"I'm sorry," Elliot blurted out. "Please, I - "
"You're out," Vincent told him.
"Yes, I - I understand. I'll be packed up and gone in - "
"Leave the table and all the product. It belongs to us now. You're gonna take your snot-nosed little nephew with you and you're gonna walk out that door and never come anywhere near me again. Cabeesh, asshole?"
Elliot nodded wearily. "All right, Vin. All right."
Vincent swung open the door to one of the metal lockers. "But first, you're gonna put your hand in this locker."
Tears welled in his eyes as his lower lip began to tremble. "But… Vincent, you don't have to do this."
"Vin," Charlie said, as if to stop him, but one glaring look from Vincent changed his mind. He spoke in Elliot's direction but found it impossible to establish eye contact. "There's nothing I can do, Elliot."
"But Charlie, we go back - "
"I'm sorry."
Vincent smiled triumphantly. "Put your hand in the locker, douche bag."
"You… you can't…"
"Make me repeat myself again," Vincent told him, just above a whisper, "and I'll beat you to death right here, right now."
Elliot made a whimpering sound and slowly slid his hand into the open locker. He took a deep breath in an effort to control himself, and then began to cry uncontrollably, like a child.
"Jesus Christ, Vin," Luther said, standing.
"Am I talking to you?" Vincent asked without looking at him.
"Come on, man, that's enough."
Slowly, Vincent turned his head to meet Luther's gaze. "Go take a shower, champ. I'll let you know if I need you."
Luther stepped forward. "In the old days, if a promoter ever talked to me like that I'd just lock the door on him."
"So lock the door," Vincent told him.
"I was hoping it wouldn't come to that."
"It just did."
"You're gonna let him do this?" he asked Frank.
Frank lit a cigarette, left it between his lips, then moved behind Elliot and covered his mouth with both hands. "I'm the one who told him to do it, Train."
After a moment, Luther nodded and turned away. "Fuck it. Ain't none of my business anyway."
Even with his mouth covered the muffled screams could be heard as Vincent slammed the door across the back of Elliot's hand three times. Frank released him and he slumped to the floor, holding his shattered hand with the other as he curled into a fetal position. "Gus," Vincent said, "get this piece of shit out of my sight before I kill him."
"Is he conscious?" Gus bent over to get a better look at him. "Well, sort of."
Charlie, white as chalk, stared at Vincent with a blank expression. "Here," he said, holding out the fifty dollars Elliot had stolen.
"You keep it."
As Frank and Vincent moved across the locker room all the wrestlers quickly occupied themselves. Luther was sitting on one of the benches, and looked up at them with a wry smile.
"Are we cool?" Frank asked him.
"We're cool." He winked at Vincent. "I didn't mean no disrespect, Vin. I was just afraid you were gonna kill him."
Vincent smiled. "What if I had?"
Luther looked at him and laughed lightly, but Frank could tell he found no humor in the question. In Luther's dark eyes he saw something new - something beyond the acceptance and respect it had taken them so many months to earn.
He saw fear.
CHAPTER 9
The digital alarm clock on the dresser read 3:18 p.m. With the shades on both windows drawn and the bedroom door open just a crack it might've been the middle of the night.
Frank rolled over, the soft mattress complying with the contours of his aching lower back. It had been unseasonably cold that night, and he'd used the top sheet when first slipping into bed, but the dense humidity typical of even coastal Massachusetts in July had returned with a vengeance. His underarms were sticky; the black hair across his chest and stomach moist and matted with sweat, and his throat was parched and mucky from too many cigarettes the night before.
It had been a quiet ride back from Connecticut. The drive home at the end of a tour always was. It seemed Frank lived a great deal of his life in cars these days, roaming the countryside like some modern day Gypsy, but any romanticism he'd associated with the lifestyle early on experience had taught him to dismiss as little more than wishful thinking. Going on tour was work - plain and simple - and it usually took a day or two to recover from it. No matter how much money the run yielded or the amount of enjoyment the participants derived from it, exhaustion eventually won out every time. Only a mark would fail to return home as limp and rung out as a used dishrag; a true professional left everything he had on the road.
As he lay there in the darkened room, still not completely awake, Frank tried to remember if a nightmare had been responsible for so abruptly interrupting his slumber. A maelstrom of varied thoughts served only to further cloud his mind, so he reached over to the nightstand for his wristwatch.
Frank heard movement in the kitchen. The bedroom door opened slowly, and Sandy entered the room wearing a top to one of her bikini swimsuits and a pair of cut-off jeans. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, held in place by a plastic clip, and her face bore almost no makeup - her smooth complexion as pristine as a child's. Frank detected the pleasant scent of her cologne as she padded barefoot across the carpeting and sat next to him on the edge of the bed.
"What are you doing home?"
"I took a personal day," she said, her hand touching his bare shoulder. "I thought it might be nice to spend a little time together. I knew you'd be spent but I didn't think you'd sleep all afternoon."
"Sorry."
"I must have been dead to the world when you got home, I never even heard you come to bed. What time did you get in?"
"A little after two."
"Wasn't the last show a matinee?"
"Yeah, but we had an end-of-tour party."
She smiled and shook her head. "You guys throw more parties than the Rolling Stones."
Frank sat up a bit and rubbed his eyes. "I'm wrecked."
"How did the tour go?"
He motioned to a stack of money he'd tossed onto the dresser the night before. "Good."
"I saw that," she nodded. "We didn't have much in the house so I took a couple hundred and went grocery shopping this morning."
"You didn't wear that outfit did you?"
"Comes in handy when I'm low on double coupons," she laughed.
Frank reached around behind her and unhooked her top. She leaned forward and it fell into her lap. His eyes consumed her before his hands did, before his mouth did, before they made love for hours, stopping only long enough to recuperate and begin again.
When it was over they remained in each other's arms despite the heat, their bodies slick and glistening. Frank listened to his chest wheeze with every breath and wondered if he'd ever quit smoking.
"Are you awake?" he eventually asked. She nodded her head without raising it from his chest. "Did you think to call the real estate agent while I was gone?"
"Uh-huh."
"Anything reasonable in house rentals?"
"Two here in town," she said in a dreamy voice. "A nice two-bedroom on Piney Nook - you know, the cul-de-sac over by the Mobile station - and another in the center of town."
Frank wiped a bead of perspiration from his brow. "I've got five days before I go on the road again. We better make appointments to look at them this week."
"Are you sure we can afford a house?"
"Of course," he said playfully, stroking her shoulder. "And that's just one of the perks being married to a wildly successful businessman like myself."
Sandy looked up at him and blinked her emerald eyes. "Is that what you are, Frank?"
"Most of the time."
"What about all the other hours in the day?"
His hand slid down into the crack of her ass. "Whatever I need to be."
"I need to know that you're all right."
"I'm fine, honey," he said, after a moment. "It's just that what I do can be difficult at times."
"Want to tell me about it?"
Frank kissed her forehead. "No."
"Why do you shut me out like that?"
"With knowledge comes responsibility, Sandy. I don't want you exposed to the business. Trust me, it's better this way."
She sighed, and Frank felt her hot breath against his skin. "But it's such a big part of your life now. I've spoken to Charlie Rain a few times on the phone, but I've never even met him. I don't know any of the guys you work with."
"They're not your kind of people."
Sandy rolled over onto her stomach, squashing her breasts against him. "I know I haven't been terribly supportive, but I'm not asking you to make me your business partner, Frank. All I'm saying is that I'd like to be more involved in your affairs. The way it works now, you take a call here at home now and then, go off to the office, pack your bags and take off for a week or two, and then you come home and throw a few thousand dollars at me. You've never discussed even the most trivial aspects of what goes on."
"It's not always pleasant."
"That much is clear."
Frank winced. "Is it that obvious?"
"It's written all over your face."
A while later he spoke again. "There's good and bad in it like anything else, but I love the business."
Sandy's eyes had not left him. "Do you?"
"Yeah," he nodded. "I'm just not sure that's necessarily a good thing. If a couple of years ago you'd asked me if I were capable of some of the things I've already done, I'd have sworn I wasn't… But it's like we've got our own little world, you know? The only rules are the ones we make, and that can get dangerous in a hurry."
Her hands cupped his face. "I don't want to lose you to that world, Frank. If - God forbid - anything ever happened to you, or if you got into serious trouble with the law and had to go to jail, I… I don't know what I'd do."
"It's nothing that dramatic," he assured her, disturbed by the ease with which he'd lied. "A good deal of the business is turning your head and looking the other way."
"But where does that end?"
Frank found cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one. "Once we're more established," he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke across the room, "I won't have to spend so much time on the road, which means I won't have to be involved in the things that go along with it. We plan to put a TV show together soon, and that'll not only increase business, it'll make us more powerful. In another year or two the ECPWL will be a national promotion - eventually even international - and when that happens you and I will be set for the rest of our lives."
She smiled. "I could quit my job."
"You can do that now."
"And what if things don't go according to plan?"
"They will."
"But what if - "
"They will."
Sandy nodded, casually tracing the outer edge of his nipple with her index finger. "I miss you when you're gone."
"I don't like being apart any more than you do, honey."
"Sure," she joked. "You've probably got a girlfriend in every town."
He slapped her bottom. "Do be ridiculous. Every other town."
"Asshole."
Frank ground his cigarette out in the ashtray. He and Vincent had decided to wait to make their move on Turano until after the next tour had ended. The tour itself was scheduled to run three weeks, and it would probably take approximately the same amount of time to amply prepare for the move against their rival. The risk of things getting rough was still a couple of months away.
"The Saturday after I get back from Indiana, Charlie and his wife are having a party at their place," he said rather hesitantly. "Do you want to go?"
She eyed him with uncertainty. "Was I invited?"
"I wouldn't be asking otherwise."
"Is Vincent going to be there?"
"No."
"How about Gus?"
"No, just a few couples."
"New York's a long way to go for a party."
"It's just over the Connecticut border." Frank shrugged. "Charlie offered to put us up for the night. It's no big deal, I just though I'd mention it."
"Sure," she said. "Let's go."
Music began thumping through the wall from the apartment next door. Sandy rolled off of him and strode to the closet for her summer robe. "What was that? You want to take me out for dinner? Let me take a quick shower and I'll be ready in ten minutes."
"Deal."
Frank heard the rumble of the shower, the rattling of pipes in the wall, the incessant beat of the funky tune next door, and decided he'd call the real estate agent personally.
***
Gus picked Kathleen up out in front of her apartment in New Bedford's south end, parked at the corner and hit the horn as he always did. He'd asked her several times to let him go to the door and call on her properly, but she'd explained that she and her daughter shared the place with a roommate, another working girl who didn't take kindly to strangers. Although the awkward arrangements made him angry, it had been several years since he'd had even a legitimate date with a woman, much less an ongoing relationship of any value with one, and Gus didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize things between them.