The Death Match Read online

  The kitchen was empty, but they found Flame behind the bar, putting away clean glasses. She looked the young redhead up and down, taking in her bruises and contusions and torn clothes.

  “Jesus, Matt,” Flame said. “Tell me you didn’t do this, or I’ll kick your ass myself.”

  “Of course not,” Matt replied. “A coupla jerks were roughing her up. I convinced them not to.”

  “Is this how you normally pick up chicks?” Flame asked Matt. She turned to the young woman and gripped her chin, turning her battered face one way and then the other. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She shook her head and went behind the bar to pour a pair of shots.

  “Thanks again for what you did back there,” the redhead said, easing herself onto a barstool. “What’s your name?”

  “Matt Cahill.”

  “Stacy Barnett,” she replied, offering her hand.

  He took it. It felt like a man’s hand, tough, hard, and callused.

  “You want to tell me what that was all about?” Matt asked. “Who is the guy with the white hair?”

  “Gregory Long.” She threw back her shot and then used a bar napkin to blot the blood from her split lip. “He’s a rich pervert who gets off on chicks fighting. It’s like a fetish for him. I’m not talking cute fake-lingerie wrestling either. I’m talking real bare-knuckle brutality. The more violent the better. He’s a pig, but he’s loaded and he’s always sleazing around the gym looking for female fighters. When he finds one he likes, he offers her a bunch of money to compete in his private, invitation-only matches. The winners are supposedly sent off on whirlwind tours through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, fighting for other pervy millionaires. But that’s the last anyone ever sees of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My best friend, Tanya Caixao, took him up on his offer,” Stacy said, looking down at her clenched and shaking fists. “I told her the guy was a creep, but she wouldn’t listen. That was two weeks ago. I haven’t gotten a single text or call or e-mail since the day she left. The last time I tried to call, there was a message saying her cell phone account had been canceled. Why would she cancel her phone? With all the money she was supposed to get from Long, it’s not like she’s too broke to pay her bills. Something’s not right. I just know it.”

  She took her phone from one of the many pockets in her black cargo pants and handed it to Matt. On the screen was a photo of Stacy and another woman, an exotic beauty with warm caramel skin and thick, copper-streaked ringlets. Her face was a little mannish in the angles, particularly the chin and brow, but she had plush, inviting lips and flirty hazel eyes behind heavy black lashes.

  “We met at the gym. She’s the only other female that fights at one forty-five, so we started rolling pretty regularly.”

  “Rolling?”

  “You know, grappling. Working on submissions.”

  “Right.” He looked down at the photo one last time, then handed the phone back to Stacy.

  “She was having problems with her visa, and her asshole boyfriend had just kicked her out of their apartment. She had a rough life, you know? Growing up on the street back in Brazil. Her own mom traded her only daughter’s virginity for crack. Tanya was eleven. Eleven. All she’s ever known is fighting. It was the only chance she had to get out of that kind of life. Anyway, she didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I suggested she stay at my place until she got back on her feet. That was over a year ago. We’ve been inseparable ever since. Like Siamese twins.” She shook her head and let out a small, nervous laugh. “That’s why I just don’t get this. This just isn’t like her.”

  “So what do you think is going on?” Matt asked.

  “I don’t know,” Stacy replied. “But I intend to find out. What about you? What’s your beef with Long?”

  Now that was a delicate question.

  “I think he might be…involved with someone I know.”

  “A woman?”

  Matt shook his head. “Someone bad.”

  She nodded, didn’t push for more information. She was amazingly focused, like nothing else mattered. Utterly single-minded.

  “I’m going up to his house tonight. I know he’s taking that girl to his place for a fight. If we can get in, we can see what’s really going on. See if Tanya is there, and if she is, I’m gonna bring her home. Want to come?”

  Matt frowned. “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “That was quite a beating you took,” Matt said. “You sure you don’t need some rest?”

  “I’ll rest when I know Tanya is okay.”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said.

  “What, you’re busy?” Stacy smirked and gestured with her chin at Flame’s big, doughy, leather-clad ass as the older woman bent to take a package of napkins from a lower shelf. “Got something better lined up?”

  Matt downed his own shot and set the glass back on the bar.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was a quiet drive to Long’s house in the Hollywood Hills, up several seemingly endless freeways and then into steep, twisting canyons. Matt didn’t really know what to say to his hotheaded new companion. He wanted to grill her, to ask her all sorts of questions, but he didn’t know how much he was ready to give away about his own situation.

  Eventually Stacy pulled her aging SUV onto a narrow, dusty turnoff beneath the target house.

  “I know she’s in there,” Stacy said.

  The house, Gregory Long’s house, was one of those ugly ultramodern concrete igloos that had been popular back in the sixties. Surrounded by high walls on three sides and a close-to-sheer cliff on the fourth, it was almost inaccessible by any way other than a long, private road set behind two locked gates.

  Almost.

  “There,” Stacy said, handing Matt a small pair of night-vision binoculars.

  “Where?” He put the binocs to his eyes, scanning the exposed belly of the precariously balanced structure.

  “On the left side of that center column.”

  The night-vision binocs painted the steep, rocky landscape a ghostly green. A white-hot moving shape distracted Matt’s focus for a moment, but it was just a trundling skunk passing through the brush under the house. He turned back to that thick central column and scanned its length. It was cold, dark, and monochrome in the binocs, and if Matt hadn’t known where to look, he might have missed what he was looking for.

  There was a maintenance hatch covered by a waffled metal grate. Barely wide enough for Stacy, it’d be a real squeeze for Matt. It was a good fifteen feet above the point where the column protruded from the mountain’s rocky flank.

  “I see it,” Matt said. “But I don’t see how you think we can reach it.”

  “Look, the cliff face comes right up under the house on the left side. We can scale it there and then use the steel beams under the house to climb across to reach the hatch.”

  “And if it’s locked?”

  “You leave that to me.” She patted one of her many pockets. “You coming?”

  Matt took one more look at the underside of the house. It was crazy and close to impossible, but she was right. It was their only option.

  He followed her as she barreled into the brush like a tracking hound hot on a fugitive’s scent. It was a ten-minute slog through thick, scratchy brambles before they even reached the base of the rock formation that supported most of the weight of Long’s circular house.

  The climb up the rugged cliff face was actually not all that bad. The rock face was steep, but good and solid, and it held strong under Matt’s hands. There were plenty of grooves and natural hand- and toeholds. If you ignored the whole possibly-plummeting-to-your-death thing, it was beautiful up there. The view was like something out of a movie, the lights of Los Angeles spread out below him, soft-focus and twinkling from the heavy smog in the air. The sky, by contrast, was dull and starless, giving him the strange feeling that the sky and ground had switched places. Above him, Long’s house seeme
d to hover like a sinister UFO.

  Stacy had already reached the underside of the house and was currently traveling monkeylike along one of the steel beams toward the central column.

  Once Matt reached the beam, he carefully transferred his weight from the cliff, gripping the beam and then wrapping his legs around its rough circumference. Once he pulled himself up onto the beam, he realized that the underside of the house was so close above him that he couldn’t raise his head and was forced to inch slowly forward on his belly. Watching Stacy’s dim silhouette ahead of him, he was in awe of her speed and agility. She moved along the length of the beam with casual grace, utterly fearless.

  Matt was even more amazed as she wrapped her legs around the beam and hung upside down to pick the padlock and remove the grate from its frame.

  “Come on,” she whispered before disappearing into the hatch.

  Matt squeezed through right behind her and found himself inside a dimly lit elevator shaft. He could see the roof of the unmoving elevator several floors below. That was a good thing. If the elevator came up beneath them, they could always hop onto the roof, but if it came down on top of them, they’d be squashed.

  There was a kind of ladder composed of thin steel rungs protruding from the concrete, each one barely wide enough for both feet. Stacy was already more than halfway down when the elevator shuddered to life, rising swiftly in the shaft.

  Stacy leapt from the ladder to the roof of the rising elevator and Matt followed suit, glancing upward to see how much headroom they would have once they reached the top. It didn’t look like much, so Matt flattened himself out, belly down, and pulled Stacy down beside him. She turned her face toward him, her eyes wide as the elevator climbed, whirring and clanking beneath them. The top of the shaft was packed with gears and greasy hydraulic equipment, with lots of sharp edges and moving parts. If they wound up squashed between the gears and the roof of the elevator, they would be ground into hamburger.

  Matt sucked in his breath and squeezed his eyes shut as the elevator ground to a halt with less than an inch between his head and a large, cagelike structure of rusted struts and humming machinery.

  The cab of the elevator dipped slightly as two heavy passengers entered, their thudding footsteps muffled by carpet and the sound of low-pitched male voices. They went quiet for a moment, and then the elevator started descending.

  Matt was silently weighing their options when Stacy kicked open the hatch and dove headfirst into the cab.

  That woman was the poster child for poor impulse control. Up until that point, he had been content to simply follow her single-minded lead, more interested in information gathering than ass kicking, but now he was starting to wonder if he’d made a mistake in trusting her judgment. He bit back on a string of frustrated swearing and unslung his ax, poking his head cautiously down into the open hatch.

  Stacy had her arms and legs wrapped around the same ginger-haired thug who’d tased her back at the pier. He was bright red and flailing, one arm trapped and sticking straight up next to his ear as Stacy used her thickly muscled arm to choke him out, legs simultaneously scissoring the breath from his body.

  The thug’s companion was someone Matt didn’t recognize, a thoroughly corrupted black guy with rank, greasy dreadlocks and strips of dead gray skin hanging from his face like a fleshy beard. He just stood there staring, his jaw hanging slack and open like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. When he looked up and saw Matt’s head peering upside down from the open hatch, his eyes went wide and he began to fumble at a shoulder holster. Too late. Matt had the handle of the ax under the guy’s chin, lifting his dusty boots up off the floor of the elevator and crushing his windpipe, letting his own considerable weight work against him. He flailed and struck out with wild, irrational hands against Matt’s arms and face, but Matt held firm on the ax handle until the guy slowed and eventually went slack. Matt let him drop beside his twitching, unconscious buddy just as the elevator came to a slow stop at the bottom of the shaft.

  Matt leapt down into the cab of the elevator, landing in a crouch with the ax ready to swing. Stacy was right beside him, fists raised to her cheeks and body coiled like a pissed-off cobra. The elevator dinged softly and the doors slid open.

  No one was there. Just an empty, brightly lit cement corridor on the other side of the door.

  Matt and Stacy exchanged a cautious glance. Then Matt leaned out of the elevator to case the layout.

  The elevator let them out in the middle of a long, curved hallway that made the set of The Andromeda Strain look cozy and inviting. The ends, if the hallway did end and wasn’t a complete circle, were hidden beyond the curve on both sides. No visible break except for a pair of steel doors about twenty feet down the left side. No other way out, no alternate escape routes, no cover. Just that long, hollow stretch of concrete.

  But it wasn’t just the logistics of navigating that hallway without being seen or caught. There was a weird psychic residue in this place, some secret, unspeakable awfulness that made the simple dimensions of that hallway seem to resonate with jangling unease.

  “I don’t like it,” Matt said out of the corner of his mouth.

  Stacy wasn’t listening. She was off and running down that hallway before Matt could blink. He still didn’t like it, but it didn’t look like he was going to have any choice in the matter. Going anywhere with that young hothead was like being strapped to a rocket. He really needed to take her aside and try to chill her out before things got out of hand. Which, if things were as bad down here as he suspected they might be, would be sooner rather than later. He followed close behind Stacy, ax in hand.

  When they reached the steel doors, Matt put a hand on Stacy’s shoulder.

  “Okay, listen,” he said. “We need to be real careful here. Be smart. You want to find and help your friend, not get us both killed, right?”

  Stacy looked up at Matt, rusty red eyebrows drawn together. She nodded slowly, skeptical.

  “So let’s take it slow. Case the place thoroughly and get as much information as possible before we take any kind of action.”

  She looked up at him with a suspicious squint.

  “Trust me on this,” Matt said. “I’ve dealt with situations like this once or twice before. Now that doesn’t have anything to do with you being a woman. I’ve seen what you can do—more than most men I know. So I’m not trying to boss you around here. I’m just saying that we need to work together. That can’t happen if you go barreling in there like a mad dog.”

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  Matt wondered if he was actually getting through to her or if she was just saying whatever she thought he wanted to hear so he’d get out of her way, but there was nothing else he could say about it. She’d either go along with it and follow his lead, or she wouldn’t, and he’d have to deal with the consequences. Nothing to do now but go on through those doors and find out what was on the other side. He used the hand on Stacy’s shoulder to gently back her up a step and then slipped in front of her. Then he eased one of the doors open a slow, careful inch.

  On the other side of the steel doors was a huge round amphitheater that had been carved out of the raw rock belly of the mountain. The layout was disturbingly familiar. There were rings of shallow circular stone steps leading down to the sunken center, forming very crude stadium-style seating, currently empty. He didn’t have to wonder where he’d seen something like this before; the original still haunted him in his nightmares. It had been in the woods behind a mental hospital that had been taken over by the inmates.

  The scene was lit by a single harsh spotlight at the center of the room. Directly beneath the dusty beam of light was a circular pit, approximately twelve feet in diameter and deep enough to be about shoulder height on the naked women currently fighting inside it. Any appreciation this lurid display of nude female anatomy might have evoked in Matt was canceled out by the ugly contusions and sticky, clotting blood covering their desperately twisting limbs and cont
orted faces.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone directly on the other side of the door, so Matt opened it a little more, just enough to allow him and Stacy to slip through.

  Inside the pit, the relentless action was ramping up to an awful crescendo. One fighter was a little larger than the other, and what was happening in that pit was less of a real fight than a straight-up chainsaw massacre. The smaller fighter was as game as hell and swinging for the fences, but there was nothing she could do to faze her burly pit bull of an opponent.

  The larger of the two fighters took the smaller one down to the blood-slick stone floor. The smaller woman tried to twist away from her opponent, turning her face toward Matt and howling like a tortured animal, her lips skinned back from a mouth full of broken, blood-webbed teeth. Her face looked barely human, a Halloween mask of gore and trauma. Eyes swollen nearly shut, lips distorted, as purple and slick as raw liver. Her nose had been squashed like a dropped tomato, and there was a large, football-shaped wound like a third eye under her left eyebrow. She threw her arms over her ruined face. If it hadn’t been for familiar intricate tattoos on those bloody arms, Matt never would have recognized the smaller woman as Olivia Lopez, the victorious fighter from the pier.

  Her opponent was not as badly injured, but her face also appeared barely human. Not from trauma, but from pestilent corruption. Her lips were cracked and oozing. Crusty sores and patches of mushy necrosis not unlike severe frostbite had covered the entire left side of her face. A crop of pale, quivering insect eggs filled the eye socket on that side. She was as completely subjugated by evil as anyone Matt had ever seen.

  But that wasn’t the thing that filled Matt’s chest with cold, coiling tendrils of familiar dread. Her decomposing face had been painted with some kind of rancid tallow. A glossy black triangle with a point at each temple and one just below her bottom lip. There was a row of smaller white triangles up her jawline to her temples. Like shark teeth.

  Just like the mask he’d seen back at the Carthage Mental Health Center. The same mask that had been worn by a mute Ojibwe fighter in another stone amphitheater just like this one. In all the time he’d been traveling, he’d encountered horror after horror, manifestations of evil so terrible it made him wonder how the human race had survived this long. But they’d all been completely different, a mass killer in one town, a rioting mob somewhere halfway across the country.