Page 3 of Iron Will

“You’ll be up and fightin’ again in no time, old man,” Mal grins. “You still got it in ya. Granted,” he concedes, “that beer gut you’re sportin’ helped cushion the blow a little…”

“Did you bring this motherfucker here to cheer me up?” Bear shoots at me. “Because he ain’t cheerin’ me up.”

I don’t answer that. “Hey,” I say instead, “Axel says he’s gonna be by later. He had some business to attend to.”

“Ah…” Bear waves his giant, paw-like hand. “Tell the prez I’m fine. He doesn’t need to do that.” Bear is clearly embarrassed by all this attention. And by the fact that he’s even here in the first place.

I open my mouth to answer him, but a sudden commotion from across the hall interrupts me. A female voice, pitched high with what sounds like fear, reaches my ears.

“Sir, you can’t be here,” the voice says frantically. “You’re scaring her. Sir—”

“The fuck I can’t!” explodes an angry male in response. “She ain’t gotta be here. You already patched up her arm. Ain’t no way she needs to be in that hospital bed. You’re just tryin’ to milk money outta her family.”

I glance over at Mal with a frown. “Hold on a sec,” I grunt to my two brothers. “Gonna go check this out.”

The angry voices continue to ring out as I cross over to the room facing Bear’s and stick my head through the doorway. Inside, a short, compact nurse is trying to prevent a steroid-jacked, aggressive-looking guy with a dark ponytail from grabbing at a tiny figure sitting on the hospital bed.

It’s a little girl, who looks about six years old, with tangled hair and a cast on her arm. Her head is banged up, and her left eye’s got a shiner. The girl is shrinking back against her pillows, clearly sick, and obviously scared. As the man and the nurse continue to argue, she draws her knees up against her chest in a defensive posture, hugging her legs tight to her torso.

“Hey,” I bark out, causing all three of them to jump. “What’s goin’ on here?”

The nurse looks at me apprehensively. The guy arguing with her swivels toward me, his chest puffed out, chin jutting toward me. “You can fuck off, man. This ain’t about you.”

“You can keep that kinda language out of your mouth around the kid,” I say, taking a step inside. “And I can hear your yellin’ across the hall, which makes it my business.”

“Her arm’s just broke,” the man snarls, nodding toward the kid. “Why she gotta be in the hospital for that? She got a cast, don’t she?”

The nurse tries to speak calmly. “The child fell down a flight of stairs. She hit her head and has symptoms consistent with a moderate to severe concussion. We need to keep her here for observation, at least overnight.”

I look down at the little girl. One thing is clear: she does not want to go with this guy. Everything about the way she’s holding her body says she’s afraid of him. Whoever the fuck he is, this situation ain’t good.

“You her father?” I ask him.

He snorts. “Nah,” he says dismissively. “She’s my girlfriend’s.”

“Why ain’t the mom here?”

“She’s at work. Someone at the motel we’re stayin’ at told me the kid got hurt.” His lip curls as he speaks. “I came down here to get her. Her mom don’t need to get money taken outta her paycheck just ‘cause her fuckin’ kid’s clumsy.”

“I warned you about that language,” I say, narrowing my eyes.

“If you aren’t a relative of the girl’s, you can’t take her from the hospital without a parent or guardian’s consent,” the nurse insists.

“You heard the lady,” I say, stepping between him and the bed. “You ain’t got authorization. You need to leave.”

“I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” he retorts, his eyes flashing.

“I’m pretty sure you are.”

The shit for brains takes a step toward me, not realizing that Mal has entered the room behind him. Mal grabs the fucker from behind just as I lean in and give him a solid punch to the gut. He buckles in half and as he does, my other fist meets his jaw in an uppercut. A resounding crack tells me the punch landed the way I wanted it to. His eyes roll back in his head as he slides to the ground.

That’s all she wrote.

Placidly, Mal starts to drag him away. “Dump him in an elevator,” I suggest. “Press the button for the first floor.” I turn to the nurse. “You wanna call security to go get him?”

Mutely, she nods and rushes out of the room.

I don’t bother to watch as Mal disappears with the now-unconscious asshole. Instead, I turn to the little girl, who is still sitting in the bed with her knees up protectively in front of her. Her face is pale beneath the bruises around her eye and forehead. She looks exhausted. Her forehead is all scrunched up, like she’s in pain.

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