Offside Trap

by A. J. Stewart

  “What did Sean say?”

  Alice looked at me as if she’d just completed a Rubik’s cube in two seconds. Or I had.

  “You inquired after a project. That’s it, isn’t it? Sean said that the project would go ahead despite Jake. He said Jake couldn’t and wouldn’t stop it. They were both most irritated.”

  Ron was still facing the quad and he said, “It might be time to think about leaving.” I didn’t turn to look at Harris. I figured he would be slowing down as he marched across the quad. It was a long, arduous trek across flat grass for him.

  “What happened, Alice? After the argument?”

  “Neither was prepared to step down, but one of the Rinti employees told them to calm themselves, chill out was the phrase he used, and some beer was passed around. I don’t partake of alcohol and my ride had arrived, so I left.”

  “And that was the only interaction you had?”

  “Jake was into sports and I don’t care for it, so we had nothing in common. I did hear that Rinti Developments was making him a job offer. He seemed as popular there as he was here.” She shrugged and rubbed at the whistle around her neck. “And since Sean arrived at the university, well he is the kind of person I avoid.” I could hardly blame her for that, and I had just spent five minutes with the kid.

  “What do you mean, since he arrived at the university?”

  “This is his first year here. He transferred from somewhere in Georgia. I heard there was an incident involving drugs—liquid ecstasy was the rumor. There was a kerfuffle, and his uncle arranged for him to come here.”

  “Time to go,” said Ron. I could hear the wheezing breath of Officer Harris in the background.

  “And I must study,” said Alice, turning on her heel and heading up the library steps.

  Ron and I took off. We didn’t run. That was unnecessary. Harris wasn’t going to shoot us in the middle of the campus, and he couldn’t catch us if we were walking on our hands. We rounded the back side of the library and I glanced back to see the officer leaning against a lamppost, huffing and watching us walk away. We looped around another nameless building and backtracked toward the car.

  “So Jake knew,” said Ron.

  “It would seem.”

  “And Sean knew he knew. So we can assume he told Rinti.”

  “Or he told his uncle. Looks like there was a little coattail riding going on after all. Maybe he told his uncle to get in his good books. Either way, Rinti knew.”

  We got in the Mustang, and I pulled out toward the freeway. Ron did the talking.

  “So in addition to Montgomery, who is sending his hoods after you and clearly has a link to Jake, now Rinti does too. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So we’re further behind than we were this morning.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What’s the other way?”

  “That’s pretty much the only way.”

  I got onto I-95 and pointed north. “I think we need to mull this one over a beer. To Longboard Kelly’s?”

  “I’m actually expected at the yacht club,” said Ron.

  “Someone I know?”

  Ron shook his head. “Interview for the position of vice commodore.”

  “You’re serious about that.”

  “Some members put my name forward. I’d hate to disappoint them.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I’ll drop you at the clubhouse, and I’ll take care of the ruminating myself tomorrow on my little sojourn upstate.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  IN THE MORNING I put on a sweater and dropped the top on the Mustang and cruised up to St. Augustine in the cool fall air. Although I was still in Florida, St. Augustine marked the beginning of the South for me. The Spanish moss hung low from ancient live oaks. The old town spread like spider’s legs from Castillo de San Marcos. I passed the imposing stone fort that had been occupied in one form or another since the Spanish arrived 450 years earlier. The downtown area was walkable and open, so I parked my car a few blocks from the fort and took off on foot. The dominant structure in town was Flagler College. Henry Flagler conceived the grand Spanish renaissance complex as the Ponce de Leon Hotel in the 1800s, as the starting point for his railway to Miami. Seemed he owned a great deal in the spots anyone might like to get off the train too. But now the grand building was a college named in his honor. I wasn’t sure if Dr. Millet would have loved it or hated it. There was truckloads of that old world charm his office cum library told me he pined for. And its town center locale meant there was no room for sports fields. They were a few miles away on the outskirts of town. But the location also meant there was no room for expansion to create Millet’s mega-campus. It would be tough to house biotech facilities in heritage listed buildings.

  I looped around and ambled across the fine West lawn before the school, easy under patchy skies. Emily Getz stood waiting for me beside Kenan Hall. She had shoulder-length curly hair that reminded me of an osprey nest, and although fit like Kim Rose, Emily was broader, stronger. A Clydesdale to Kim’s thoroughbred. She gave me a polite if guarded smile as we shook hands. She directed me back to Valencia and onto Cordova Street. We made our way to a small restaurant called The Floridian, and sat in a small room with a rowboat pinned to the ceiling. It was one of those places that used local producers and charged a premium for it, which always worried the hell out of me. Emily ordered a shrimp salad and I had something called a chipwich, which was a chicken sandwich with tomato, blue cheese and arugula, and potato chips smashed into it. First bite was dry, like they’d seasoned the chicken but forgot the mayo. The second bite put me into taste heaven. I had my eyes closed as I chewed when Emily spoke.

  “So you went to college with Kim.”

  I opened my eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “After you called, I called her.”

  “Cautious.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t take some stranger at his word.”

  “Fair enough,” I said through chip-crusted lips.

  “You guys were close?”

  “Back in the day.”

  “She never mentioned you.”

  “She ever mention anybody?” I said.

  Emily looked at me with steel-gray eyes and the same intensity as Kim. I took a bite of my sandwich and let her size me up.

  “Kim was a bit confused as to why you would want to talk to me,” she said, stabbing a shrimp.

  “Overview,” I mumbled. “Just trying to understand the playing field.”

  “To mix a metaphor.”

  I smiled. “I do that.”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  I sipped on some iced tea and wondered exactly what it was I wanted from Emily. I really didn’t know.

  “You played together.”

  “Olympics and World Cup.”

  “What position did you play?”

  “Center back.”

  “You head the ball a lot?”

  Emily frowned. “Plenty. You asking if I’ve got brain damage?”

  “I can see you don’t have brain damage. I just wondered if it hurt, heading a soccer ball like that.”

  “Almost every time, but you get used to it.”

  “Not sure I would,” I said, taking another bite.

  “Kim said you played football at college.”

  I nodded.

  “You ever get tackled?”

  “In practice.”

  “It never hurt?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you got used to it, right?”

  “I learned to live with it.”

  “Close enough,” she said, eating some salad greens. “But that’s not what you really want to know.”

  I brushed my mouth with a paper napkin and leaned on the table. Emily wasn’t just wary, she was shrewd and smart and could read me with her eyes closed.

  “Do you use performance-enhancing drugs in your soccer program?”

  “No,” she said. Her eyes didn’t
waver.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I test. I removed a student-athlete from my roster two years ago for breaches.”

  “That’s college policy?”

  “That’s my policy. And the college agrees, yes. Mr. Jones, we’re not here just to teach athletes to win, but to win the right way.”

  “So you follow USADA guidelines.”

  “And then some. This is not about keeping the school out of trouble. This is about keeping the bad apples out of the school.”

  I studied her face and found no trace of irony.

  “How hard would it be for a student-athlete to cheat the system if you were just doing the bare minimum?”

  “It would go from impossible to possible, but not easy.”

  “And if you weren’t doing the bare minimum?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Did you ever see any PED use when you played soccer?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “So yes. What about Kim Rose? Did you ever see her do PEDs?”

  “Do you even know Kim?”

  “I did, a long time ago.”

  “And do you think she’d cheat like that?”

  “People do all sorts of things under pressure.”

  “Not Kim. She was gifted, but she also worked hard.”

  “Sometimes hard work isn’t enough.”

  “Besides which, Kim was a natural athlete. She hardly ever got injured and she could run all day.”

  “They used to say the same thing about Lance Armstrong.”

  “But his teammates knew, as it turns out. Didn’t they? I knew Kim—I played, trained, traveled and lived with her for the better part of a decade. She’s clean.” She glared at me. “I’m surprised you don’t think so.”

  “I do think so. But I don’t think everyone in the program was. Law of averages.”

  The waiter arrived and bussed our table and refilled our iced tea. The interruption allowed an uncomfortable silence to descend on the conversation. I like uncomfortable silences because I rarely find them as uncomfortable as the other person. Most people try to wait, then they squirm, and fight the compulsion to fill the dirty void, and then the compulsion wins. Kim Rose never felt uncomfortable with silence, back in the day. I was hoping that not all female footballers were the same. They weren’t.

  “So let’s say hypothetically, that some girls flirted with the rules on drugs, what of it today?”

  “Let’s say hypothetically you knew they were doing it. Would you tell?”

  “I told you already, I expelled a player for it.”

  “That’s now. I’m talking ten hypothetical years ago.”

  Emily went quiet and stared into her iced tea.

  “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you didn’t tell anyone. Why wouldn’t you then but would now?” I said.

  “Hypothetically, you might not have thought it was right, but you didn’t feel like you had the power to stop it. It might have kept you up at night, so you might’ve convinced yourself it wasn’t so wrong or so bad. That it was more like medicine than a bad thing. And now you might know better. And you might be in a position to do something about it.”

  “And what about Kim?”

  She sipped her tea and frowned.

  “How well did you know Kim?”

  “As well as anyone I met at college. Better maybe.”

  “You date?”

  “No.”

  Emily gave me a knowing grin. “Why?”

  “It never really came up. We had our common ground, and there was no impetus to go further.”

  “And that’s the thing. Kim was a great teammate but a lousy friend. Everything revolved around the team and the team’s performance. If she knew of someone doping, she wouldn’t have thought about it more than it was just that teammate preparing the best she could; doing the best for the team. To think more would be to think like a friend, and that was never Kim’s strong suit.”

  I took a long, slow sip on my iced tea and thought back to my time with Kim. Emily’s words seeped into me like cheap wine on a linen tablecloth.

  I paid for lunch, and we wandered back to the college. A bank of clouds hovered offshore, and I suspected I might have to put the roof up on the way home. I offered Emily a ride, but she had her car nearby and needed to get back to her office out near the sports fields.

  “You staying in town?” she said.

  “Gotta get back to West Palm.”

  “Long drive just for lunch.”

  “It was an enlightening meal.” I shook her hand and left her by Kenan Hall and wandered back to my car. I dropped the top, slipped in some Kenny Chesney and headed out toward I-95 with the feeling that I had all the puzzle pieces in hand, but no idea yet how they fit together.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THE SUN HAD set by the time I got home, and the Mustang’s headlights played across the black Mercedes parked in my driveway. I pulled in behind the Merc and left the lights on it. The license plate was Florida, something about saving manatees. I couldn’t see anyone in the vehicle. I cut the engine and slid out of my car, and let my eyes adjust to the dark. The Mercedes was a big four-door sedan, like a German version of the Lincoln town car. There was no movement in it, or around my yard, save the palm trees swaying in a breeze that was yet to bring rain but smelled as if it surely would. I stepped between the cars and across my lawn, keeping off the path to the front door. Once I got in view of the door I could see a heavy-set guy in a leather jacket leaning against it. He was smoking a cigarette that was blowing away toward the Intracoastal, and making no attempt to hide himself. He nodded toward me and dropped the cigarette and crushed it with his shoe. I took a couple steps toward him. My feet sank into my lawn, and I wondered when the gardener was due. As I got closer I noted that this guy was different from the limeys in the office parking lot. He was olive-skinned and tanned further, and had heavy eyebrows. Perhaps one of Pistachio’s local crew.

  “Where you bin? We bin waiting,” he said. So local was out. The accent was old Brooklyn. Perhaps a transplant, one of those guys who loves the Florida sun but refuses to give up the leather coat regardless.

  “I can’t be too hard to find. You did it.”

  He grinned. “I heard you was a wise guy.”

  “Funny, I heard the same thing about you.”

  He pointed his finger at me, like a gun. “That’s a good one. Wiseguy. I get it.” He nodded and grinned again. Then something exploded across my shoulders, and I rocketed face first into the lawn. Pain seared across my back and shot up my neck, and breath came in short raspy stabs. I felt like I’d been smashed across the back with a club. The grass was soft and moist, and it felt like I was breathing it in instead of air. I was losing control, panicking. I rolled onto my side to escape the grass and then lost the ability to breathe completely. Now I knew I was either drowning or I was winded, so I got on my hands and knees and tried to relax. Danielle had taken me to a yoga class once, and I recalled the position being called downward-facing dog. I felt like a mutt that had just received a serving of the owner’s boot, but my chest relaxed and my breathing kicked back in. My vision was blurred, and I blinked several times hard. It didn’t clear things much, but enough to see the second guy step into view. He was as dark as the first guy, but wore a large Florida Panthers NHL jersey. He tapped a black hockey stick into his beefy palm. It hurt to talk, but I did it anyway.

  “You hit like a girl.” I was pretty certain I was concussed, and I was going to use that as my excuse for such a lame comment. For trash talk it was edible rice paper. And Danielle could hit a fast-pitch softball into tomorrow, so it wasn’t even accurate. Plus, it didn’t endear me to the guy. He swung the stick at me again. I saw it coming so I dropped away, but the blade glanced off my shoulder and splayed me out like a Portuguese chicken. Then he kicked me in the side of the stomach. It must have been the side my lunch was residing on because stabbing pain and chip sandwich launched it
s way up and out onto my lawn. When I finished I rolled over wearing a mask of vomit like a woman’s face cream. The two guys stood over me. The guy who hit me had the stick resting across his shoulders, like he was stretching on the bench. The guy in the coat got on his haunches.

  “You gotta learn to leave well enough alone, capiche?”

  I blinked like an animatronic robot at Disney.

  “Capiche? You guys really say that?”

  The guy grinned again. “I like you. You got spunk.” He stood up and nodded at his buddy, who lifted the hockey stick off his shoulders. The pain receptors in my brain cursed my stupid tongue and tensed for more impact. But the guy walked away. It hurt like hell, but I sat up and watched him get into my Mustang, fire it up and peel out my driveway backward, tires screeching for mercy.

  “You’re stealing my car? This is how Pistachio works?”

  He grinned again. “I surely don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked up and turned his eyes to the street. I heard the rumble of the engine before I saw the headlights. It sounded a lot more impressive from the outside, and was one of the reasons I had bought the car. The lights grew bigger as the Mustang sped down my dark street, the placid homes of Singer Island looking on. My house was at the end of the cul-de-sac, on the edge of the Intracoastal. The car sped right at me, and then at the last second turned away toward the huge royal palm in my front yard.

  “Are you kidding me?” was all I could think of to say. The Mustang hit the palm tree at full throttle. There was a sickening crunch of steel and fibrous wood as the tree gave way some and the car gave way a whole lot. The hood caved in to a huge V-shape, and the inside of the vehicle exploded in white as the airbags deployed. Steam and the hiss of hydraulics rose from the crushed vehicle. For a moment the night was still with the sound of frogs, cicadas and weeping oil, and then the occupant of the car began thrashing at the airbags until the door cracked open. The guy kicked at the broken door until it yielded. He unfurled himself from the wreck and strode toward me with a smile like it was his first day out on parole. He walked easily, as if he had been bouncing on a trampoline rather than totaling a car against a tree, and I got the creeping feeling that this wasn’t his first time. He turned toward the driveway and bent down to retrieve the hockey stick that he must have dropped before getting into my car. I had to give him credit for not taking the weighty projectile into the vehicle with him, given what he was planning to do. He spun and carried the stick back to the car, where he smashed every window that wasn’t yet in pieces, then he started in on the rear of the car which looked completely undamaged.