Knuckle Down: A Sneak Preview of my new Novel

The following is an excerpt from my second novel, KNUCKLE DOWN, due to be released on August 8, 2016. It is the second book in the CAGE LIFE series. CAGE LIFE currently holds a 4.20 out of 5.00 rating on Goodreads and a 4.90 out of 5.00 rating on Amazon. I will be scheduling a Giveaway of KNUCKLE DOWN in the next few weeks. In the mean time...this.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Romans had an expression for gladiators who made their plans in the arena.

It translates roughly into English as too late.

The only time I’d been legitimately whipped in a fight, I’d known little more about my opponent than his name. Dem’yan Suba, on the other hand, had plenty of video of me to study. He’d stepped into the cage knowing my fighting style like the back of his hand, while I’d been forced to improvise. The result had been a disaster.

Now the coin had flipped.

Hieronymous Bash was one of the most popular and successful fighters on the Cage Combat League roster. He was featured in video games, T-shirts, bobblehead dolls, instructional videos, fan expositions, and even online seminars. If you wanted to bone up on his fighting techniques, all you needed was an ethernet cable.

He, on the other hand, knew fuck-all about me.
How could he? The most recent tape of me was three years old. I’d been off the radar all that time, fighting on small untelevised regional shows or obscure foreign promotions, my style changing, refining, sharpening, becoming something entirely different, entirely more dangerous, than anything he was prepared for.
How do you like the blindfold, Hieronymous?

The flow of blood from his mouth tells me not very much.

Bash was stronger than I, and more experienced. His kickboxing skills were excellent and he had superb footwork. While it was not overly difficult to take him down, years of amateur wrestling had given his body an explosive power that made it nearly impossible to keep him there.

I knew all of this, but I knew something else as well.

Any strength can be turned into a weakness.

As Max Schmeling had once said: In analyzing a boxer’s style, the distance from which he throws his most dangerous punches is really the critical variable. Once this is known, he can be outmaneuvered by staying out of that range.

As they say in New Orleans: true dat.

He needed room to strike. I gave him none. Either I circled just on the end of his effective range or I leapt inside the arc of his fists and feet, then back out again, like a wolf fighting a bear.

Just like Alton had trained me.

Head movement? It doesn’t help you if your opponent keeps striking to the body – jabs to the solar plexus, hooks to the ribs, kicks to the outside and the inside of the thigh.

Superb footwork? It’s hard to move your feet properly when two hundred and five pounds of Irish-Italian badass is stomping on them every time you clinch. Harder still when leg kicks are demolishing the capillaries in your legs, causing the blood to draw the
flesh over the muscle as tight as drumskin.

Explosive power? Use it, Hieronymous. I want you to. When I go for the double-leg takedown and plant you on ass and elbows, don’t stay there in the guard where you might catch your breath. Instead, escape back to your feet like you’re shoving a broken pillar off your body. Now do it again…and again…and again. Keep doing it until you’ve exploded yourself hollow.

His eyes made for interesting reading.

At first they showed nothing but that haughty, superior glint. Then, about halfway through the first round, I thought I saw confusion shallowing in their molasses-brown depths. Things were not going as planned. The Mickey Watts in front of him was not the Mickey Watts he’d seen on tape, getting choked unconscious by Dem’yan Suba and submitted by Wilson Kreese. His expression began to bear the look of a schoolyard bully who had gone to collect some lunch money and found himself spitting teeth onto the playground asphalt instead.

When the ship’s bell clanged the end of the round, Bash hesitated. He was breathing hard, and there were ugly reddish wheals on his ribcage, his bicep, the exposed areas of his thighs. I returned his stare.
Then I dropped him a wink.

I won’t lie. The ceaseless movement, the necessity of utilizing speed and of being constantly aware of distances, was using up a lot of my gasoline. It’s no easy feat to cut fifteen pounds in four days, and even after the weigh-ins, when sweet liquids had coursed plentifully down my throat and solid food made a welcoming bulk in my shriveled belly, I could tell I lacked my normal firepower. But nobody ever goes into the cage at a hundred percent physically and mentally. There’s always a drag coefficient.

I would simply have to fight through it.

The bell rang again. A clear, powerful sound; I could feel it in my sternum. Bash roared out of his corner grimacing so ferociously I wondered if he were going to bite clean through his mouthpiece. His foot was a blur – faster than I could dodge. But I didn’t have to match his speed. Alton’s videotaped reconnaissance had discovered that Bash’s gym-built muscles tensed visibly in the instant immediately before he released a high head kick. The moment I saw that tension I brought up my elbow to shield the left side of my face. His foot struck it like a freight train plowing into a mountainside. I felt the impact all the way down to my heels…but I also felt a bone in his foot give way, and saw the pain register in his eyes.

Speed, meet timing.

I drilled him hard with a lead right to the chest and another to the side of his head that sent a glittering spray of sweat into the air. He staggered, so I helped him along with a push-kick to the belly, and he slammed into the cage hard enough to make the chain-link shiver. I could see that he was hurt, but he wasn’t hurt enough. So I didn’t follow him in.
Instead, I waved him at me.

The crowd loved it.

Five thousand voices took up the chant:

Mick-ey! Mick-ey! Mick-ey!

Hieronymous accepted the challenge.

A front kick sought out the pit of my stomach; an overhand right whistled toward my jaw. I was just within the range of his foot and I elected to take the shot, knowing it would propel me clear of his much more dangerous fist. His momentum carried him after me, but his injured foot, even numbed as it undoubtedly was by adrenaline, was dragging like a muffler sprung loose of its undercarriage. Putting all that weight on it was more than it could handle and his knee buckled.

As it did, I slammed my own knee into the point of his chin.

Bash hadn’t risen as high as he had in the light heavyweight division carrying around a glass jaw. The blow rocked his head backward, but he still had his senses. Enough of them to swing his arms around me as he pitched forward.

A couple of years ago I probably would have fallen right on my ass with him on top of me. But that was a couple of years ago. I’d added dimensions to my game, and one of them was judo. I twisted my body as he smashed into me, turning a drunken slide-tackle into a crude hip throw. He hit the mat as if he’d just chugged a fifth of vodka, and before he could rise, I’d turned and let fly with a kick into his ribs, one so hard I could feel the pattern of the bone against the van of my foot.

That should have ended it there. Against the caliber of opponent I’d been fighting recently, it would have.

Unfortunately, Bash was a lot more than a mere opponent.

He rolled with the blow, and ended up in the butt-scoot position; on his back but with his legs and arms positioned to protect his body, daring me to jump into his guard. Instead, I slung a kick into his thigh; he retaliated with a hard heel-strike into my solar plexus. I countered with a downward punch into his belly, and caught a fist to the lip in exchange.

That set the tone for the next three minutes – three minutes that felt like three years. I attacked again and again from my feet, but it was like trying to fight an anaconda. All my blows came at a price – tit for tat. And all the while, I could see in his eyes an expectant, predatory look. He knew I was tired, and he was waiting for me to get sloppy, to leave a foot or a fist where he could trap it like said snake trapping a rat in its coils. Trap it and crush it.

I said his face made for interesting reading, and it did. There was still confusion there, and now frustration and anger, too; but no resignation. He hadn’t lost a fight in years. He didn’t think he was going to lose now. Scratch that – he knew he wasn’t going to lose. And his certainty was unnerving. It mingled with my growing physical exhaustion to leech yet more strength out of my muscles. For a moment, standing over him, gasping, one hand clutching at his waving feet, the other cocked above me like a stone in a sling, I flashed back to the moment in the Suba fight when I realized he’d beaten me.

To the look on Anne’s face when she told me it was over between us.

To the blinding sting of Don Cheech’s blood spattering into my eyes, and then the sound of my cousin pleading for his life as Nicky Cowboy stood over him with the silenced pistol: No no no no no Jesus no!

To the sound of Wilson Kreese breaking my arm.

In that instant, I could feel my confidence sliding away from me, as suddenly and decisively as if it were crockery on an upended table

What do you do in that instant you see it all heading for a crash?

Dig, my old man had said. But I was afraid to dig, to go into that last, darkest corner of my heart and retrieve what I knew was buried there. I knew only well the damage it could do.

There had to be another way.

Bash lashed out again. His foot struck my collarbone and sent a shockwave of pain rippling all the way to my toes. I stumbled backwards. A grimace exposed his mouthpiece, giving him a savage, feral look. He shouted something and waved me in – urgently, frantically, furiously. Come on!

The crowd loved it.

Bash! Bash! Bash!

Less than a minute to go in the round, and the tide was turning. He had awakened now, inflamed himself; I was sagging. I needed inspiration, and I found it in the strangest place. Not in some traumatic memory but in a place so prosaic I’d almost forgotten it existed.

My own home.

In my apartment stood a trophy case of sorts; the disjecta membra of my amateur fighting career. Ribbons. Medals. Trophies. I had once been very proud of those baubles, but in recent years they had taken on a different meaning. It had become evident that nothing I had won had ever really mattered. Olympic gold had eluded me. Hell, the Olympic team had eluded me. And in all the years I’d been plying the dark trade of mixed martial arts as a professional, the only belt I’d ever strapped around my waist was the one I cinched around my jeans.

Mikhailis had said it best: The brass ring’s been playing hide and go seek with you your whole life, hasn’t it?

Yes.

And in more than one way.

I realized then, as Bash issued his challenge, that the things that really mattered, personally and professionally, had not been denied me by some superior, external force. It wasn’t my cousin Clean or Gino Stillitano or Mikhailis Morganstern who had steered my life to shipwreck.

It was me.

My own decisions had led me to ruin.

When I chose to hit Tommy Battaglia all those years ago in a Manhattan nightclub, I unleashed a tidal wave of events that had destroyed my relationship with Anne, swept me away on an avalanche of crime, and buried me in an abyss of debt I’d found possible to pay only by making more and more destructive choices. I’d felt powerless, a pawn being shuttled round the board by fingers not my own. Even when I chose to break free, I had insisted on playing by other people’s rules. But there were no rules in this life; only choices. Responsibility and reward. Rule and ruin. Success…or failure.

Mine to choose.

So right then and there, half-deafened from the noise, running with sweat, quivering with exhaustion, I did just exactly that.

Bash wanted a submission?

I’d give him one.

I threw a hard right to his mouth, and then, pretending to lose my balance, let my hand fall to the ground beside him.

He seized it hard and fast with his left, a crushing grip on my wrist that sent a shiver of pain all the way to my elbow. I felt rather than heard his opposite foot plant itself on the mat behind me. He pushed up with his hips onto his left forearm and slung his right arm beneath my chin and over my left shoulder. In two seconds he would have a kimura-lock in place, whereupon he could pop my arm out of its socket as easily as a cork out of a champagne bottle.

I didn’t give him those two seconds.

I took them.

Wrenched myself upward at the exact moment he tried to close the lock. Shoved him flat on the canvas with my hips on his waist, neutralizing his legs, trapping his arms at an awkward angle where they could no longer defend his face. A classic transition attack, designed to bait-and-switch an opponent into beating himself by making him think he’s got you beaten.

Not at all difficult if you practice it a few times.

Say…five or six thousand.

I was in full mount with half a minute to go.

So I used it.

A fight to the eye socket. A left to the forehead. An elbow across his cheekbone, and then, as that elbow completed the arc of its rightward movement, another elbow on the opposite side of his face.

Lather, rinse…repeat.

I didn’t have much energy left. What I had, I crammed into each shot. His head was so hard it was like punching granite, but I kept it up, and in seconds, his face was a glistening crimson mask through which a single eye – its twin was puffing shut – glared up at me in helpless, disbelieving rage…until at last it began to go glassy, to lose focus, to flutter and roll as its owner slipped into unconsciousness.
Hieronymous went limp.

My fist hesitated over the bloody mess that was his face…lusting to drive itself down for one last, vindictive blow…

…then slowly unclenched. Desire knelt to discipline, the monster to the man. The referee pulled me away.

I honestly don’t remember much of what happened afterwards. I was almost as limp as Bash when Alton picked me up like a straw dummy and carried me victoriously around the cage; when the fireworks burst red, white, and blue over the ship, their reflections spreading out over the black waters of the Hudson; when the announcer in his Liberace tuxedo shouted to the exuberant crowd that I had advanced into the semifinals; when the two gorgeous ring-card girls strutted into the cage carrying a novelty check for a hundred thousand dollars damn near the size of a bedsheet. Mainly what I remember is the music, blasting out over the crowd, raising waves of goosebumps on my scuffed, sweat-slick flesh, whose refrain seemed to sum up everything I had been taught -- in school, on the streets, in the ring and now, finally in the cage:

The smile of God is victory.