The Franchise

by Peter Gent

  “If they’re big,” Don Cobianco said, “they’ll pay big. If they don’t want to pay big, they’re not the kind of customer you want for the Franchise. We want spenders. High rollers. There’s lots of stuff to sell at spectacle besides the spectacle. We want our share of all of it and we want the customer to pay the absolute highest price possible. Any other business technique would be un-American.” Don looked at the square, dark, curly-haired heads of his brothers. “So, A.D., I’m asking again. How many tickets?”

  “Twenty-seven thousand, five hundred,” A.D. said.

  “It’s a seventy-thousand-seat stadium,” Don Cobianco said. “We get at least half the seats. It’s our stadium and we’re one of the Super Bowl teams. It is our franchise. No. You tell the commissioner that we want thirty-five thousand seats minimum. Repeat: minimum. We have commitments.” The thick-set man turned and looked at A.D. “Make Robbie understand what seventy thousand drunk fans would do if we shut Clyde, Texas, and the Pistol Dome down on Super Sunday. It wouldn’t be super, believe it. You explain or I’ll go see the commissioner and explain myself.”

  “I’ll do it,” A.D. said. “Robbie told me that I should carry on all contact with you. Since McNamara did the newspaper series on the League and the Mob, Robbie thinks a little distance wouldn’t hurt deniability.”

  “No. It sure wouldn’t hurt deniability.” Don Cobianco grinned. “Tell him thirty-seven thousand, five hundred, and settle for no less than thirty-five thousand. You tell him that comes from me. If he has to give up some of his tickets, I still want thirty-five thousand bottom. Otherwise we’ll come to his office and get them.”

  Stop here, Johnny. We’ll let Mr. Big Shot Pistols General Manager off three blocks of deniability away from his office. The walk will do him good.” The car stopped and A.D. got out. They drove away.

  A.D. stood for a moment, taking off his tailor-made silk suit jacket and loosening his tie, tossing the jacket over his shoulder. He began walking slowly toward the offices.

  He had lied to Don Cobianco. The Pistols’ share was thirty thousand, but A.D. had held out a few for himself. He had plans for two thousand tickets between the forties. Kimball Adams would give him $540 apiece for them and then make them part of a Super Bowl travel package from Las Vegas, New York or L.A.

  A.D. planned to walk with a million in cash, tax-free.

  Now he had to find an additional five thousand tickets for the Cobiancos. The commissioner would have to supply them, A.D. decided. Robbie Burden would have to take them from someone else.

  The season ticket holders will go crazy, A.D. thought as he walked. The fans had just gotten settled down after the Franchise forced them to finance the Pistol Dome. And now their Super Bowl tickets were going to be scalped.

  A.D. was worried; they had promised Super Bowl tickets to season ticket holders. There were going to be heavy negative vibes on this one. It was going to take real public relations.

  A.D. walked in the warm January lexas sun. The heat penetrated his already sweat-soaked suit. In the heat of that afternoon moment A.D. decided that it was time for a new League rule absolving the Pistols Franchise of any blame on the distribution of tickets that would be done in the commissioner’s office by a secret process. A.D. figured the people would buy it if the press would. The press would buy it if the commissioner stuck to the story. A.D.’s step became quicker, springy. A.D. had solved a problem and it made him feel good.

  By the time he reached the Pistols offices, A.D. Koster had completely forgotten that solving the problem merely broke him even with the Cobianco brothers.

  It was not until the middle of that night that A.D. sat straight up in Monique’s bed and fully realized that the Cobianco brothers were taking his million dollars.

  They would continue.

  Soon they would take everything, as Don Cobianco had just done with the Super Bowl tickets.

  “They want it all?” is what Suzy asked when A.D. told her the ticket demands. Robbie Burden said the same. Nearly. The commissioner had been expecting between six and nine million dollars.

  “They’ll ruin the game,” Burden said.

  “They’re ruining it for me already,” Suzy cried. “If we give in this time, they’ll want more the next. I can’t pay them back if they keep stealing my money.”

  “They were hoping we wouldn’t notice right away,” A.D. said.

  “Well, I’m noticing,” Suzy said. “They got to come way down.”

  “Absolutely,” the commissioner agreed.

  “And you have to give up some of your tickets,” Suzy said to Burden. “These guys are friends of yours too. Maybe better friends? Maybe you are in with them? How do I know?”

  “Now just a second ...” the commissioner started to protest.

  “Look,” Suzy cut him off, “we have to stick together on this—unless you are in with the brothers. If that’s the case, I think your secret Bahamian bank account can be proved. I believe they give jail terms for tax evasion, Robbie. The person who turns you in gets ten percent. We can’t afford to have people like A.D. in desperate straits where they are liable to do something that drastic.”

  “I was needing that million. I got debts.” A.D. looked hangdog. “Commissioner, you’re going to have to give us some of your tickets.”

  “Wrong.” Robbie Burden watched Suzy file her long nails. “How do I know that you two aren’t in on this with the Cobiancos?”

  “You don’t.” Suzy lit a brown cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke through her nose and mouth. Finally she looked right at the commissioner.

  Burden rubbed his chin. “I could cut some allotments, then use Kimball Adams to scalp the tickets back to the same people. They’ll still get tickets; it’ll just cost them more in the secondary market. That’ll free up other tickets that I had earmarked for the secondary market.” The commissioner smiled. “Kimball sure has come in handy over the years.”

  “When you were a general manager, you always had a great eye for talent, Robbie.” A.D. smiled. “I thought your trade of thirteen players for a guy with a broken leg was genius.”

  A.D. cut his own throat by humiliating the commissioner. Right then and there Robbie Burden decided A.D. Koster no longer served a purpose worth one Super Bowl ticket.

  After the meeting with Robbie Burden, Suzy knew she needed money even more than she needed it before. So she called Red Kilroy into her office. “How’s your coaching strategy coming along?” she asked pointedly.

  “Super Bowls come every year, but the chance to own part of a franchise is once in a lifetime,” Red said.

  “It will be our secret until after the game.” Relieved, Suzy again shook hands with Red, sealing their bargain. Then she passed the word to Donald Cobianco.

  The Cobiancos bet heavily against the Pistols. Their book quickly hit the million-dollar mark, at which point they usually began laying off money around the country. But the Cobiancos continued to accept all bets on the Pistols, laying off only the bets against them.

  Later estimates put the Cobiancos’ total bets against the Pistols winning the Super Bowl at between two and five million dollars. Some estimates went as high as ten million. Dick Conly supposedly bet two million himself. Even Suzy Ballard Chandler bet five hundred thousand dollars she didn’t have against her own team.

  On the Tonight show she predicted a twenty-one-point win. There was talk of her getting a Lite beer commercial. The fix was in.

  Only no one knew what the fix was.

  THE LOUISVILLE SLUGGER

  THE FIST WAS MASSIVE or somebody was beating his door with a Louisville Slugger. Unfortunately, when Taylor Rusk jerked open the door, it turned out to be both.

  Instinctively dropping his left shoulder and ducking his chin into his rising right shoulder. Taylor pivoted on his left foot, bringing his right arm up to protect his face and head. The move kept the baseball bat from caving in the temporal area of his skull. His shoulder and arm absorbed the glancing blow. But while deflecting
the bat, Taylor pivoted directly into Tiny Walton’s short right hook. Two more quick hooks to the face with Tiny’s massive fist—covered by a black leather, lead shot-filled sap glove—and Taylor was down.

  A well-honed ability to take and roll with a punch, plus a small miracle, accounted for Taylor’s cheekbone, jaw and teeth remaining intact. He hit the floor with the skin split wide under his left eye, another dislocation of the septum and a series of mouth lacerations. Not seriously injured, Taylor bled copiously.

  Hymie, the large man wielding the bat, was uglier and taller than Tiny, with a bald anvil-shaped head and bad teeth. Fortunately he didn’t have Tiny’s wrist action, otherwise Taylor might not have ducked the bat quickly enough, and a major miracle would have been necessary to keep Taylor’s skull intact.

  The two men dragged Taylor to the couch and tossed him facedown.

  “You dropped him like a sack of ashes. Tiny. You can still punch for a guy your age.”

  “Fuck you. My age.” Tiny punched the unconscious man in the kidney because Hymie had pissed him off. Hymie went looking for a drink, coming back with the square Herradura bottle. Hymie took several quick drinks.

  Taylor’s whole body hummed; he felt peaceful and happy. His head tingled with flashes of disconnected color and sounds. He felt a spiritual connection with The Oneness: total loss of ego, complete confidence and fearlessness.

  He was out cold.

  Regaining consciousness took several minutes. It was quite painful but extremely fortunate. Taylor first wiped his fingers in the blood dripping from his mouth, nose and cheek. He rubbed the blood between his fingers, staring at it. His mouth tasted of metal. Slowly the harder pulses pushed their presence into Taylor’s addled brain. Alarm reactions were going off. The brain stem had good news and bad news. The good news was that Taylor was not yet seriously injured.

  “Huh,” Taylor said. He was looking at the blood on his hands and shirt and all over the floor. “Kimball? Bobby? Is that all my blood?” He knew he was in his apartment, but he thought it was his rookie year, the night they moved in and got drunk. His battered head rang with throbs of pain. “Am I cut bad?” His tongue found all his teeth and began to probe the cuts.

  “You got some blood left. How long you keep it is up to you.” Tiny leaned down into Taylor’s face and clutched it with his thick left hand. “Now, understand this. You are going to tell us where the documents are hidden.”

  Taylor couldn’t yet place Tiny, but he remembered that his rookie year had been a while ago.

  “You will return the documents, that is for sure.” Tiny pushed the bloody glass-eyed face away. Taylor felt the burn of the fabric as his nose mashed into the cushion. “When you tell us, how much pain you stand, what kinds—those are all minor considerations, because you will give.”

  Taylor’s recollections of Tiny Walton surfaced. Tiny spoke from experience. Taylor remembered the documents and Tommy McNamara’s fingers lined up on each side of the typewriter in Doc Webster’s bunkhouse. Taylor decided to give them everything and more.

  Tiny took another small sip of tequila. He held it in his mouth momentarily before swallowing. “Then, even after you tell, Hymie’s got to keep doing you and keeping you alive, just to make-sure you ain’t lying. A pitiful commentary on mankind when you can’t take the word of a man whose nuts you just crushed with vise grips. Hymie, let’s make this slow.”

  Taylor tried to separate the reality from the dream. Kimball Adams was a dream. The rest turned real quickly as Hymie left and returned with his black bag. It was an old doctor’s grip filled with scalpels, needles, drills, pliers. Placing the grip on the counter, Hymie lit a stove burner.

  “Hymie’s going to heat up some stuff.” Tiny pulled handcuffs from the bag.

  Taylor had been handcuffed once by a Houston cop, who had then proceeded to work him over with a nightstick. It was a woman cop. The experience gave him the sense to know, even semiconscious, that once Tiny got the cuffs on him, Taylor would never live to see them off.

  Lunging upward, Taylor drove his head directly into Tiny’s face, breaking the nose but not crippling him nearly as much as Taylor had hoped. Tiny didn’t seem to mind the broken nose at all. Hymie didn’t even seem disturbed. They were old hands at this, few stood still for what they had planned.

  But their underestimation of Taylor’s size, strength and sudden reaction to handcuffs allowed Taylor to get free of Tiny and off of the sofa, stumbling into the doorway.

  Unfazed, Tiny reached for the quarterback’s throat to choke him down. But Tiny’s vision was blurred slightly by his flattened nose. Taking a long step, his foot slipped off the carpet, onto the wooden floor and into a pool of Taylor’s blood. Skidding in the blood, Tiny went down fast, hitting his head on the Heisman Trophy doorstop, which Taylor had moved from his bedroom. The trophy cut Tiny badly, punching a small hole in his skull. Blood and a clear fluid ran from the wound, which made him slightly woozy and very angry.

  Hymie snatched up the bat and was in his backswing to hit Taylor, who was stumbling toward the stairs, trying to reach his bedroom and Johnny Cobianco’s gun in the bedside table. Hymie was beading on Taylor’s skull base when Lamar Jean Lukas barged through the front door, blazing away with his Smith & Wesson, just like he’d been taught. Lamar wasn’t trying to hit them, only get them moving out and away. All he wanted to do was to make them somebody else’s problem. He blew big holes in walls and door frames and hit both men with fragments of wood and hot lead, but he let them escape. Just like the war. Lamar seldom shot to hit anything over there—but when he did he hit it. Lamar passed up killing shots on both men. Just didn’t pull the trigger. He chased the men out the back, reloaded for practice and fired again at their car as they sped away. Taylor could hear the slugs hitting the car body and shattering window glass. Lamar was an expert pistol shot. He had a medal.

  “I knew they looked fishy walking across the lot,” Lamar said, holstering his pistol as he entered Taylor’s apartment. “I went around the pool, and when I got back I lost them. I should have figured they were in your apartment with the drapes pulled. You never pull your drapes. Make a hell of a target.” Lamar pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “I scared the bejesus out of three girls next door. Dove headlong into a room full of naked titties and girls in panty hose. What did they want?”

  “Conversation and fungo practice.” Taylor wrung out a towel and blotted his bloody face. He kicked the bat Hymie had dropped. “They wanted some answers for The Sporting News before they killed me.”

  “Killers?” Lamar pressed his forefinger to his lips. “You ain’t dead.”

  “My only good fortune.”

  “You know, the Major told me to take the night off tonight. Should I have shot to kill?” he asked.

  “You didn’t have to on my account.” Taylor looked at his damaged face in the hall mirror. “They told me this was for starters. They work for Cobianco.”

  “The Major has the contract for security on the Pistol Dome. He got it through the Cobianco brothers,” Lamar said.

  Taylor put ice in the towel and placed it against his split cheek. “The stocky guy is Tiny Walton. He’s their mechanic. I never saw the medical technician before.” Taylor pressed the gash in his cheek together. “Get me that white tape out of my bag over there. I’ve got to close this.”

  “They won’t be back tonight.” Lamar dug through Taylor’s canvas bag. “They’ll regroup. But I’d be glad to look after you.” He pulled out the tape roll. “I told you that a long time ago.” Lamar tore strips of tape. “I guess you forgot or didn’t hear.” He quickly made butterfly-style tape strips. “I am your friend. Friends look out for friends. Lamar’s Law.” He handed Taylor the well-designed butterflies and helped him seal the wound.

  “I feel like I’m in an episode of The Godfather.”

  “I should have killed them, huh?” Lamar watched Taylor.

  Taylor washed out his mouth with golden tequila. He offered the bottle to Lam
ar. Refusing, Lamar pointed at his own head, making the crazy sign. Taylor nodded at Lamar’s question, then drank Lamar’s share of the alcohol.

  “Those two guys going to keep after you?”

  “Yep.” Taylor wiped his lips gently with the ice-filled towel.

  “It’s been obvious for a while, but I just got convinced for the first time tonight. I didn’t figure they would kill me.”

  “Nobody does,” Lamar said, and smirked slightly. “I could’ve killed those two. The fat guy knew it. He almost went for his gun, then he looked at me. Right here”—Lamar pointed at his own eyes—“and he knew. I was hitting what I wanted to hit. If I decided on him next, he was stats.” Lamar looked at Taylor.

  “The fat guy has killed people, several up close and personal. He’s a hard guy.”

  “I’m a hard guy,” Lamar said. “The Major told me not to work tonight, which means he is involved.”

  “He got the Pistol Dome contract,” Taylor repeated. “That makes him theirs.”

  “Whose?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “You better find out quick before you are dead.” Lamar’s voice turned harder. He seemed less consciously submissive, apologetic. He assumed a military bearing toward problem-solving. “Anything they want, short of you dead? Something to bargain?”

  “Documents maybe,” Taylor answered, “but I’m beginning to wonder. They seem to bring violent death from Tiny but little interest otherwise.” Taylor touched his purple, split cheek, bloodying his fingertips.

  “We make a deal,” Lamar decided. “Your life for the documents.”

  “What’s to keep them from killing me after we give back the documents?”

  “It would make your story more believable if they killed you.”

  “What are you? A literary agent? I don’t care what anybody believes about anything if I’m dead.” Taylor’s head started aching.

  “I see your point there.”