Mercy (Atlee Pine #4)(9)

Yet the possibility of a thousand bucks for one night’s work was more than enough incentive for Cain to be standing where she was, mouthpiece in, fists gloved, strategy mapped out, adrenaline spiking.

The women met in the middle of an improvised ring, where fence posts had been cemented into huge tractor trailer rims to hold them upright. The chain-link fence around the ladies was eight feet high with a padlocked gate. Unlike a UFC octagon ring, the chain link was not coated with soft vinyl and the metal posts had no safety coverings. You got rammed into that, it was not going to feel good. The floor was not springy canvas, just concrete, so ditto for sudden collisions there. But Cain didn’t mind. This was a piece of cake compared to other things she’d endured in life, although the locked cage door always bothered her. But if need be, she could climb the fence.

She glanced at her opponent, who was giving Cain her version of the intimidating dead-eye stare, which differed from the way that men did it. While testosterone-spiked guys always overplayed their hand and abilities in mental confrontations like this, women usually understated how badly they were going to mess you up.

“In your dreams, buttercup,” Cain said. She tacked on a broad smile at the dead-eye, which really seemed to piss the gal off.

If I get in your head, all the better.

The setup was three five-minute rounds, unless one fighter was knocked out or otherwise was no longer able to defend herself. Cain had never been knocked out, but there was always the chance. The lower number of rounds meant that the fight would be high intensity pretty much from the get-go. There was no cruising in this ring of human mayhem. The crowd wanted punishment and blood and lots of it. Like watching the NFL, it was far more American than baseball and apple pie ever would be. The tough and vicious won, and everybody else was a loser.

The only people inside this temporary prison where the max sentence was fifteen minutes were the fighters and the ref. This one was a stout, arrogant piece of work who had the deserved rep of being a misogynistic creep who was not below feeling up a gal who had been knocked off her feet and/or robbed of consciousness. He had tried that on a momentarily dazed Cain in one fight, and she had communicated her displeasure by nearly biting off one of his fingers. He had never tried it with her again, but she didn’t hold out hope for the jerk to call anything fair her way tonight.

But Cain also wasn’t overly confident. She had assorted injuries that had never healed properly, including a rotator cuff that had the tendency to seize up on her when she needed it the most. And her opponent wouldn’t need much of an advantage to knock Cain right on her ass, lights out.

The ref gave his brief instructions, shot a glare in Cain’s direction, wiggled his permanently damaged index finger, and the ladies stepped back, awaiting the commencement of the match. It came a few seconds later via air horn, and the fight was on.





CHAPTER





7


THE WOMEN CHARGED FORWARD AND met once more in the middle of the ring, with flared nostrils, cocked and locked limbs, and lethally intent eyes, while the crowd noise revved higher as the old, rusted guts of the factory rose up behind them. The whole scene was bolstered by ear-piercing music. “Eye of the Tiger” was running on a loop, and someone had set up seventies-era strobe lights and even a smoke machine that was already starting to peter out. It was tackiness taken to a whole new level, and everyone in attendance apparently loved it, except the two women about to do serious battle. They had other things on their minds, like survival. And money.

While the volume of the crowd spiked, Cain and her opponent took just a few seconds to feel each other out. Cain threw a jab and a snap kick to gauge the other woman’s tendencies, power, skill level, and reaction time. Her opponent did the same. The woman landed a crisp shot to Cain’s left oblique. Cain made her retreat by looping a kick in the woman’s direction. But she did not stretch her long leg to its maximum range of motion.

Cain took a right cross to the chin and a knee to her other oblique. Both blows stung. The chick was faster than Cain was, she had to admit, her muscle twitch superior; none of that was unexpected. She could tell that the lady was not maxing out, not yet. She had the fuel to dump Cain on her ass, that was without doubt.

Cain feigned a short left and then hit her opponent with a right uppercut straight to the gut. But the woman’s ab wall was stone. No damage done there, not really. Cain observed a sharp exhale of breath come out of the lady’s mouth with the impact, like air from a popped balloon. But the eyes remained clear, and her expression looking more assured of victory. She must have assumed Cain had used max power on that blow. But the arms were your weak limbs. True strength, the real knockout power, Cain well knew, was housed lower.

Two rounds passed with hundreds of punches and kicks and knees thrown and painfully landed, and blood and sweat released. And it was a lot of blood and a lot more sweat, as their bodies collided, separated, and slammed against each other again and again like grizzly bears ripping at each other.

The concrete floor quickly became littered with the droplets of both women’s blood and sweat, which their constantly moving bare feet had fashioned into blurry, ill-defined patterns that looked like an early-stage Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Welts and purplish bruises covered their arms and legs and torsos. Cuts littered their faces. You didn’t do this sort of thing if your looks really mattered to you. A forearm to the nose or a foot to the chin was going to land you on the floor, not a magazine cover.