The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “You didn’t think to come and get us?”

  “I did, of course. I’m sorry. But we were chatting, and it felt kind of rude to leave him alone.”

  “You were chatting? About what?”

  “Stuff. Baseball, books, life. Walt Whitman.”

  “You were talking to my father about Walt Whitman? What do you know about Walt Whitman?”

  “More than I thought I did, to be honest.”

  The two women went back to their father’s room to check on him and found him sleeping peacefully, so we left the hospice and wandered down the street to a local diner.

  We took a booth and ordered burgers and fries, and Danielle and Jane both got milkshakes, one vanilla, one chocolate. I went with an unsweetened iced tea. We chatted about nothing much at all until the food arrived, and after I had taken a bite of my burger, I looked across the table at Jane.

  “So you live in Seattle? Is that right?”

  Jane wiped her mouth with a napkin and swallowed. “Everett, actually. Just north of the city. I work in a hospital downtown.”

  “So you never left Seattle?”

  “No,” she said, munching on a French fry. She glanced at Danielle. “We grew up in Bellevue, until Mom left. Then we moved over to Laurelhurst, to a small apartment, so Dad could be closer to the university.”

  “How did he end up out here?”

  “After Danielle and I had both gone to college, Dad took a professorship with Arizona State University in Tempe.”

  “That explains it. At least the weather is better.”

  “If you like the sun and skin cancer,” said Jane.

  I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. While I was no fan of skin cancer, I did enjoy the sunshine. I generally had enough sense to get in under the shade in the middle of the day. Danielle and I weren’t the types to lie around on beach towels, basting like a Jimmy Buffett song. But having grown up in Northeast winters, I was fairly certain I would be no kind of fan of the perennial gray cloud that seemed to hover over the state of Washington.

  “You like the rain?” I asked.

  “You get used to it,” said Jane. “And it makes the nice days all that more precious.”

  For a moment the three of us looked at each other in our booth, reading or not reading too much into Jane’s analogy.

  “I don’t think Danielle ever told me if you were married?” I asked.

  Jane shrugged. “I was, for a bit. He was also a nurse. Nice guy, but the job wasn’t conducive to it. We parted as friends, and no kids, thank God.”

  “So it’s just you?”

  She stopped with her hamburger halfway to her mouth and looked at me. “If you must know, I date here and there, but yes, for the most part, it’s just me. Me and my work.”

  I took a bite of my own lunch and then a sip of tea, and I asked Danielle how the meeting had gone with the hospice administrator.

  “We were making life and death decisions as easily as choosing from the lunch menu. Breaking down a man’s life into its last financial components, like a P&L for a company.”

  I glanced at Jane, and she shrugged. “It’s no kind of fun,” she said. “But these things don’t take care of themselves.”

  As we ate, my mind drifted back to Ryan Castle and to the ideas of opportunity and regret. I thought about windows that had long been open but were suddenly closing, and I wondered about two states of being and how to cater to them. The now in Arizona, the past and future in Florida.

  I glanced up at a flat-screen television on the wall. An earnest-looking news anchor was discussing matters of the day with two guests. The TV was on mute, and no one in the restaurant seemed to be paying it any mind. But the presenter was clearly in a studio, well lit and made up. His guests were both beaming in from home. Neither wore makeup, and in their backgrounds, one had a potted plant, and the other a ramshackle bookshelf.

  I glanced back at Danielle and Jane, both seemingly enjoying their lunch, for the silence it afforded as much as the nutrients, and I told them I just needed to step outside for a moment.

  I had an idea, or at least the kernel of one. I walked out past the hostess and into the noonday sun. It was as dry as a French red wine, and I could feel the heat building, like a lake pressing on a dam. I took out my phone and made a call to a pawn shop in South Florida.

  “What kind of trouble are you in?” asked Sal Mondavi.

  “No trouble.”

  “That makes a change. When we going to another baseball game?”

  “Soon,” I said. “I’m in Phoenix.”

  “Arizona?”

  “Is there another one?”

  “You’ve given up on the Grapefruit League and taken up Cactus League instead?”

  “We’re visiting with Danielle’s father.”

  “You said he wasn’t well.”

  “He’s not. Listen, there’s something I want to do, but I’m not sure how.”

  “Talk to me.”

  I outlined the bare bones of my plan to Sal. Bare bones because that was all I had. I was hoping Sal, and his army of kids, could flesh it out for me. As expected, Sal ended the call by saying he would talk to one of his kids and get back to me.

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  “You got it, kid.”

  I went back inside and finished my lunch. Neither woman asked what I had done or who I had called, and I got the distinct impression that they were both running low on giving-a-damns. When we finished lunch I paid the bill and then we stood outside in the sunshine, deciding what to do next.

  “I think I’ll drop by and check on Dad,” said Jane.

  “I’ll come,” said Danielle. She glanced at me. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure. You bet.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ve got to talk to a moron about a dog.”

  Jane gave me a frown like I had suddenly started speaking Russian, but left it alone. The sisters walked away together, and I took out my phone. I rummaged in my pocket for the piece of paper on which John Cashman had scrawled a phone number for me.

  It took longer for the guy to answer than was necessary, and when he did I got the distinct impression that I’d woken him up.

  “Zed Graham?”

  A groan, then: “Who wants to know?”

  “My name is Miami Jones. I’m representing Ricky Spence. We need to talk.” I heard the guy grunt as he clearly sat up, and I thought I heard the sound of bedsprings, but that might have been my imagination.

  “I’ll check my calendar,” said Graham smugly.

  “No, I don’t mean in theory, at some future time. I mean now. Right now.”

  “You don’t even know where I am, man.”

  “You better make it close by, then, right? You got five minutes.”

  “Should we do this in a park or something?”

  I smiled. I always enjoyed it when a blackmailer looked to me for advice on getting his extortion done the right way.

  “No,” I said. “A bar.”

  “I know a bar,” he said.

  He told me the name of the bar, and I said, “Five minutes.”

  Chapter Eight

  It took me more than five minutes to get to the bar. It was closer to twenty, but I didn’t care. Getting there in a timely fashion wasn’t the point. I had given Zed Graham five minutes to get there simply to put him off-kilter. In my experience, blackmailers were rarely the sharpest tools in the shed. It was, in actual fact, a pretty difficult crime to pull off. Graham’s assertion that we should meet in a park, as if I were going to arrive with a paper bag full of Benjamins, gave me an insight into not only Graham’s intellect but also his preparation. Neither got particularly high marks from me.

  My rideshare pulled in to the tight lot in a small strip mall near the freeway loop that headed north toward Scottsdale. The bar wasn’t much more than a double-wide shopfront with darkened windows, the kind of place that looked like it was built to withstand a nuclear holocaust. It had a torn green awning ha
nging from the front, with the words Irish pub written on it, but no other name. Perhaps the place had changed hands so many times the latest owners hadn’t bothered to put their moniker on it. Or it might have been some clever device, like calling a Chinese restaurant Chinese restaurant or a wine place the wine bar. As I stood in the lot and looked around the neighborhood, I developed the impression that I might have been giving their creativity a lot more credit than it was due.

  On the other side of the street was a U-shaped hotel motel, a mom-and-pop-type variation on a Motel 6. The windows were grimy, the doors were in need of fresh paint, and none of the cars that I could see parked outside the rooms were newer than fifteen years old. But at least now I knew where Zed Graham was probably holing up until his master plan came to fruition.

  I was about to wander across the lot toward the dive bar when my phone rang. It was Sal.

  “Hang on,” he said. As a general rule of thumb, when someone calls me and then the first thing they say is “Hang on,” I hang up. I’m really not one for the self-importance of having an assistant make a call and then have the recipient wait on hold. But this was Sal, and no doubt there was a reason for the delay.

  I heard some shuffling and knocking noises down the line, then I heard Sal’s voice again, not quite as clear, somewhat tinny, and I knew that I had been put on speakerphone.

  “You there?”

  “I’m here, Sal.”

  “Okay, I’m here with Julio. One of my kids.”

  “Hey, man,” said Julio. He didn’t sound like a kid. He sounded like a lumberjack. But the fact was very few of Sal’s kids were still kids. Sally Mondavi was an enigma. He’d grown up a member of a New York crime family, gotten out of the big smoke but not the family game, and was now possibly the most well-connected pawn shop owner in the United States. He’d seen things and done things that were never to be spoken of, and more than occasionally he got hassled by the local cops, the state attorney, the FDLE, and even the FBI. But Sal hadn’t lived to become a very old man without being smart. He wasn’t Teflon—he was too clever to assume that nothing would stick. But despite his background, Sal had a heart of gold. He regularly helped kids who needed a leg up—kids with single mothers, kids with single fathers, kids with no parents at all. He slipped them computers, textbooks, and even cash with a mandate to stay in school and make something of themselves. Sal had helped me out of a pickle on more than one occasion, and I knew from experience that he expected very little in return. Nothing more than the odd visit and maybe an occasional afternoon at a baseball game, munching on a foot-long and sipping a beer.

  Sally asked me to once again outline the highlights of my plan so that Julio could understand what was and wasn’t possible. I did that and then asked him what he thought.

  “It’s no problem,” he said. “I can set that up right now.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah. All we need is a text-alert system and a videoconferencing app.”

  “How do we get those?”

  “I got it.”

  “And what will all that do, exactly?”

  “Well, the text system is kinda like an Amber Alert on your phone, you know the text thing you get from the cops when some lowlife kidnaps his kid?”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, it’s kinda like that, only it’s for people that you know. You set up all the numbers, and when you’re ready to roll, you just hit the send button and boom! Everybody gets the message.”

  “And the video thingy?”

  “It’s kinda like we’re chatting now, right? Only we can see each other, and lots of people can join at once.”

  “And what about at my end? Do I need a crew?”

  “You need a phone.”

  “I have that.”

  As I was holding the phone to my ear, it vibrated and beeped and buzzed, and I looked at the screen. It said that Julio wanted to video chat, so I hit the little green icon, and then with one more definitive bloop sound, my screen filled with the ancient face of Sal Mondavi and some guy who looked like a cross-dresser who ran a comic book store.

  “You see us?” asked Julio on screen.

  “I do.”

  “Where the hell are you, kid?” asked Sal.

  “Deepest, darkest Phoenix,” I said. “On the wrong side of the loop road.”

  “Keep your wits about you,” said Sal.

  “Always.”

  Julio moved closer so his entire face took up the screen. He had fine cheekbones, like a supermodel, and a well-manicured beard, trimmed like a putting green.

  “Just send through the list of people you want on the alert. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Okay. My office manager, Lizzy, will get back to you on that.”

  “I’ll look out for it,” said Julio.

  Julio said he would text me a link to the apps that I needed.

  “Just set them up on your phone, and I’ll put all the details in from this end. Then all you need to do is hit the send alert button on the one, and record on the other. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Julio. Thanks, Sal.”

  “No worries, kid,” said Sal. “And kid?”

  “Don’t say it, Sal.”

  “Pull the damn trigger.”

  Chapter Nine

  I left Sal and Julio to work their magic, but I didn’t put my phone away. I wandered across the small lot and paused in front of the solid wooden door to the Irish pub. I glanced around the low-rent area glowing in bright sunshine and readied my eyes. Then I pulled on the door and stepped inside.

  It might have been a bright midafternoon outside, but inside the bar was as dark as night. The only apparent light came from three sources: two large flat-screen televisions mounted above the bar; a row of glass-fronted refrigerators holding bottles of beer; and a spotty Coors Light neon sign.

  It looked and smelled like a dive bar. The floor had a slight tackiness to it, and the space was constructed in such a way as to have lots of little nooks and crannies where people could sit in private, with their friends or with their thoughts. I could smell stale beer over baked pretzels and peanut shells. It was the aroma of a Thai restaurant long gone out of business.

  I made no move into the bar. I stood by the door and looked around. The televisions were all muted and there was no jukebox to be seen, so there was no movie scene where the noise stopped and every face in the place turned and looked at the newcomer. Nobody seemed to care that I had come inside.

  It was hard to see the entire darkened space, but there appeared to be no more than four or five patrons in the bar. Those sitting at tables were of no consideration to me. I was interested in the two men sitting up at the bar itself. They weren’t together. They had left the minimum two stools between them. One of the men was watching spring training baseball on a flat-screen. The other guy was tapping his fingers on the bar top and looking at his phone.

  I sidled up next to the nervous-looking guy and put my phone on the bar in front of the stool beside him. I didn’t need to get the attention of the bartender. It wasn’t exactly 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, or even happy hour on Thursday. He was standing before me ready and waiting before I even got up on the stool. I ordered a draft beer and sat down.

  I looked along the rows of liquors behind the bar and watched the bartender slowly pour me a beer before I bothered glancing at the guy beside me.

  He looked like one of those guys. The kind of hotshot that was probably somebody during his sophomore or junior year of high school. Not a big man on campus in senior year, probably because he wasn’t there. He had the kind of body that suggested that once upon a time, his musculature had been important to him. No longer. I suspected the closest this guy got to working out was lifting his beer bottle from the bar mat to his lips. To be fair, it was an exercise regime I was completely in tune with, except for the fact that I had Danielle to boot me out of the house for a run every now and then.

  I had suspected he had been asleep when I had cal
led earlier, and my impression was reinforced by his look. His black hair was disheveled, and he was in serious need of a shave. Unlike Sal’s kid, Julio, there was no greenskeeping going on with this guy’s face. His skin was blotchy, and his beard grew in ragged patches, like a jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing. He was flabby around the jowls, and the spread around his belly pushed at the fabric of his T-shirt in such a way that the bold letters written on front—California—showed only to me as Califor.

  Eventually the guy spoke. “You Spence’s guy?”

  I waited for the bartender to deliver my beer, then I slowly took a sip. It was my contention that blackmailers liked to develop a rhythm, a sense of momentum, a feeling that events were moving along, extortions were being taken seriously, money in brown paper bags was being prepared. I was more than happy to disrupt any momentum Zed Graham thought he was getting.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was about to leave,” said Graham. “You said you’d be here in five minutes.”

  “No, I said you should be here in five minutes. I’ve got more important things to do. What do you care, anyway? You’re sitting at a bar in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “I might have somewhere to be.”

  People who had somewhere to be tended not to use the word might. “You don’t have somewhere to be. No one who meets in a bar in the middle of the afternoon has anywhere better to be.”

  Graham harrumphed and then downed the foam at the bottom of his beer bottle. “You gonna buy me one or what?”

  I thought long and hard about telling him to stick it, but this guy had a story that I wanted to hear, so I gestured to the bartender that he should grab my new pal another.

  “What’s your name?”

  “If you’re with Spence, how do you not know my name?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t know your name. I’m asking if you know it.”

  “It’s Zed Graham.” He frowned as though the conversation wasn’t heading in the direction he expected.

  “You know, blackmailers usually like to hide in the shadows.”

  “It’s not blackmail,” said Graham. “It’s, like, a hush payment. It’s what rich people do.” Graham took his phone off the bar and looked at it as if he was expecting a call, then he put it back down.