by Sean Black
Malik, the crowd and the team were one, playing every pass, jumping for every rebound, holding their collective breath in the seconds between the ball leaving a player’s hands and whooshing through the net, or rattling off the back board.
Forty seconds to go. Up by nine. All they had to do was stay cool. It was their game to lose. He called a final time-out. He wanted to kill the pace. They needed to nag and niggle and frustrate.
He looked over their heads into the stands for Kim but caught the eye of Tromso. The short, burly cop, his face flushed with beer, raised his hands and gave him a double thumbs-up. It was as much as Malik could do not to wade into the stand, pull Tromso out and kick his ass right then and there.
As the players headed back out on to the court, whatever rush Malik had going on evaporated. Not even the final buzzer could bring him back. As the crowd erupted, and one of his assistant coaches hugged him, Malik stood, impassive.
He plastered on a smile. Shook hands and exchanged hugs. He feigned anger as a cooler was dumped over him by the players, ruining the suit he’d put on and leaving him soaked. As he stood there, water running down the back of his neck, he thought of the boy.
As the celebrations continued, Malik Shaw pushed his way through the crowds, headed down the corridor, got into his car and drove off into the night.
Ten
He drove for miles, heading south for no particular reason and with no destination in mind. Driving helped clear his mind. It always had. He craved empty roads, big spaces and his own company. He would think of everything and nothing. But not tonight. Tonight he could only think of how hollow the victory had made him feel.
A hundred miles out from home, he felt his mood begin to clear. He pulled over and checked his cell. The cell with the missing picture. The cell that had been wiped clean by Tromso, as if that would erase what had happened.
He had a dozen missed calls, and several voicemail messages. He sat beside the highway and listened to them. The first was from his assistant coach, Mike, who was concerned that he was missing out on the fun. The second was from a worried Kim, wondering where he was and asking him to call her straight away. The third was the real surprise. It was from Laird. The chancellor was offering his congratulations and asking to see him in the morning, telling him not to worry, it was good news.
Malik called Kim back, reassured her that he was fine: he had just needed to clear his head and would see her soon. He got back on the highway, got off at the next exit, then back on, this time heading north toward Harrisburg.
The party was still in full swing when he arrived back. It had spilled out from the stadium onto the usually deserted streets. It seemed like everyone in the whole town was there. Young, old, middle-aged, students, faculty, locals.
Malik told himself he could let the dark stuff go for one night. In any case, Chancellor Laird had known what he thought, and presumably, now he’d had time to think about the seriousness of what had happened and reflect on the consequences, he had come round. Malik would no doubt walk into the man’s office tomorrow to find a prosecutor waiting to speak to him, and real action being taken.
That was the lie Malik told himself as he hugged his wife and kids, convinced that with victory would come justice.
Eleven
The next morning Malik was ushered into the chancellor’s inner sanctum without delay. A silver coffee pot and china cups had been laid out on a small table. Laird made a big show of serving Malik. The message was as subtle as a Patrick Ewing charge to the basket.
‘Didn’t see you at the celebrations last night, Coach?’
Here it came, thought Malik. Laird was testing the ground, seeing where his head was at, if he’d calmed down, the win having distracted him.
‘I needed some time to clear my head.’
‘And?’ said Laird, offering cream from a tiny silver jug.
Malik wasn’t enjoying this as much as Laird had probably assumed he would. He liked people who were direct. ‘And what?’
‘Well,’ said Laird, ‘did it work?’
Malik watched as Laird, his serving duties done, retreated behind the safety of his desk.
‘I guess it did,’ said Malik.
‘Good,’ said Laird. ‘I wanted to see you to discuss your contract.’
Here it comes, thought Malik. He’d signed up for an initial period of two years. The package they’d offered had been surprisingly good. At the time Malik had guessed that they’d already lost out on a few people. A lot of coaches didn’t want to move to a division-two college, and if they did, they usually wanted to go somewhere with better weather, such as Florida or California.
Of course, there were other factors in play. A successful sports team on campus could be a powerful revenue generator. But to achieve that you needed quality players, and one way of doing that was to hire a coach whose name they’d at least recognize. That was what they’d paid for when they’d hired him, the use of his name. There had even been a clause in the first draft of the contract about image rights.
Laird shot Malik that shark smile of his, all teeth and gums. ‘As you know, we’ve been without an athletic director for the past couple of months.’
When Malik had been hired the director had been a guy called Bob Lovitz, who had been around a long time. He was a decent man, keen to hire Malik, and had pretty much left him alone to run the basketball program. He’d also had a drinking problem. When he’d left at short notice the rumor was that his drinking had become an issue.
Laird opened a manila file, pulled out a sheaf of papers, and handed them to him. ‘How’d you like to step up?’ Malik took them but didn’t glance at them. He didn’t say anything.
‘I told you it was good news, Coach.’ Laird smiled.
‘Chancellor, I’m a basketball coach. That would be a big step up, different set of skills.’
‘I think you’re being overly modest, Coach. Plus we’ve been looking at candidates since Bob left, and we’ve yet to find one who would be a good fit. You already have a feel for the place.’
Malik started to leaf through the new contract. The new headline salary surprised even him. The college must have been in better financial shape than he’d suspected.
‘We’re keen to have this resolved as soon as possible,’ said Laird. ‘I’m sure after last night there will be more schools taking a look at you, and we don’t want to lose out now that we have you here.’
Malik said, ‘I’ll need to have an attorney check it over.’
‘Of course.’
There was an awkward silence. Laird drummed his fingers on the desk, as if to signal that the meeting was over. ‘So, you’ll get back to me?’ he said.
Malik figured now was as good a time as any to acknowledge the elephant in the room. ‘I actually thought you wanted to talk to me about what we discussed yesterday.’
Laird’s face showed a flicker of irritation, but he moved fast to cover it. ‘I’m glad you brought that up, actually.’
Malik looked at him, playing the chancellor at his own game, using silence to force a response. Laird might have been used to running the play in his office, but Malik knew more than about steering things than most people. It was at the center of being a coach, the ability to push buttons and provoke a required response.
‘I was a little tetchy,’ said Laird. ‘And the last impression I wanted to give you was that we as an institution wouldn’t take seriously an incident such as the one you described. In fact, my next meeting this morning is with Captain Tromso.’
‘So,’ said Malik, ‘what you gonna do?’
‘Coach, I hope you’ll understand when I say that before the meeting it would be premature of me to discuss that with you. But I promise I’ll keep you fully informed of any developments. As long as you understand how sensitive this matter is.’
Malik could feel anger rising, like bile, at the back of his mouth, but he did his best to tamp it down. Losing his temper would achieve nothing.
The meeting
hadn’t been a complete waste of time. At least he knew now that they were playing a game, trying to soften him up with a new contract, offering him a bigger job. Making all the right noises about doing something but stopping short of actually committing to what that something might be. Malik was being played. And when you’re being played the best strategy is often to play dumb.
‘Oh, I do,’ said Malik. He rolled up the contract, got up from his chair, and placed his china coffee cup back on the table. ‘You can count on me,’ he said to Laird.
‘I never doubted it for a moment,’ said Laird, the smile back.
Malik walked out. As he opened the door, Tromso practically launched himself from the chair where he’d been waiting for his turn with the chancellor. He bounded over to Malik, offering a beefy hand.
‘Great result, Coach. Just great.’
Malik shook his hand, playing along with the forced bonhomie, but thankful he had some hand sanitizer in his car. ‘Thanks.’
‘Well, keep up the good work,’ Tromso said, blundering past Laird’s secretary and into the office.
Malik watched as the door shut. Fuck you, guys, he said to himself.
Twelve
Malik’s office was quiet. He had given the rest of his coaching staff the day off. There was a victory rally later and, no doubt, more raucous celebrations that evening. Right now he was guessing that most of the team would be nursing hangovers. The short walk from his car to his office had been filled with people wanting to talk to him about the game or shake his hand. There was a buzz in the air.
He wished he could have enjoyed it with everyone else. He sat down at his desk, piled high with papers and DVDs of potential recruits for next year. He unrolled the contract offering him the new job and flattened it on his desk. He began to read it. It was a slow process: like most contracts it had been drawn up to be about as clear as mud.
After a few moments, he checked the page count:—nineteen, including the definition of terms. He got up, went to his filing cabinet, and scrabbled around for the original contract he’d signed. He checked the page count: seventeen. He doubted the difference could have been accounted for by the number of zeroes added to his salary, which they’d raised by about a half, a ridiculously generous amount, even allowing for the win and what might lie ahead.
So where had the two extra pages come from? He laid both contracts side by side, and worked through them page by page, matching sections, clauses and paragraphs. About half a page could be accounted for by changes to the structure of his bonus payments, which, like the salary, seemed over-generous.
He found the bulk of the changes around page fifteen. The section was headlined: ‘Non-disclosure Agreement’. Even allowing for the legal jargon, Malik could figure out what it meant. Signing it would mean he could not discuss any aspect of his job without prior approval. There was a specific clause pertaining to ‘revelations that may be detrimental to the image and standing of the college’.
The clause was retroactive. They were giving him a big chunk of extra cash to keep his mouth shut. The contract was their way of bribing him without it being completely obvious.
Malik grabbed the new contract, threw it into the metal wastepaper bin next to his desk, grabbed a box of matches from a drawer and sparked one. Cupping his hands around the flame, he lowered it toward the edge of the contract. He watched as it caught the edge of the paper and slowly took hold.
As the contract burned, grey-black smoke curled upwards. A few moments later, the fire alarm began to shriek. Malik grabbed a bottle of water from his desk and doused the flames. He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair, and headed out of his office.
Thirteen
Malik marched across campus. He was so consumed with anger that he almost didn’t recognize him. He stopped dead.
He stared at the boy’s floppy fringe and large brown eyes. Then he noticed the woman with him, a regular suburban mom with a blonde bob, wearing a long skirt and a white blouse.
The boy held out a program from the game and a pen. As Malik took it, he had a moment of doubt. Maybe he just looked like the same kid. Yeah, that had to be it. Lots of white kids had the same floppy Justin Bieber-style haircut.
But it wasn’t. The boy’s features had been burned onto Malik’s consciousness. It was a face that would haunt him. A face he would see for years.
This time the boy wasn’t crying. But there was something in the way he looked at Malik that hadn’t changed since the first time they’d met. His eyes held a plea that Malik shouldn’t say anything, a plea born of shame.
Malik turned to the boy’s mother. She smiled at him, her eyes crinkling. She was a good-looking woman. Nothing in her manner suggested that she was anything other than a mom out with her son. She sure as hell didn’t look like a woman who knew what her son was mixed up in. Her normality freaked Malik out. It would have been easier if she’d seemed beaten down or anxious. Maybe then he’d have been able to find the words to tell her what he knew.
The pair were both looking at him now. ‘Could you sign it “to Jack”?’ she asked.
Malik uncapped the pen, and signed the program. ‘You have a second name, Jack?’
The boy’s eyes made the same plea.
‘Barnes. Jack Barnes,’ said the mom. ‘And I’m Eve Barnes.’
Malik managed, ‘Nice to meet you.’ He wanted to talk to the boy. To be able to reassure him that there was one adult who wasn’t about to abandon him. But he didn’t want to say anything to the mom. Not in public, anyway.
‘Hey,’ said Malik, ‘I’ve an idea. If you like I could get the team to sign it, then mail it back to you. How does that sound?’
Jack seemed to sense where this was going and didn’t like it. ‘It’s okay,’ he murmured, so softly that Malik had to strain to hear him.
‘That would be wonderful, Coach Shaw,’ said Eve. She rifled in her handbag and came up with a slip of paper. She scribbled an address on it and handed it to Malik.
Malik waved the game program. ‘I’ll get the guys to sign this and mail it back to you soon as I can. Okay?’
Jack gave the barest nod as his mom beamed at Malik. Her smile broke his heart. There was no way he was walking away from this, and no way he was signing any goddamn non-disclosure agreement.
‘That’s so good of you,’ said Eve Barnes. ‘What do you say, Jack?’
‘Thank you,’ said the boy, as he studied the sidewalk.
‘Well,’ said Eve, ‘let’s not keep Coach.’
He watched as they walked away. A couple more people passed Malik as he stood there. One of them high-fived him. Malik looked around. The campus had taken on a surreal edge. Everywhere he looked, people were smiling, walking around with extra pep in their step. If only they knew, he thought.
He turned to walk away, and as he did so, he heard the boy calling after him, ‘Coach!’
He swung round to see Jack Barnes running toward him. He held out the pen. As he gave it to Malik, he whispered, ‘Please don’t say anything.’ There were tears in his eyes. He swiped them away with the back of his sleeve. ‘If they find out I’ve told, they’ll kill me.’
Then he turned and ran after his mom, as Malik thought, They. He didn’t say he, he said they. He walked back toward his office, pulling out his cell phone as he went.
Fourteen
Fifth Avenue and 47th Street,
New York City, NY
Bullet-sized drops of rain ricocheted from the hood of the black Lincoln Town Car as it pulled up outside the apartment building. A doorman stepped forward with a golf umbrella as the passenger door opened and Ty Johnson stepped out.
‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the umbrella and using it to shield his principal, a nine-year-old girl with long, curly blonde hair as she scrambled out, laden with shopping bags from the FAO Schwarz toy store on Fifth Avenue.
‘You want me to carry those for you?’ Ty asked her.
‘No, thank you, Mr Johnson. I’m perfectly capable,’ came the re
ply.
Ty bit back a smile as Ryan Lock, his business partner and friend, walked round from the front passenger side to join them on the sidewalk. The doorman had retreated under the building’s green canopy, already soaked by the downpour, his grey hair matted to his skull.
Together the two men escorted Kristina Makarova into the building. When they hit the door, Ty stepped aside as Lock escorted the child toward the elevator and up to her parents’ apartment – an eight-room, 4000-square-feet piece of Manhattan real estate that was worth a cool twenty million dollars.
Ty sheltered under the canopy and scanned the street. He was watching for a loiterer across the street, a vehicle parked with someone inside, anything that suggested surveillance. In truth, the security risk to the family was low but they were wealthy, which made Kristina a potential kidnap-for-ransom target. The chances were that no one was looking at the family but neither Ty nor Lock liked to phone things in. No matter the job, no matter the principal, they liked to do things right and maintain standards. Switching off was not an option they entertained.
Satisfied, Ty walked past the soaking doorman and into the lobby. Lock was waiting at the elevator with Kristina, who was investigating her purchases. She pulled out a fairy costume, complete with wings, and held it up for Ty’s inspection.
‘What do you think?’ she asked the six-foot-four, 230-pound African American.
‘Don’t think it’s my color,’ he replied, deadpan.
‘No, it’s for me, silly.’
Ty made a show of taking a closer look. ‘It’s real nice.’
‘Thanks,’ said Kristina, jamming it back into the bag.
Ty had grown attached to the little girl, who sounded more twenty-nine than nine. He and Lock both had. She was capable, like most kids, of being bratty, and there was no question she was spoiled, but she engaged with and was interested in others. The way Ty looked at it, she’d had no more say in her circumstances than some kid from the projects.