Ham Read online

  HAM

  Dustin Stevens

  HAM

  Copyright © 2018, Dustin Stevens

  Cover Art and Design: Paramita Bhattacharjee, www.creativeparamita.com

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden, without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, settings, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Free Book!

  Dustin’s Books

  Prologue

  I. The Offer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  II. The Pickup

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  III. The Hide

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  IV. The Agreement

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  V. The Decision

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Sneak Peek

  Thank You For Reading!

  Free Book!

  Dustin’s Books

  About the Author

  Free Book!

  As thank you for reading, please enjoy a FREE copy of my first bestseller – and still one of my personal favorites – 21 Hours!

  Dustin’s Books

  Works Written by Dustin Stevens:

  Reed & Billie Novels:

  The Boat Man

  The Good Son

  The Kid

  The Partnership

  Justice

  ( Sydney Rye/Reed & Billie Crossover)

  The Scorekeeper

  The Bear

  (Coming Soon)

  Hawk Tate Novels:

  Cold Fire

  Cover Fire

  Fire and Ice

  Hellfire

  Home Fire

  Zoo Crew Novels:

  The Zoo Crew

  Dead Peasants

  Tracer

  The Glue Guy

  Moonblink

  The Shuffle

  (coming soon)

  Standalone Thrillers:

  Four

  Ohana

  Liberation Day

  Twelve

  21 Hours

  Catastrophic

  Scars and Stars

  Motive

  Going Viral

  The Debt

  One Last Day

  The Subway

  The Exchange

  HAM

  Standalone Dramas:

  Just A Game

  Be My Eyes

  Quarterback

  Children’s Books w/ Maddie Stevens:

  Danny the Daydreamer…Goes to the Grammy’s

  Danny the Daydreamer…Visits the Old West

  Danny the Daydreamer…Goes to the Moon

  (Coming Soon)

  Works Written by T.R. Kohler:

  Standalone:

  Shoot to Wound

  Peeping Thoms

  The Ring

  My Mira Saga

  Spare Change

  Office Visit

  Fair Trade

  “… they call us ‘hard women.’ As if

  survival could ever be delicate.”

  —Brenna Twohy

  “They broke the wrong parts of me. They

  broke my wings and forgot I had claws.”

  —Anonymous

  Prologue

  The ground absorbs any sound made by my footfalls. Walking heel-to-toe, I make sure each foot is placed down carefully, the thick bed of pine needles insulating the earth and masking my movements.

  Moving in a serpentine pattern, I trace a path through the thin underbrush of the forest, this place one of the few in the world I have ever called home.

  And right now, this man is here violating that. Not just with his mere presence but with everything he represents. Everybody he is associated with, every intention he has in mind.

  With every thought, every realization, every moment, I am in his presence I can sense my animosity growing higher. I can feel as it raises my pulse, increases my body temperature, even tightens the grip on the rock in my hand.

  To shoot this man would be easiest. To simply sight in on the back of his skull and ease back the trigger, knowing from this distance there is no possible way I can miss.

  But the easiest path right now won’t necessarily be the easiest moving forward.

  And it would damned sure be far, far kinder than this man deserves.

  I

  The Offer

  Chapter One

  The last sliver of orange has just slid beneath the western horizon as the ring announcer steps through the ropes. It sends a thousand shards of shimmering light across the surface of the Pacific Ocean with its last gasps, the sudden absence plunging the world into a state of exaggerated darkness.

  And just as they always do, the strands of bare bulbs strung high above the ring kick on a moment later, casting a straw-colored pallor over everything below.

  The aging ring is built on pressure-treated 4x4’s buried directly into the sand, spots of blood and assorted detritus dotting the canvas mat. The twin aluminum risers are on either end, both loaded with drunken revelers, their skins painted shades ranging from tomato red to dark tan. Beers in both hands, tobacco juice or sunflower seeds hang from their lips and the assorted forms of facial hair stuck to their chins.

  Per usual, the overwhelming majority of onlookers are men, the few women that are mixed in serving clearly as accompaniment, still dressed in bikini tops from the day or already in leather anticipating the night ahead.

  No in-between.

  On the east and west ends of the ring are scads of wooden folding chairs, what were once even rows already a twisted jumble. Housing most of the regulars, they’re g
rouped into random clusters, seats turned so they can see some combination of the sunset, the ring, or each other.

  Considering that every last one of them had to pay to get in, I’m not sure anybody rightly gives a damn what they look at.

  Least of all, me.

  Despite the open-air venue, the recent sunset, the faint breeze pushing in from the sea, there is a palpable charge in the air. That familiar buzz that I’ve known for decades now, the unshakable feeling that seems to reach deep inside, igniting the parts of me I spend most of the week keeping tamped down.

  For the last hour, the crowd has sat and watched the undercard for the night. Beginning with less than half of what is now on hand, the combination of buckets of beer and the cheap cover charge has managed to pull in enough to fill the bleachers, easily the largest crowd we’ve drawn in a while.

  It also doesn’t hurt that the first several bouts turned into little more than backyard brawls. Bloody affairs with over-muscled men that had once been high school athletes and can’t let it go, so they come out here to the sand every weekend. Smaller guys that work the fields nearby, carrying resentment for damn near everything in their lives, entering the ring with something to prove.

  And of course, a healthy sprinkling of fools that have watched a few too many MMA bouts on television and figured it didn’t look that hard. Little more than chum for the crowd, they have done their part, sacrificial lambs for the maddened rabble.

  With each passing bout, I sat in the back and felt the energy rising. Starting low, it worked steadily upward, cresting into a veritable hunger, bordering on lust, the feeling so strong I can feel it pushing in from every angle.

  Goose pimples cover my exposed forearms and calves as I assume my stance in the corner, waiting as the ring announcer steps through the ropes. A cordless microphone in hand, he doesn’t pretend to be some sort of Michael Buffer knockoff, showing up in the traditional attire of a tuxedo and polished wing tips.

  Opting for little more than board shorts and a tank top, the tail of his unbuttoned Aloha shirt flaps to either side. No more than a couple of hours from the surf, his long hair is sun bleached and pulled back, a crooked grin on his face.

  All in all, a look that holds no pretense, neither confirming nor denying the fact that he’s a Los Angeles trust-fund baby down here hiding from his family and the real world and all the responsibility both brings with them.

  Not that I give a shit. This isn’t the place anybody ends up unless they’re hiding from something.

  Myself included.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, his sandals slapping against his heels as he saunters to the center of the ring. A quick squawk of feedback through the cheap mic echoes through the speakers, vocal displeasure sounding out from the audience.

  Pretending not to notice, he pushes on. “Let’s hear another round of applause for our last combatants, Charlie Reed and Eric Montrose!”

  Calling the last two guys combatants is something like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch. Both big and beefy, the bout quickly devolved into a couple of gorillas trying to see who could withstand more haymakers.

  It was like watching three rounds of the last forty seconds of every Rocky Balboa fight.

  The crowd had loved it.

  The reception to his request is weak at best, what clapping there is accompanied by a healthy smattering of boos. Already the crowd has moved on from the last spectacle, ready for the next in line. A small shower of peanut shells and paper napkins rain down, the items dotting the outer edges of the ring, some even landing within a few inches of my feet.

  Not that the announcer seems to notice. Even with the top of my head buried into the corner pad, my gaze aimed straight down at the ground, I can imagine the look on his face. One corner of his mouth is rising higher, his grin growing ever more lopsided.

  He lives for this shit, inciting the masses, feeling like he’s some sort of ringmaster in his own personal circus.

  All bought and paid for with his daddy’s money.

  Not that he — or any of us — have any delusions about where we are and what we’re doing. The last guys beating the hell out of each other just means there are a few more stains on the mat going forward. Pelting the ring with garbage doesn’t mean we’re going to slow things down to sweep up. It’s just that much more crap for me to now roll around in.

  This isn’t Las Vegas, or New York City, or even Rio. The people that have shown up to watch know that. Those of us that step inside the ring damned sure know it.

  And here we are in spite of it.

  Or, some might even argue, because of it.

  “All right,” the announcer says, a bit of his surfer accent sliding out, making him sound like McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. Rotating at the waist, he looks to either side before saying, “and with that, I’ll get us straight to what we all came here to see tonight.”

  “Ham!” a stray voice calls out. “Ham!”

  My eyes slide shut. This is the worst part. That damn chant that some drunken idiot always gets started.

  “Ham!”

  Ignoring him, the announcer calls, “For tonight’s main event, we have one of the most anticipated bouts in Shakey Jake’s history.”

  His voice cracks as he walks around the ring, pretending that he’s trying to whip them up a bit more, though there’s no need. The collective energy has continued to rise, the lack of walls or a roof having no negative effect on the tension brimming in the air.

  No, this is about him siphoning off a little piece of things for himself, reminding everybody here who is responsible for all this.

  Because it has been a whopping fifteen minutes since he last pointed it out.

  “Two women, different in every way,” he continues. “One Latina, the other white. One from South America, the other North. One making her Tijuana debut here tonight, the other putting her crown and perfect record on the line!”

  The hype achieves some modest bit of effect, enough to at least push a swell of cheers and applause from the crowd.

  Again, I hear the same inebriated bastard attempt to get a chant going, calling, “Ham! Ham!”

  Once more, the announcer ignores him. My time will come. Right now, he’s still milking his moment.

  “In the blue corner,” he continues, his voice rising and ebbing, “a woman coming to us straight from the underground club circuit of Colombia. Standing six foot two and weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, with a 38-2 record, the Bogota Brawler herself, Victoria Rosales!”

  I don’t bother moving from my spot in the corner, already knowing exactly what the woman looks like, her actual physical description enhanced the standard twenty percent by announcer hyperbole.

  On a good day — in boots — she might go six feet even. Weigh maybe a pound or two above a buck forty. Striated muscle lines her arms and shoulders but her midsection is a bit softer, free of definition, with small bulges visible above her trunks.

  Not that all of that is easy to see, most of it obscured by dark ink etched into much of her skin. Beginning around her ear, it wraps down one side of her neck before spreading over her back and, eventually, making it all the way to her calves.

  With basic coloring and blurry lines, it’s the sort of thing referred to in the States as prison ink, though I don’t have enough knowledge of the girl or parlors in Colombia to know if she got hers inside or if that’s just how tattoos look down there.

  Not that it much matters, my lifetime interaction with her is about to come to an abrupt end in about ten minutes.

  Perfunctory cheers ring out as a bit more debris lands in the ring. Right now, I imagine she has a fist or two raised into the air, making a small circle, the announcer remaining silent, extending the moment as long as he can.

  Same cocksure smile on his face.

  The first few times I was down here, I played the part. I stayed upright in the corner, responding to all the cues, doing what was expected.

  That was long ago, well befo
re I came to see that it went the same way every time, that the kid was more interested in playing out his own little fantasy than actually doing justice to the venue or the fighters.

  Now, I just stay in my corner, wrists draped over the ropes, top of my head pressed into the pad, waiting it out.

  “And her opponent,” he eventually pushes out, “a woman that you all already know. Making her way down from just over the border and standing before you tonight with a perfect twenty-eight-and-oh record, your champion — Haaaaam!”