Monsters, Matt Rogers [ereader for android .txt] 📗

with age. Now they were here, their dreams of prizefighting glory dashed, left to deal with the harsh sword of truth that was reality. It was the same with college athletes who don’t make the big leagues — NFL, NBA, NHL — although maybe not quite as visceral as fighting. If your MMA career fails, then it wasn’t just that you weren’t good enough at a sport. It’s that you weren’t enough of a man. Or, at least, that’s what these two would tell themselves. So when they had a chance to prove their manhood — namely, if Frankie tasked them with doing something sociopathic, violent, illegal — it wouldn’t have taken much of a push to tip them over the edge.

Coombs stared at Frankie as they all congregated beside the punching bags, which hung like frozen obelisks.

Frankie noticed the look and said, ‘What?’

Coombs finessed a toothpick between his teeth. ‘They know what they doin’ here?’

‘Not yet.’

Coombs shook his head, made like he was going to walk out. ‘Then I don’t want any part of this. They got snitch energy.’

All the way in on his persona, King got right in Coombs’ face. ‘Say that again.’

He spoke with all the intensity he could muster. Coombs froze. He tried to keep a placid expression on his face but he couldn’t manage it. Tension rippled through him, like his bones had turned to heavy metal.

King stepped back. ‘We’re not fucking snitches.’

Frankie said, ‘They’re good, Carter. I’ve got something on them. They wouldn’t dare talk.’

Carter tried to save face. ‘You sure about that?’

‘The question is,’ Slater said, ‘what are you going to do about it? What do you think you can do?’

Silence.

One of the older guys said, ‘I don’t like this.’

He sniffed and shook his head and turned to walk away.

King said, ‘Stay where you are.’

The quiet got sinister.

King glanced over his shoulder at Frankie, who nodded wordless permission.

King turned back to the group. He made sure not to look at Danny. He thought that if he did his façade might crack. ‘I’m Jason. This is Will. We’re part of this now, whether you like it or not. And we’re going to stay part of it — whatever it is — because we’re indispensable. Carter, Danny,’ — he didn’t make eye contact — ‘you two saw us at practice this morning, so you understand why that is. You other two meatheads will just have to use your imagination. Now, you got a problem with us being here, you talk to Frankie, but you ain’t walking. I’d imagine he’s got enough dirt on you to put you under the jail. So that’s that.’

The meatheads simmered with tension but they didn’t move or speak. They seemed to have got it through their thick heads that Frankie indeed had enough blackmail to keep them in check for the rest of their lives. Because of what they’d already done for him, no doubt.

Slater turned to Frankie. ‘So what are we doing here?’

Frankie cleared his throat, shuffled in place. Turned out that when it came to crunch time, he really didn’t like oversharing. He was probably getting more and more paranoid, the longer this racket went on. But he pulled himself together.

He said, ‘You’re going to go beat a man to death for me.’

42

Frankie’s words echoed off the concrete walls, carried up to the slanted roof.

King made a point of not visibly reacting, only changing his tone. ‘So it’s like that, is it?’

Frankie said, ‘If that ain’t your thing you can walk. I normally wouldn’t say that, but I didn’t vet you before I brought you here. I trust you’ll keep your mouth shut about this if it isn’t your cup of tea.’

Slater knew they couldn’t be too eager. ‘Not usually our thing when it’s unprovoked.’

‘How’s ten k each? Does that provoke you?’

Slater looked at King for a beat, then turned back. ‘That’s a little low.’

‘Because you’re not going to do anything tonight. You’re just going to be there to watch. It’s a trial run. These boys will take care of the messy business. You’re there to prove you can stomach it, and if all goes well I’ll make sure you’re hands-on for the next one. You’ll get a pay bump for that. Twenty k each.’

No one spoke.

Frankie continued. ‘You do a few of these jobs for me, you’ll be worth six figures. That’s beers on a beach at a resort in Mexico for years. Maybe even a decade. You reckon that’s worth it?’

Silence.

Frankie said, ‘Not much attention in Mexico. No…bright lights.’

Slater said, ‘I don’t see a problem.’

King said, ‘Me neither.’

Carter and the two meatheads visibly relaxed, letting go of the breaths they were holding. Danny stayed tense as a metal rod. King refused to look at him.

He knew they both, in pointedly different ways, felt they had betrayed the other with their presence here.

Slater said, ‘What’d this guy do?’

‘Pissed off the wrong people,’ Frankie said. ‘And those people came to me.’

King said, ‘That happen often?’

‘More and more of late. Business, as they say, is booming.’

Slater said, ‘San Francisco seems a little pretentious for business like that. Detroit, I’d understand.’

Frankie cackled, ‘There’s no money in Detroit. People make billions in this town pumping out a single app. You think anyone takes their chances when there’s nine figures on the line?’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ King said, ‘but you don’t exactly seem like a professional assassin. There must be better men than us.’

‘There are. But they’re clean. Precise. They’re all about making it seem accidental. That sort of thing. We’re…the opposite. I run this gym and that’s the only thing I’ve got going for me, but turns out that gives me leverage. Because I can recruit helpers who hit like trucks, and that’s important when you don’t care about making it look accidental. I’m the guy you come to when you need to scare the living shit out of people, when you need to beat someone so bad that no one else will think about breathing a word