WE WENT DOWN THE HILL IN THE DARK AND TO THE GATE OF the mine, where we were met by some men with guns. I showed them my ticket—that slip of paper Tibbs had given me—and they led us into the yard. They didn’t talk to us. They didn’t talk to one another. Nobody told a joke or sung a song. We were down to business. Moonlight pooled on the barrels of their weapons. We followed them to the mine elevator, where a group of our fellow ticketholders was waiting, as well as some men holding dogs on thick leather leashes.
Finally, the elevator came up, and a redneck holding a TEC-9 stepped forward and said, “Boys, we gonna get on this thing now and go down into the mine. Here’s how this works: I tell you to do something, you do it. You don’t do it, you might get peppered with this here TEC. ’My clear?”
He must have been clear because nobody said anything. He nodded some and said, “Okay, we want spectators grouped in the middle of the cage, doggers at the edges facing outward.”
That didn’t make the boys happy. They didn’t want to stand ass-to-elbows with a bunch of strangers as scummy as they were, I guess. Firearm threats notwithstanding, some of them got vocal about it. Some redneck George Washington decided to lead a mini-revolt for the freedom of the elevator platform and got a rifle stock in the nuts for his trouble. He dropped to his knees with a grunt and was dragged away to his fate.
Everybody else hurried to the middle of the cage. No one wanted a rifle stock in his nuts. Next the doggers were led on and instructed again to stand facing outward, with their backs to one another. Well, none of them wanted to do that, either, and there was another little fuss over it. In the end, though, everybody agreed to obey the guns aimed at their faces. The walking boss’s TEC-9 and one or two Cobray M11s. And with the fancy suppressors, too. You’ve never seen so much agreeing. We were like conservative ministers deciding we hated sin, Satan, and folks on food stamps. When we were finally in position, a beer gut in a quilted Day-Glo vest snapped shut the lanyard. The cage lurched, and we were on our way.
More ways than one, down we went into the dark. The first thing that strikes you about the inside of a coal mine is the cool. Rock and earth are good insulators, and as we sank into the shaft the cold air rose up to meet us like a corpse’s breath. Everyone started shrugging into their coats and hats. Jeep put on a ball cap that barely contained his head. I was already wearing my cap, and I hadn’t brought extra clothes, so I just jammed my hands in my pockets, which was just as well since I couldn’t stop them shaking. A thousand feet or so later, we rattled to a standstill. “Rattled” is maybe understating it. We hit down with a bang that sent our skeletons into our hats. The cave cold came howling at us like Baskerville’s hound.
“This way, gentlemen.”
The gate opened, and the gentlemen disembarked. One of them hocked a serious loogie into the dark. Someone else farted. Just like Camelot. Another armed group led us off the platform and into the work area. It was a different group. They looked the same, but they were missing different teeth. It was a subtle difference, but if you looked closely you could detect it. They waved their guns at us, and we followed them into the main run and five or six hundred yards deeper into what was once a pretty good size room-and-pillar mine. Or still was, maybe. This wasn’t an old mine. It was a relatively new outfit—last twenty years or so—and the cuts were clean and the works new. The lighting systems were functional and you could feel the steady breath of the ventilation system as the air coursed through the veins cut in the rock. So maybe we were just in a closed section. You couldn’t ask anyone. Asking would get you stitches. Or worse.
Our group was full of stitches and worse. The doggers, especially. No one was pretty, but every one of those doggers was a Frankenstein of wounded parts: scars, cuts, abrasions, missing fingers and flesh. It was like the world had taken a bite out of them. If they’d started comparing scars, they’d have stayed down there until the coal turned back into plant and animal life. Their personal style didn’t do much to smooth out the rough edges. You could have filled twenty barrels with their tattoo ink, and the hairstyles they favored ran the spectrum from twenty-to-life to life-without-parole. Their dogs seemed to be in better shape, but I didn’t guess that was going to last much longer.
We finally made it to the room. It was a big one, fifty yards by fifty yards, maybe. The ceiling was low and gave the whole thing a claustrophobic feel. There were lights bolted to the ribs and a fight ring in the center. An ugly woman in a one-piece bathing suit ordered us into a circle at the edges of the room. One of the doggers thought he’d make a romantic pass at her, but she wasn’t in the mood for love. She tucked an automatic into his crotch and invited him to take his place. He took his place. He looked vaguely shocked that his manly wiles hadn’t panned out. Then Ugly Woman joined another woman, even uglier but younger, and together they started dancing and grinding to some kind of dance music that was bass and nothing else.
“We’re in hell,” I said to Jeep.
“Not yet.”
More men came in, and the edges of the room began to swell. The onlookers stood arm’s length apart, careful distances. They stacked their firearms and cash at their feet.
“Case the place gets raided,” Jeep explained. “You just walk away. You still get busted, but there’s no clear weapons charge.”
“Walk away? You can’t just walk away. You’re in a coal mine.”
“Principle’s sound, though.”
“And I guess no one can prove you were gambling on the fight.”
“Less a sure thing, anyway. Complicates the legal process. Makes deals more likely.”
The MC stepped into the chamber and brushed past us. You could tell he was the MC on account of his clothes: a cream-colored cowboy suit and one of those bolo ties with a scorpion trapped in a chunk of amber. He was wearing a pistol in a patent leather holster. A big .45. He was as short and round as a highway barrel—the MC, not the gun—and his face made me want to give up on humanity once and for all. He had a slung jaw and tiny black eyes and eyebrows that seemed to carpet his entire forehead. Flannery O’Connor would have considered him implausibly grotesque. He pushed through the crowd and into the ring, then squatted down and rubbed his hands through the piles of straw on the floor. He was awfully attentive about that straw. Then he stepped across the pieces of plywood that formed the walls of the ring and raised his hands. There was a roar from the onlookers. It was on, I guess. I felt my stomach drop.
Jeep pushed earplugs into his head. “You sure you got the stomach for this, slick?” he asked, and when I looked a question at him he grumbled, “Once. Down in goddamn Broward County, Florida. I was drunk off my ass; the place was full of asshole Marines. Only reason I left without killing anyone is I got hit from behind with a fucking parking meter.”
“Parking meter?”
“Yup.”
“An actual parking meter?”
“Full of coins, too. Must have been a busy street, wherever it was. I chewed a bottle of aspirin every day for a month, washed it down with a fifth of Cabin Still, and the headache’s still never quite gone away. But at least I stopped seeing double.”
“And now you get to see this.”
Highway Barrel barged into our conversation.
“Tickets, boys.”
I handed over the slip of paper Tibbs had given me. Highway Barrel held it in his palm like a dog turd.
“This ain’t quite the right one,” he said. “This was the one from a while ago. You should have the new one.”
For an instant, I nearly panicked. Then I got myself together and said, “Leonard said it would be all right.”
“Leonard?”
“Black.”
He looked shocked by that.
“I . . . might need to call for confirmation,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Call him from the mine tonight. Call his home. Leave a record for the cops.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he stammered.
“What did you mean?” Jeep said, catching on.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe now you do know,” I said.
He stared at us a moment more, but then he took the ticket and went away. The next guy handed over his ticket without hesitation. Highway Barrel still found a reason to read him the riot act up one side and down the other.
Jeep whispered, “Think that was smart, slick? Bringing Black into it? Now the little guy almost has to call.”
“Yeah, but he won’t call tonight, I’m guessing. And even if he did, it’s hard to imagine they’d care too much. This is bullshit, man. The Cleaveses might be psychopaths, but even they aren’t stupid enough to kill somebody over a game this small.”
Jeep inclined his head toward the ribs of the mine tunnel, first one way, then the other.
“Check it out, slick,” he said.
I couldn’t make out what he was talking about at first. But then my eyes adjusted to the shadows, and sure enough, there they were: webcams, digital cameras built to transmit live images directly to the Internet.
“You’re kidding? We’re on the YouTube?”
“Not that. But we’re definitely online somewhere. Could be a hidden link,” Jeep said. “Part of an at least halfway legit streaming service. Subscribers only.”
“Wouldn’t the cops be able to find something like that?”
“Most cops couldn’t find their own butts with a road map and an extra hand,” he said. “But, yeah, maybe. That is, if they were looking, which they probably aren’t. Their best shot would be if some animal cruelty outfit were monitoring the web for shit like this. But then again, you can bet your ass that site isn’t advertising itself.”
“So what—it might be part of some otherwise-legit gambling thingy?”
Jeep grinned. “Site?”
“Yeah. Site.”
“Yeah, it could be part of something semi-legit,” said Jeep. “But it probably isn’t. I had to bet, I’d say it’s probably hiding behind something pretty run-of-the-mill. Something you’d never suspect. And the link to the real shit could be invisible.”
I was about to ask him to explain all that when another cage-load of men and dogs arrived. Suddenly the room was too full. Everyone lost their breathing room and stood scowl to scowl. One guy’s tattoo took up on the next guy, and so on, forming a giant, horrible tapestry. Something like that could never last. This wasn’t a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention—it wasn’t that mean—but it was close. Someone would say something or smell something, there’d be a wink or a laugh or a nothing, and hell would break lose. The room was itching for reasons to murder. Highway Barrel must have known it, too, because just then the lights flickered, the sad dancing girls started jumping and waving their arms, and the show was under way.
“Hold your breath, bro,” Jeep said.
Now the man in charge took the center ring, grinning like a moray eel, his double chins spreading across the bottom of his face.
“Pure.” He smacked the word between his swollen lips. His face beamed in maniacal glee. I wanted to hit him and never stop. “In a world of bullshit, liberal media lies, homo propaganda, and PC revisionism, what we have is pure. Muscle, bone, teeth, fur, and blood.”
The crowd loved it. They wouldn’t have known a liberal revisionist from a chicken in a dress, but they loved it. His speech had the word “liberal” in it, and they’d been trained to hate that word and all it stood for. These were poor guys, most of them. You could tell by their clothes, their hairstyles, and their choice of pastime. A lot of them were on public health. One older guy in a corner was rocking a brace he probably got from the state. But somehow none of that counted as the dole. The dole was what everyone else was on, and they hated them for it.
“And by moving underground, into the secret places of the world, we’ll show them that pure things survive and thrive, even in shadows. We . . .”
Someone switched on the boom box, interrupting him. Thank the gods. The girls reappeared, dancing and fondling each other in a display of sad eroticism while Highway Barrel grumped his way out of the ring and the first dogs grumped in, led by boys no older than fifteen or sixteen. Tomorrow’s sociopaths, today. The dogs were underweight pits, bony things with sharp ribs and knobby knees. The muzzles came off, and they flung themselves together with the nauseating sound of crunching cartilage and flattening muscle. The men around us rushed the edges of the ring in a sudden stampede. If Jeep hadn’t been there, I’d have been trampled.
And after what happened next, I sort of wish I had been. The dogs locked jaws and snarled. There was a spray of blood. And that was about it. Almost as fast as it started, the bout ended. One of them lost part of an ear, and the other was bloody around the eyes, but when the men in the hunting vests separated them using long metal rods, the animals trotted back to their disappointed masters as though nothing much had happened.
“Rookies,” a kid with pimples said to me. Maybe he’d pegged me as the new guy and wanted to be buds. “That bigger dog’s got some promise. Not much, but some. The little guy’s going to get himself killed, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Hells, yeah,” he said. “He’s twenty pounds underweight if he’s an ounce. He’ll get in a serious fight one day and . . . poof. Doggie all gone, man.”
I didn’t want to be buds back. I wanted to start a chain reaction that, in the fullness of time, would lead to the boy shitting his own teeth. But just then the next contenders emerged. These were bigger things. Scarier things. Pimples went nuts with applause, along with the rest of the room.
“Playtime is over, man,” he said over the noise.
The dogs were called King’s X and Ripper, and they were old pros. Their owners were muscleman types with loads of oozy tats on their arms and shoulder blades. When they looked at their animals, it was with the frozen appraisal of a pair of robot killers. I felt Jeep buzzing beside me. He wanted to kill them, too.
This fight was longer and bloodier. King’s X was a brown and white pit with a head like a cement block. This was a big animal. I’ve seen smaller cars. Ripper was darker and even bigger. I suspected he was a weightlifter in a dog suit. When he collided with King’s X at full speed, both dogs crashed to the straw mat in a bundle of exploding muscle. Ropes of foam splashed across the ring to dowse the psychopaths who’d moved in too close. The dogs smashed against the plywood barrier with a sound like raw steak hitting concrete, separated, and went after one another again, harder this time, teeth flashing.
“How long will it go?” I whispered up at Jeep.
“Dogs like these,” he said, “it’s what they call a dead game. They’ll fight till one of them is a corpse.”
He was right. After a few moments, it was clear King’s X had had enough. He turned and spun. He snapped at Ripper, but it was weak. He ran, trying desperately to get away.
“Uh-oh.” Pimples. “Game over.”
Ripper was on him, jaws clamping around the other dog’s left hind leg and tearing until the limb held on only by a few bloody ligaments. Ripper took his throat between his jaws, and shook. And it was over. King’s X sighed. His eyes rolled back in his head as blood pumped out his gasping mouth, and when he shit himself before he died, the men around us laughed their asses off.
“What do you think, man?” Pimples asked.
I showed him what I thought. I turned and threw up all over him.
THIS WAS A NIGHTMARE NIGHT, AN ENDLESS NIGHT, THE KIND that would hunt you through the rest of life and come to stand at your deathbed with black eyes. There were five more fights. Three more dogs died. A fourth lost most of his jaw. He’d probably end up in a garbage heap somewhere. The straw in the ring went black with the blood. By the time we headed back to the surface and into the hot air of early morning, I was shaking so bad I thought the rattle of the lift would vibrate something inside me loose that couldn’t be fixed. Jeep put his arm on my shoulder.
“Easy, brother.”
It was still dark and the light rain had pressed east, leaving behind a humid stew. When we arrived at the surface, it jumped on us and stuck there. The men with guns were nowhere in sight. A few of the doggers and spectators hung around to chat or smoke before saddling up and heading off into the night to God only knows what. Families, probably, a few of them. Little kids. I stopped thinking about it. The nightmares would come soon enough anyway. Pimples shot me an unhappy look before climbing into a bright yellow Ford pickup and roaring away in a cloud of dust. He didn’t like being puked on, I guess. I was busy repeating his plate number under my breath when I realized that Jeep wasn’t beside me anymore. He’d vanished.
Well, hell, he’d been on the elevator with me, so he couldn’t have gone far. I waited five minutes. Then ten. At fifteen he finally came jogging up, shush-finger to his lips.
“This way, slick.”
I started to ask a question, but he was already gone, jogging off again. I gave chase. That was easier said than done. Black #5 was a two-shaft outfit with a surface area about the size of ten football fields laid end to end. By the time I finally hobbled up to Jeep waiting behind a Quonset hut, my still-recovering legs were screaming just a little less urgently than my lungs.
“Hey, slow down, asshole,” I said, although the big man had already stopped moving. “What’s the rush?”
Jeep aimed a finger, and I saw. Highway Barrel and one of the muscle dudes. Ripper’s owner, I realized. Someone had moved several giant rubbish containers near one of the shafts, probably to hold used-up or trashed equipment brought up from the bottom. Highway Barrel was busy filling it with the bodies of dead dogs. Muscle Dude was sitting on one of the containers, smoking a hogleg joint. He didn’t want to help. Highway Barrel was huffing and gasping, and his sweat made him look like he’d been dipped in cooking oil, but Muscle Dude didn’t care. He was indifferent to suffering, human and inhuman both.
Jeep said, “Time to gather a little information. Maybe bust some heads.”
“I’m for that. The head-busting thing, especially. Who gets to be the bad cop?”
Jeep thought about it.
“How about no good cop, bad cop? How about just two crazy redneck motherfuckers?”
“Sounds like a scheme.”
Highway Barrel wasn’t happy to see two strangers approach, but at least he didn’t open fire. That was something. Muscle Dude puffed away on his hogleg. That was something, too. I admit, the guy worried me a little. He was too calm, one. Two, he was as big as a bank vault. I’ll fight just about anything human, but Muscle Dude looked like he’d just rolled off the assembly line at the Mack factory.
“What’s up, amigos?” he said. “Come to help bury the collateral damage?”
Highway Barrel glared at him. The boy didn’t notice glares. Highway Barrel didn’t want it to go to waste. It was a dandy of a glare. He turned it toward us.
“What do you want, men? Fight’s over. Show’s done. Time to vanish into the night.”
“We know.” I showed him my hands. He didn’t relax. He didn’t add my name to his Christmas card list or ask to be Facebook friends. I turned to Muscle Dude. “Hey, sorry about your dog.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. Fucking thing was a loser from day one.”
“What do you want?” Highway Barrel.
“What’s your name?”
“Fuck you. That’s my name.”
“I’m Slim,” I said, ignoring him. “This is Jeep.”
Muscle Dude laughed. The veins on his neck crawled around.
“Oh, how I love this part of the world, man.”
“What do you want?” Highway Barrel again. His hands twitched. I wondered when he’d remember he was armed. “You’re cops, aren’t you? Oh, Lord have mercy, Jesus Christ.”
Muscle Dude stiffened. He didn’t like that we might have been cops. I don’t know how he felt about Jesus. Probably it was a troubled relationship. He hopped down from the container.
“We’re not the police,” I said. “But we are looking for someone.”
“And you’re gonna help us,” Jeep added.
Highway Barrel sucked his lower lip. His upper was covered with tiny beads of sweat.
“Who?”
“A. Evan Cleaves,” I said. “And his gang.”
The little guy took a step back like I’d take a swing at him. He wasn’t wrong. I was about to.
“No. Uh-uh. No fucking way.”
“Just tell us, and we’ll be on our way.”
“I can’t.”
Jeep said to me, “I knew he wouldn’t tell us.”
“Hey, you were right. I was wrong. What can I say?”
“You want me to take care of these two, Carlos?” Muscle Dude finished his joint. He pitched away the roach and flexed his muscles. Jeep laughed at him.
“Pretty,” he said. “There’s almost nothing you can’t inject these days.”
“Shut up,” Highway Barrel hissed.
Jeep ignored him.
“About that dog of yours, son,” he said.
“Shut up,” Highway Barrel hissed. “Please.”
“It’s like I said, man,” said Muscle Dude, “fucking garbage.”
The boy sprang like a jolt of lightning. He was so fast he knocked over his bud. Highway Barrel went down on the gravel pad with a shriek. I caught a hard knife-hand strike to the shoulder and dropped to one knee. But the boy didn’t want me. He wanted Jeep. Jeep wanted him. It was a match made in heaven. The two men collided like dogs in the ring, both growling. I looked up. Highway Barrel was fumbling with the big .45. He’d finally remembered it.
I hit him hard enough to make him forget it again. I hit him with a snapper of a right, then spun and side-kicked him into the garbage cans. As he flailed over backward, I ended up with the .45 in my hand.
“Stay down, you idiot,” I said.
He didn’t want to stay down. They never want to stay down. He might have been a little guy, but he was strong as a brown bear. And none too bright. I waved his own gun under his nose, but he kept coming. He kicked my right leg with the silver cap toe of his Western boot. But that was pretty much his only move. I backed out, stepped quickly under his slow right hook, and came up again with a right hook to his balls. I followed this with a jump kick to his chest—a little like targeting the broad side of a billboard—and an elbow to the face that dropped him in a pile. He looked up at me and held out a hand.
“I don’t like fighting,” he said, spitting blood.
“You’re shitting me.”
“What?”
“You don’t like fighting? You’re the MC of a goddamn dogfighting ring.”
“I mean human fighting.”
I reached down to pull him upright. My plan was to beat him to death, administer CPR, then beat him to death again, but just then I got hit hard from behind and lost my feet.
Not on purpose, either. Jeep and Muscle Dude were engaged in some serious hand-to-hand combat, and they’d run right into us. For a moment I worried that Jeep was getting the worst of it. Muscle Dude’s bulges weren’t merely ornamental after all. And he’d been trained to fight. Two quick roundhouse kicks upside Jeep’s head sent the big man staggering before a beauty of a spinning stiff-leg to the midsection that would have split open a football took him off his feet altogether. But they don’t make them much tougher than Jeep Mabry, and flash and high kicks aren’t any match for plain old country-boy meanness. When the big man found his footing again and raised up into the light, he was actually grinning. Lashing out, he caught Muscle Dude by his short curly hair and drove the boy’s face down into his knee. Then he unleashed a spinning kick of his own, a whirling arc that met the side of Muscle Dude’s head and sounded roughly like a sledgehammer smashing an overripe melon. The kid should have done the smart thing and taken a nap. But when he came up again, this time with a boot knife in his hand, and lunged forward, he ran full-force into Jeep’s jump front kick, a shot that sent the boy end over end one too many times. He skidded on the rain-slicked lip of the shaft head and plunged, headfirst, into the hole. He didn’t even scream.
Carlos did, though. He screamed bloody murder. And he screamed even louder when Jeep hauled him from the ground and dragged his terrified ass to the hole.
“Last chance,” he said.
“A. Evan,” I said to Highway Barrel. I touched Jeep on the forearm, trying to hold him together. I might as well have been touching a lead statue.
“Woodrat Road,” Carlos whimpered. “They’ve got a hideout place in Woodrat Road. Near Pyramid and the park.”
“You know it?” Jeep asked, still looking at the little man, digging holes with his eyes.
“Yeah,” I replied, because the question was for me. “I know it.”
Jeep tossed the little man aside like a used hanky. He lay on his face near the garbage bag of dead pit bulls, whimpering softly. At least he had sympathy for something.