25

MICK LEANED AGAINST THE WALL NEXT TO THE door of the elite dressing room, sucking at his cigarette like smoke was the fuel that kept his lungs running.

His ferret-like eyes darted to me as I approached and raised a finger to my lips. I puffed myself up to look even more pathetic and threatless.

“Hey, Mick?”

He nodded but didn’t acknowledge I’d known his name.

“Hey, you got a pick-me-up? I’m on soon and am dragging my ass.”

That’s when I heard Bikini’s annoying voice from behind the closed door. “No way, Shemp. No way. Don’t welsh. We’re going to flip me today. I don’t care that Jack’s dead. I don’t care that some monkey is wearing his mask. Tonight, we go atomic.”

Mick exhaled smoke, looked at me. “You don’t have pockets, fella. You got cash?”

I lifted my right boot and gave it a slap. “Always prepared. Like the Boy Scouts.”

He smiled and the best I can say for it was that it didn’t drip slime. There was no taste of magic around him, just the sour-mash smell of a filth peddler. “Come on,” he said, turning on his yellow Cuban heels. “My office is this way.” Dragging his heels as if his boots were too taxing for his legs, he slid away from the office.

I was awful at first impressions, but, seeing him push open the emergency exit with a spidery hand, I couldn’t drum up anything positive to see in a guy pushing drugs that killed people, especially since he seemed to have been enjoying the mayhem of his work.

I followed him into the night air. We were in a back lot, around the corner from where Achilles’s eyes would have spied us, for which I thanked Glycon and other false gods. The ground was littered with the yellow corpses of a thousand smokes, one of them still lit.

A black Lincoln Continental Mark VI sat amid the cheap wrecks that the wrestlers piled in to haul ass across country. I was less than a step behind him as he started to slither toward the Lincoln. “So,” he said without turning, “what you be needing, big guy?”

I punched his kidney, sending a shock of pain through his entire body. Before pain gave way to reason and causality, I locked my arms around his neck and pulled him back with a real sleeper hold—a blood choke. Mick’s rubber legs gave way, fingers digging into my forearm before dropping.

I grabbed his backpack and riffled through it. Mick was stirring so I applied some blunt-force trauma to his head with a wingtip. The concussion should keep him out for several minutes.

There were three wooden cases, each covered in tourist-styled Yin-Yangs or Buddha faces, each a different color: red, black, and blue. Nothing tasted of magic. Red? Hundreds of scattered bennies. Black? White horse heroin, by the looks of the powder in the little bags.

Blue?

I opened the case and licked my lips.

It tasted of nothing. Not air. Not nothing. “Charmed,” I said. Fucker had a hex on it. Inside was a single baby blue bag. In it was a dried leaf.

“Where the fuck is he?” screamed Shemp, and the door opened with a gust, sending the tiny baggie into the air. I palmed the one burning cigarette from the ground, stinging my knuckle before I could snake it between my fingers.

“Why are you out here? What the fuck are you doing?”

“I came out for a smoke,” I said, standing. “Found this guy. Guess he got mugged. Want me to call the cops?”

“Cops? Are you insane? Get the fuck back inside.”

“I feel kinda responsible.”

Shemp grabbed me by the throat and brought me eye level with the brown buttons stuffed into his mashed face. “You owe Jack. You owe Sam. Go, and do me a favor? Die. Just make sure it’s in the ring. Or else I’ll do it back here later.” Brick fingers released me. “I’ll handle this guy.”

I coughed, as I was supposed to have no choice in doing, and let Shemp know he was still the master of the iron claw. I ambled off, quite aware that as soon as Mick woke up, they’d be having my ass.

He was my only connection to Black Lotus.

But if I fucked this up, a widow might lose her kid.

I ran back inside. I needed to lose quick, get back to the soon-to-be-conscious Mick, and finish up our business. They’d surely not stop the match to accommodate his assault complaint against me.

I hoped.