"Immediatly," he'd said in his email, which meant that I'd be there immediately.
Hawks Stadium was build in three main levels. Down on the first level, the pathways were large, cavernous, and industrial, with exposed pipes running along the ceilings. Down here were the entrances to the team locker rooms, as well as access to the field.
The middle level was where most of the fans hung out, and the interior was lined with stalls and stands. All of those shops were closed, now, but during the games, they supplied food to thousands of hungry spectators, as well as caring for their other needs. Passages led from the second level out into the middle of the stadium, to the stands.
The third level was largely off limits to most of the fans, at least those who didn't pay for the privilege of access. Up on the third level, private staircases led up to the sky boxes, and the floors were thickly carpeted. Unlike down on the main level, where everything had a coat of paint that was, first and foremost, easy to hose off, the third level felt rich and luxurious, with lots of exposed wood grain.
Halfway around the stadium, a set of wide stairs led up from the third level to the largest of the sky boxes - Jed Benson's personal box, and his office.
I climbed those stairs now, looking up at the frosted glass doors above me. Already, I could hear voices coming out from inside that big office, and I could see shadowy and indistinct forms moving about inside the box. Jed must already be there - and he clearly wasn't alone.
I reached the doors and knocked, holding my breath.
"Come in," came a gruff shout from the other side. I opened the door and stepped inside.
I was right - Jed wasn't alone in his office. In fact, the office appeared quite crowded already, even before my entrance.
Jed Benson III sat behind his desk, big and chubby and pompous and imposing. He held an unlit cigar in his mouth, and occasionally chewed furiously at the tip. If I squinted my eyes at him, he looked a bit like that tycoon guy from Monopoly; he just needed a top hat and a monocle to complete the illusion. His reddened face didn't look happy, but I couldn't ever remember seeing him looking truly happy, not even after his team won a game.
Three chairs sat in front of Benson's massive wooden desk. Two of those chairs were currently occupied, although the middle one sat open and empty.
On the left side, I saw short, balding, steaming Terry Muskgrave, the head offensive coordinator of the Hawks. Muskgrave kept his hair buzzed short, and whenever I laid eyes on him, I always felt uncomfortably reminded of a bulldog. He had the same big jowls and angry, slightly short-sighted squinty glare, and the liver spots that were visible through his short-cropped hair just made him appear as though his fur had spots. I'd never seen him wearing anything other than a too-large and rumpled windbreaker with the Hawks colors pulled over an incredibly wrinkled suit, and sure enough, he wore the same thing now. I didn't know how the pudgy man wasn't sweating in his getup.
My eyes moved over to the right chair, and my breath caught for a moment in my throat.
Seth Chase sat in the other chair, his eyes cast down at his lap. His clothes looked messy, as well, but although he didn't look up at me when I entered, I sensed his focus. He had something on his mind, and he wasn't going to let it go.
Benson, Muskgrave, and Chase weren't the only three people in the room. An assortment of other coaches and assistants stood around the edges of the room, either leaning up against bookshelves or tables or just standing and waiting. I didn't recognize any of them in particular, but they all wore expressions ranging from nervousness to boredom.
I stepped forward, and as the door to Benson's office closed behind me, Chase's eyes flicked up to meet mine. He only held eye contact with me for a split second, but I sensed powerful emotions behind his blue eyes.
Everything's going to be okay, he'd said in the email.
Please, I prayed to myself as I stepped forward, let that be true.
Chapter Twenty-Three
☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼
"Ah, Miss Tense," Benson acknowledged me as I let the door to his office close behind me.
"Um, it's Tenner, actually." Oh god, I was starting off the meeting by correcting the owner of the football team. Probably not a good move, but the words were already out of my mouth.
He frowned. "What?"
"Katy Tenner. That's my name. Um, sir." Well, at least I might get the right name printed on my severance checks.
"Right. Now, I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but my star quarterback has been keeping us all waiting for some sort of announcement, and he insisted that you have to be present." Benson slapped a meaty hand on his desk. "Now that you're here, maybe we can finally get this thing going? I've got a tee time that I don't want to miss."
Chase nodded, and he glanced up at me again. His eyes flicked from me over to the chair in the middle of the room, and I obediently took a seat. Chase nodded, a single nod as if he was glad that things were going according to his plan so far, and then turned back to Benson.
"I'm here," he said in a clear voice, "to talk about cheating."
From the reaction of everyone else in the room, he might as well have told us that he was planning on amputating his throwing arm.
"Like hell!" Muskgrave roared, as the other coaches and assistants around the periphery of the room murmured and exchanged worried looks with each other. "Chase, what the fuck has gotten into you? This isn't the time or place to-"
Benson brought his hand down on his desk again, the thundering smack cutting through the other noise. "Shut up!" he roared, his bass tones drowning out even Muskgrave. He glared around the room, his eyes burning, demanding silence.
He got his demand. Benson might be rotund and a caricature of a monopoly tycoon, but the man had presence, and he commanded respect when he wanted it.
Only after everyone had closed their mouths, very reluctantly in Muskgrave's case, did Benson shift his eyes back over to Chase. "Young man, you better have a very good story to tell me, ya understand?" he said, taking an angry chomp on his cigar.
"I do, sir," Chase replied. "But it will take some time - and if you want to really understand, I have to start all the way back at the beginning."
Benson looked steadily at the quarterback for another minute. "Gimme a second," he said, reaching for the phone on his desk. He picked it up and began punching in a number with his thick fingers before waiting for an answer.
Amazingly, everyone in the office remained quiet, watching and listening as Benson dialed the number, held the phone up to his ear, and waited. "Yeah, Beth, dear?" he said, once the person at the other end picked up. "This is Jed Benson. You're gonna need to go ahead and cancel my golf time for today. I think I've got another issue on my plate. Yep. Yep. Yeah, that sounds good."
After another moment, Benson dropped the phone back down into its cradle. He returned his full attention back to Chase, interlacing his thick fingers on the desk in front of him. "Go," he commanded.
Chase nodded, and started talking.
"Footballs," Chase began, "change pressure under different conditions. If you inflate a football in a warm location and check the internal pressure, and then you bring it into a cold location and check the pressure again, you'll get two different readings.
"Most of the time, this isn't a big issue. After all, the temperature doesn't change that much over the couple hours of game time. But it can be important, sir, because a ball that's only partially inflated behaves differently than one that's fully inflated. A ball that's had a little air let out of it is easier to squeeze, throws a little differently. You can't spin it as well, but you can get a lot more distance out of it, especially if you know that it's a little soft and adjust your throw."
Benson listened to all of this. "So what?" he asked. "The refs check the balls. They've got standards for everything in their little rule books."
"Yes, sir, the referees do check the balls," Chase agreed, "but they usually do it before the game, and sometimes after. Other t
han that, they rely on the equipment managers for the teams to hold onto the balls."
Here, Benson's gaze shifted off of Chase, running around the other people assembled in his office. Terry Muskgrave still glared angrily at Chase, his eyes looking hot enough to melt the polar ice caps, but a couple of the other men standing around the office looked a little uneasy, and didn't raise their eyes to meet Benson's.
"Keep going," Benson said to Chase, still looking at the other people in his office.
Chase nodded. "I noticed this thing with the partially deflated balls back in preseason training. I had one practice where the footballs felt different, handled a little differently. I investigated to figure out what was different, and worked out that the equipment managers inflated the balls inside the warm locker room, checked their pressure there, and then brought them out into the cold outdoors for practice."
"I mentioned this to the coaches," Chase continued. "I just wanted them to inflate the balls properly, to make sure we wouldn't have any problems like this in the games later on. But instead, Muskgrave talked with me and convinced me that we should see whether we could keep the balls at the lower limit of the acceptable pressure for the first game coming up. He said that we needed any advantage, no matter how minor, and that he would make sure that we weren't breaking any rules."
At this point, however, Muskgrave couldn't hold back any longer. "This is all bullshit!" he roared, exploding up from his seat. "Benson, you can't possibly listen to this shit about how I might have-"
"Shut the fuck up, Terry," Benson interrupted smoothly, levelling a finger across his desk at Muskgrave. "Say another word before I tell you to talk, and I'll drag you in front of the league myself, right now."
Looking as though he'd just been forced to eat an entire lemon, Muskgrave sank back into his seat once again, although he glared black daggers at Chase and me.
Benson next turned his attention to Chase. "So, you're telling me that Muskgrave, or someone, partially deflated the balls that you used in one of your games."
"Not just one of them, sir," Chase answered. "All of the games so far have been with deflated footballs."
"But Muskgrave said that he would keep them within the acceptable limit. So this isn't technically breaking the rules."
Chase glanced over at me, and I realized that he wanted me to speak up.
Oh god, Katy, I thought to myself. Whatever you do, don't stutter.
"They weren't within the acceptable limit, though," I managed to get out.
Benson shifted his eyes over to me, raising his eyebrows slightly but not commenting yet.
"I, um, I found out about the partially deflated footballs," I said, my words spilling out of me in a torrent of nervousness. "It started when I found some in the locker room, but my suspicions were up, and so I wanted to investigate, and then-" I stopped for a minute, feeling myself spiraling out of control.
A hand suddenly reached out and wrapped around my fingers. I looked down in surprise, and then up at Chase. He'd reached across the distance between our chairs to take my hand, holding it lightly. His fingers felt warm and comforting as they wrapped gently around mine.
I took a deep breath, forcing myself to let it out slowly. I could get through this, I told myself. "At the most recent game, I took one of the balls off the field so that I could measure it," I said. "It was below the acceptable pounds per square inch - by more than just a little bit. That was the same ball that Chase used to score a touchdown."
"And it hasn't just been that one ball," Chase added. "Trust me, sir, when I hold a ball, I can tell exactly how inflated it is by how much it squeezes in my hands. These balls in the games haven't been properly inflated."
With a sigh, Benson nodded. He turned back to Chase. "And you've kept your mouth shut about this?" he asked.
"Until now, sir. I didn't say anything about it from the start, and if this comes out, I'd be in just as much trouble as the coaches and equipment managers."
"So why the change now?" Benson asked.
For a minute, Chase just gritted his teeth together. Finally, he glanced over at me, and his fingers tightened a little more around my own. "Because it's wrong, and I'd rather come clean about it later than never," he said.
"Jed," Muskgrave interjected, and Benson turned his attention.
"Terry, what would happen if this information got out?"
"Suspensions, at the minimum," Muskgrave replied promptly. His tone sounded somewhat calm, even though his eyes still glared pure anger. "We'd lose Chase for the rest of the season, and our entire record would be called into question. We'd definitely be out of the running for the Superbowl, or even any ranking this year."
Benson nodded again. "Now, that would be unfortunate," he said. His eyes moved over to me. "Especially after the Hawks were finally starting to shake their negative image in the press and to the public."
I nodded myself in agreement with him, but something about how he pointed out this fact seemed a little odd. Was he already thinking about damage control, or did the owner of the Hawks have something else in mind?
"Now, this is just an idea," Benson said slowly, running his eyes around the room, "but perhaps this would be the sort of thing that could go away on its own."
What? Was he kidding? Chase didn't outwardly react, but I felt his hand tense up on mine.
"Sir?" he asked, looking at Benson.
"As I see it," Benson said slowly, chewing on his cigar as he ran his eyes around the room, "this was a big mistake. A mistake where all parties want to leave it behind, so that there won't be any further problems.
"And that's what I'm suggesting. We simply leave this behind, to fade away in the past. An unfortunate mistake." His eyes settled on Chase. "One that was caught and has now been corrected. No longer a problem."
Benson's eyes next moved over to Muskgrave. "Don't you agree?"
Muskgrave bit at his lip for a moment, his fingers digging into the armrests of his chair until they turned white, but he nodded. "Whatever you say," he growled.
Next, Benson ran his eyes around the room, locking gazes briefly with each of the assistants and others standing around the edges of his office. I turned my head to watch them, and I felt my stomach drop a little bit more as each one of them nodded, sensing the opportunity to get out of here without any further punishment.
Finally, Benson's eyes moved back to Chase and me. "It looks like everyone else is in agreement," he said, his smile making him look very self-satisfied. "And you two are as well, aren't you?"
Chapter Twenty-Four
☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼
For a second, Chase felt his breath catch in his throat. Benson had just done the unthinkable.
When he'd called this meeting, he fully expected the irascible owner of the Hawks to completely blow his lid, going nuclear and taking out his anger on Chase, Muskgrave, and everyone else associated with this cheating scandal.
Never in a million years, however, would Chase have guessed that Benson might consider going along with the entire thing!
Now, Benson's eyes rested on him. "Chase, you're a smart guy," Benson commented, his head tilting slightly to one side. "Surely, you don't want this sort of scandal to leak out. Not now that the press is finally starting to get off your ass. And if we just drop the whole thing, leave it behind us, that would be the best choice all around.
"Don't you agree?"
He sat paralyzed, not knowing how to respond. Benson was right. If he stopped saying anything, just let this all fade into the past, he could get out of the whole thing without facing any repercussions.
He wouldn't be eviscerated by the press, would still be seen as a hero. He wouldn't face suspension - or worse - from his team by the league, and he could keep on playing.
The Hawks wouldn't lose their shot at the Superbowl.
It was the perfect answer, he knew. Normally, he wouldn't have hesitated to say yes, to accept this option in a heartbeat. This way, everyone won. He wouldn't need to kee
p worrying about being caught in the scandal, caught cheating, because the cheating would stop. But at the same time, he didn't have to face any punishments, didn't have to deal with that black mark on his past performance.
He needed to say yes.
Why couldn't he speak, then? Why did he feel paralyzed, unable to open his mouth and just agree with Benson, let this whole troublesome issue go?
A little part of his mind knew the answer - and it lay in the fingers still curled in his hand.
What would Katy say?
She might not say anything, he tried to convince himself. Maybe she would understand how much this meant to him, would be willing to go along with it.
Next to him, he heard Katy open her mouth, and waited to hear what she would say.
"I can't go along with this."
Well, shit. He turned and looked at her, as did Benson, Muskgrave, and the rest of the coaches and assistants in the room.
He saw her blanch a little as every eye in the room turned to her, but her expression remained determined. "This sort of thing isn't going to stay hidden forever," she insisted, glaring across Benson's wide desk at him. "It's going to come out at some point, even if you stop doing it now. It can't stay buried. And when it comes out, I want to know that I'm on the right side. I don't want to live with this on my conscience for the rest of my life."
"Your conscience?" Muskgrave shouted out from her other side. "Are you fucking kidding me, you little bitch? This is about winning! Fuck your conscience, if it stops us from winning games! Do you know how much shit will come down on your head if you don't shut your little mouth and go along with this-"
Benson held up a finger, and Muskgrave's mouth snapped shut. "Terry has quite the mouth on him, but he's right," he pointed out. "Surely, Miss Tenner, you can see how saying something about this will hurt your own career. While if you keep your mouth shut, on the other hand, I'm sure you will be delighted to find that you receive a healthy bonus for your efforts in keeping the name of this team clean."
The message behind those words was clear, but Katy stood up from her chair. She gave Chase's hand one last squeeze, and then let him go.
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