“Mr. Kitts, do you know why you are here?”

This was an interrogation room.  That much Dane Kitts was able to deduce.

“No, and I’m not saying anything until I talk to my lawyer.”

He’d watched enough cop shows to know that you lawyer up as soon as the cop starts to ask you questions.  

The detective that was staring him down, he didn’t think that a lawyer was necessary.  He didn’t want Kitts, he wanted his associate, X.

“Mr. Kitts, make things easy on yourself.  I want to give you a free pass for all the crimes that you are surely going to be convicted of when we catch up to your associate.  You tell me what I want to know, I uncuff you, and send you on your way to live a better life than what Mr. Cross has earned you.”

Three Days Ago

“Come on, we need to go.” one young man shouted at the other as they held a gun at the owner of a convenience store.  

“Not yet.”  What happened next wasn’t a very pretty occurrence.  For the people in the store, time seemed to move slowly as the one that didn’t want to leave yet pulled the trigger.  The bullet propelled out of the gun and into the chest of the owner.  Tearing a hole first through his shirt, and then his flesh as it proceeded to travel straight through his heart.

He was dead before he hit the ground.  His two children would later find out from a police officer what had happened.  

Unfortunately for the two men that were now responsible for the man’s death, someone that didn’t fear the afterlife was in the store when this all went down.  It didn’t take him long to come up and disarm the other young man.  

Today

“We know that he’s been doing this vigilante stuff for years.  Ask yourself, Mr. Kitts.  Whatever happened to the two men that did that to your face?  Did you ever see them again?” the detective continued.  Dane was increasingly uncomfortable sitting there.  The laws preventing him from smoking in the building made it even harder.  He hadn’t had a cigarette in hours, and was really starting to come under the effects of nicotine withdrawl.

“I don’t know where he is.  I haven’t seen him in days.”

The detective just looks at him after taking a glance at his folder.  “13 unsolved murders that he’s been implicated for.  13 people, granted, all of them bad people, dead by his hand.  Only, he made the mistake of being seen on camera for his last one.  

Three Days Ago

As soon as he had taken the gun from the one assailant, he already had it trained on the shooter.  He didn’t believe that justice was going to catch up to him.  He knew that the only way that he could pay for his crime was to have taken from him what he had just taken.

The news that night would say that it was brutal.  He calmly fired the round from the gun that he had procured and watched as the brain matter exploded from the side of the murderer’s head.  The rest of the people that were in the store at the time were traumatized by it.  The man then used the gun to knock out the other shooter.  

The police found the gun in a trash can less than a block away.  The man made one mistake.

In the heat of the moment, he forgot to wipe his prints from the gun.

Because he was also seen on the video, the FBI finally saw the face of the man that they were looking for.  

Michael Cross.  A man that was recently seen on TV wrestling under the ring name of X.

Wanted in connection for the deaths of 12 other people, including two New York mafia members that were involved in the fixing of Mixed Martial Arts events.

Today

“Tell me, Dane.  Tell me why, if you can go free, tell me why you won’t help me find Michael.  Right now, I have a list of 10 killings that I can hold you responsible for because of him.  Right now, I have the families of 13 people that want to see the man that ended those lives brought to justice.  Now, if it was my choice, I would let him go free.  Those men weren’t good, innocent people.  The latest was shot to death AFTER shooting another person in cold blood during a robbery.

“Dane, tell me that you don’t want to go to prison for the rest of your life because you want to protect your friend.”

Dane just looks down at the table.  He honestly didn’t know where X was.  He hadn’t seen him since before the incident.  But Dane knew something really damning.  Something that the detective wouldn’t be able to believe.  There wasn’t just 13 bodies.  The blood from 13 people weren’t on X’s hands.  There were lots more.

But the detective was right about one thing.  None of them were good, innocent people.

Three Years Ago

“Cross, are you sure about this?”  Michael hadn’t taken the X as his nom-de-guerre.  

“Dane, if you didn’t want to be involved, you shouldn’t have come along.”  Three years ago, Michael was a little more…chatty.

“Listen, I know that you feel that it’s your responsibility and all, but don’t you think that it would be better for the police to handle this, instead of going all ‘Lone Ranger’ and shit.”

Michael didn’t pay much mind to the fact that he was probably breaking more than a few laws at this very moment.  All he knew was that he saw a young girl brought here against her will, and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.

“You aren’t fucking Batman.”

Michael just looked at Dane with a stern expression to his face.  The kind of expression that would get anyone to stop in their tracks.  He didn’t plan all that much for what he was about to do, but he knew that the warehouse that he was going to break into wasn’t that secure.  All he brought with him was a balaclava.  That was all he needed.  This was simple.  He goes in, he gets the girl.  He gets out.  He returns the girl to her parents.  

Outside of those parameters, it didn’t matter how he did it.  As long as he did it.

Dane could only watch from the outside as Michael entered the warehouse.  Less than twenty minutes, a lot of gunfire and a lot of yelling later, he came out with the girl in his arm.  

“It’s done.”

Yesterday

Atlantic City’s famed Boardwalk was a place where Michael Cross was more than familiar.  He grew up not too far from here.  Only, back then his name wasn’t Michael Cross.  It was Eric Evans.  For the last 12 years, he had lived under different guises.  Doing what needed to be done.

He was good at it.

He watches as the seagulls soar into the heavens and children play at the beach.  His New Jersey Devil’s Baseball Cap and sunglasses hide enough of his identity so that even cops that come by don’t realize who he is.  

He just sits and watches.  

He doesn’t even bother to look to the man in a dark suit as he sits down next to him.

“Well, Eric, you’ve done it this time.  Face was caught on a hidden security camera.  The fact that you decided to retire to wrestle didn’t make matters any easier.” the man says.

“It was instinct Pete.  It was instinct.  How many ops have you had me run?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Pete, people had seen me.  People knew who I was already.  It was only a matter of time before they turned on a television and saw me.  I thought that going into wrestling was going to do that.  I need to disappear.  This was the only way I could think to do that.”
Pete just looks at Eric.  “Well, you got your wish.  You’re a liability now, and we can’t have that.  Back in the day, I would have just liquidated you right where you sit.”

“It’s a good thing this isn’t back in the day then.”

“Yeah.  You get to live.  I get a ton of paperwork.  But, this is what has to be done.”  Pete pulls an envelope out from inside his coat.  “Inside you’re going to find a new passport, a new ID and enough money to get you started wherever you go.  Also, you’ll find two plane tickets.  One to Mexico, the other to Cuba.  That’s where we’re going to station you from here on out.  

“I hope you have a convincing Canadian accent.  You’re now from Toronto.”

Eric, Michael, X, and now whatever the government has renamed him, picks up the envelope and takes a look in it.  “Eh.”

“You are going to owe us another five years of intel work.  You really screwed the pooch on us this time.  Now I have to go through, and change your fingerprints over to someone that’s already going to be gassed down in Texas and have him transferred to Buffalo.”

“Pete, can you do me a favor at least.”

“Kid, I already know what it is.  He’ll be taken care of.”

Today

“Are you kidding me?” the detective that had been trying to get Dane to spill the beans on where X was for the last three hours looks at a junior detective with a look of anguish.  

He shakes his head and walks over and sits at the table where Dane had been sitting all day.  “Well, Dane, you just lucked out.  The FBI is here.  I can’t tell you how much it’s going to pain me to see your friend walk scot free while you are serving time in some federal hell hole.”

Dane just looks down at the table.  He thought for sure that by now X would have made some sort of daring rescue attempt.  Maybe his friendship didn’t mean that much to X as it did to him.  

“Special Agent Venmer, this is Dane Kitts.”

The man wore a wonderfully pressed dark suit.  “Well, Mr. Kitts, I guess it’s time to go.”

Two officers that were with Agent Venmer walk over to Dane and bring him to his feet.  “Come on son, the sooner we do this, the sooner we can get you to your new home.”

The officers escort Dane through the corridors of the precinct.  Finally, the reach a non-descript black Ford Sedan.  The officers help Dane into the back seat as Special Agent Venmer gets in on the other side.  There are two additional agents sitting in the front seat of the sedan.

As the car pulls away, Special Agent Venmer unlocks the handcuffs.  “Well, Dane. I bet you are wondering what is going to happen next.  Have you ever heard of Gitmo?”

Dane stays silent.

“Well, that’s where you’re going to be meeting your contact, who’s going to take you into the heart of Havana.  You’re free to live whatever life you want in Cuba.  Just do me a favor while you head down there.  Get yourself acquainted with a Canadian accent.  You’re now an asset for us.  When you get there, tell Michael that Pete said hi.”

A small smile comes to Dane’s face as they take the most direct route out of town.

 8:34 PM…Somewhere in America

The streets of the city are glowing from the combination of overhead street lights and the wet cement from a recent storm.  People are bustling through, leaving their places of business, going to a concert, wondering if their baseball team is playing that evening.

They say that Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps, but that is true of almost all major cities around the world.  Something is always going on.  

From atop his perch, looking down upon the hurried masses sits a man that not many people know, though he will soon be noticed by the teeming crowds of SCW’s wrestling arenas.  

Until the day that he walks into a wrestling ring, he will still be one of the faceless.  He has spent is more than 20 years on the planet being an unknown entity, an enigma of sorts.  

No one knows who he is, yet.  But soon enough, they will.  

Sitting, silently observing the people that are below, all anyone knows about him is the fact that they don’t know anything.  He hides his past.  His billed “hometown” was ripped from a mockumentary about a controversial wrestler from the 80s.  

Even his name, a symbol that is too easily mistaken with the letter that it looks like, doesn’t tell a story of who this man really is.

He sits, he waits, he thinks.

For him, this is as much of a home as any apartment or hotel room that he’s ever lived out of.  

The clouds that had filled the sky have now vacated the heavens, the light reflected off the surface of the moon visible to all, the stars strain to be seen through the light pollution that the human population has caused over the years in building the sprawling metropolis.  

The sounds of the street are interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing.  The man chosen to be known as X pulls the phone from his pocket and takes a look at the screen.  He taps the screen and returns the phone to where he had pulled it from.  The call isn’t important.  Nothing is important when he is sitting, quite literally, on top of the world.

8:36 PM…Many stories below

Dane Kitts is standing in the middle of the lobby of the very building that X was sitting on top of.  He looks at his phone in disbelief.  

“The nerve of some people, he knows that we have to leave soon.” Dane looks up, realizing that his thoughts had been said out loud, instead of staying in his perfectly shaved head.  The rather prominent marking on his face defies the man who bears it.  

The story of who Dane Kitts is, or rather how he became to be that man, is more interesting than the man that he waits on.

In fact, it was that past that brought Dane into the company of the man that everyone will soon be calling X, though many will mistake looking at his name and calling him X instead.  Dane is one of the few people that even knows X’s real name, where he’s from, or what his past has been other than the last five years.  

That’s a brotherhood that not many people can understand.  

Five years and a lifetime ago

Dane first met X when they both were attending a seminar on fighting techniques.  It was being taught by a guy that wanted to make everyone that was there think that they were on the path to fighting in the world famous Octogon owned by the Fertitta Brothers.  At the time, everyone knew X by the somewhat phonetic spelling of his identity.

Much like he does now, he sat in that gymnasium, sitting quietly, and observing what was going on.  The mixed martial artist was showing everyone the “proper” way of applying a kimura.  At this point, two and a half hours after the seminar started, everyone was thinking that they paid 2.5k just to see this.  Some were calling bullshit on the whole seminar; some still had dollar signs in their eyes.  

Not the man that would eventually go by a symbol.  He just sat there.  

“You, mute, come here and let’s see if you can lock this on Me.” the man was confident that there was no way that this “beginner” could do it, but he liked to fuck with those that don’t seem to be that attentive.  

The young man got up and walked to the mat that he had basically been dared to go towards.  Like all of the other young men there, he already had his gloves on.  Silently he stood there and waited.  Less than a minute later, the fighter was grasping his arm, thankful that it wasn’t broken.  

That put an end to the seminar, and most of the people were angry that they didn’t get their money’s worth because of someone like them teaching the teacher.

Dane wasn’t one of them though.  As they all left the gymnasium, Dane chased after the young man he only knew of as Cross.

“Whoa, hold up a second.  Where’d you learn that from?”  The excitement in Dane’s voice was that of someone that found coattails that he could possibly ride.  

X just kept walking towards the car that he had driven to the gymnasium.  He didn’t even make eye contact.  Dane made the mistake of getting in his way.  X looked right at him; a “why the fuck did you get in my way” look came to his eyes.

“Man, what you did in there was fucking awesome.  My name is Daniel, but everyone just calls me Dane.”

The man that would come to be known as X simply sidesteps the man, making it to his car and leaving.  Little did he know, what the future would hold for him.

A Year Later

A year had passed and Dane had gotten into Mixed Martial Arts.  Fighting for a promoter that liked style over substance, Dane felt quite at home.  That night, he was fighting a man that he had run into a year earlier at a seminar.  One that he knew could fight.  

“Ladies and gentlemen, this fight is a light heavyweight bout scheduled for 3 rounds.  In the blue corner, fighting out of Des Moines, Iowa, Dane “The Des Moines Demolisher” Kitts.”  The announcer came up with the nickname on his own, Dane didn’t like it all too much.

“And in the Red Corner, fighting out of…”

Well, the introductions to the fight weren’t important.  What was important was that Dane was supposed to throw the fight, and didn’t.  His pride got the best of him.  That night, he found himself strapped to a chair by a pair of rather burly looking men, upset that he cost them as much money as he had.  

Now, obviously they didn’t kill him.  Instead, on his left cheek they simply tattooed the word “FINK”.  The beating he took afterwards was even worse than anything that he had taken in the ring.  By the time they were done, he wasn’t able to walk on his own, hold a can of soda or even eat solid food.  

He was thrown into a back alley, bleeding profusely, left to die.  Only, he didn’t.  He woke up a day later in a hospital.  Sitting in a chair across from him was a man that he tried to recognize.   With his one good eye, he squinted to attempt to focus on the person’s face.

The fact that his jaw was wired shut didn’t stop him from trying to talk to him.  “I know you.” Dane said through his clenched teeth as he pointed.  

The man stood up and just nodded in agreement.  

“Last year, the kimura?”  Again, the man nodded.  

“You don’t say much, do you?”  The man that was known to Dane at the time as Cross just shook his head as if to say no.  He exited the room.  

Unfortunately for Dane, he was meant to die in that alley, and when the two thugs found out that he in fact did not get perished, they came and decided to finish the job.  Unfortunately for them, the man that would eventually take on a symbol as an identity was still there.  

As they attempted to subdue their injured prey, they found themselves on the receiving end of a beating worse that what they had done the previous evening to Dane.  As he watched the carnage from his bed, Dane realized that the man was really a saving grace for him, that there was something about him that he thought that he could relate to.  He didn’t know what that was, but as he saw the man putting his foot to the faces and ribs of two men that easily outweighed him by 100 pounds, he knew that there was something special about this guy.  

8:40 PM…The lobby

A young girl looks at Dane’s face, amazed by the rather large tattoo on his left cheek.  Dane notices this, and looks through his glasses at her.  He diverts his attention back to his phone and thinks about redialing the last number that he called.  

Finally, he decides that it would be the appropriate thing to do, only for an elevator to open up on the other side of the lobby.  From inside it emerges X, seemingly relaxed from his sojourn to the top of the world.  

“Man, we have to go.  There are still things we have to do before you leave for London.”

The man that had been a friend to Dane for the last 4 years just walks up to him and puts a gloved hand on his shoulder.  

“Relax, Dane.  Everything is good.”