Cheap Heat, page 14
“I can tell.”
With that I decided a retreat was in order, and went back to my seat with Grant, and back to reading my fantasy epic.
Chapter 32
I read while Grant slept. The fantasy epic was not gripping me, but it was better than the highway or the wrestlers that wouldn’t talk to me.
Grant was suddenly yanked out of sleep by the bright, brassy fanfare of his phone ringing from an incoming call. It took me a moment to recognize that the ringtone was the fight song of our alma mater.
I guess only his alma mater, technically, as I hadn’t graduated.
He stared at the screen stupidly before answering it and immediately cracking a giant yawn into the ear of whoever was talking. I could hear the voice, slightly tinny in the phone’s speaker, loud and concerned.
“Everything’s fine, mom, I’m fine. Don’t pay attention to whatever the blogs say.”
My head snapped up. My stomach started churning. I waited for Grant to finish assuring his mother that everything was indeed fine, and hang up, before I cleared my throat.
He looked at me expectantly.
“Grant,” I said, “you want to check out a wrestling blog called Squaring the Circle?”
“Oh, I love that one,” he said. “He actually covers us. All about the local scene, you know?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you pull it up.”
He did just that, and almost immediately his face brightened, and not just from the glow of the screen, but from the huge smile that broke out on his face.
“Well, hot damn,” he said, “I’m on the front fucking page of Squaring the Circle! I’m the top goddamn story!”
Grant immediately paraded into the aisle, brandishing his phone at everyone on the bus—breaking up card games and ending naps, showing his phone to a host of bewildered and annoyed fellow wrestlers and employees.
With a sigh, I looked it up on my own tablet.
“DELMARVA DEATH THREATS: U.S. Grant Traveling with Body Guard” read the headline and the kicker beneath it.
“God. Dammit.”
I opened the article and scanned it, my rising anger not allowing me to absorb any too much of it.
What I could read, I didn’t like.
“…angry fans are not new to the world of professional wrestling, but threats of death and harm are few and far between. Surely this is the first time a regional promotion such as the DWF has been forced to hire round-the-clock personal security for their talent.
“DWF have hired professional bodyguard and investigator Jack Dixon, of Elkton, Maryland, to investigate these threats. Dixon has been spotted at the two most recent DWF shows by our own field reporters; in at least one case, sources have referred to Dixon having a special operations background…”
I had to close the folding case over the tablet and stop reading. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment.
Grant came bouncing back into his seat, a huge grin still plastered over his face, brimming with excitement.
“Man, I can’t believe it. The heat I’m gonna get for this…”
“Heat? You’re fucking excited about this?”
“Of course I am.”
“Grant,” I said through clenched teeth, “now whoever is making threats knows you have security. They know who I am. Thank Christ, at least there isn’t a fucking picture of me. But this puts us at a serious goddamn disadvantage.”
“Look, man, you’ll handle it. But this is gonna make for some electric crowds.”
Grant did not seem to see the threat at play here, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. I’d never had a particularly high estimate of his intelligence and it was dropping by the second.
“Your confidence in me is flattering, if completely and totally unwarranted,” I said through still-clenched teeth. “But anybody who reads this article is going to know I’m there. They’re going to recognize me. And if they mean you harm, they can try and get me out of the way first.”
Daphne, having quietly watched all the hubbub from her seat at the front of the bus, came stalking back toward us.
“We can make this a win-win,” she said with a smile. “You get to stay close to Grant. And we get to make use of the publicity.”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what she meant, but I could tell I wouldn’t like it if I figured it out.
Chapter 33
“Nope. No way. Not happening.”
We were backstage in a Kent County theater and I could hear the crowd outside chanting “DEL-MAR-VA. DEL-MAR-VA.”
Daphne smiled. “You’re a part of the show whether you want to be or not, Dixon. If you go out there in with the crowd, they’re already between you and Grant and anybody with a smart phone knows who you are.”
As much as I hated to admit it, she was making sense.
Which is why I was stuffed into a dark gray suit a crew member had purchased at a thrift store. I was wearing the Kevlar under the jacket but over the cheap white dress shirt that went with it. I had the gun under my arm, the Taser visible on my belt, and the baton up my sleeve.
I didn’t like any of this. I was in over my head already, and we weren’t even in the area the threats were located in.
But I didn’t see any options. “Fine. But I need to be in the clubhouse with Grant.”
Her grin went full Cheshire Cat. “Good. How do you want to be billed?”
“Billed?”
“You know, announced.”
“I don’t.”
She leaned back, looked me up down. “Mystery bodyguard. I can sell that.” She tugged at my lapels. “They could’ve gotten you a suit that fits, at least.”
“Haven’t met the off-the-rack suit that does,” I said.
“Well, I did some work in costuming. Tailored my own tux. I can do some work with it later. For now?” She checked a watch tucked subtly under the cuff of her dinner jacket. “Showtime. Welcome to the world of managing.”
She marched out into the cheering.
I marched a few steps down the corridor and thumped a knuckle on the door with the sign that said ‘Clubhouse’ on it.
It opened a crack and a face appeared: Blake’s.
“Talent only, man,” he said, the first time I’d heard something approaching antagonism in his voice. He started to close the door but I wedged a foot inside it.
“Not anymore. If I’m managing, or whatever the fuck, I need to stay next to Grant’s side all the time. I’m not going out in the crowd and then running towards him. That’d be ridiculous and cause a panic.”
Blake tried to stare me down. He was at a disadvantage, namely that I knew just how much of a toll his passion had taken on him. I didn’t really doubt that I could shove him out of the way.
“Go on, let him in.” That was Grant’s voice, slightly muffled. Blake swept the door out of the way.
I wasn’t entirely sure what they’d been protecting. Nobody actually dressed in the place; nobody was preserving their modesty. It was the largest backstage room. Against one wall a small buffet was set up; mostly fruit, sports drinks, various kinds of water making health claims it couldn’t back up, and some bowls of nuts.
In the middle of the room there were folding tables with some card games going. On the wall was a monitor with a closed circuit of what was going on in the ring, with the sound on high enough that anyone who wanted to pay attention to it could, though it played out of a couple of tinny speakers set high on the wall.
A card game was in progress on one of the card tables, with Derrick Rigg, Spitfire, Caliban, and Grant playing something that looked like Whist. I wasn’t too interested in the rules.
Caliban glared at me over his hand, the cards looking like matchbooks in his gigantic hands, but Grant grabbed his attention. I gathered from the flurry of activity at the table that they were partners in this particular game. There was money on the table. Not huge money, but certainly more than anybody’s per diem.
There was a knock at the door; someone quickly silenced the TV with a remote, and all other conversation stalled. Cards were held in midair.
A black polo-shirted crewmember with a headset and a clipboard stuck his head in the room.
“Grant, you’re not leading off tonight. Caliban and the Twin Terrors, you’re up.”
The enormous man set his cards down and stood, still glaring at me.
I smiled at him. He was probably pushing seven feet, sure. He likely had eighty to a hundred pounds on me. And no matter what his body fat percentage might be, once he had all of that moving in any given direction, it’d be awfully hard to do anything to discourage him.
But it wouldn’t do to let the rest of the talent see me sweat.
And if he really was interested in making a ruckus, I was the one carrying weapons.
He brushed past me on his way to the door, followed by his tag-team competition, a pair of guys who were definitely not brothers, but wore matching masks anyway.
That seemed to suspend whatever game was going on. Cards were set down, money was left in place, and everyone walked away from the table.
I could read a little of the dynamic in the room. Grant had some kind of swagger, which seemed unusual. Blake had appointed himself the doorman, leaning against it with his eyes trained on the TV.
But Derrick Rig was the center of power in the room; he was holding the remote.
You couldn’t slip an important fact like that past me.
He also had a cell phone he kept looking at. I would’ve liked to know what had captured his attention but I didn’t want to appear too nosy. I thought about walking over to the buffet—I’d have to pass by him—but that presented problems.
First was that it would stretch the etiquette of my being in here in the first place.
Second was that I really didn’t want anything on that buffet table.
Third was that Derrick was at least a couple inches taller than me, and peering over his shoulder was going to be an impossibility.
Besides, it seemed remarkably unlikely that he had anything to do with whatever was happening with Grant. He was the star of the show; he was relaxed, calm, in command of himself and everything around him. And if that blogger who’d clocked me had it right, he was soon to be leaving for greener pastures anyway.
I saw no motive for him being involved in any threats against Grant. I’m not sure I saw motive for anyone in the company to be making threats. I certainly couldn’t eliminate any of them.
Hell, the only people I could eliminate were me and my boss. A suspect pool of every single person in the states of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and Pennsylvania will run a lonesome detective ragged.
I decided not to worry too much about Derrick and focus on reading the room. Blake was doing his sentinel-of-all-that-is-right thing. Spitfire and Night Witch—I didn’t know their real names, as they tended to keep to themselves—were looking at their phones in a corner, occasionally leaning close and sharing a laugh at something on one of the screens.
There was no singular mood in the room. Everyone was getting ready to work, and that was a different headspace for everyone.
But no one—not even Grant—was worried.
Here we were with death threats against a member of their company, and clearly nobody cared.
I wandered over to Blake. He looked at me, eyebrow raised, clearly curious.
“Anybody here worried about any of these threats?”
He shrugged. “You’re gonna be a professional, you learn to put shit aside.”
“Well, sure. Everybody has bad days and still has to go to work, but…” I trailed off, looked around to see if anyone was listening in or paying attention. Everyone was in their own world.
“Well, most people’s job isn’t as dangerous as ours,” Blake said. Then, with a chuckle, he gestured at the vest I was obviously wearing underneath my ill-fitting suit. “Present company excluded, I guess. But if you are not totally focused on what you’re doing in the ring, you can get hurt. Worse, you can hurt the person you’re working with.” As he said this, unconsciously, his eyes flitted toward Grant.
I nodded and went back to watching the monitor, the action of which was too small for me to follow.
Some time passed. I sweated in my suit and my vest, and finally, someone knocked on the door and called for Grant and Blake.
Out in the corridor that led to the stage area and the ring, the cheering of the crowd became a dull roar.
Grant put on his hat, adjusted the hang of the vest he wore, and was handed a Confederate flag from a stage hand. Grant held it out to the guy, who delicately snipped the top and bottom of it with scissors he pulled from a toolbelt. Grant looked at me and shrugged.
“Makes sure I can rip it in half in one go, right?”
Then we heard Daphne, from the ring, boom out the words “U.S. GRANT.”
He turned to me and winked. “Two steps behind me, bro,” he said, and set off.
I counted his footsteps and followed, trying to keep focused and not completely and utterly lose my shit.
Just before I went out a stage hand grabbed me and stuck a Bluetooth headset in my ear. “What the hell?” I glared at him.
He shrugged. “Daphne’s orders. Says it completes the look even if it’s not connected to anything. These, too.” He handed me a pair of dark plastic sunglasses.
Those, I could possibly use. I certainly wasn’t going to see much of the crowd past the stage lights without them. I put them on and hurried down the tunnel just in time to see Grant vault himself over the top rope with flair, climb the post, hold up the Confederate flag, and rip it in half.
The crowd erupted, a mixed chorus of booing and cheering.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 34
The heat of the kevlar and the suit in the dressing room was nothing compared to the heat of it out in the arena, under the lights. It wasn’t even that big of a house, but it was packed straight to the rafters. Between the heat of the crowd, the lights, and the pressure of being in front of that many eyes, I thought I was going to drop from dehydration before we’d been out there for three minutes.
Grant went through his whole routine with the flag, talking about the Union, downplaying and trash-talking the Confederacy.
“Rebels shouldn’t get memorials,” he was shouting. “Losers don’t get statues in my book!” The crowd was lustily booing as he threw the torn flag to the mat and ground into it with the heel of his boot.
“The only place this flag and everything it represents belongs,” he was saying, really getting into it, biting at the words, throwing the crowd’s energy back into its face, “is in the trash!” With that cue, a stage hand held out a metal trash can to me, and I dutifully passed it over.
Inside there were already a few scraps of flash paper, to make sure that the flag burned, or at least that it looked like it burned.
As I watched the crowd I realized that Grant was good at this, or better than he’d been the first time I saw him do it. Everyone likes an energized audience.
I tried to pay more attention to them than to him, which was tough. He was pretty magnetic, and I don’t think anyone was more surprised by that than me. I saw a lot of folks yelling, some people waving signs I couldn’t read, but I didn’t see anyone coming out of their seat, nobody holding a weapon, nothing that rubbed me any wrong way.
I was so busy studying the crowd I didn’t realize Grant was talking about me until his hand landed on my shoulder. He was handing me the trash can with the smoldering remnants of the torn flag in it.
“Some people don’t like hearing these truths,” he shouted. “Some cowards assume I’ll be just like them, and shut up the first time someone threatens me. Am I scared? Have I stopped?” The crowd roared, “No!”
I took the trash can and handed it down to a waiting stage hand, who dumped a cup of water in it and spirited it away down the tunnel.
“But the company…the company needs to protect us, you know? They’ve go to watch over their investments. So they went and got me the finest bodyguard money could buy.” He slapped me on the shoulder. The crowd cheered.
“Any of you cowards out there want to try anything, think twice,” he yelled. “My boy Jack is ready for you!”
I hated this. I hated it beyond words. I never liked thinking about crowds at wrestling meets, and those were pretty tame compared to this one. I did my best “stoic movie extra portraying a bodyguard,” keeping my face completely neutral, hands at my sides, idly scanning the crowd.
The attention shifted off of me pretty quickly once Blake came out to a smattering of applause that sounded almost polite compared to the response Grant had gotten.
Then the real show started.
Grant was into it, this night. Their early clinches and exchanges of blows had a sharpness to them that I hadn’t seen before. Early on Grant had Blake in some kind of come along hold via his shoulder and dragged him to the corner, dramatically waving at the crowd, getting them to their feet, before slinging Blake across the ring into a complicated series of off-the-ropes moves.
I stayed put in the corner, watching the crowd, but occasionally I was drawn into the match. At one point I heard an honest to god slap—not the ghost blow complete with stomp on the ring to make a sound, but the real contact of flesh on flesh.
I turned to see the imprint of Blake’s hand across Grant’s cheek, white and livid. Both of them looked furious; Grant with being struck and Blake about whatever had caused him to lash out.
They came together in a clinch and I strained to hear anything they said to one another.
I didn’t catch anything, but when they came out of it, Grant was focused on their wrestling and not on the crowd. It was only a matter of moments till he lifted Blake up and slammed him down again, then pinned him.
With that I decided a retreat was in order, and went back to my seat with Grant, and back to reading my fantasy epic.
Chapter 32
I read while Grant slept. The fantasy epic was not gripping me, but it was better than the highway or the wrestlers that wouldn’t talk to me.
Grant was suddenly yanked out of sleep by the bright, brassy fanfare of his phone ringing from an incoming call. It took me a moment to recognize that the ringtone was the fight song of our alma mater.
I guess only his alma mater, technically, as I hadn’t graduated.
He stared at the screen stupidly before answering it and immediately cracking a giant yawn into the ear of whoever was talking. I could hear the voice, slightly tinny in the phone’s speaker, loud and concerned.
“Everything’s fine, mom, I’m fine. Don’t pay attention to whatever the blogs say.”
My head snapped up. My stomach started churning. I waited for Grant to finish assuring his mother that everything was indeed fine, and hang up, before I cleared my throat.
He looked at me expectantly.
“Grant,” I said, “you want to check out a wrestling blog called Squaring the Circle?”
“Oh, I love that one,” he said. “He actually covers us. All about the local scene, you know?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you pull it up.”
He did just that, and almost immediately his face brightened, and not just from the glow of the screen, but from the huge smile that broke out on his face.
“Well, hot damn,” he said, “I’m on the front fucking page of Squaring the Circle! I’m the top goddamn story!”
Grant immediately paraded into the aisle, brandishing his phone at everyone on the bus—breaking up card games and ending naps, showing his phone to a host of bewildered and annoyed fellow wrestlers and employees.
With a sigh, I looked it up on my own tablet.
“DELMARVA DEATH THREATS: U.S. Grant Traveling with Body Guard” read the headline and the kicker beneath it.
“God. Dammit.”
I opened the article and scanned it, my rising anger not allowing me to absorb any too much of it.
What I could read, I didn’t like.
“…angry fans are not new to the world of professional wrestling, but threats of death and harm are few and far between. Surely this is the first time a regional promotion such as the DWF has been forced to hire round-the-clock personal security for their talent.
“DWF have hired professional bodyguard and investigator Jack Dixon, of Elkton, Maryland, to investigate these threats. Dixon has been spotted at the two most recent DWF shows by our own field reporters; in at least one case, sources have referred to Dixon having a special operations background…”
I had to close the folding case over the tablet and stop reading. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment.
Grant came bouncing back into his seat, a huge grin still plastered over his face, brimming with excitement.
“Man, I can’t believe it. The heat I’m gonna get for this…”
“Heat? You’re fucking excited about this?”
“Of course I am.”
“Grant,” I said through clenched teeth, “now whoever is making threats knows you have security. They know who I am. Thank Christ, at least there isn’t a fucking picture of me. But this puts us at a serious goddamn disadvantage.”
“Look, man, you’ll handle it. But this is gonna make for some electric crowds.”
Grant did not seem to see the threat at play here, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. I’d never had a particularly high estimate of his intelligence and it was dropping by the second.
“Your confidence in me is flattering, if completely and totally unwarranted,” I said through still-clenched teeth. “But anybody who reads this article is going to know I’m there. They’re going to recognize me. And if they mean you harm, they can try and get me out of the way first.”
Daphne, having quietly watched all the hubbub from her seat at the front of the bus, came stalking back toward us.
“We can make this a win-win,” she said with a smile. “You get to stay close to Grant. And we get to make use of the publicity.”
I didn’t have the faintest idea what she meant, but I could tell I wouldn’t like it if I figured it out.
Chapter 33
“Nope. No way. Not happening.”
We were backstage in a Kent County theater and I could hear the crowd outside chanting “DEL-MAR-VA. DEL-MAR-VA.”
Daphne smiled. “You’re a part of the show whether you want to be or not, Dixon. If you go out there in with the crowd, they’re already between you and Grant and anybody with a smart phone knows who you are.”
As much as I hated to admit it, she was making sense.
Which is why I was stuffed into a dark gray suit a crew member had purchased at a thrift store. I was wearing the Kevlar under the jacket but over the cheap white dress shirt that went with it. I had the gun under my arm, the Taser visible on my belt, and the baton up my sleeve.
I didn’t like any of this. I was in over my head already, and we weren’t even in the area the threats were located in.
But I didn’t see any options. “Fine. But I need to be in the clubhouse with Grant.”
Her grin went full Cheshire Cat. “Good. How do you want to be billed?”
“Billed?”
“You know, announced.”
“I don’t.”
She leaned back, looked me up down. “Mystery bodyguard. I can sell that.” She tugged at my lapels. “They could’ve gotten you a suit that fits, at least.”
“Haven’t met the off-the-rack suit that does,” I said.
“Well, I did some work in costuming. Tailored my own tux. I can do some work with it later. For now?” She checked a watch tucked subtly under the cuff of her dinner jacket. “Showtime. Welcome to the world of managing.”
She marched out into the cheering.
I marched a few steps down the corridor and thumped a knuckle on the door with the sign that said ‘Clubhouse’ on it.
It opened a crack and a face appeared: Blake’s.
“Talent only, man,” he said, the first time I’d heard something approaching antagonism in his voice. He started to close the door but I wedged a foot inside it.
“Not anymore. If I’m managing, or whatever the fuck, I need to stay next to Grant’s side all the time. I’m not going out in the crowd and then running towards him. That’d be ridiculous and cause a panic.”
Blake tried to stare me down. He was at a disadvantage, namely that I knew just how much of a toll his passion had taken on him. I didn’t really doubt that I could shove him out of the way.
“Go on, let him in.” That was Grant’s voice, slightly muffled. Blake swept the door out of the way.
I wasn’t entirely sure what they’d been protecting. Nobody actually dressed in the place; nobody was preserving their modesty. It was the largest backstage room. Against one wall a small buffet was set up; mostly fruit, sports drinks, various kinds of water making health claims it couldn’t back up, and some bowls of nuts.
In the middle of the room there were folding tables with some card games going. On the wall was a monitor with a closed circuit of what was going on in the ring, with the sound on high enough that anyone who wanted to pay attention to it could, though it played out of a couple of tinny speakers set high on the wall.
A card game was in progress on one of the card tables, with Derrick Rigg, Spitfire, Caliban, and Grant playing something that looked like Whist. I wasn’t too interested in the rules.
Caliban glared at me over his hand, the cards looking like matchbooks in his gigantic hands, but Grant grabbed his attention. I gathered from the flurry of activity at the table that they were partners in this particular game. There was money on the table. Not huge money, but certainly more than anybody’s per diem.
There was a knock at the door; someone quickly silenced the TV with a remote, and all other conversation stalled. Cards were held in midair.
A black polo-shirted crewmember with a headset and a clipboard stuck his head in the room.
“Grant, you’re not leading off tonight. Caliban and the Twin Terrors, you’re up.”
The enormous man set his cards down and stood, still glaring at me.
I smiled at him. He was probably pushing seven feet, sure. He likely had eighty to a hundred pounds on me. And no matter what his body fat percentage might be, once he had all of that moving in any given direction, it’d be awfully hard to do anything to discourage him.
But it wouldn’t do to let the rest of the talent see me sweat.
And if he really was interested in making a ruckus, I was the one carrying weapons.
He brushed past me on his way to the door, followed by his tag-team competition, a pair of guys who were definitely not brothers, but wore matching masks anyway.
That seemed to suspend whatever game was going on. Cards were set down, money was left in place, and everyone walked away from the table.
I could read a little of the dynamic in the room. Grant had some kind of swagger, which seemed unusual. Blake had appointed himself the doorman, leaning against it with his eyes trained on the TV.
But Derrick Rig was the center of power in the room; he was holding the remote.
You couldn’t slip an important fact like that past me.
He also had a cell phone he kept looking at. I would’ve liked to know what had captured his attention but I didn’t want to appear too nosy. I thought about walking over to the buffet—I’d have to pass by him—but that presented problems.
First was that it would stretch the etiquette of my being in here in the first place.
Second was that I really didn’t want anything on that buffet table.
Third was that Derrick was at least a couple inches taller than me, and peering over his shoulder was going to be an impossibility.
Besides, it seemed remarkably unlikely that he had anything to do with whatever was happening with Grant. He was the star of the show; he was relaxed, calm, in command of himself and everything around him. And if that blogger who’d clocked me had it right, he was soon to be leaving for greener pastures anyway.
I saw no motive for him being involved in any threats against Grant. I’m not sure I saw motive for anyone in the company to be making threats. I certainly couldn’t eliminate any of them.
Hell, the only people I could eliminate were me and my boss. A suspect pool of every single person in the states of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and Pennsylvania will run a lonesome detective ragged.
I decided not to worry too much about Derrick and focus on reading the room. Blake was doing his sentinel-of-all-that-is-right thing. Spitfire and Night Witch—I didn’t know their real names, as they tended to keep to themselves—were looking at their phones in a corner, occasionally leaning close and sharing a laugh at something on one of the screens.
There was no singular mood in the room. Everyone was getting ready to work, and that was a different headspace for everyone.
But no one—not even Grant—was worried.
Here we were with death threats against a member of their company, and clearly nobody cared.
I wandered over to Blake. He looked at me, eyebrow raised, clearly curious.
“Anybody here worried about any of these threats?”
He shrugged. “You’re gonna be a professional, you learn to put shit aside.”
“Well, sure. Everybody has bad days and still has to go to work, but…” I trailed off, looked around to see if anyone was listening in or paying attention. Everyone was in their own world.
“Well, most people’s job isn’t as dangerous as ours,” Blake said. Then, with a chuckle, he gestured at the vest I was obviously wearing underneath my ill-fitting suit. “Present company excluded, I guess. But if you are not totally focused on what you’re doing in the ring, you can get hurt. Worse, you can hurt the person you’re working with.” As he said this, unconsciously, his eyes flitted toward Grant.
I nodded and went back to watching the monitor, the action of which was too small for me to follow.
Some time passed. I sweated in my suit and my vest, and finally, someone knocked on the door and called for Grant and Blake.
Out in the corridor that led to the stage area and the ring, the cheering of the crowd became a dull roar.
Grant put on his hat, adjusted the hang of the vest he wore, and was handed a Confederate flag from a stage hand. Grant held it out to the guy, who delicately snipped the top and bottom of it with scissors he pulled from a toolbelt. Grant looked at me and shrugged.
“Makes sure I can rip it in half in one go, right?”
Then we heard Daphne, from the ring, boom out the words “U.S. GRANT.”
He turned to me and winked. “Two steps behind me, bro,” he said, and set off.
I counted his footsteps and followed, trying to keep focused and not completely and utterly lose my shit.
Just before I went out a stage hand grabbed me and stuck a Bluetooth headset in my ear. “What the hell?” I glared at him.
He shrugged. “Daphne’s orders. Says it completes the look even if it’s not connected to anything. These, too.” He handed me a pair of dark plastic sunglasses.
Those, I could possibly use. I certainly wasn’t going to see much of the crowd past the stage lights without them. I put them on and hurried down the tunnel just in time to see Grant vault himself over the top rope with flair, climb the post, hold up the Confederate flag, and rip it in half.
The crowd erupted, a mixed chorus of booing and cheering.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 34
The heat of the kevlar and the suit in the dressing room was nothing compared to the heat of it out in the arena, under the lights. It wasn’t even that big of a house, but it was packed straight to the rafters. Between the heat of the crowd, the lights, and the pressure of being in front of that many eyes, I thought I was going to drop from dehydration before we’d been out there for three minutes.
Grant went through his whole routine with the flag, talking about the Union, downplaying and trash-talking the Confederacy.
“Rebels shouldn’t get memorials,” he was shouting. “Losers don’t get statues in my book!” The crowd was lustily booing as he threw the torn flag to the mat and ground into it with the heel of his boot.
“The only place this flag and everything it represents belongs,” he was saying, really getting into it, biting at the words, throwing the crowd’s energy back into its face, “is in the trash!” With that cue, a stage hand held out a metal trash can to me, and I dutifully passed it over.
Inside there were already a few scraps of flash paper, to make sure that the flag burned, or at least that it looked like it burned.
As I watched the crowd I realized that Grant was good at this, or better than he’d been the first time I saw him do it. Everyone likes an energized audience.
I tried to pay more attention to them than to him, which was tough. He was pretty magnetic, and I don’t think anyone was more surprised by that than me. I saw a lot of folks yelling, some people waving signs I couldn’t read, but I didn’t see anyone coming out of their seat, nobody holding a weapon, nothing that rubbed me any wrong way.
I was so busy studying the crowd I didn’t realize Grant was talking about me until his hand landed on my shoulder. He was handing me the trash can with the smoldering remnants of the torn flag in it.
“Some people don’t like hearing these truths,” he shouted. “Some cowards assume I’ll be just like them, and shut up the first time someone threatens me. Am I scared? Have I stopped?” The crowd roared, “No!”
I took the trash can and handed it down to a waiting stage hand, who dumped a cup of water in it and spirited it away down the tunnel.
“But the company…the company needs to protect us, you know? They’ve go to watch over their investments. So they went and got me the finest bodyguard money could buy.” He slapped me on the shoulder. The crowd cheered.
“Any of you cowards out there want to try anything, think twice,” he yelled. “My boy Jack is ready for you!”
I hated this. I hated it beyond words. I never liked thinking about crowds at wrestling meets, and those were pretty tame compared to this one. I did my best “stoic movie extra portraying a bodyguard,” keeping my face completely neutral, hands at my sides, idly scanning the crowd.
The attention shifted off of me pretty quickly once Blake came out to a smattering of applause that sounded almost polite compared to the response Grant had gotten.
Then the real show started.
Grant was into it, this night. Their early clinches and exchanges of blows had a sharpness to them that I hadn’t seen before. Early on Grant had Blake in some kind of come along hold via his shoulder and dragged him to the corner, dramatically waving at the crowd, getting them to their feet, before slinging Blake across the ring into a complicated series of off-the-ropes moves.
I stayed put in the corner, watching the crowd, but occasionally I was drawn into the match. At one point I heard an honest to god slap—not the ghost blow complete with stomp on the ring to make a sound, but the real contact of flesh on flesh.
I turned to see the imprint of Blake’s hand across Grant’s cheek, white and livid. Both of them looked furious; Grant with being struck and Blake about whatever had caused him to lash out.
They came together in a clinch and I strained to hear anything they said to one another.
I didn’t catch anything, but when they came out of it, Grant was focused on their wrestling and not on the crowd. It was only a matter of moments till he lifted Blake up and slammed him down again, then pinned him.
