$200 and a Cadillac

by Fingers Murphy

  Hank watched Lugano shouting instructions to his team and fending off parental suggestions. He looked completely out of his element. Occasionally someone would shout something from the bleachers and Lugano would look over. Sometimes he would shout something back, sometimes not.

  They watched a pinch-hitter walk up to the plate while a scrawny kid got ready to run. Hank watched Ron move as he gave the scrawny one directions. Biceps strained the fabric of his shirt. Lugano still worked out. He could still put up a fight. Hank knew he would need to make a clean hit. Stay away from the guy.

  There was a moment of stillness as Ron and the kid watched the ball careen through the air before the loud crack of the bat sent it flying off into left field. The scrawny kid took off. The outfielder chased the ball, but it was no use. It was gone.

  The parents screamed as the kid rounded third and slid into home. Hank and Janie clapped along with the commotion. Hank leaned over and said, “That was a quick score.”

  Janie smiled and said, “We should all be so lucky in life.”

  Hank laughed. “Life ain’t like baseball. In life, the quick scores always come with a price.”

  “Well, I could sure use one,” she said. “Just to get the hell out of town. Whatever the price.”

  Hank saw Ron talking to one of the parents and smiling at some of the others—too much time facing the crowd. Hank realized it was time to go. He couldn’t run the risk of Lugano recognizing him right there on the bleachers. It was twenty years since they met. The chances were slim. Hank wondered if he would have recognized Lugano if he hadn’t had the photographs to remind him. It was hard to imagine. Still, on the off chance, he had to get out of there. Surprise was his whole advantage.

  He turned to Janie and said, “Why don’t we grab some beers and go check out this monument everyone keeps mentioning?”

  She smiled, “You must drive a bitchin’ Camaro.”

  On the way back to the car they passed the sheriff walking from the parking lot toward the baseball field. Mickey smiled when he saw the two of them together. “Stay away from this guy,” he said to Janie, “or at least don’t let him drive you anywhere.”

  “If he’s driving, I’ll be on coyote alert.”

  Mickey laughed, and then asked Hank, “You ever going to actually get your survey work done out there?”

  “We’re headed to the monument right now, Sheriff.”

  “Hell, I know what kind of work goes on out there at night. People around here are lucky I have an enlightened approach to law enforcement.”

  “Well,” Hank thought for a second, “there are lots of ways to keep the peace.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Mickey nodded to them and resumed his walk toward the baseball diamond. He wondered about the two of them. A strange pair, certainly, but he supposed Janie needed the entertainment. He turned back to see them, but they were already gone. Instead, Mickey saw the two guys from Southern Petroleum hoofing it across the lot toward the baseball game. Fantastic.

  Mickey wanted them out of his town. They gave him a bad feeling, at least the gung-ho former agent did. The other guy just seemed like a lackey along for the ride, taking orders and staying out of trouble. He wasn’t sure if they’d seen him, but he turned around and kept walking anyway.

  They caught up to him at the backstop. Mickey liked to linger behind home plate, watching the pitches come in. Despite the commotion of the parents on the bleachers, he could feel them coming up behind him. Agent Asshole stood a few feet away, watching the game, pretending not to notice him. And then, when he caught Mickey looking at him out of his peripheral vision, the agent turned and smiled, like they were old drinking buddies.

  “Hey, Sheriff, didn’t see you there. We just came out to catch a little of the game.” He gave Mickey a shit-eating grin and nodded. Just a good old boy, out for an evening with the locals, trying too damned hard to be nice. Mickey could see it was hurting the guy.

  “Well, enjoy the game, boys.” Mickey smiled back and moved on around the backstop, over to the red team, where he mingled with the kids on the bench. He had to watch where he stepped, there was equipment scattered everywhere: gloves, bats, balls, and empty soda cans. “You guys ought to clean some of this stuff up,” he told them. But there was nothing doing. The team had two outs and their worst guy was at bat. Tension was high.

  Mickey watched Ron yell encouragement to the batter. Eye on the ball. Concentrate. Follow through. All of that and more, but it was no help. The kid struck out and the inning was over. Mickey’s eyes met Ron’s as the kids gathered around their coach, awaiting instructions before taking the field. Ron gave him a hesitant smile and a slight nod. The moment of the gesture, it struck Mickey as odd, though he couldn’t say why.

  Although they had spoken many times, it was always vapid talk about baseball. The kind of idle conversation two people make when they have no reason to speak at all other than the simple fact that they happened to be in the same place, over and over. Ron Grimaldi was the baseball coach for one of the town’s little league teams. Mickey O’Reilly liked baseball and watched most of the practices and all of the games. It would only be right to chat once in awhile. But Ron Grimaldi’s glance held a sudden flash of energy, and a measure of restraint that Mickey could not place.

  Mickey felt an irritation come over him. Perhaps it was the oil company guys, coming into his office, demanding his attention, he couldn’t say. But for whatever reason, he no longer felt like baseball. He felt like nothing. He wanted to be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence, away from his job, away from the job of enforcing rules in a place that had no use for them.

  Mickey strolled back around the backstop, passed the two guys from the oil company, and stood for a moment on the other side of the field. He noticed that the agent, Victor Jones, paid no attention to him this time, and he was glad the guy didn’t seem to notice him slipping away. Mickey lingered for another moment, watching the game go on, watching another inning come to a close, progressing ceaselessly toward its conclusion in accordance with the collection of rules that made it a game at all.

  Perhaps that was the attraction. Baseball had rules. And even though there were rules—nine innings, three outs per team per inning—you still never knew what any actual game would be like. An observer only knew that the game would progress in accordance with the rules. The particulars of each game depended on circumstance. But the rules themselves required a certain order that transcended the particulars. If you wanted to play, you agreed to the rules. Violate the rules and you get penalized, or you can’t play anymore. Unlike life, Mickey thought.

  In life, everything is circumstantial and you’re simply born into it. Nobody asks if you agree to the rules before hand. And in fact, there aren’t any rules anyway. Certainly, there are loose collections of laws that people are supposed to follow and people like Mickey are supposed to enforce. But get people alone in the middle of nowhere—or in the middle of a war zone—and ask them what the rules are. It’s a ridiculous question. People do what they have to do. The strongest or the luckiest survive. Law is about power and nothing more. The guy with the biggest stick gets to say what the rules are. Mickey felt the weight of his gun on his belt. Not much of a stick in a town like Nickelback.

  The same thoughts had haunted him since the war. Though he was generally able to dismiss them, sometimes they came over him in a wave and sucked him under. What was the purpose of his life? Why work in law enforcement if he thought there were no laws? Or that all law was mere artifice? Mickey like to believe he was more benevolent, more understanding of the true horrors of life, and that this made him better at deciding when things really deserved punishment. He thought again of the kid’s rotting body in the desert, the buzzard with the ruptured stomach, the temporary madness in Paul Kramer’s eyes as he attacked the bird. Mickey shook his head and turned to go.

  Victor stood behind the backstop and stared, a cold feeling coming over him. I know I’ve seen that coach somewhere, V
ictor kept thinking to himself. The feeling nagged at him as he studied the profile. It wasn’t from his time in California, but from before, back in New York, somewhere in his past. Victor’s face went slack as he concentrated, flipping back through the mental Rolodex. Was he an agent? Someone from the Bureau? A friend of his wife’s from somewhere? He couldn’t place the face.

  “What are you spacing out for?” Tom nudged him. “We need to find a place to eat. I think there’s a Chinese place near the motel.”

  After another minute, Victor said, “You see the coach of the red team?”

  “The Italian guy?”

  “Yeah. I know him from somewhere.” Then he thought about it. The Italian guy, sure, it was someone from one of his cases. Victor started going through them, starting with the last one, the biggest of his career, the Fazioli case. Who was involved? Victor watched the coach pick up a bat and demonstrate a swing to one of the kids. And there it was. Bingo. Plain as day.

  “Hey Victor? What’s got into you?”

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  “What’s that?”

  Victor turned to Tom. “You remember that backpack the sheriff was looking at?”

  “Yeah.”

  Victor turned back and stared at the coach, trying to be certain. Victor shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll be damned.”

  XXIII

  Back at the Super 8, in the dim light of the motel room, Victor rifled through one of the bags he’d brought in from the car. Tom stood near the door, confused and watching with trepidation. Victor hadn’t been right since the seventh inning. Something about the coach had freaked him out. The way he kept staring at the guy, and then demanded that they tail him after the game, following him home, watching him get out of his truck and go into his little brick house. The source of this strange obsession? Victor wouldn’t say. “I can’t tell you anything, but trust me, we need to know what this guy is up to,” was all he would offer by way of explanation.

  Now he was racing around the room, arranging the stuff from the car, assembling a small pile of gear—the night vision goggles, a flashlight, a small tool kit—and stuffing it into a bag. Victor stood in the center of the room and patted his pockets with his hands, as though he’d forgotten something. Then he rummaged through another pile, came up with a pocketknife and opened the blade. He grinned at Tom as the light from the metal glimmered off the ceiling and said, “Let’s go flush this animal.”

  Then he bolted over to the nightstand, cut the cord on the telephone, and tossed the telephone and the knife into the bag. Victor slung the bag over his shoulder and threw the keys at Tom on his way out the door. “C’mon, let’s go. You’re driving.”

  The keys hit Tom in the chest and fell to the floor. He checked his shirt for a mark and then snatched the keys up and followed Victor down the stairs to the car. Tom was nearly begging. “Look man, you’ve got to tell me what this is all about.”

  When they were in the car, Victor spoke in a calm voice that resonated with his underlying exasperation. “There’s something you’ve got to understand. As a retired FBI agent, I’ve got a lot of secret information that I’m privy to and that you’re not.” Victor took the phone from the bag and unscrewed the mouthpiece, removing the speaker and screwing the cap back on. The tone of his voice became more controlled, measured, as though he was giving a lecture to the new recruits at the academy.

  “The role of a federal agent is one of utmost responsibility. We are entrusted with a wide range of national secrets that we cannot divulge to anyone. This duty remains with us even after our tenure at the agency has ended.” Victor had retrieved the knife and was stripping the wires at the severed end of the phone cord. “If my hunch proves to be correct, I’ll be able to disclose what I know. Until then, you’ll have to trust me. After all,” Victor smiled at him as he twisted the loose ends of the bare wires, “I’m a professional.”

  Tom sat in the driver’s seat with the car facing the street. “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Back to the coach’s house.”

  “Good God.” Tom shook his head and pulled into the street, resigning himself.

  As they drove, Victor used the knife to pry the bell from the bottom of the phone casing. He held it up like a prize when it finally came loose. “Ah yes, now the little bugger is silent.”

  “You’re destroying that phone. They’re going to bill you for it.”

  “Tom,” Victor began, with an impatient huff. “Don’t you understand? We’ve commandeered this equipment. We’re going to be heroes by the time this is over. This is real law enforcement here. Not like that shit we spend our days doing back at the office. This is the real McCoy. We’re doing society a favor right now, and you don’t even see it. They don’t send heroes a bill for the phone, Tom.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re not in the FBI anymore.” Tom was nearly shouting.

  “You see?” Victor shook his head, as though overcome by a sense of tragedy. “That’s the problem with people. That’s what’s wrong with society. Don’t you understand that we’re all charged with a duty to enforce and uphold the law? Did you know, Tom, that you and I can arrest people, just like the police? You know, that’s not just some kind of bullshit you see in the movies. When you see a crime, as a citizen, you have the power to arrest. I would go so far as to say you have a duty to arrest.”

  Victor jammed the phone back in the bag and dropped the mangled bell on the floor of the car. He turned to Tom and continued. “Shit, man. Don’t you see these distinctions are meaningless? You’re in the FBI, you’re not in the FBI, you’re a cop, you’re not a cop. It doesn’t fucking matter. We all owe each other an obligation to make society a better place, and we do that by upholding and helping to enforce the law. That’s what we’re doing here. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know. Just trust me about the coach, Tom.”

  Victor went silent for a minute as Tom drove. Then he added, “Besides, we’ve got to do something. Did you see that sheriff? That hack couldn’t solve the Sunday crossword, let alone a murder. We’ll show him how it’s done.”

  Tom listened and shook his head, squinting at the street signs in the darkness. The roads at the edge of town had no streetlights, and he hadn’t been paying close attention when they followed the coach home the first time. They’d had to linger far behind in order to avoid being caught. It was enough of a challenge just keeping their eyes on him, they hadn’t had time to memorize the roads.

  Victor said, “I think it’s up here, on this next block.”

  Tom slowed the car. The street looked familiar, but all the streets looked the same. Run down houses on oddly shaped lots. There were no sidewalks, and the lawns—which were mostly packed patches of dirt and debris—ended where the street cut through them. Many of the homes had old cars up on blocks, or strange pieces of machinery abandoned at the edge of their lots. Old oil equipment of some kind, Tom supposed. All in all, it was a poor neighborhood, in every sense of the word.

  Tom thought he saw the coach’s truck at the house up at the end of the block. “Is that it?”

  “Keep driving past it, we’ll see. Just go around the block like normal.”

  They drove past and could see the truck parked out front. Inside, there were lights on, but they couldn’t see any movement. Victor studied the exterior of the house as they turned the corner and headed up the block. When they were fifty yards up the street, he told Tom to stop the car and shut it off. They were in a dead patch, between houses, with no one around and no light anywhere.

  “Alright,” Victor whispered, as though there was a sudden need to be very quiet, even while they were still in the car. “Now I want you to follow me. Just go where I go. Once we get over to the house, the only thing I need you to do is stand guard. If anyone comes along, let me know—but be quiet about it—don’t yell or do anything stupid like a fake birdcall or nothing. Just a tap on the shoulder will be sufficient.”

  Victor rifled through the bag again, feeling each item,
ensuring everything was there. Then he slipped the night vision goggles on and peered into the darkness toward the house. Tom wanted to look through them too, but didn’t ask. When Victor was done he put them back in the bag. Tom could hear Victor pull the latch on the car door and start to open it. Tom did the same. Victor gave him a nod, “Let’s go.”

  They slipped out and stood next to the car. Victor closed the door slowly, pushing it lightly until there was a soft click. Tom did the same. Then Victor was off, moving quickly through the darkness along the edge of the road. They stopped at the rear corner of the chain link fence that marked the outer edge of the backyard and stood for a second.

  Tom looked around behind them and across the street. Everything was dark and lifeless. On the other side of the street the houses became scattered, as though the town officially ended and everything became dispersed and random, off the city grid. There were lights glowing in the desert, marking the houses, but they were all far enough away that they didn’t matter. Victor nudged him.

  “Pay attention,” he whispered. “What we want is on the outside edge of the house, toward the street. We’ll have to be quick because we’re right out in the open.”

  Tom asked, “What is it we want, anyway?”

  “You’ll see.” Victor’s grin was visible through the night. “A little trick from the old days.”

  Then Victor was off again, rushing along the fence line and then crouching at the corner of the house. He shuffled a few feet down the brick wall to where the electricity meter was, as well as the gas line and the telephone box. Tom stood at the corner of the house, trying to be the lookout, but watching Victor the whole time.