20. DONNIE DARKO
20
DONNIE DARKO
JACK
“ W hat the hell are you doing in here?”
Everybody froze at the pissed-off, feminine voice that rang through the air. They turned in unison, including Jack, who was immediately stricken. Goddammit. It was Penny, and she looked angry as fuck.
She looked like he felt. Absolutely furious. And that only made all of this that much worse.
“It’s your pretty old man over here,” La Roque said. Despite the neat dark suit and clean white shirt with his hair pulled back in a man bun, nothing could make him look like a gentleman as he glared at Penny while pointing at Jack. “Did you teach him how to give head? He must have sucked some good dick at league HQ because I got suspended. He got me fucking suspended !”
Penny audibly gasped. Everything inside Jack urged him to pound this bastard into dust right then and there, but he held back, held onto his control with vicious determination.
“No, you got you suspended for going on television and spewing pure foolishness,” Charlie said in a querulous voice. “There is such a thing as unsportsmanlike conduct, ya stupid geebag, whether you’re in or out of the cage. If that jabbering gobshite over there had taught you not to hit your opponents after they were already down or taught you not to act the maggot in public, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The “gobshite” Charlie was referring to was Quinn, who was with the camera crew smiling.
“Aw, now, Charlie. You always think the worst of me. It’s like we were never friends.” It seemed impossible that Quinn’s grin could get any bigger, but it did.
It was all Jack could do not to grab him by the lapels of his leather coat and push him out the door. He’d been seething since the two had shown up with their filming crew, asking for a match then and there, but he’d refused to play along. Kiss his endorsement contracts and his public reputation good-bye for a brawl that would be on every social media platform and every sports broadcast? He knew that’s exactly what they hoped to achieve with those insults and that camera.
There they went again, underestimating his intelligence.
“I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit,” La Roque spat out. “It should only matter that I’m the best fighter in the league…in the world !” Now he was practically shouting with his arms flung out dramatically.
The camera was eating up the performance. With every breath, Jack detested him more and more.
La Roque went on. “And now with this suspension, I can’t fight for six months. Six fucking months while somebody else snatches the title from under my feet. All because this old pussy is too scared to face me and answer for what his family did to mine.”
Whether the onlooking crowd understood his incoherent accusations or not, it didn’t matter a bit to Jack. He needed to get Penny out of there before La Roque pushed him off the slim tightrope he was walking.
Jack grimaced, heading toward her. “It’s nothing, love. Let’s go.”
“Yeah, look at him go. The big man, running away from another fight to go hide under mommy’s skirt,” La Roque jeered.
Penny’s eyes widened. “You need to shut your fucking mouth.”
“Let’s go,” Jack said quickly before he could explode. This wasn’t good for the baby or her. “We’re going.”
“No, he’s going,” Penny said, pointing at La Roque. Then she addressed the creep directly. “You need to take your little camera crew and go find some attention somewhere else. Maybe from your mother .”
La Roque was already heading for the door. He stood with his back to it, blocking it before they could leave. He ran his tongue over his teeth, looking Penny up and down.
“I can see why you like her,” La Roque said with a lusty grin. “She’s tougher than you. Maybe she should get in the cage. I’m sure she’d put up a good fight.”
Jack stopped when he reached Penny, a dull tinge of red at the corners of his eyes beginning to shade his vision. All he had to do was take three steps closer…
“Move,” Jack gritted through his teeth.
“Move me, motherfucker,” La Roque said. The camera’s blinking red light beamed in Jack’s eye like a beacon. “You and your bitch aren’t going anywhere until you tell the world that you’re a —”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He was too busy getting knocked off his feet by Doolie, who ran over and tackled him. Doolie got off one good punch, but it wasn’t enough. La Roque rolled him over and started a ground and pound. It turned into bedlam when Simon ran over to pull La Roque off his friend, ending up getting knocked down and punched too.
Then the three of them were fighting in a mad scrabble. The fool holding the lighting got knocked over like a bowling pin and knocked Penny over with his hip.
When she fell, it was as if time slowed down to a crawl. The floor was concrete, and when she hit it face up, her skull slapped the hard cement. She lay there stunned, staring up at him. Suddenly, time sped up and released him from his paralysis. Jack scooped her up, forgetting about the brawlers, the camera, or even Charlie, who was bellowing at the top of his lungs for everyone to fucking stop.
“I’m fine, Jack,” Penny said, but her eyes were big and frightened. She touched the back of her head, and her fingers came back bloody. His heart stopped. “What about the…?”
It was as though a giant snake was writhing in his body, squeezing his organs, shooting venomous panic into every vein.
If she was hurt…if the baby was hurt…
Jack was in the habit of walking or jogging to the gym, no matter the weather but he did have one of his cars stashed in an old loading zone in the back of the warehouse, just in case he needed one quickly. Good thing. He raced outside with Penny still in his arms and rounded the corner. The garage was there on the right, at the back end of the building. This little car was a piece of shite, but it was tuned up and full of petrol. He stashed Penny in the back seat and jumped behind the wheel.
She didn’t have to ask where they were going. Within minutes, they made it to the best private hospital on this side of town, a place he was all too familiar with.
“I can walk,” she tried to say when they’d parked, but her eyes were now swimming with tears. Despite that, she gave him a watery grin. “Stop the soap opera routine.”
Breathing in and out, trying to maintain some calm, he let her walk in, but the second he spotted a wheelchair, he made her sit in it. He snatched a nurse, who stared up at him. “My wife just had a bad fall. She hit her head on a cement floor. She’s in her first trimester.”
“Okay, let’s get her looked at,” the nurse said matter-of-factly. Smiling at Penny, she asked, “What’s your name?”
When they wheeled Penny away to the A&E for her exams, Jack was handed a clipboard and a pen. He stared at the paper for a long minute, trying to clear his head enough to put down the right answers. Briefly, he hesitated over the spot where it asked what his relationship was to the patient. If he said he was just a boyfriend, there was a chance they might not let him see her, so he put “husband” down.
That should have been made official the day Penny’s last things were installed at his place.
Then he waited. And waited. Ignored Charlie’s calls and messages and waited some more with his fists clenched on his thighs and his throat tight. As he sat in the uncomfortably small chair in that waiting area, his thoughts shifted, turning away from the outsized panic that had thundered in his chest to the slowly building rage in his stomach.
That rage was fiery, almost sweet, as it licked upward and spread throughout his body. It was a singular blaze he’d never quite felt before, one that wasn’t going to be quietly smothered or dampened with soothing words.
This was the kind of fire that could only be doused with blood.