The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Whatever you have.”

  He frowned at me. “That’s the problem. I don’t have anything.”

  “Nothing? As in zero cars?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I can offer you an office with a desk to do some work for an hour until I get one cleaned up and back over here.”

  I held my hands up, showing no luggage, no briefcase, no computer. “Do I look like I need an office?”

  “Um, no.”

  “What I need is a means of transport. A donkey will do.”

  This comment seemed to brighten him up some, and for a moment I wondered if he did indeed have a spare donkey out the back.

  “I do have one vehicle I could offer you.”

  “Then why are we still talking?”

  “It’s a van.” He screwed up his face like this was clearly an unacceptable option.

  “That’s fine. I can drive a minivan.”

  “Not a minivan. It’s a van van.”

  “A van van?”

  “Like a delivery van.”

  “Like a delivery van?”

  “Well, it is a delivery van.”

  “Does it have a steering wheel and a full tank of gas?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s go with the van.”

  The guy nodded but didn’t smile, as if he suspected I would either change my mind or turn out to be a lunatic. I knew which one was more likely, but I kept it to myself.

  When the paperwork was done, the guy walked me out into the parking lot to find the van. It wasn’t a tough job, despite the fact that he had misspoken.

  The van wasn’t a van at all. It was a small truck, the kind of thing people who lived in apartments rented from U-Haul when they moved house. But the rest of the story was accurate. It had a steering wheel, and a bench seat, and a full tank of gas. The guy did a walkaround, checking on his clipboard any blemishes he found on the vehicle. I didn’t follow him around. The truck looked to be more blemishes than not, and I figured his clipboard would end up looking like a child’s crayon drawing. Instead I just got up into the driver’s seat, felt the springs groan beneath my weight, and waited for him to finish. When he did, he had me sign the bottom of his sheet, and then he pointed me toward the exit.

  “Left on ninety-five,” he said. “That’ll head you straight in toward the Strip.”

  I gave him the old eyebrow raise. I couldn’t imagine what he thought I was going to be doing, driving a moving truck along the Las Vegas Strip. But I had places to be and things to do, so I didn’t take it up with him. I just nodded my thanks and watched him walk away as I pulled out my phone.

  Ron had sent me a series of text messages. Clearly it was bad form to talk on the phone while you were on the fifth tee at South Lakes Country Club. The first text message told me that the first address I had given him was to a motel just south of the airport where I now sat. He had provided a link, which I clicked, and the motel appeared to be a lower-midrange hotel that, in typical Las Vegas style, was actually a gambling hall with bedrooms. The name of the place was Texas Station, and I had no clue as to why a place on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada, would have such a name. Perhaps they had a cowboy motif. I didn’t care either way. I wasn’t planning on staying there, or at least I hoped not. The website told me that they offered rooms for twenty-eight dollars a night. They looked like a step up from a Motel 6, more Best Western with slot machines. But it was very much the kind of place I could see Zed Graham staying.

  Ron’s second text message told me that the other address was residential. The owner of record was someone by the name of Lily Barkin, and once again the address in Ron’s message was a link. I started to wonder whether that was indeed Ron’s doing or if my phone was trying to be helpful. Either way, I clicked it and opened a map and found the location to be in a subdivision called Centennial Place, about fifteen minutes north of my location.

  That was where I needed to be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I selected the residential address as my destination, then set my phone on the console of the truck and started her up. It started explosively, like an army tank waking up from a big night out, but as I pulled it into gear and moved toward the exit of the airport, I found that it actually handled a lot better than I imagined such a truck would. I got to the exit, and I glanced left, toward the distant Las Vegas Strip. A lot of folks would have found a trip to Las Vegas to be incomplete without a visit to the Strip. I wasn’t one of them. The Strip really wasn’t my cup of joe. The traffic crawled, the heat seared, the throngs of people lining the sidewalk was like New York City on a bad, bad day. The entire place was some kind of warped reality, a city designed to bilk every visitor out of as much money as was humanly possible while giving them the impression that they were having a whale of a time losing their dough.

  I turned right. I chugged and spluttered my way up through what was clearly a residential area. My map showed subdivision after subdivision that ended abruptly in nothing. I wasn’t sure what the nothing represented on my map, but I figured I’d find out soon enough, because my destination point was just short of where the housing stopped and the nothingness began.

  It wasn’t a million miles away from a map of South Florida. The north-south corridor from West Palm down to Miami was a similar hodgepodge of housing subdivisions that suddenly ended on the east side with the Atlantic Ocean—usually denoted on my map by blue—and on the west side by the Everglades—usually denoted by green. My map now was telling me that whatever nothingness was out there was best denoted by a sort of Dijon mustard yellow.

  As I got close to my destination, I found a curious and rather confusing naming convention was in use. Centennial seemed to be a very popular word in these parts. I wasn’t sure if the area had been founded a hundred years after the rest of Las Vegas or a hundred years after the United States, or if the whole thing was just affectation. But I drove by a shopping mall called Centennial Gateway, past the Centennial Hills Hospital, and then a series of subdivisions with names like Centennial Point and Centennial Village.

  The community I wanted was called Centennial Place. It was just off Route 95 before the nothingness that I could now see for myself. The road headed into the desert seemingly forever, like the old Eagles album. But I turned off and found myself on surface streets between neighborhoods delineated by large stucco walls. The streets were wide and clean, and above the eight- or ten-foot walls I could see the tops of two-story houses. Everything was new build, at least within the past few years. I guessed this was where housing affordability had pushed people as Las Vegas had become more and more popular. The whole thing reminded me of South Florida. Communities of houses walling themselves off from each other for the feeling of security that belied the word community.

  I reached the entrance to the community and found large wrought iron gates and no gatehouse. There was an intercom box just short of the gate. I punched some random numbers and waited for anyone to answer. It was like the old trick to get into a New York apartment building. Just hit every button and wait for some numbskull to let you in. I could see a small camera in the intercom box staring at me like an evil eye, and I was thankful to the gods and dumb luck for the fact that I had wound up in a moving truck.

  My first set of numbers elicited no response, so I tried a second and then a third. The fourth set of numbers brought no conversation but movement with the gate.

  I waited for the gate to slowly open, then I moved on through, looking around like a delivery driver might do. A delivery driver might also use a map application on their phone, exactly like I was, so they may well have known exactly where they were going.

  Every house looked the same. They were all two-story with a garage in front and a neat door into the house on the right side of the garage. In a concession to individuality, the houses were different colors, but only just. In South Florida the same uniformity of build was usually painted pastel blues and yellows and coral. Here the selectio
ns looked like the ground beneath them. Variations on tan and brown and rust red, the weather-beaten colors of the desert.

  I slowly cruised through the quiet subdivision. Just like in South Florida there were no cars parked on the roads. Communities like these had rules demanding residents park their vehicles in their driveways, or even, God forbid, in their garages.

  I found the house I wanted near the end of a cul-de-sac at the rear of the community. I pulled the truck over and turned off the engine. It was far from the most inconspicuous vehicle to be watching a house in, and I felt like there were a thousand eyeballs peering through plantation shutters, watching my every move, or lack thereof. I didn’t know how long I would have before someone got suspicious, but I wanted to get a feel for the place. I already had. It was suburbia. People with more money than some but far less than others came out to the distant reaches of cities to plant roots, to have their own postage stamp–sized backyards, to build families and communities. I didn’t know who Lily Barkin was or who she had been fifteen years ago, but right now the phrase that went through my mind was soccer mom.

  I checked my watch and felt my stomach growl, keen for some kind of midday nutrition break. A sandwich would have been good, a beer even better. I watched a man come out of the house at the very end of the cul-de-sac and get into a recent-model Honda something-or-other. He glanced in my general direction, probably noticing the fact that a vehicle was sitting on the road in his street, but he pulled out backward, turned around the cul-de-sac, and drove by me without so much as a second look.

  I figured as long as people who noticed me did it just the once, my cover was pretty good. If the guy came back and found me still in place thirty minutes from now, it might have been a different story. But I wasn’t sure I had another option. There was nowhere to stand, nowhere to hide. The landscaping was zeroscape—desert style—no tall oaks or pines or hedges to hide behind.

  The house belonging to Lily Barkin was just short of where the road turned into a bulb at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was slightly redder than its neighbors, but certainly not red. Maybe orange. I was searching my mental color wheel for the right term for the color of dirt, when a woman stepped out of the front door of the house I was watching.

  She looked like a suburban housewife. Not tall but not short, not Hollywood actress thin, but not out of shape either. The word that came to mind was normal.

  She glanced around the empty street but paid no attention to me or the truck, then she got in a white Audi A4, put on her seat belt, and then pulled out onto the street. In the reflection on her windshield it was hard to see her face, but she seemed to glance briefly at the truck as she drove by.

  I let her reach the intersection at the end of the street before I started the truck. I wasn’t turning around in any kind of easy fashion, so I drove straight ahead and around the curve of the cul-de-sac and then back out toward the intersection. I could no longer see the car that I wanted to follow, but I figured she was headed for the exit. As I reached the road that led to the iron gates, I saw the Audi turn right onto the wide street beyond, out of the community and into the great unknown. The gates started to close, so I hit the gas and must have gotten through with only inches to spare, as the gate spasmed and then attempted to open after I was through.

  I followed the Audi at a casual distance. I wasn’t exactly sure what a casual distance should be, especially while driving a large moving truck, but I hoped I looked like I was doing the rounds, delivering people’s parcels or some such.

  The streets were quiet. Only a few cars here and there, and no pedestrians. People seemed to move from their gated communities to whatever place they needed to go—the mall, the office, the school—and then back, and lunchtime on a Saturday didn’t seem to be the time that they did any of that. I knew the rhythms of such movement well. People in Florida did the exact same thing during summer. When the snowbirds had returned to whatever distant land they came from, those who remained moved like animals on the African savanna. There was a lot of activity early in the morning and just as much in the evening. But during the heat of the day, when the humidity was high and unbearable, people hunkered down. I imagined it to be the same in Las Vegas. Although I doubted they got the same kind of humidity, I knew the mercury could go well north of a hundred here on a pretty consistent basis, and I expected that like in Florida, people did what they had to do either side of the big bake.

  The Audi pulled onto Route 95, drove for about two minutes, then pulled off again and headed through surface streets. There was one car between us when I saw the Audi pull into the driveway of a parking lot. There were some stout, desert-colored buildings in the way, so I wasn’t sure if it was a mall or some other kind of civic enterprise, until I reached the parking lot myself.

  It was a school. A big one. I suspected it was a high school. The campus seemed enormous, almost like a small college. I felt like the truck was going to stick out a bit too much in the school parking lot, so I drove on a good half a block and pulled over on the road. It was no gated community, so street parking was allowed, and I locked the truck and walked back toward the lot.

  Beyond the parking lot I saw the back side of a grandstand, bleachers that extended high, shielding my view of what I knew to be a football field. But it was spring, and I heard no noise, no sound coming from the field. Not the call of plays or the heavy impact of bodies clashing, or even a gathered crowd cheering or groaning.

  There were a good number of vehicles in the parking lot, however, and although it was hardly a stream of people—it was more like a dribble—the people arriving seem to share a common destination.

  I spotted the now empty Audi parked neatly in a slot in the middle of the lot. I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the woman who had been driving the car was probably headed in the same direction as everyone else, so I dropped in with the flow and followed to wherever it might lead.

  It was springtime, and in springtime all roads lead to baseball. I found myself at a well-tended baseball diamond. There were large bleachers on either side of home plate extending beyond the cages that took the place of dugouts, where the teams were milling about on the first- and third-base sides. The clay on the infield was pristine, and the outfield was a newfangled version of artificial turf. It looked like real grass, and the individual blades appeared to be different colors, some freshly grown, some brown and dying. It was a convincing effect, except for the slight sheen that the blades of grass gave off. In painter’s terms, real grass was matte. It didn’t shine or glow. Whichever way you cut it, artificial turf was artificial, made from some kind of plastic. They hadn’t quite gotten the matte effect down pat, but they were well on their way. It was a convincing look and a fine-looking field.

  Kids were tossing balls around in the outfield, preparing for play. A gentle breeze drifted across the field, a breeze I hadn’t noticed while waiting on the street of Centennial Place, but it gave the whole thing a pleasant feel. It reminded me of spring days in New England, the joy of the first warmth after long, arduous winters. I figured the winters weren’t so arduous here, but the joy was just the same, getting their games in before the summer heat baked their field like a plastic pizza oven.

  Where the football field bleachers might have held thousands, the baseball bleachers only held hundreds. But it was still a good number, and the seats were about three-quarters taken as my eyes scanned the crowd for the woman from the Audi.

  I found her sitting three rows back from the bottom, on the first-base side. I didn’t know if that was the home team or the away team, but it didn’t seem to matter. I walked around the back of the bleachers past a small concrete hut that was selling hot dogs and cold drinks and something called churro bites, and I felt my stomach growl again. But I didn’t stop. I came in right behind home plate and turned straight up the bleacher steps. I went up about three quarters of the way and then sidled between people already in position for the game so that the woman from the Audi was belo
w and to my right.

  I watched her watching the practice. She had her eye on a group of kids who looked like they might be sophomores or juniors. As the boys rotated through their practice, I noticed that the woman kept her attention on one boy in particular.

  I didn’t feel like I was going out on a limb by assuming this was her son. The limb was reserved for the idea that the son might also belong to Ricky Spence. The kid looked about fifteen years old, so the timeline fit. I looked him over. He was tall and lean, yet to fill out with any kind of muscle. Ricky Spence was well-built, strong and stocky, with forearms like clubs. He had been that way even back in the minors, and I wondered at what age he had filled out. I was guessing about six.

  As I watched the kid warm up, I glanced back at his mother and saw the similarities in the way they held themselves, the lines of their cheekbones. I hadn’t gotten a good look at the woman I assumed to be Lily Barkin, but I could see her son just fine, and if I were pressed, I would have said the boy had his mother’s looks. Which told me nothing about Ricky Spence.

  The kids drifted off the field and back to the benches behind wire that substituted for dugouts in diamonds like these. A few more people arrived, and then a short girl who didn’t look more than about thirteen sang the national anthem without the aid of a microphone. She didn’t need it. I suspected she may have eaten a microphone as a toddler. She projected like an opera singer and held the high notes just as easily as the low ones. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was no easy song to sing, especially under the pressure of doing it in public, and it often sorted the wheat from the chaff. This girl was all wheat. She belted it out with a passion that I wasn’t sure a child could fully comprehend, but it gave me goose bumps, and I didn’t think I was the only one. The crowd cheered like we were at Wrigley Field, and then everyone sat, and those with caps put them back on. Then nine kids ran out onto the field, and one picked up a piece of wood and headed for home plate.