“You wanna sign my bat?”
Glancing over his shoulder, Lofton saw that Tenace was looking at him, staring back. Closer by, a few yards away, the kids were getting loud in the dirt. Lofton’s kid lost another quarter.
Lofton turned the bat in his hands. The girl had been collecting signatures. There was Sparks’s. Large, looping letters. Apparently the girl had gotten his signature before he left town. Most of the other players had signed, too. Banks. Barker. Lynch. Carpenter. He studied the last one longest, staring at the letters.
“He’s going to the majors next season, you know; maybe it will be worth something,” the girl said.
As he turned, Lofton saw the kid lose again. Though the kid didn’t seem to mind, it bothered Lofton. He remembered how he’d abandoned the kid last night, when he was shaking in the stands, and now he was trying to get the kid involved again, sending him off with another note. He became very conscious of the bat in his hands, the good feel of the wood grain against his palms.
“Can I have this for a minute?” he asked.
“Why?” The girl was suspicious now.
“I want to show it to the boy over there. He’d get a kick out of it.”
The blonde looked sidelong at her friend. Suddenly she spoke to the brunette in Spanish. Lofton was surprised. The girls laughed. The blonde went up on her toes and whispered in Lofton’s ear. She touched the front of his shirt, clutching it lightly with two fingers. “Okay, but there’s something I have to show you, too,” she whispered, and then backed away. The blonde laughed again. The brunette turned away.
“Doesn’t she speak English?”
“Not to scouts,” said the blonde, and she twirled away, following her friend. “Bring us our bat back soon.” She gave Lofton a long, silly backward glance—the look of a teenager teasing an adult. He wondered, again, if he should bother trying to contact Amanti. He looked to the outfield. It was calm there; things made sense. The fielders stood in their positions, hands on knees, feeling the good sun on their necks. They waited for the batter to swing.
Glancing back to the press box, he saw that Tenace was no longer there. Odd, he had never known Tenace to leave the box, not till the end of the game. He had to keep track of balls, strikes, hits—all for the record, no matter the score. Now only Rhiner sat in the box, a solitary figure behind the wire mesh.
The kids paid no attention to the field but went on playing their game. Still holding the girls’ bat, intending to show it to the kid, he watched while the boy lost the last of his quarters. Reaching into his pocket, Lofton took out five dollars and knelt down with the kids.
“What do you want with us, man?” asked one of the kids.
“I’m going to stake your friend here.”
“That’s not smart.”
Lofton put his hands on the kid’s shoulders, and the kid smiled. Lofton slapped his money on the dirt. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Tenace coming out of the clubhouse. What’s he been up to in there? Lofton had a sick feeling. On his way out, Tenace jostled up against the two girls, pretending it was an accident. Holding his hands to his head, making some joke, then laughing, Tenace was trying to strike up a conversation with the girls. He didn’t appear to be succeeding. Lofton heard a siren in the distance. One of the teenagers playing flip heard it, too.
“More fires.” The teenager smirked.
“Nah, it’s a cop car, not an engine,” another one said.
After listening a moment, Lofton realized the second kid was right. Holyoke’s fire trucks sounded a siren that rose and then died and then rose again, a piercing and falling cry, as the engine rushed down the streets. This noise was not like that. This noise was that of a police car: a steady, insistent wail. The car seemed to be coming in their general direction, toward MacKenzie Field.
After turning his head and saying one last thing to the girls, Tenace shrugged his shoulders and headed over to Lofton.
“How come you’re not up in the box? You got Rhiner keeping score?”
“I just had to run an errand.” Tenace winked. “Wanted to check out those girls you been talking to. Look like sluts to me.”
“Didn’t look like they thought much of you either.”
Outside, the siren was closer. At the last minute, though, as the noise got closer, it suddenly stopped. Trouble a few streets over, Lofton guessed. Looking up at Tenace, he saw that the other man’s face was red, embarrassed.
“No, they liked me fine, Lofton. It’s just those girls, to tell you the truth, I just don’t think they’re your style.”
Below him, Lofton’s kid flipped and missed. The others shuffled quarters up out of the dirt, into their pockets. Then, closer than before, just over the outfield wall, the siren wailed again, a brief, anxious bleat, as if the cop were testing his siren or snapping it for fun. Tenace glanced nervously toward the front gate. Lofton looked, too. Leave, he told himself. Get out of here now.
“What are you up to?” Lofton asked.
“Nothing, pal.” Smiling, pleased with himself again, or pretending to be, Tenace put a hand on his shoulder. “I got to get back up there and do my job, but I tell you those girls aren’t your type. You know, you need someone more intellectual—you know, like that girl down at the library, that little pale-faced one.”
Tenace patted him again, grinning hard, then turned to leave.
“Hey,” said Lofton, “I didn’t know libraries were the kind of place you spent—” Lofton cut himself short. Tenace had walked only a few steps, and Lofton, glancing down at the man’s ass, had seen—riding in the scorer’s pocket, stuck halfway out—the fountain pen Lofton’s own brother had given him back in Colorado. He recognized it instantly, the black pocket clip down the center of the tarnished silver, and he lunged toward Tenace, grabbing him by the back collar with one hand, forgetting that he still held the baseball bat in the other. “You bastard, you’re the one who trashed my room. You been staking me out from the beginning, setting me up all the way around.” Tenace tried to pull himself free. He was a big man, and he pushed hard, so that Lofton lost his balance and his grip. Lofton reached out to grab him again, but the scorer gave him another shove and pulled away quickly, despite his weight, and the kids behind them suddenly let out a scream.
“The cops!” they yelled, and then they scattered, grabbing for the money, Lofton’s kid included. Run, Lofton thought, but he hesitated, taking a step after Tenace, then turning, seeing the cops, watching the kids scamper and disappear. One of the cops was Ryan, homicide. Glancing back, Lofton saw Tenace was gone, working his fat ass up to the press box. Meanwhile, the girls watched: the brunette in her pink blouse, eyes half shut, dim and sultry, and the other girl, who stood twirling a strand of her honey-colored hair between her fingers.
Detective Ryan sauntered toward him slowly. The cop was smug; he was savoring the moment. Lofton gripped the bat tighter in his hands. It must have been Tenace who told them I was here, Lofton thought, patting my back one minute, then sneaking off the next, calling the cops from the clubhouse. Tenace. He wasn’t the type who went down to the library to talk over classics with the woman behind the desk. Tenace had been following him from the beginning, that was clear, and had trashed his room, taken the fountain pen. Everything else fell in place quickly, easily, behind those facts, so that Lofton didn’t have to think about the details: how Tenace had seen him with Amanti here at the park; how Tenace had taken him aside, that day at Barena’s, the day before Golden tracked Lofton down; and how he himself—thinking Tenace nothing more than a deliveryman, clumsily spouting someone else’s message—had mentioned that he was supposed to meet Amanti the next night. True, he had not said where he was going to meet her, or why, but Tenace must have passed the information along to Golden; then Golden had searched Lofton out on his own, waited outside Amanti’s. “Let’s just say,” Golden had said, “that I put a nickel in the jukebox.” So Tenace had been the one gathering information, selling it back and forth, to Brunner, to Golden, to a
nyone who would pay.
Detective Ryan paused in front of Lofton. The cop’s hands hung loosely at his side. His fists were closed.
“I think you made a mistake,” Ryan said. “You’re a murder suspect now. You should have done like you were asked.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Lofton.
Ryan, as he moved to reach for his handcuffs, looked Lofton up and down. Another cop stood at the main gate, but the ballpark kids were taunting him from the street, distracting him just for fun. Lofton’s best chance was across the field at the right field gate, where there was only that old security guard. It would be a long run across the outfield grass.
“You’re a suck-ass, Ryan.”
Ryan’s face dropped. Lofton didn’t hesitate. He came around with the baseball bat and hit Ryan hard in the face. Ryan, a bright burst of blood covering his eyes, dropped to the ground. The blonde’s mouth fell open; the brunette was serene, passive. Lofton jumped the fence and starting running toward the right field gate.
The Carib, halfway into his windup, saw Lofton but did not stop. He followed through and fired at the plate. The bat cracked back, and Lofton got a glimpse of the ball arcing away from Banks’s bat, headed for the left field wall. He saw Banks digging for first, and he could tell, by the crowd noise, that the hit had fallen in. They cheered because Banks had broken up the Carib’s attempt at a no-hitter; then they cheered for Lofton as he ran. He headed toward the old black watchman, ahead at the gate. The guard, Lofton guessed, was dumbfounded, and for a minute Lofton felt good, knowing he had smashed Ryan good, written his story, done everything that it was in his power to do. The running exhilarated him, his lungs felt good and clean, and he pushed himself, stretching his legs as far as they would reach. He thought he heard the crack of the bat again, not once, but twice, three times, impossibly loud, as if the noise had come from inside his bones, his heart. That cop is shooting at me, he guessed; then, before he realized he’d been hit, he was hit again, his neck snapped backward, and the crowd went silent, watching, as he fell against the outfield grass.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Domenic Stansberry
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1200-3
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