The Unwilling(23)

In a corner of the same cell stood a man known as Prisoner X—or just, X. That wasn’t his name, but people called him that. They thought it was short for Axel, his true name, or because he’d killed ten men, and eaten parts of them. Others said that he’d killed his wife for infidelity, but only after he’d emasculated her lover, then cut Xs into his eyes. X had been an inmate for so long that people didn’t really care anymore. He was part of the prison, like the steel and concrete and stone.

“Higher, please. Your left hand.” X gestured, and the man by the bed complied. Shirtless in prison jeans, he stood with both hands up and fisted. “Excellent. Perfect.”

The man by the bed was only two inches taller than X, but wide and rawboned and forty pounds heavier. Raised hard in the Georgia mountains, he’d run away young and grown up a thief and a killer, a bare-knuckle, fight-for-cash brawler on the streets of Atlanta. He’d been inside for less than five weeks, but every guard told the same story, that the kid could take a beating, spit blood, and come back for more, that he was a serious, determined, no-bullshit kind of fighter.

“Don’t move,” X said. “You’re moving.” X was not a great painter, but he wasn’t bad, either. He made a few more strokes with the brush, then said, “It’s strange. I know.”

“It’s a freak show, is what it is.”

The kid talked tough, but the doubt was in his eyes. He’d heard the stories. He was, in fact, having his portrait painted in a subbasement beneath death row. X enjoyed the young man’s doubt, but didn’t let the pleasure show. That would be weakness, and X despised weakness in all its forms. After a final stroke, he turned the painting so the young man could see it, a hyper-contextualized impression of violence and its aftermath: the broken stance, the bruising, and the blood. “You understand what comes next?”

“They told me, yeah.”

“Good.”

X put down the painting and stripped off his shirt, revealing a narrow torso corded with muscle. Even at forty-nine, there was nothing soft, not anywhere.

“I’m not afraid of you,” the young man said. “I think the stories are only stories.”

X smiled, but it was not a nice smile. Backing through the open door, he moved from the cell to a narrow corridor that ran the length of a half dozen other cells, all devoid of prisoners. The corridor ceiling was twenty feet high, the light fixtures rusted where old water stains discolored the concrete and stone. A guard sat near a metal door, but knew better than to watch.

Trailing X from the cell, the young man said, “Why me?”

“Was it four men you killed, or five?”

“Six. Bare-handed.”

“Is that not reason enough?”

“I don’t fight for the fun of it.”

“For what, then?”

“Cash money. Or if someone needs killing.”

“And today?”

“They say the warden is in your pocket. That you own the guards, too.”

“You fear retaliation.”

“Yeah, well. Busting up random convicts is one thing…”

He left the thought unfinished, so X pulled a sheaf of cash from his pocket, counted out some bills, and dropped them on the floor. “A thousand dollars for the fight. That’s a hundred a minute for the next ten minutes of your life.”

The young man stared at the money like a dog would stare at meat. “I’ll take your money, old man, but you’re not going to last any ten minutes.”

He stooped for the bills, then came with his chin tucked and the big fists up. He thought the fight was a joke, that X was used up and stupid-crazy, an old man with half the reach. In a different life, he might have been right, but X, in motion, was a marriage of power and speed that few in the world could match. He worked the right eye first—four hard jabs—then bloodied the mouth, the nose; cracked a rib on the left side.

That was the first nine seconds.

X slipped out of reach, then came back for the face, two lefts and right, then a roundhouse kick that cut cables in the big man’s knees. X danced away a second time, not yet breathing hard. He saw the fear then, the understanding.

What if they were true?

The stories …

X smiled as that fear opened like a flower. The big man saw it, and hated it. “You paid me to fight, so fucking fight.”

He came harder that time, and X bled, too. It’s why he’d picked the big man in the first place.

All those kills.

That readiness.

X made it last the full ten minutes, but the fight was never close. X got hurt; the big man got ruined. By the ten-minute mark, he was bent at the waist and half-blind, too bloody and broken to lift his hands. He looked once at the guard, and X felt the first real distaste. “He can’t help you.”

“Do it if you’re going to do it.”

The man’s face was a mask of blood, one eye ruined for life, the right shoulder out of its socket. The rage was still there, though; he could go longer. But what was the point?

“Guard. We’re finished here.”

The guard kept his eyes down, but knew from long experience what to do. He got the big man up and out, and never looked at X.

When they were gone, X went into a second cell, washed blood from his hands and face, then taped up the cuts.