She went with the paramedics when, eventually, Jerry was loaded into their chair, and wheeled out of the arena. It was only then that I remembered the crowd: to an hombre and senora they had stayed in their seats, watching the scene, or as much as they could see, in silent fascination.
I was still carrying my mike. I switched it on, and apologised in my best Spanish for the delay, and asked them to stay seated. ‘Might as well send them home,’ said Everett despondently, as he stood in the ring beside me as I made my announcement. ‘I’m screwed. The stations are gonna have to show back-up material. Bang goes one million dollars in penalty payment.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘You can still shoot the match with you and Rockette. There’s still time. But right now, can we try to figure out what happened?’
‘This happened.’ Liam Matthews’ voice came from the corner of the ring, the one into which Jerry had been slammed. We stepped across to join him.
He had his hand on the top turn-buckle pad. As we looked at it we could see that it was ripped, that the padding was protruding, and that some of it was blackened and scorched.
‘I was watching from the side as Jerry went into the corner,’ said Matthews. ‘It just seemed to burst, but looking at this, I’d say there was some sort of explosive charge inside it, and it went off when The Behemoth hit it.’
‘But other people have been posted in that corner tonight,’ Everett protested.
‘None as big as him,’ I reminded him. ‘Or as hard as that.’ I sniffed the pad, and remembered the burning smell, as I climbed into the ring. ‘Liam’s right; this thing was rigged to take out either big Jerry, or you.’
I shoved a finger into the rip, then pulled it out, fast. There was metal inside, and it was still warm. I reached behind the turn-buckle, found the cords which held the pad in place, and untied them.
‘That’s the answer,’ I said to Everett, waving it at him. ‘Now, are you going to rescue this show?’
The big man was still struggling to focus on the reality of the situation. ‘What time is it?’ he asked at last.
I looked at my watch. ‘Ten past nine, local time; an hour earlier GMT.’
As he frowned, Diane came to stand beside him. Her costume was damp with sweat, and almost transparent. I looked down and saw that there were blood streaks around the hem.
‘They’ve downloaded the first hour of the show to the station,’ she said, her voice still steady. ‘We have to send them the second half inside the next twenty minutes.’
‘Then we’re screwed,’ said her husband. ‘We don’t have time to fill the gap.’
‘Yes we do,’ she snapped. ‘They break for commercials before the last match. We can download what we have right now, then follow up later with tape of you and Rockette.’
Everett shook his head. His expression was agonised. ‘Just what the hell do you think I am, bitch?’ he snarled at her. ‘That guy in the ambulance, that guy who could be dead right now; he’s my best friend in the world. I knew him long before I knew you. When I joined Triple W out of college, it was Jerry who taught me what this game is all about, even though he knew he was probably making me the main man, at his expense.
‘You think I can just step back up to the plate and perform? Stand in his blood and perform? No way.’
She stepped in front of him, hands on hips, glaring up at him. ‘That’s exactly what Jerry wants you to do. He owns a chunk of this company, remember.You want him to wake up and find that you’ve cost him a couple of hundred thousand dollars because you’ve acted like a pussy?’ She spat the last word at him.
He sighed, and nodded. ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll do it. Oz, you hold on to that pad. Di, tell Rockette he’s on in five minutes. Tell the camera ops not to shoot the blood on the floor unless they got no other option.’
‘You’ve got another option,’ said Liam Matthews, quietly.
‘What do you mean?’ Diane asked.
The Irishman looked at her. ‘Daze and Rockette as a main event, with no gimmicks, just will not work. We all know that. We need an edge. . and you’re looking at him.’
‘You can’t wrestle,’ I heard myself protest. ‘You had a kidney injured two weeks ago.’
‘I don’t have to wrestle,’ he shot back. ‘You’ll see.
‘Trust me on this, boss. You begin your match with Rutherford, string it out, then go along with whatever happens.’
Everett was beyond arguing. He nodded and headed back towards the dressing room area.
I switched on my mike again, and told the crowd, in broken Spanish, what they knew already; that The Behemoth had been injured. Then I told them a small lie; I said that he wasn’t badly hurt. Finally, I announced that Daze would be back in the ring in five minutes. The buzz of conversation turned into a cheer; not as loud as before, certainly, but a pop none the less. By the time the lights dimmed, and the spotlight picked up Tommy Rockette, guitarless, making his way down the aisle, they were as excited as they had been before.
I announced him, in English, then Spanish, and jumped down from the ring to await the arrival of Daze. Diane had found a chair and was sitting at my table, wrapped in a roadie’s jacket. As I took my place, Sally Crockett, who had gone back to the dressing room to find a GWA tee-shirt to replace her silk shirt, came and knelt beside me. She was shaking; I took her hand and gave it a squeeze.
‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘He’s going to be all right. I know it. You can’t kill Behemoths.’
She looked up at me. ‘But what happened, Oz? Was it someone in the crowd?’
‘No. I can’t tell you for sure, but it wasn’t that. Just you concentrate on being thankful that my ex was there to take charge.’
So much had happened, so fast, that I had barely had time to consider Prim’s cameo reappearance in my life. I had just begun to wonder why, when the lights dimmed again, and threw me back into the midst of the show.
Everett’s match stank, I have to say. He fumbled at least three moves as he and Tommy Rutherford hammed it up in the ring above me, but the Spanish crowd were there to see Daze, and damn few of them knew the difference between a power slam and a polka.
The pair had been in listless action for three minutes, when Liam Matthews, back at the commentary table, took off his head-set, stripped off his jacket to reveal muscles bulging out of his short-sleeved shirt, picked up a hand mike and trotted up the steps into the ring.
The first clue Tommy Rockette had of his presence was a karate kick which caught him on the left temple and turned him into the same sack of potatoes which he had imitated so well a week earlier. Daze looked on, genuinely astonished I guessed, as the Irishman, a foot shorter than him, shook his hair out of its pony tail and stepped up to him, poking him with his right index finger in the centre of his huge chest.
‘Big fella yerself,’ Matthews drawled in his best adopted Dublin brogue. ‘Have oi got a bone to pick with you. Two weeks ago, in England, I picked up a little scratch.’ He paused, not for the crowd, I knew, but so that the viewing audience could follow him. ‘Next thing I knew, I wasn’t the Transcontinental Champion any more.’ He nodded. ‘That’s right, when I was injured, they stole my belt.
‘Now everyone knows that you’re the ringmaster of this here circus, and that everything that happens in the Global Wrestling Alliance has to be okay with you. So I guess that when the suits in the back office took away my belt, you didn’t argue about it.’
He poked Everett in the chest again. ‘So here’s what I’ve got to say, Mr Daze, sor,’ he yelled into his mike. ‘The hot news in the GWA, is that the Champ, The Behemoth, is on the injured roster. That means the suits will have to forfeit his belt too. So little Liam is here to make a challenge to the mighty Daze.’ The spectators didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but as his voice rose, so their excited buzz began to build into a cheer.
‘At the next pay-per-view, in Edinburgh, it’ll be me against you, big man for the GWA title — assuming you’ve got the guts to face me, that is.’ The cheer grew into a roar.