Outlaws

by Tim Green

  "Yes," she said. "I should have thought of that."

  "Jenny," he told her, "I hope the day never comes when you do think of everything. If it does, you might not feel like you need me anymore."

  Jenny looked over at him. He wore only the slightest of smiles, and she had no idea what it meant, if anything.

  Cody returned from Detroit Sunday night. The team had won, and his own performance was good, if not as spectacular as the first few games of the season. He knew from the light under the door and the low murmur of her voice that Jenny was in the guest room talking on the phone. Cody took a beer from the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table alone in the dark. He kicked his leg awkwardly up onto the chair beside him. On the outside of his jeans, the trainers had wrapped two big bags of ice that were just now starting to melt and leak. Every once a while he would hear a shriek of laughter coming from the guest room, and it made him lonely. How was it that she could be right there in the next room and be so cold and indifferent. Their life together had turned to shit. Maybe, he thought, it was because her life was a jackpot. She wasn't facing a trial. She was young and beautiful and smart. As much as it hurt him to admit it, he felt certain Jenny was going places.

  Cody lumbered up and got another beer, but this time took it upstairs. He ran a hot bath and turned on the Jacuzzi. Unwinding the tight wrap from his knee relieved the pressure and let the pain rush in like a flash flood. He'd done extensive damage to it on the turf in Detroit. Cody dug through his black bag looking for some Percoset and washed down two with a swig from his bottle. He stripped the rest of his clothes off and climbed into the tub, letting his bad leg hang out over the edge. The last thing he wanted to do to his knee was heat it up in the tub,- it would swell to the size of a basketball if he did that. The bad knee would see nothing but ice for the next seventy-two hours.

  As the tub rumbled, filling with bubbles and a soothing, steady rush of water and noise, Cody began to slip into the familiar comfort of the Percoset. He wondered if he would have to go through a drug treatment program by the end of the season because of all the narcotics he took for his pain. A voice echoed off the bathroom tiles, and he realized that he had laughed out loud.

  Jenny isn't the only one who can laugh, he told himself. That made him lonely again. Cody didn't really have any close friends. He had never been like that. It had always been tough for Cody to get close to anyone. He didn't know why. It wasn't intentional. It just seemed that between football and Jenny, he never had the time or the opportunity to develop the kind of friendships most NFL players aid'rle went out with the guys on his team from time to time, but the ones he liked the most were married with kids, and Cody just didn't have that much in common with them. Kids. Cody had wanted them for more than five years. He wondered if he'd ever have them. It almost seemed impossible now.

  Suddenly he had a strong urge to call Madison. He missed her. For two nights now he hadn't seen or spoken to her. But all last week he'd spent every evening with her, talking with her well into the night. After he'd gotten over the initial sparks from her steely exterior, he found her appealing. Unlike Jenny, she was tough but had a gentleness about her. One night when their legal session was over, they got caught up talking for fifteen or twenty minutes at the door as he was leaving. The next night they talked a little longer,- they sat in her study and talked until two A. M. At one point her phone rang. Some crank caller simply breathed a little and hung up. Cody calmed her down.

  In those hours following their legal sessions, talk somehow turned to personal stories. They talked about mistakes they'd made and their dreams for the future. To Cody it felt strange but wonderful to talk like this after they'd finished such emotionally difficult work. It felt like a dream because everything was so intense: he was going on trial for a murder but was innocent,- both his professional life and his marriage were coming to an awful end; a beautiful and sensitive lawyer comes into his life, and every night after they review crucial issues for the trial, they end up talking about their personal lives. He could very well never see her again if convicted; even if they appealed, another attorney in her firm would handle the case. Everything in his life was in a vortex, swirling and gushing about him like the whirlpool of water he was sitting in.

  Cody picked up the phone that sat on a small shelf above the Jacuzzi. There was a dial tone. Jenny was off.

  "Must have caught her between calls," he mumbled.

  He dialed and then hung up before it could ring, suddenly feeling that he was calling too late. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty,- that was okay. He hit the redial. On the third ring she picked up.

  "Hello?"

  "I know I have no business calling you at--"

  "That's all right," Madison cut in. Her voice sounded sleepy.

  "1 woke you up?" he asked apologetically.

  "No," she said, sounding soft and intimate. "No, I was just sitting here reading. How do you feel?"

  "Good since I took a couple of pills. Hang on."

  He leaned over and shut the air jets off. "There, that's better. 1 had the Jacuzzi running."

  "You must feel sore," she said. "I don't know how you do it."

  "It's a living," he said.

  "We watched the game, Jo-Jo and I. You looked great. It's not often I get to see a client on TV."

  "Unless they make the news for a jailbreak, huh?" he joked.

  "My clients don't go to jail. That's why I get paid so much."

  "I'll say."

  That was the wrong road to have traveled down, and Cody was sorry he'd brought it up. There was an awkward silence.

  "Well," he said finally, "I just wanted to tell you that I missed not talking with you over the weekend and I--I'll see you tomorrow night, okay?"

  "Okay," she said.

  And then in a tone that made him feel lousy because it was so businesslike, she said, "We've got a lot to cover this week because jury selection starts on Wednesday, so be ready to work."

  "You got it," he said. "Good night, Madison."

  "Good night," she said.

  After he hung up the phone, Cody got out of the tub and dried off. By the time he got to the bed, the room had started to rock gently back and forth, lulling him to sleep. It was a wonderful feeling, free from pain and wony. Cody dropped off. His last thoughts were of Madison. He was certain that there had been a quality in her voice that was different, softer than normal, that meant she thought of him as more than just a client.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  By the end of the following week, Cody knew every detail of his case and exactly how Madison was going to try to defend him. Madison had battled with Rawlins over the jury. She felt it was about as good a mix of people as she could hope for. She had done her best to get as many women seated as possible. There were six. She knew that a man as handsome as Cody Grey could influence a woman's mind just on his appearance alone. It was a sad but true fact that the defendant's appearance could give him a distinct advantage or disadvantage when it came to the jury.

  Before the shoes had appeared, Madison had planned to focus her attack on Hauffler, the eyewitness, and the lack of evidence linking Cody to the crime. When the shoes appeared, Madison knew that if she was going to convince the jury that Cody hadn't killed Board, she would have to provide at least the hint of an answer as to who did and why. With Cody's shoes linking him to the killing, she now had to convince the jury that there was a conspiracy afoot, that someone else had killed Board and manipulated the evidence to make it look as though Cody was the murderer. Together they spent many hours trying to think of who and why. They came up with nothing.

  Then on Thursday, they finally caught a much-needed break. Madison had subpoenaed Board's work files at the IRS in the hope that they could uncover some blemish in his past that might have somehow lead to foul play at hand. Marty was examining those files and found a man who had been investigated by Board and who looked like he might have some ties to the underworld. His name was Ricardo Lopez.
He lived in El Paso and owned numerous strip clubs outside the city and in small towns around south Texas. Board had investigated Lopez and forced him to pay one hundred thousand dollars in back taxes and penalties. The thing was, after crawling through the numbers like a half-starved ferret, Marty found that Lopez had actually short-changed the government for over three million dollars.

  "Something that big," Marty assured them, "usually results in a jail sentence. And a guy with as much money as Lopez would certainly be assessed at least three million dollars in additional penalties alone. Either Board was just a stupid lazy bastard and didn't see it, or he cut some kind of deal with Lopez.

  "1 looked into Lopez," Marty continued. "He's got a rap sheet from his younger days, auto theft, a couple of aggravated assaults. 1 called the D. A. in El Paso and he told me Lopez is one bad hombre, stays out of trouble now only because he's got so many people to do his dirty work for him. Supposedly his strip clubs are linked to a biker club called the Scorpions. Murder, drugs, prostitution, you name it, they do it."

  "Well," Madison had said after mulling it over, "as far as we're concerned, Lopez cut some kind of a deal with Board, maybe they were in business, or maybe Board was threatening him for more of... whatever. Anyway, Lopez had him knocked off in a way that made it look like Cody did it. We're certainly not concerned with preserving the reputation of a dead man nobody liked when he was alive, so let's assume that Board was a real backroom dealer. It fits perfectly, Marty. If Lopez wanted Board dead, he had to wait until the perfect opportunity arose. When it would look like someone else killed him. That opportunity was Cody. This is exactly what we needed."

  Marty beamed. He was delighted with Madison's praise and thrilled to be contributing to Cody's case, and this had him grinning for the rest of the week.

  Madison would call Board's boss to the stand and confront her with the Lopez file. This would bolster the underworld connection theory she would make in her opening statement. She would accentuate Cody's alibi and tear into every witness Rawlins called, most especially Hauffler. For him she would reserve her most brutal cross-examination techniques. After she got done with him, she was willing to bet the man would wonder if he'd seen anyone at all leaving Board's house after the shooting. With the news about Lopez, Madison began to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

  On Saturday, when Cody left for Philadelphia to play the Eagles, he felt more confident than ever about his trial, which was now only two days away.

  Cody knew something was wrong when the two doctors who were draining his knee looked at each other the way they did. Instead of the usual surplus of clear yellow fluid, Cody's knee would only yield a syringe half-filled with dark, viscous blood. No matter how many angles from which Burlitz attacked the joint, none of the yellow fluid was to be found. Even though they said nothing to him that indicated anything was wrong, the grim looks on the doctors' faces were enough. And the swelling hadn't gone down nearly as much as it had on prior Sundays after the drainings.

  But if the doctors were willing to give it a go, he was too. Biggs, he knew, was almost ready to play. His running during the week had gone better than anyone had expected. It was inevitable that Cody would be replaced, but he would fight it with every ounce of life he had. For some reason, it had become critical to him to keep his starting role at least until the trial began. He knew the entire state would be watching the trial, and he wanted people to know that he was still a starter, not some loser on his way out of the league. If he could put together another great game, as he had done almost every week since the beginning of the season, he might fend off the reemergence of the younger player. If Cody was doing well, there would be more incentive for the coaches to play it extra safe with Biggs. If Cody faltered, he knew he would be sent to the bench.

  He slipped on his remaining leather glove and flexed his fingers to get them jammed all the way into the tips. Cody looked around at his teammates. Each one was caught up in his own individual preparation, but within minutes they would come together and throw their bodies around the football field in the synchronized patterns of the plays drawn up in the play book and practiced throughout the week. Each player had to be where he was supposed to be, otherwise the entire team suffered. That was what football was about, winning your own individual battle against your counterpart on the other team,- assuring that you accomplish your part in a successful play. Cody really didn't know if he was going to be able to come through for his teammates as one of the eleven effectively functioning parts.

  Instead of waiting for the rest of the players to surge through the tunnel together as he normally did, Cody decided he'd better take himself out on the field early and try to work out his knee. He knew from past weeks that the more the game went on, the more flexible his knee seemed to get. Now it was so stiff that he couldn't get the full range of motion on either his extension or his flexion. He tried to disguise the slight limp,- he didn't want them pulling the plug on him before the game even began. So he began to jog. When he emerged from the tunnel, the stadium erupted with boos. Because the Outlaws and the Eagles were in the same division, they played each other twice a year, once at home and once away, so the Eagles fans knew #40 well enough to hate him the way only NFL fans can hate a player from a rival team.

  Cody jogged from one end of the field to the other. Philadelphia had to be the worst place to play in the NFL. It was an Astroturf baseball field, nothing more than a thin layer of plastic rug thrown over a slab of concrete. To make matters worse, there were seams throughout the field where the baseball diamond normally was. It was the wrong place to have to play on a bad joint. And there was no question now the joint was bad. That was all there was to it. It was stiff, and even though the whole thing didn't hurt because of the Xylocaine, Cody could sense that by forcing his leg through the range of motion it took to run, he was essentially turning the gear in an engine that had no lubricating oil. Still, he was going to play.

  Back in the locker room, Cody could see that Biggs was dressing. He looked around in panic and saw Dryer coming toward him. The coach pulled Cody over to a comer of the locker room where they could talk alone.

  "How's the knee?" Dryer asked, staring intently at Cody's face.

  Cody returned the stare and said, "Fine."

  "Fine?" the coach said.

  "Yeah," Cody said, "I just went out and ran on it. I can go."

  "You can go?" Dryer said.

  Cody nodded, "No question."

  "Look," Dryer said, throwing his arm casually over the top of Cody's shoulder pad, "1 know how tough you are. There isn't a damn guy on this team who doesn't. But you've got to know when enough is enough. Now, the doctors told me that you might not make it today, so I'm activating Biggs. I'd rather play you, and I'm willing to give you a crack at it, but you've gotta know that if you're hurting us, I'm gonna pull you. Okay?"

  "Okay," Cody said. He wanted to thank the coach, but for some reason he couldn't.

  The Eagles came out running the ball, and the strategy couldn't have better suited Cody. All he had to do was charge the line of scrimmage and clean up on the running back after the defensive linemen and linebackers had slowed him down. He could do that with even minimal mobility.

  It was late in the first quarter when the Eagles threw their first really deep pass. Cody had over-the-top coverage with the comerback playing underneath on the fade, and when the ball went up, Cody was five steps behind where he should have been. His head burned with the frustration of not being able to perform a physical feat that was normally as simple as crossing the street. The receiver caught the ball, and the comerback got him by the jersey to slow him down. Cody caught up, and out of sheer frustration, he launched his body, throwing a forearm. He intended to hit the receiver squarely in the chest and knock the stuffing out of him. Twisted and turning, the receiver ducked, and Cody's arm smashed into the side of his helmet instead, sending the receiver into a senseless heap.

  The crowd roared with rage. Cody looked down o
ver the incapacitated player. The cornerback got up and slapped Cody's shoulder pads, pounding on his helmet in jubilation. Three yellow flags came sailing at them through the air from three different directions. One hit Cody in the chest before falling limply to the plastic grass. Cody shrugged and held his open palms skyward. These flags, he wouldn't argue about. He apologized to the player who was slowly trying to sit up, shaking the cobwebs from his brain. Cody hadn't meant to hit him in the head, and he told him so. The crowd didn't know, they didn't care, and they certainly didn't let up their storm of booing. People started throwing cups of beer from the stands. The whole thing made Cody really feel like the criminal he knew they all thought he was.

  The referees marked the penalty off half the distance to the goal line giving the Eagles the ball on the Outlaws' four-yard line. The defense huddled. Cody's teammates were nothing but thrilled at his vicious hit, despite the penalty and the long pass. His ass hurt from congratulatory slaps. The network took a time-out while the Eagles' medical staff helped their receiver off the field. When both teams were lined back up to play, Cody found himself five yards deep in the end zone. The crowd still roared.

  He tried to block out the sounds, but they were so close he could clearly hear their screams.

  "Grey, you fucking criminal.1"

  "Murderer!"

  'You murdering bastard! I hope they fry your ass!"

  "Killer!"

  Someone threw a disposable camera at him, and it shattered against the back of his helmet, making him jump. The crowd laughed uproariously. Cody spun and searched fruitlessly for the perpetrator. That he would date turn and face them only fueled the crowd's fire even more. Beer cups rained down on him, and the officials had to halt the game. To keep the junk out of the end zone, they were forced to raise the net used to keep the ball from going into the stands after an extra-point kick.

  Three times the Eagles ran the ball but were unable to get it into the end zone. On the fourth down, they tried once more from an l-formation with the fullback leading straight up the middle and the tailback right behind him. With perfect timing, the Outlaws' middle linebacker threw himself at the blocking back, and the inertia of both canceled each other out. The tailback with the ball jumped just to the left of his blocker, projecting his body up and forward to gain the eighteen inches he needed to score. Cody hit him dead on with a crack that cut through the noise of the crowd like a gunshot. The officials came charging in to spot the ball, signaling first down for the Outlaws going the other way.