Blackbird, Farewell

by Robert Greer

  They lay in silence, clinging to one another and listening to the crackle of the fire for several more minutes, until Damion whispered, “You own me, Niki.”

  “Forever?”

  “Longer.”

  “Let's lie a while longer and put everything else on hold. Damion, please.”

  Damion pulled her to him tightly. “Okay. For a while.”

  The fire had become a smoldering log and a few glowing embers when Damion slipped his arm from beneath a very contented, half-asleep Niki twenty minutes later. Barely opening her eyes, she said, “Damion, please, just a little longer.” The look he gave her let her know that no amount of pleading would keep him from his game tapes any longer. Realizing that the very thing that had driven Damion to become an All-American basketball player was driving him right then, she said, rising from the warmth of the rug, “Everything'll go quicker with that hot chocolate I promised. I'll go make some.”

  Damion drank in every inch of Niki's naked body as she stood. “You know, you're exquisite.”

  “Oh, I bet you say that to all the girls, Mr. Madrid,” Niki said, blowing Damion a kiss.

  “Nope. Just to the ones who've stolen my mind.”

  Every step she took toward the kitchen made Damion wonder just how much of his mind still belonged to him.

  An hour and two cups of hot chocolate later, Damion sat on the king-sized wrought-iron bed in the cabin's master bedroom, with Niki snuggled next to him, staring at a wall-mounted TV screen several feet away. They'd watched CSU dispose of Oregon and UNLV, with Damion attempting to wear out the fast-forward and reverse buttons on the VCR's remote. Now, as they watched the final minutes of the NCAA championship game, Damion jotted notes on what was now the sixth page of the legal pad resting on the muscular thighs that had helped him become a college rebounding phenom.

  His notes included comments on the pace of each game, musings on who was doing most of CSU's scoring, who was blocking out, who was rebounding, and who'd run into foul trouble straight out of the gate.

  Noting the intensity on Damion's face, Niki asked, “See anything special?”

  “Not really,” Damion said, shaking his head and looking frustrated. “It's hard to pick up anything that might be construed as point-shaving—even if you know the game and you're looking for it—if you're stuck with nothing but what a damn TV camera can see. But it's what television has conditioned us to do. Follow the ball and focus our attention on one player. Problem is, I can't really appreciate what the players who don't have the ball are doing.”

  “TV's also conditioned everyone to buy more beer.”

  Pleased that Niki had cut through the intensity, Damion laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Hang in there with me, okay? If Shan-dell or anyone else on the team was shaving points, sooner or later, I'll spot the setup.” Leaning forward and refocusing, Damion prepared to watch the final two minutes of the most disheartening game of his life.

  As the tape wound down to the game's final critical seconds, he watched Jackie Woodson bring the ball upcourt with his usual high, left-handed dribble. For what seemed like the thousandth time, he saw Jackie get double-teamed. He ran the tape back and forth a half-dozen times as, near the edge of the screen and almost out of camera view, he watched Shandell struggling to get out of defensive traffic. When the ball skyrocketed out of Jackie's hands, not toward Shandell but straight across court to Damion, Damion muttered, “Okay.” With the ball now in his hands, Damion froze the tape, telling himself, Forget about watching the ball, and forget about having the play-by-play announcer's words bounce around in your head one more time. Look at what every other player is doing. Running the tape back and forth, he tried to account for each player's position. There he was in the process of passing the ball. Shandell, wide-eyed and surprised that he was open, stood eagerly awaiting his pass, and Corky Blake was boxed out in the lane away from the ball. There was no missing Corky's trademark knee-high white socks or Willie Morgan's size 14s caught up in baseline traffic, even with the camera focused elsewhere. “Where the hell's Jackie?” Damion yelled suddenly, startling Niki just as, tape now rolling, Shandell let his final errant shot fly. Leaning back against the wrought-iron headboard, Damion whispered as if Shandell himself might be listening, “Damn, Jackie was free.”

  “What?” asked Niki, looking puzzled and feeling the muscles in Damion's right arm quiver.

  “Jackie was free.” Damion ran the tape briefly backward and stopped it. Restarting the tape, he said, “Look, Jackie's two steps inside the free-throw line on the left-hand side of the basket. The camera's only picking up his legs, but it's Jackie all right. There's nobody on Jackie when Shandell goes up to shoot. Nobody! Damn it, Shandell could've gotten him the ball. Shit! I can't believe I've missed it all the times I've run the last few seconds of that game through my head.”

  “Have you seen this tape before?”

  “Only once. Coach Horse had the whole team look at it two days after the game. But hell, back then I wasn't looking for any signs of point-shaving, and neither was anyone else. We were all too devastated. We sleepwalked our way through our standard postgame film review. All this time I've been running the final fifteen seconds of that game through my head, thinking about the damn ball when I should've been looking at who was offering weak side help, who was doubling down in the middle, and who it turns out had lost their man. What an idiot!”

  “Damion, come on. You had no idea.”

  “Well, I should have. We were better than UCLA. Better at every position. There's no way we should've lost that game and no way Shandell should've lost his life.” He jotted a note on his tablet and dropped the pen at his side. “Now that I think about it, the evidence was there in the other game tapes too. Everything you'd need to see if you were looking for point-shaving. Shandell coming across the middle just a hair too slow to set his pick. Jackie holding the ball a split second too long on a simple give-and-go or failing to pick up his cutter. And Shandell shooting when he shouldn't have, just like in the championship game's final seconds. Hell, we've all run that cut-for-the-basket play, the one where Jackie breaks free, since the sixth grade. Jackie would've known he'd be the cutter. So he got the ball to me knowing that I'd look for Shandell and that even if he was free, Shandell wouldn't get him the ball.” Damion slammed his palm against his forehead. “Shit!”

  “So, if you picked up on it, wouldn't Coach Haroldson and the rest of the coaching staff have seen the same thing?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. All three of the games we've just looked at were pressure packed, and they all went down to the wire. You've gotta remember, we were college players, not pros. When you're dealing with amateurs, you've got to leave some margin for pressure-induced errors. If Coach Horse or any of his assistants had picked up on anything, they probably would've chalked it up to us crumbling under pressure. Besides, who would've thought that the top college player in the nation would have purposely missed setting a pick or failed to box out or, most important of all, failed to pass the ball to an open man in the biggest game of his life? Shandell was supposed to take that final shot, and he did. The whole country was preprogrammed to expect it. And if he missed on purpose, no one, including me, would have been the wiser.

  “But when you start seeing a recurring theme on the court, a reproducible pattern of missing cutters, failing to box out, and screwing up give-and-gos, you take notice. These tapes say a lot, and what they shout the loudest is that Jackie and Shandell were probably working together, and they were doing it in an unbelievably smooth and calculated fashion. They weren't blowing layups or free throws—nothing that blatant. As the person running the offense, Jackie was simply slowing down the game. Putting a ceiling on the score. And damn it, what Shandell was doing was slapping a governor on his game.”

  “You've lost me, Damion. Want to explain?”

  “Sorry. I'm so upset, I guess I've gotten ahead of myself. What Jackie and Shandell were doing in the subtlest of ways was keeping the rest of
us from scoring. If either one of them made a bad pass, failed to fill a lane, missed setting a pick, or failed to cut for the basket when they should've—what they were actually doing was making certain that their error meant the rest of us couldn't score.”

  “I think I get it. They were keeping the ball out of their other teammates’ hands by making errors in order to control the score, and since most of the time you won anyway, no one would have been the wiser.”

  Damion leaned over and planted a wet kiss on Niki's forehead. “That's it exactly. Their goal was to shave points so that someone betting on the game based not on the outcome but on the gambling point spread would come up a winner. They weren't out to have us lose the game, except with the championship game, where the sky was probably the limit and some smart gambling fixer stood to make the ultimate killing.” Damion stroked his chin. “One thing's for sure: Shandell and Jackie never could've done it by themselves. Someone else had to be in on the fix.”

  “Who?”

  “Garrett Asalon, that big-time Vegas-style gambler and fixer Flora Jean sent Pinkie after, may have gotten into Shandell's head. And I know that Pinkie had a talk with Asalon about possible point-shaving but that he came back empty-handed. I had to force the info out of Flora Jean at the repast, but she finally told me.”

  “So you think Shandell might've gotten himself involved with a mobster?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “You can't go after somebody like that, Damion.”

  “You're right, I can't. But Flora Jean can. And if worse comes to worst, there's always Pinkie.”

  “Damion, do you hear what you're saying? That you're going to sic Flora Jean on some Las Vegas–style mobster who may have killed Shandell, and if that doesn't work, you'll send your own personal hit man after him?” Niki rolled her eyes in disbelief. “The game clock's expired, Damion. You need to let the police handle this. You've already nearly gotten yourself killed, and you've come within a whisker of losing the use of your left arm. Would you please tell Sergeant Townsend what you suspect and give up your vendetta? I'm not interested in being in love with a dead man.”

  The outrage on Niki's face told Damion that now wasn't the time to debate the issue. They could do that after he found Shandell's killer. As he reached over to embrace her, he had the strange sudden sense that Niki was feeling the very same thing that Mavis Sundee must've felt during all the years she'd struggled to keep CJ from being swallowed by the dark shadows of his world. Recognizing that he was far too much like the man who was his godfather, he said, “Can we talk about it later?”

  “There's nothing to talk about, Damion. You know where I stand. I think we should just call it a night, okay?”

  “I guess,” said Damion. As Niki slipped out of his embrace, he had the feeling that, like Mavis before her, Niki didn't really believe he'd give up his quest to find out who had murdered his best friend. There would be time for debate, and for explanation, if it came to that, but for the moment, he realized that silence was the clear winner.

  Chapter 21

  Leotis Hawkins was frustrated at having had to wait over three hours for the lights inside the cabin to finally dim. Now, as he hummed the refrain to the old Ray Charles standard “The Night Time Is the Right Time,” he moved in for the kill. He'd had plenty of time to think about how to settle up with Madrid, and after passing on the idea of charging in and shooting him and the woman he was with—a risky proposition since he didn't know whether Madrid was armed; picking one or both of them off when they came out for more fire-wood—which never occurred; or driving Madrid's Jeep—a vehicle he could certainly have hotwired—into the cabin's porch, forcing Madrid to come out and investigate, he'd decided on a fourth course of action. He'd smoke the fuckers out.

  Dropping to one knee next to the tinder-dry brush he'd piled up and partially jammed beneath the front steps of the porch, he realized that for the first time all day his headache had disappeared. It had taken him a good thirty minutes and half-a-dozen stealthy approaches to assemble the ingredients for his bonfire, and he wasn't quite certain as he lit the pile whether the three-inch-thick Douglas fir steps would actually catch fire. But that didn't matter. The brush fire alone would be enough to get Madrid to forget about the sweet piece of ass he was probably getting and come a-running. He was certain of it.

  As the smell of burning piñon and the musty aroma of smoking Douglas fir filled the air, he knew he'd set up with a game winner. Watching smoke rise, he found himself humming “The Night Time Is the Right Time” once again. Retreating from the fire, he settled in behind a four-foot-high boulder twenty yards away from the steps to wait. He scooped up a couple of baseball-sized rocks, the last of the ingredients in the equation that would get Madrid's attention, and cocked his arm.

  Niki smelled smoke seconds before she heard two loud thuds against the front of the cabin. Suspecting that a fireplace log was responsible for the smoke and that a tree limb had likely fallen onto the porch, she sat up in bed and gently nudged the peacefully sleeping Damion.

  “What?” Damion sat up, looking disoriented.

  “I think the fire's restarted. I smell smoke. And a tree limb may have fallen on the porch. I heard a couple of loud thuds. Better go check.”

  Looking puzzled, Damion sniffed the air. “I thought I banked that fire.” Shaking his head, he slipped out of bed and into the pair of faded CSU warmup sweats at his feet.

  Admiring the muscular upper body of the man who'd earlier sent her to new sexual heights, Niki said, “Guess you didn't, Mr. Eagle Scout.” She winked and wagged an index finger at him playfully.

  Damion pointed back and smiled. “When I get back I'll show what a Boy Scout can do, Ms. Estaban.”

  “Promise?”

  “Count on it.” He headed for the bedroom door, inhaling the increasingly strong scent of burning piñon. As he looked back to see Niki buried beneath the covers, he ran his tongue back and forth along the inside of his lower teeth, a nervous habit he'd had since his early teens that seemed to surface whenever he was stumped by something that failed to make sense—like Shandell's murder, fires that mysteriously restarted, and things that went bump in the night.

  The aromatic smell filling the air seemed much too strong to be coming from a couple of rekindled logs, and as he walked down the hallway that led to the great room, he wondered whether the cabin, or maybe even the surrounding forest, might be on fire.

  Stepping into the great room, he glanced out of one of the room's floor-to-ceiling windows to see flames and a rising plume of smoke perfectly framed by the window. As he turned to run and get a fire extinguisher from an emergency cabinet in the kitchen, he glanced back toward the window and realized that there was no smoke outside the adjacent window. Torn between retrieving the fire extinguisher and determining the fire's source, he raced to the second window and stared out into blackness, thinking all the time that he was wasting precious seconds trying to determine the source of the fire instead of simply putting it out. Mumbling, “Shit,” he finally ran to the kitchen, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and headed for the front door. He was about to open the door when Niki screamed behind him, “Damion, the cabin's on fire!”

  Looking confused but feeling somehow strangely fortunate that Niki had stopped his mad rush out the front door, Damion stared at the fire again. Nudging Niki to the floor, he whispered, “Shhhh.”

  “Damion, we're on fire!”

  “Yeah, but the fire's acting too much like it's man-made. And that thud you heard earlier—where'd it come from? I want you to go back to the bedroom and lock the door.”

  “Damion, are you crazy?”

  “Go back and lock the bedroom door, Niki! And take one of your uncle's shotguns in there with you.”

  Niki stood naked and speechless, watching the determined look in Damion's eyes. It was a fearless look she'd seen before. One that said, I'll take the game-winning shot; just get me the damn ball.

  “Damion, is there someone outside?
”

  “Now, Niki!”

  Shivering, not from cold but from fear, Niki headed for her uncle's gun case. When she glanced back to see Damion taking his antique long-barreled Colt Peacemaker out of the box his game tapes had been in, her heart sank. As he spun the chamber on the hundred-year-old six-shooter with his thumb, she knew that there was nothing she could do to stop him from doing things his way.

  Damion headed for the back door of the cabin, reasoning that if someone were waiting out front, he might surprise them with an end-around maneuver. As he prepared to step out into the moonlit darkness, he had the eerie feeling that he'd stood in the exact same place scores of times before. There was no reason to believe that if someone had started the fire to smoke him and Niki out, they couldn't be waiting for him at the back door. Nonetheless, dressed only in sweatpants and with his gun at the ready, he stepped out onto the soft, damp ground. There was no one. For a split second he found himself thinking that maybe he was crazy. That standing there in the cold, half naked, toting a six-gun in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other, he'd lost his ability to reason. Then he heard it. Not the sound of a crackling fire or the noise made by some forest animal running for cover but the low, muffled sound of what he swore could only be someone humming.

  As he moved barefoot and in a crouch toward the sound, protected by the wraparound porch's three-foot-high, ivy-laden river-rock superstructure, he could see that the fire was limited to his side of the porch. What he couldn't determine in the semidarkness was whether the porch, the steps, or simply the pile of brush that he could now clearly make out was burning. He knew for certain, however, that no matter the source, it would be difficult for the fire to consume the heat-treated, fire-retardant, three-inch-thick Douglas fir porch steps and decking, which meant he had some time.