The Wrestler's Daughter (Finale): $472,600

When Greg Miller, who trains twenty or so futureless wrestlers and one forty-something Jason Snow, enters his warehouse wrestling school at 8:47 A.M. on Dempsy’s first freezing day of the year, he finds the aforementioned Jason Snow, alone, hooded, and presently beating the absolute bejesus out of a 200 lbs punching bag that, to the best of Greg’s knowledge, has done nothing to deserve this.

Greg asks, “How’d you get in? Place was locked up.”

Snow hits the bag three more times. No expression on his face. “Back door.”

Greg had forgotten there was even a back door in this place.

Snow digs in with a left hook. He’s not wearing bag gloves. Jab-jab-cross. High kick. Pouring sweat. He’s clearly been at this a while.

Greg says, “You’re gonna burn out before training even gets started. Nobody shows up usually before ten.”

“No training partners today.”

“No training par–What do you mean? You’ve got a title shot comin.”

Snow tears into the bag–a series of hooks–like he’s trying to rip the thing from its chain. And Greg thinks he just might. Snow’s face is all teeth.

Greg says, “Hey,” while Snow launches another assault, “this is your chance to avenge a big L against Daytona Diamonds. Colossus. We need to lay the ground work.”

Snow walks away from the bag. “No training partners,” he says to Greg, passing by, his face lost in the shadows of his hood. “Not today.”

“Well Jesus,” Greg says. “What’s got you in such a pissy mood this morning?”

###

It started a few days ago.

“Well lookie here,” Bryce said when Jason stepped through the door of Kitchen Care Used Appliances in Saint Ambrose. “I was just thinkin I’d come look for you soon. And here you are.”

The store’s showroom consisted of one long center aisle flanked by rows and rows of refrigerators and washing machines and dryers and dishwashers, some stacked three items high.

Jason, in a heavy coat and jeans, shook the snow out of his wool hat. “Need to talk to King,” he said.

“That so?” Bryce smirked. He was a tiny little man, maybe sixty years old, elf-like. He was also about as dangerous as anyone Jason had ever met. Which was saying something. The appliance store, while fully operational, was little more than a front for the criminal operation, run by “King,” which had taken over Saint Ambrose roughly fourteen years ago, when the Italian mob imploded. “What is it you want?”

“I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.”

“A big one.”

“You know you were supposed to come work for us. You owed us already.”

“I’m here now.”

“To work?”

“To do whatever I have to do.”

Bryce’s eyes narrowed and his tight little head tilted. “Just how big is this favor you need?”

Jason inhaled deeply. “I need $472,600.”

For a second Bryce did nothing but blink. Then he said, “You need what?”

Jason didn’t respond.

Bryce said, “What for?”

Because my daughter, who doesn’t know I’m alive, thinks she’s in love with a man who abuses her, who feeds her drugs, and who’s threatening to marry her and disappear with her forever if I don’t hand him one million dollars, cash. I don’t want to pay him. But I don’t see any other option.

All Jason said was, “It’s complicated.”

"Well. I'm all ears."

###

Haley was born when Jason was twenty-two years old. This was back when life was a more normal kind of stressful, back when his career had just begun to take off, back when he wasn’t quite famous, nowhere near legendary, nowhere near financially secure. Things like prison and the mafia and murder seemed, back then, to be the stuff of movies.

Haley. She came into Jason’s world and became Jason’s world. Instantly and forever.

He had a lot of regrets about those early years. Haley was born a few weeks early on a night when Jason was a thousand miles away, trying to kickstart his PCW career. When he arrived at the hospital the next day, Raven, his wife, placed Haley in his arms for the first time. And Jason felt immediately weak in the knees. Looking into his daughter’s brand new little face, Jason became aware that he would do anything for her. He would make her life privileged in all the ways his life had not been. That’s what led to all the regrets he had now. Because while Jason’s decisions, in the years that followed, had all been for Haley’s sake, the vast majority of them–particularly the major ones–had been terrible. Some, you might even call evil. But you know what they say about the road to hell…

Haley’s childhood, it felt to Jason, had been like a series of snapshots. He missed so much of it. She learned to crawl while he was on the road. She spoke her first words and took her first steps while he was in prison.

The money was always coming in. Jason made sure of that. The money was always present. But Jason, unfortunately, was not.

###

Jason, in his life, had come to know many gangsters. He’d talked with them, joked with them, threatened them, killed a few of them, and beaten several within an inch of their lives (after being granted the proper permissions, of course). He had rubbed elbows with dozens, perhaps a hundred, of the most dangerous–sometimes downright psychopathic–people normally reserved for nightmares. But of all the gangsters he had known, he had never met one anything like the one known simply as King.

She was atypical of a gangster in every way. She was a She, for starters. Her real name was Cheryl King. Jason had known a few women who’d come right up to the fringe of organized crime, but never one who’d gotten fully involved. Let alone run the whole show. More, there was simply nothing intimidating about her. At least not physically. She was under five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds, eighty two–eighty-two–years old. She kept her hair jet black and clipped above her shoulders, pulled to one side and held tight with a barrette. Her make-up was so precise it gave her the look of a child’s doll that had just slightly melted. She had very kind, grandmotherly eyes. Jason had never once met a gangster whose eyes could be described as “kind.” To say nothing of “grandmotherly.” Atypical indeed.

King’s office was the office of a woman running a legitimate used appliance business, as opposed to a small criminal empire. The office was situated next to a hallway that led to the store’s vast backroom where the proverbial sausage was made. It had a window that looked out on the showroom so she could see customers enter. And there was a desk against the wall, below the window, with a phone and an adding machine from the 80s and a cup of pens and a rack full of documents. And behind that desk that day, of course, sat Cheryl King herself, looking like a well-painted porcelain doll, bewildered, watching Bryce lead Jason in from the showroom.

Bryce gestured for Jason to sit in a chair at the side of King’s desk before he himself took a seat along the opposite wall. “This here’s Jason,” he said to King. “You might remember he was supposed to some work for us before he fucked off like an asshole. But now he’s back. Because he needs a favor.”

King said, “And we’re considering doing him the favor?”

“I don’t know,” Bryce said. “What he’s askin for is a little crazy.”

“Then why–”

“But,” Bryce interrupted her. “But. Asshole though he may be, he is a very special talent. In our line of work. I talked to you about him. About what he used to do for the Italians.”

There came a light in King’s babydoll eyes. “Jason Snow,” she said.

Bryce said, “Right.”

She said, “The wrestler.”

“Yeah. This is him.”

King nodded, studying Jason intently.

Bryce said, “He needs to make someone disappear.”

King turned her head to Bryce. And when she spoke her voice had shed all its grandmotherly qualities: “Don’t you think you should close the fucking door before talking about something like that?”

Bryce did as he was told. Sat back down.

There followed a lengthy silence, King staring at Jason. Eventually Jason realized she was waiting for him to speak. “Not that kind of disappear,” he said.

King’s eyebrows went up. “How many kinds of disappear are there? I’m not a fucking magician, Jared.”

Bryce corrected her: “Jason.”

Jason exhaled. “I need to borrow money,” he said. “There’s a man I need to pay off. To go away. Disappear.”

King nodded. “How much?”

Jason scratched his eyebrow and sniffed. “I need four hundred and seventy thousand dollars.”

King looked confused. To Bryce, she said, “Did he just say he needs four hundred and seventy-seven dollars?”

Bryce chuckled.

Jason cleared his throat and said, with a little more volume, “Four hundred and seventy THOUSAND dollars.”

King leaned in and blinked. “Four hundred and seventy thousand?”

“$472,600, to be specific.”

King sprung from her seat more quickly than Jason would have believed possible for a woman her age. “Four hundred and seventy thousand? Dollars!? You don’t mean dollars. Je-sus H. Christ it would have been better if you did just want to kill him. Why in the fuck would you pay someone half a million dollars just to go away?”

“It’s a full million,” Jason said. “I have the rest.” After a few seconds he added. “It’s going to a man named Oliver Preston.”

“Who the fuck is Oliver Preston?”

“He’s beating my daughter.”

King looked suddenly like she had just taken a punch herself. Her entire demeanor changed. For a second she just stood there. Then she sat back down and folded her hands over her belly. Breathed. “You have a daughter.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And this man hits her.”

Jason nodded. “I believe so, yeah. Among other things.”

King took a second to digest that. Then she said, “You know I have daughters. Four of them. And one son. I have grandchildren. Great grandchildren. Do you know what I would do if some son of a bitch was hurting any one of them?”

“I have a pretty good idea.”

“You should consider it.”

“I have,” Jason said. “Look. What I want most is to have her back. To be in her life. More than anything in the world, that’s what I want. This guy–”

“Oliver Preston.”

“Right. He has people around him. And if anything happens to him–even if I’m not involved–my daughter will be told I’m responsible. And she’s in lov–” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. “She thinks she’s in love with this guy. So I can’t kill him. Trust me, I want to. But if I do that I’ll lose her forever. And I’m so close to finally getting her back into her life. It’s all I want.”

King frowned. “So money.”

“Yeah. Money.”

###

So much of Haley’s first two years were reported to Jason, rather than experienced by him. Reported by Raven, Haley’s mother. But then she died. She was twenty-four. And Jason, also twenty-four, quite suddenly went from being a somewhat absent workaholic father to a single father who’d missed out on so many of parenthood’s early lessons. He had no idea how to raise a child. But Haley remained the single most important thing in his world, so he was determined to learn.

Of course, as with most things in Jason’s life, his decisions were all wrong. While on the surface he built a wonderful relationship with his daughter, he had simultaneously begun to kill himself with alcohol. It was the only thing since Raven died–drinking himself to oblivion–that could quiet the voice inside urging him to just kill himself, to leave Haley to someone better suited to raising her, and be done with it. And so the next few years of Haley’s childhood bled together, in Jason’s memory, with little chronology whatsoever. Like the morning she began what would be her years-long routine of crawling onto his bed to wake him up; like the time they went horseback riding with her aunts; like the first time she insisted on reading him a bedtime story; like the time he passed out on the sofa after putting a couple of frozen pizzas in the oven and Haley had to shake him awake–Haley crying, terrified–and the house full of smoke; like the time he drove her to another little girl’s birthday party so incredibly smashed on booze that only fragments of the memory survived.

Eventually Jason sobered up. By then he had gone back to wrestling and begun enhancing the legacy he had built in Haley’s first two years. But of course, by that point, there was also all the crime. And it wasn’t long before the FBI came around and forced Jason out of Haley’s life forever. Or, at least, what seemed like would be forever at the time. Haley was nine years old then. Jason hadn’t seen her since. For a long time he was sure he never would again.

###

Jason waited in the showroom for quite some time. Over and over he did the math in his head. $472,600 would give him one million dollars, and leave enough for him to get to Colossus.

Through the main window he could see snow beginning to fall onto the street where the occasional car would pass. Jason watched. And then Bryce came out of King’s office with a grim look on his face.

“You’re gonna get the money,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“It’ll take me a couple of days to put it together. But hey. Hey.” He put his hand on the crux of Jason’s elbow. “Something you need to know here. She ain’t just givin you this money.”

“I’ll pay her back.”

“This ain’t no loan either.” Bryce licked his upper lip. “She’s gonna want you to work for it.”

“I can do that too.”

“You need to listen to me. The thing she’s gonna ask you to do–I’m not sure, but the thing I think she’s gonna ask you to do–is hard. Not just anybody can do it. But she thinks you can.”

Jason nodded.

Bryce said, “You don’t understand.”

“There’s nothin I won’t do for my daughter.”

Bryce shook his head. “You think you understand, but you don’t.” It seemed to Jason like, after all the times he’d met Bryce, he was just now, for the first time, seeing the real person. “You’re not gonna want to do it. But if you take this money, saying ‘no’ will not be an option. Do you understand me here? No bullshit.”

“I do.”

“You don’t. Or else you’d need to think about it.”

Jason looked Bryce dead in the eye and repeated himself. “There’s nothing,” he said, “I won’t do for my daughter.”

###

“Jesus Christ,” Greg Miller says, approaching Jason, who’s seated on a bench in front of the warehouse’s makeshift ring with a towel over his head. 

Hours have passed since their last conversation and the gym is alive with the grunts and groans and crashes of wannabe-wrestlers learning their craft. Jason is bent forward after a morning spent with the heavy-bag and weights. He doesn’t say anything.

Greg says, “That thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Your daughter’s boyfriend. You paid that motherfucker off, didn’t you?” It was the only thing he could come up with to explain Jason’s even-fouler-than-usual mood.

With his head still covered by the towel, Jason nods.

Greg sighs. “Jesus,” he says with a sigh. “I mean, you want my opinion? You probably did the right thing. I guess. No need to go back to the way you used to do things before. That’s true out there in the real world, and that’s true here–in this gym–too. So right now I need you to focus. Here.” Greg points at the empty ring in front of them. “We put in the right work, and after Colossus? You could be adding a brand new title belt to your collection. And hey, if there’s ever been a match where you need to be Jason Snow 2.0, this is the one. Right here. Because Daytona Diamond? Don’t let him fool you. He’s gonna give you all you can handle on the technical side.”

Jason doesn’t say anything.

“This guy beat you. Took half the roster, but you lost. I’m tryin to show you how to win. So come on. Get up. Let’s get you in the ring with somebody and we’ll break it down.”

Jason shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

Jason sits up straight and the towel falls from his head, revealing the ear closest to Greg is mostly black. The skin behind it is all shades of purple and brown. “Greg,” Jason says, “you put me in there with one of these kids right now? They’re gonna get hurt. I can’t control it right now, Greg. If I told you I could, I’d be lying.”

Greg can’t stop staring at the ear. “What happened to you?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jason snuffs. “This thing with me and Daytona? Whatever it is? At Colossus I just need to walk into that ring and fight the man.”

“That sounds like a good way to lose again.”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care.”

“No,” Jason says. His face is frighteningly expressionless. “Win or lose, I just need a fight right now. I need to go in there and hurt somebody. Daytona Diamonds has the unfortunate task of being that somebody. This is just gonna be a fight, Greg. I need to hurt him.”

Now it was Greg’s turn to stay silent.

Jason looked at him. “I need it.”

###

The whole thing happened so quickly…

Oliver Preston. Tall, slim, ever-smiling. Even in the winter cold Oliver came to this meeting, held in a sparsely populated parking lot, in a white v-neck in order to, presumably, show off the ink on his arms. Jason had never heard of this town and would never have been able to find it if not for Google Maps.

Three biker-types stood near Oliver. Two kept their hands in their pockets while the other held a pistol flat to his belly, just visible enough for Jason to take note. Jason had left his own pistol at the hotel, to avoid temptation. That felt like a stupid decision now.

Three motorcycles behind Oliver, their rear plates facing Jason, along with Oliver’s own little blue Civic.

Jason had a suitcase in his hand. “Protection?” he said to Oliver, glancing at the other three.

“Can’t be too careful. I’m making a million dollar deal here. And I’ve heard about the things you do for money.”

“You know,” Jason said, “if this were to go bad? They wouldn’t be enough to help you.”

Oliver kept right on smiling. “That’s the money?” He gestured to the suitcase. “All of it?”

Jason nodded.

Oliver said, “Put it on the ground and take a few steps back.”

Jason did. He watched Oliver approach, Oliver pretending not to be cautious, and then kneel down for a quick peek inside the suitcase. Satisfied, he straightened with the suitcase in hand, the December wind stroking his short hair like tall, dead grass.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

Jason said, “Now you disappear.”

“Absolutely,” Oliver said, backing away, but his smile had brightened in a way that Jason didn’t like at all. And then, when Oliver was safely behind his three armed friends, he went on. “I will now disappear, Mr. Snow.” And then, just before he entered his car, whose engine was already running, he added, “Or wait. Maybe I should call you Dad.”

It didn’t make sense for a moment. The comment. It rendered the next few seconds surreal. He knew something was wrong but the comment–Maybe I should call you dad–had struck him so confused that he couldn’t quite put it together.

And then the moment only got more confusing:

Jason saw Haley. For the first time in fourteen years. Unquestionably Haley, right there in the passenger-seat of Oliver Preston’s Civic, Haley, seeing her father for the first time in fourteen years too. Jason was too stunned to realize Oliver’s three friends had closed in. One of them clubbed Jason in the right ear with something. Probably the gun. And in the fraction of a second it took for Jason’s world to go black–in the terrible, fleeting moment in which consciousness fled–he digested and understood the look he had just now seen on his long-lost daughter’s face:

Recognition.

Maybe even fear.

But not surprise.

Not an ounce of surprise.

She knew.

She had known the whole time.