The Big Bout Read online

  “You do?” Kay asked her.

  “If you’re talking about the driver’s rude behavior,” Lauren said. “I mind it a great deal.”

  I tapped Vickery’s head with the barrel of the revolver.

  “If you’re talking about who people love and how they love and what they love,” Lauren said, “then of course I don’t mind. Can’t help who you love. No one should try to stop you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Vickery said.

  “I spoke with a very scared young man earlier in the week,” Lauren said. “He’s terrified he’ll be found out. The way we’re treating those willing to fight and die for our country is truly dreadful. Have you heard about this?”

  Kay nodded. “We didn’t even have a policy of keeping homosexuals out of the military before the war began. Now we’ve got all sorts of screenings. Directives coming down from on high. We’ve got psychiatrists using words like sexual psychopathy.”

  “His cousin was killed at Pearl Harbor and since that moment all he’s wanted to do was avenge his death, fight for his country. He just knew the doctor interviewing him was going to know exactly what he is. But all he asked him was did he like girls, and he answered honestly yes, of course he likes girls. He likes them a lot––as friends and confidants, just not sexual partners.”

  I thought about the good Lauren had been doing at the USO, thought about how I had behaved, what I had said and mostly what I had thought, and felt ashamed.

  “What I was saying earlier,” Kay said, “and feared to finish was that Becky and I have the same kind of love you two do.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Lauren said.

  “We just live in a world where we’re not allowed to have it––or at least not let on that we have it.”

  “The world doesn’t exactly sanction our love either,” Lauren said. “I was married when we met. Now . . . we’re together, live together, and aren’t married.”

  “Why aren’t you two married?” Kay asked. “Unlike us you can be.”

  “What we have is so far beyond . . .” Lauren began. “It seems, at least to me, that getting married at this point would lessen it somehow. But that’s just how I see it. You’ll have to ask Jimmy why he hasn’t asked me to.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “We’re here,” Vickery said.

  Here was a dirt road off Highway 98 between Panama City Beach and Destin––not nearly as far west and into Fort Walton as Vickery had originally claimed.

  At the end of the straight, narrow road, an old, smallish two-story converted hotel sat next to a body of water I didn’t recognize. A lake perhaps. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, though the moon had come partially out from behind the clouds and glowed eerily on the smooth surface of the water.

  The area was unpopulated and densely forested––consisting primarily of sand hills, wet flatwoods, and prairies and cypress swamps.

  The night noises, all the chirps and croaks, squeaks and nocturnal songs, were louder than anything that could be heard back in Panama City––even among the all-night activities on Harrison.

  A sign near the building read Point Washington Center for Reparative Therapy and Treatment.

  “Oh my God,” Kay Hudson said.

  “What is it?” Lauren asked.

  “It’s one of those places.”

  “‘Those places’?” I asked.

  “A torture chamber of barbaric horrors. They do aversion therapy for the prevention and elimination of homosexual behavior. We’re talking electrodes to the genitals. We’re talking the most inhumane, violent, harmful brutality you can imagine. Torture drugs. Shock therapy. Even ice pic lobotomies and castrations.”

  “Is an ice pic lobotomy what it sounds like?” Lauren asked.

  “Transorbital lobotomy, where the so-called surgeon enters the prefrontal area of the brain through the patient’s eye sockets with an instrument resembling––or in some cases an actual––household ice pic.”

  “This is where you brought them?” I asked Vickery. “You’re sure?”

  “Them?” Kay said. “I thought it was only Jeff. Becky is here too?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she jumped out of the car and ran across the yard, up the stairs, and into the building.

  “Come on,” I said to Vickery. “Help us in here and you live. Do anything other than that or if anything goes wrong, you’re the first one to die tonight. Understand?”

  He nodded.

  I handed Lauren a gun, kissed her, and Vickery and I followed Kay.

  Inside, the place was dim and quiet.

  There was no one in the lobby or at the front desk.

  I shoved Vickery past the desk, toward the hallways and stairs in the back.

  When we reached the corridors, we peered down both. No movement. No light. Nothing.

  The ceiling above us shook, and we could hear running coming from the hallway upstairs.

  “Upstairs,” I yelled. “Now.”

  He opened the stairwell door and ran up the two flights of stairs, me following close behind him.

  “Don’t trip and shoot me,” he said.

  When we reached the top floor, we found Kay Hudson pointing a gun at a red-headed, freckled young orderly, who was leading her from room to room.

  “There are only three others,” he said.

  “Show me,” she said.

  “Why’re you doing this?” he asked. “You really need to talk to Dr. Delpy. May I call him in for you?”

  “No you may not. You may find me the people I’m looking for.”

  He opened the next door, turned on the light, and they disappeared inside.

  Vickery and I waited in the hall.

  Emerging a few moments later, Kay shook her head.

  A moment after they entered the next room, I heard her exclaim, “Jeff! Oh, thank God. Jeff. Jeff? Jeff? It’s me, Kay. Jeff? What’s wrong?”

  We went inside to find a poor, confused creature who bore very little resemblance to the legendary boxing war correspondent Gentleman Jeff Bennett.

  Kay looked at the orderly.

  “He’s still recovering from the procedure Dr. Delpy performed on him. He’ll still get some better.”

  “Some? Some?”

  “He won’t be a sexual deviant anymore.”

  “Help him up,” I said to Vickery. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  “Come on,” Kay said, motioning to the orderly with her gun.

  Vickery helped Jeff up as the orderly led Kay into the next room.

  When we were back out in the hall, I heard Kay say, “Who’s this? This isn’t––”

  “Whatta you want me to do with him?” Vickery asked, holding Jeff by the arm.

  “Walk him up and down the hallway. Try to get him to wake up.”

  “It ain’t that he’s asleep,” Vickery said.

  Kay and the orderly stepped back into the hallway.

  “Where is she?” Kay asked.

  “Who?” the orderly said. “That’s everyone. We have no female patients at the moment.”

  “Rebecca Bennett,” she said. “His wife. Where is she?”

  “She didn’t survive the procedure,” he said. “It happens sometimes.”

  Kay’s knees buckled and she fell back against the wall.

  “Dr. Delpy’s success rate is very high,” the orderly was saying, “but . . . occasionally you get one that doesn’t respond well to the treatment plan.”

  “Shut up,” Kay yelled. “Stop talking.”

  Pushing herself off the wall, she brought the barrel of the small revolver to the bridge of the orderly’s nose.

  “Where is she?”

  “It just happened. Earlier this evening. The body’s in a room downstairs until the funeral home can pick it up in the morning.”

  “It?”

  “Give me the gun, Kay,” I said.

  “Show me,” she said. “Show it to me.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just meant––”


  “Say another word and you’ll be an it,” she said. “Show me.”

  He led her back down the stairs, Vickery, Jeff, and I following close behind.

  When we reached the lobby, I said to Vickery, “Stand here with Jeff so I can see you. If you move, you die.”

  He did as he was told, and I walked down the corridor behind Kay, to the second door on the right, and to her fate awaiting behind it.

  This time when Kay’s knees gave way there was no wall to catch her, and she fell to the floor sobbing.

  Rebecca Bennett was laid out, her nude body only partially covered by the white sheet, her beautiful brown hair splayed out around her face, her skin pale as moonlight on river water, the corners of each eye still seeping blood.

  Kay tried to stand but was unable.

  I reached down and helped pull her up the best I could.

  Once on her feet again she stumbled over and fell onto her lover, draping her upper body over the breasts that, like Lauren’s were for me, must once have been her safe place of refuge from the tumult and tempest of life.

  Above her, Becky wept tears of blood, crimson rivulets trickling down death-pale skin not yet gone waxy.

  And I cried tears of my own.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  A very long while later, Kay, Lauren, and I stood in the lobby.

  “I’ll let you decide what we do next,” I said to Kay. “I can call David or Folsom, have them come over. We can call the locals or––”

  “Help me get everybody out,” she said. “I’m gonna burn it to the ground. I don’t care who you call after that.”

  Lauren nodded. “We can do that,” she said.

  Torching the place would make it all the more difficult to prosecute and convict Delpy and those behind this, but . . . since it wasn’t all that likely to happen anyway––particularly if Birdie Bennett and Noah Mosley were involved––and since I knew firsthand exactly what she was going through, knew how much she needed to burn something, anything, the whole world if possible, I agreed to it.

  In short order, I called David Howell and Henry Folsom, and we evacuated the building, Kay insisting on carrying Becky on her own, and using gas we siphoned from our car and that of the orderly’s, we set a fire Prometheus would be proud of.

  By the time Folsom and Howell arrived, there was very little left of the structure, and everything there was, was engulfed in flames.

  “What the hell happened?” Folsom said.

  “You need to find Dr. Delpy,” I said. “It’s his place. The orderly should be helpful with that. Just threaten him a little. Delpy’s a quack trying to cure homosexuality with electric shock to the genitals and ice pics to the brain. He’s killed one of his patients that we know of. I’m sure there are others.”

  The three of us were standing away from everyone else.

  “How’d the fire start?” Folsom asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s an old tinderbox. No telling how long it’s been here. Maybe Delpy did it to destroy evidence. Thankfully we got everybody out.”

  “How’d you find this place?” David asked.

  “Lady Bird Bennett’s chauffeur,” I said. “He brought us out.”

  “And you didn’t think you should let us know?”

  “I did. It’s why you’re standing here,” I said. “The moment there was something to tell, I told it. And I didn’t tell it to just anybody. I told it to you two.”

  “Okay. Okay. Don’t get worked up,” David said.

  “She’s behind all this,” I said.

  “Who?” Folsom asked, looking over his shoulder toward the cars and the people standing there with Kay and Lauren.

  “Bennett,” I said. “It’s why she lied about her son being dead. She had him brought here for this barbaric treatment. She’s responsible for all the death and destruction. I don’t think her son will ever be right again.”

  “Not like he was right to begin with,” Folsom said.

  “Tell me you’re gonna do the right thing,” I said. “That you’re not going to let her pay you off.”

  “Nobody’s payin’ me off anything,” he said. “I’ll get everyone responsible for this. Everyone.”

  “I’m not talking about everyone,” I said. “I’m talking about the main one. Your good friend, the mother of the city you work for.”

  “Everyone,” he said.

  “You heard that,” I said to Howell.

  He didn’t say anything, just gave me the slightest of nods.

  “I’ve reached my limit of letting you accuse me of being corrupt,” Folsom said.

  “I’ve reached a few limits of my own,” I said. “You’ve gotten away with some shit before because there was nothing legally I could do about it. That won’t happen again. If you don’t do what’s right here, if you let your personal distaste or Birdie Bennett’s money keep you from doing what you know is right, I will burn your life to the ground.”

  “You’re tired, upset, injured,” he said. “So I’m gonna let you threatening a police officer slide, but just this once. Last chance, kid. Better use it wisely.”

  He turned to David.

  “Get him the hell out of here before I do something I can’t undo.”

  “What’s wrong with the world?” Lauren asked.

  We were holding each other beneath the covers in our warm bed in the Dixie Sherman hotel, after having made love.

  We had moved once again. This time out of the Marie and back to the Dixie.

  We had come in spent and smelling of smoke, but too grateful to be together not to express how we felt––to one another, to the world.

  “Nothing right now,” I said.

  “I know. And that makes me feel so guilty. I keep imagining Kay Hudson all alone in her bed, or Jeff drooling in his, and I feel so bad for them.”

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  In actuality, Jeff was in a hospital bed under a different name, Kay in a chair beside him, but it made me feel no less bad for them both.

  “What they were doing at that place was not too unlike what they say the Nazis are doing.”

  I nodded.

  “In our own backyard.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “It is.”

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Keep loving each other,” I said. “Keep fighting back the forces of evil. You’ll keep helping Gladys and the soldiers at the USO. I’ll keep bumblin’ around in the dark trying to shine a light. But for now . . . we’ll sleep.”

  Chapter Forty

  When I arrived at the gym the next morning, I found Clip in the ring working with Gus, Freddy’s trainer.

  He was wearing Freddy’s gear, and except for the gauntness and eyepatch, he looked remarkably like him.

  I walked over and sat down on the first row of bleachers beside Saul.

  “Jimmy,” he said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Freddy’s gone,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Just gone. Decided to run. Left a note. Left town.”

  “What’s Clip doin’?”

  “Says he’s gonna fight in Freddy’s place.”

  “What?”

  “Told me to put in the paper that Freddy has lost a lot of weight and injured his eye during training but that the fight would still go on.”

  “He’ll get killed,” I said. “Lights Out is too good a boxer for a skinny, one-eyed guy with no experience with boxing.”

  “He’d get killed if he had two eyes,” Saul said. “As it is . . .”

  “Now,” I said, “if it was a street fight . . .”

  “But it ain’t,” he said. “And the ref ain’t gonna let it turn into that. You gotta talk to him.”

  “What’d Freddy’s note say?”

  “Threat of death was too much. That he couldn’t take Lydecker pressuring him no more. That there was no way to pay him back and his pride wouldn’t let him take a dive.”

  �
�Somethin’ I gots to do,” Clip said.

  “Why?”

  He was still inside the ring, still had his gloves on. I was standing outside the ropes near one of the corners. Gus, who was giving us a minute, was over talking to Saul.

  “Think ’bout all he done said in the paper,” he said. “Not just what he said, but the way he said it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He stood up. Spoke truth. He full of himself, full of shit, but . . . he said a lot needed sayin’.”

  I nodded.

  “How it gonna look he run away like a coward?”

  “Doesn’t change the truth he spoke,” I said.

  “Does for anybody wantin’ it not to be true,” he said. “He don’t fight, it not just reflect on him.”

  He was right.

  “But . . . the fight’s in two days,” I said. “Against one of the top heavyweights in the world.”

  “I know. And you keepin’ me from trainin’.”

  “You could get seriously injured,” I said. “Or worse.”

  “I know.”

  “What he said or how it looks if he doesn’t fight isn’t worth that,” I said.

  “I think it is.”

  “You’re willin’ to die for another man’s words?” I asked.

  “Lots a people do that,” he said. “But they was my words. Least most of ’em.”

  “What?”

  “I tol’ him what to say.”

  I was more surprised than I should’ve been.

  “Freddy ain’t a big thinker,” he said. “He had a audience but nothin’ to say.”

  “So you coached him on what to say.”

  “Not his words I willin’ to die for,” he said. “It mine.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  When I walked out of the Bay High School gym, Miki’s uncle and his two young gunsels were waiting for me.

  One in front. One behind. Both jabbing barrels at me as the uncle reached in and withdrew my weapon from beneath my right shoulder.

  “You ah die ah here or you ah take us to Miki now ah,” he said.

  I looked around.

  They had the drop on me.