackson was against the ropes, the black man advancing
on him, looking ready to strike hard and many times over. He did just that,
hitting Jackson ruthlessly a couple times across the face, then squatting low
and pummeling Jackson’s ribs with his fists. Jackson supporters were on their feet
now, screaming in anguish. Jackson didn’t usually get hit this much. Lila
suddenly became very worried. She put the vodka rocks down and headed off to
her last delivery, trying to keep an eye on the ring. The black man took a big
step back, Lila’s guts seized, and he fan kicked Jackson across the face. Blood
sprayed out of his mouth. Lila let out a gasp, stopping in the middle of the
floor with her tray, not worried about the drinks anymore.

He wasn’t going to fight. Lila could see it in his eyes and
it scared her, not because he’d get the shit beaten out of him—Jackson would be
able to withstand that—but because of what his parents would do to him if he
threw this fight.
Come on, Jackson
, she willed silently,
fight
.
Jackson must have heard her, because at that moment, his eyes found hers in the
crowd. The man’s other foot came up and cracked Jackson right on the chin,
whipping his head back.

Lila let out a cry, but it got lost in the uproar of the
shocked crowd. Still, Jackson didn’t fight. Lila could only hope that he either
tapped out before things got too bad, or went down and didn’t get up. She
didn’t want to see him get knocked out. Another hard punch to the gut and
Jackson faltered, almost went down on one knee. She turned to find Lyle and
Cassandra, afraid of what she might see. Both sat completely still, like they
normally would have during one of Jackson’s fights, but the looks on their
faces were terrifying. They weren’t even angry, it seemed—they were murderous.
Another crack dragged Lila’s attention back to the ring, where Jackson had just
taken a hard jab to the face, and
his
nose was now bleeding profusely.
Before he could recover, the black man kneed him in the stomach, and Jackson
doubled over and went down.

The crowd was booing loudly, ruthlessly, yelling horrible
things at Jackson. Before the legal amount of time had passed, or before
Jackson had tapped out, Lila saw the referee glance over towards the bar, then
throw his hands up and blow the whistle. The black man was declared the winner,
in a rather shady ending to the fight. The crowd responded with audible
confusion. Lila followed to where the ref had looked, and saw Lyle a few steps
forward now, and on the phone.

“Victory by willful default!” The ref shouted over the
crowd. Willful default, meaning Jackson wouldn’t fight back. The crowd was up
and agitated, some heading for the bar, some throwing trash at the ring, others
yelling loudly for any of the numerous reasons. Jackson’s trainer helped him up
and dabbed away the blood on his face, shoving cotton balls in his nostrils to
stop them up. Jackson didn’t seem that hurt, just resigned—but Lila caught a
glimpse of a glimmer in them, which she knew was curiosity about his parents’
reaction. If anyone was going to be brave enough to make his way to the bar
after a thrown fight like that, it’d be Jackson, and sure enough, he shooed the
trainer away and slid under the ropes, heading towards where Lyle and Cassandra
coolly, dangerously, stood.

Lila rushed to get her last round to its patrons, partly
because the bar was swamped and she needed to get back up there, and partly
because she needed to be nearby when the confrontation happened. She finally
made it back up there, through the thick deposits of crowd, into the quiet showdown
that had already started.

“You pull a fuckin’ stunt like that again, and you’ll be
sorry,” Lyle muttered to Jackson as he sipped a whiskey, not looking at his
dad.

“Yeah? You gonna fight me, dad?” Jackson shot back.

“I’ll do more than fight you, son, I’ll beat your sorry
ass.” He said it so calmly that Lila almost didn’t understand the words at
first.

“You cost us a lot of money just now, Jackson, you know
that? A lot, a whole lotta money, son. D’ya get that?” Cassandra tried to
reason with him, but there was still an undercurrent of danger to her words.

“Yeah, I fucking got that, Mom. I fucking get it,” Jackson
spoke very loudly, and other patrons at the bar were looking now. “I’m nothing
to you but a fucking paycheck, I get it, you don’t have to clarify it for me anymore,
okay? You know, I might not always be here to win your fucking money for you. Why
don’t you and Dad start training to get into the ring? You’re both heartless
bastards anyway, should be right up your alley.” He slammed his empty rocks
glass down and started off.

“Hey!” Lyle barked at Jackson, trying to rein him in. He
reached out and grabbed Jackson by the forearm, and Jackson spun around
dangerously, shooting daggers at his father.

“If you don’t take your hand off me, I’ll deck you so hard
you’ll wish I’d never been born.” From the look in his eyes, Lila knew he meant
it, and so did Lyle. He let go and Jackson stormed towards the elevator and out
of the club. Cassandra got up off her stool and smoothed her dress out. Lyle
shook his head and got out a cell phone.

“’Scuse us, girls,” Cassandra said tersely, slipping an arm
through Lyle’s as he typed away on his iPhone. “We’re going to need to take
care of a few things now. Get off your asses and do some work, yeah girls?
People pay good money to be here.”

Lyle got back on his phone. “Yeah,” Lila heard him say, “no,
he threw it. Yes I’m fuckin’ sure. You think I don’t know how much a’ my own
goddamned money I put on it? Well, we’ll just have to talk to him about that.” Lyle
walked out of earshot and Cassandra caught up with him, and they began having a
private conversation that Lila didn’t want to watch. It made the stone in her
stomach feel like a boulder.

The patrons had fallen to a dull roar in the aftermath of
Jackson’s default. Groups were huddled, discussing what could have happened,
but gradually, conversation picked back up and the quiet, curious whispers died
down. Then, people realized they needed more booze, and the bar got slammed
again. Lila wanted to call Jackson, to make sure he was okay, but she didn’t
have time to. As Lila and Georgia figured out the next round of orders, the
next fight started without Lila noticing. She gingerly picked up a full tray
and started off to deliver it, only then catching that Barrett was in the ring
and doing his normal dance.

She didn’t have time to look at him, but periodically her
temperature spiked, and she could feel Barrett’s eyes on her. Thunks and
jeers—Barrett must have been handling his opponent, a heavyset olive-skinned
man, with relative ease, because his usual haters didn’t even seem that
interested in the fight that night. Lila barely had time to glance at the ring
every now and then, but as was usually the case with Barrett, the fight was
over relatively soon. Lila heard the wail of the heavyset man that she knew
meant Barrett had him in his special hold. Right as she dropped off the last
drinks on her tray, she heard the slaps of submission on the mat, and the fight
was over.

The night got even weirder: for the first time, maybe ever
since Lila had started working there, with the end of Barrett’s fight—the final
fight of the night—patrons began to clear out almost immediately. She weaved
through the exiting crowd, most of them too busy leaving to even throw stuff at
Barrett like they normally did. He slid under the ropes and caught up to Lila
as she made her way back to the bar.

“You’re not even going to look at me tonight?” he asked,
clearly angry. She sighed.

“I’m super busy, Barrett, I don’t really have time to make
eyes at you from across the room. Give me a minute and I’ll eat you alive with
my gaze, okay?” She tried to keep her tone light and joking, but she could
sense that he didn’t take it that way.

“No, whatever, don’t fucking bother.” She turned to try to
reassure him that it really only was because of how busy she was tonight, but
when she turned he was gone already. She caught sight of his shoulders bobbing
through the crowd in another direction. She really didn’t have time for this. At
the bar, she and Georgia began closing people out, but they were leaving in
hoards tonight. Lila was thankful that Lyle and Cassandra had left already,
because in the moods they were in tonight, the patrons booking it out of Club
Malevolence wouldn’t have made them any happier. As she ran a credit card for a
well-dressed businessman, she took a moment to consider Barrett’s reaction. Why
was he so mad that she hadn’t looked at him? That meant something, because it
had clearly pissed him off, and she didn’t take him for the type to just get
jealous about a booty call’s attention. But, before she could think about it
too much, the machine spat out a receipt and she was dunked back into work.

The bar began to clear out, and she and Georgia took a quick
shot together. They deserved it after the night they’d worked. Wiping a hand
across her mouth, the whiskey burning down her throat, Lila looked across the
room and her blood went cold for a second. In the seats, off in the far corner,
Barrett was sitting with a trashy looking blonde, one arm casually draped on the
seat behind her and one sitting comfortably on her exposed thigh. Lila’s jaw
clenched. As if sensing her, Barrett’s eyes flitted over to the bar and met
hers, and they stared at each other for a moment, Barrett with a shit-eating
grin on his face, Lila incredulous. She shook her head, not breaking eye
contact with him yet, her top lip curling in disgust despite her attempts to
conceal her displeasure. At her reaction, Barrett’s grin dropped a bit, and,
now uncomfortable, he turned back to the blonde.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Lila muttered, beginning to slam
glasses around to clean. Her face burned and she realized she was grinding her
teeth. She washed several martini glasses in a row, plunging them furiously
into the warm, soapy water, seething.

“Georgia, can we get 2 Four Horsemens?” She jolted to
attention at the sound of his voice at the end of the bar. Turning slowly,
already knowing what she was going to see but not wanting to see it, she found
Barrett and the blonde standing there, the latter giggling like an idiot and
swaying slightly on her feet. Lila’s jaw dropped open. Barrett didn’t look at
her.

“Coming right up,” George growled, adding, “asshole,” under
her breath as she walked away.

“What’s a four horsemen?” the blonde drawled in a high, nasal
voice.

“The four whiskeys,” Barrett answered, turning to her and
sliding a strand of hair behind her ear. The blonde giggled again and swayed a
little harder, reaching out to grab Barrett’s bicep to brace herself.

“That’s a lot of whiskey,” she slurred. Georgia set the two
shots down in front of them with a grudge-filled clink, and put on the fakest
smile she could manage.

“Enjoy.” She clearly did not mean it.