Cold Crossover

by T. R. Kelly

  “Together with Bart Knight? Bart Knight, too, Mitch? You know that call I just got? Well, the ME says there was more than Jim Dolan in there, Mitch. They found other body parts in that tank, Mitch. And they happen to belong to Bart Knight!”

  Harvey clenched his fists and started at Mitch, then hesitated as the cop by the door closed in.

  “Do you want to take a break, Harvey?” the cop said.

  “No,” Harvey said. “Let’s keep this moving.”

  Moore continued, without any prodding, as if he didn’t want to omit even the slightest detail.

  “Can you imagine?” Moore said. “That stupid moonshiner wanted to part-out a ’57 Chevy. Part it out! Thing is a classic and would bring beaucoup bucks, man. Now, I might understand chopping the Pontiac, but the Chev? Gimme a break. When he popped the hood to begin yanking the engine, I guess I hit him too hard with a crowbar. Cut him up in a hurry with the shop tools. Bagged him. That dog seemed to like the blood, though. Not much to mop.”

  Sheriff McCreedy slumped back down in a chair. back down. Harvey collapsed into a folding chair near the door and settled his arms across his middle.

  “And Linn?” I started softly. Then, feeling my anger, “Just how hard did you hit him?”

  “That frickin’ Cheese. Been useless ever since he cost us the state title.”

  I jumped to my feet.

  “Easy, Ernie,” McCreedy said.

  “Yeah, easy, big fella,” Moore said. “Not cool to swing on a guy with cuffs.”

  I dropped my fists to my sides and groaned loud enough to draw stares. But I sat back down.

  “So, he’s renting there for months and questions every move I make,” Moore said. “He stayed a lot in North Fork and Seattle, so I did most of my digging when he wasn’t around. Last week, he comes out heading for a game in town and he sees me lifting something heavy out of the bucket of my backhoe near that big madrona tree. You know him. Always the damn helper. As if I needed help or something. Anyway, turns out it wasn’t a rock I dug up, but one of the saddlebags. It rips open, and out comes this gold. His eyes about came out of his head!”

  Mitch went on to explain that he tried to convince Linn to keep the discovery quiet, lest the sandspit turn into another Sutter’s Mill.

  “Gaawwd, I argued with that kid for more than an hour,” Moore said. “Said I’d pay him a lot of money to keep his mouth shut. He just couldn’t see my way of doin’ things. He was adamant about telling Barbara about the gold. Said he told his stupid girlfriend about everything and this was no different. I couldn’t afford to have word get out about this.”

  I could feel the heat in my face. I flexed my hands. “Then why not just kill him at Dolan’s place?” I said. “Why go to the trouble of staging a suicide if the goal was to protect your pot of gold?”

  Moore leered my way and raised his lip. “I needed to see him suffer. Yank the life out of him. Like he did to me and my money.”

  Before I could take a step, Harvey slammed a forearm into my chest. He turned to Moore. “So then what? You followed him to Seattle?”

  “Yeah, I followed him. Told me he had a game at Montlake. I was afraid he would spill the beans, and I’d be ripped off again—the little girls had my ruby, and I had squat for all my work. I really didn’t want to share my find with that loser kid. I just stewed sitting there in a dark corner of the parking lot, waiting for him to come out.

  “When he finally showed, I blasted him over the head, wrestled him into the trunk of my rental car, and then drove his Subaru wagon on to the Bremerton ferry. I was lucky Barbara didn’t see me because I saw her turning into the Montlake gym parking lot as I was leaving. I’m sure he couldn’t wait to tell her about my gold –”

  “Hold it right there,” I said. “How did you know Linn would leave the gym and go to Bremerton that night?”

  “I got my sources, asshole. You ain’t the only one with a network, ya know.”

  “Difference is my sources are legal.”

  Moore scoffed and swayed in his seat, taxing his chair. “Since you just gotta know, I stopped for petrol early that morning at the Shell station. Kelvin told me Cheese had a doubleheader. Montlake then Bremerton. Said he was worried about the kid, workin’ and playin’ too hard. I told Kelvin he should be worried about him, if you get my drift.”

  The room was silent. All eyes were on Moore.

  Harvey broke the quiet. “So, you drove the car onto the boat. What did you do next?”

  “’Bout halfway over, I jammed his basketball and jersey into his gym bag and tossed it over the rail,” Moore said. “It was so cold and blowy that nobody was on the car deck to see me. Then I locked the station wagon up, walked off the boat in Bremerton, and waited in the ferry terminal for the tow truck to haul away the station wagon. When the boat was cleared for the return trip, I lined up with the other walk-on passengers for the return sailing.

  “When I got back to the Seattle side, I took a cab to the Montlake Gym, picked up the rental car, and drove it back up to the lake. I drove down Dolan’s driveway, backed the car as close as I could to the septic tank, took off all his clothes and shoved them in.”

  “Was your plan to dispose of Linn the same way you got rid of Jim Dolan’s body?”

  Mitch sneered. “Was to begin with,” he said. “Given what happened, I probably should have followed through.”

  “So, what changed your mind?” Harvey said.

  “You know, all I could think about when I saw him coming out of the Montlake gym that night was how he lost my state title. Not the gold, that game! It was right there for him to win, and he couldn’t do it. I mean, this was state, and I bet just about every dime I had on the Crabs to win. I needed to have him see what he’d done. See and remember.”

  “So, that was what the television was for in the cabin,” Sheriff McCreedy said. “And the tape machine?”

  “Bingo, big guy,” Mitch hollered. “Copied the last five minutes of that game dozens of times on to a five-hour VHS. Took him to the shack and set him up with his own tape session. Told him to break down his stinkin’ performance in front of the biggest crowd our school’s ever had. Came back every few days to check on him.”

  My mouth was open, but nothing came out. No one said a word.

  “And the noose?” Harvey said. “Was the plan to use that rope in that room?”

  “Thought he might like to go out knowing the state championship game was the last thing he ever saw,” Mitch said. “Too bad you guys got there first. He was probably just a few hours away from swinging above his last shot. Then, into a sleeping bag he’d go with some cement shoes, and into a deep spot in the river.”

  I leapt with such speed and purpose than none of the men in the room could stop me before I landed a right-left combination to Mitch Moore’s face. I felt his cheekbones shift under both punches before two huge uniform arms were wrapped around my middle, lifting my feet off the ground.

  “You still don’t get it, Coach!” Mitch wailed. “He had an open shot—his shot—and he couldn’t make it? C’mon! It was state, man. state!”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  9:30 a.m., Friday, February 11, 1982

  Dr. Elmer Crehan’s New England accent and ubiquitous bowtie clashed comfortably with the flannel shirts and casual conversation of downtown North Fork.

  While waiting for the MRI results, he ran me through the same tests in his exam room that Dr. Timoteo Mesa performed in the parking lot of the Gas ’N Go—rubber hammer for reflexes, pizza wheel, and safety pin for sensation. I was grateful to have completed my trip inside the claustrophobic MRI scanner, a huge donut with a tube-like coffin on one side that allows only inches of clearance and no body movement while being bombarded by magnetic vibrations that sound like the unhappy union of a jackhammer and ancient popcorn popper.

  A young radiologist knocked and looped through the room without waiting for a greeting, an oversized manila folder under one arm of his creased white lab coat. The flat pa
ckage was split open at the top, exposing huge sheets of black film.

  “The written report’s inside.”

  “Thanks, Sam,” Dr. Crehan said, yanking the first image from the folder with one hand and jamming it into the clips of a wall-mounted X-ray viewer. He drew closer to the slide, then jerked it down and instantly replaced it with another. “That first one didn’t show us much of anything, but this one does. See the difference in this area here?” He pointed to my upper neck.

  The two slides looked exactly the same to me. It wasn’t until he pointed to a few tiny bubble-like areas in my spinal cord that I could see any perceivable difference. Once I looked away and then returned my gaze to the area, I had a difficult time finding the bubbles again. “Well, I think so. How can you see this stuff so quickly?”

  “Takes a while,” Dr. Crehan said, flipping the frames into the light and then onto the countertop below faster than a Las Vegas dealer. “Here’s a better one, a view looking down. From the top of your head.”

  I felt strangely clueless, needing an expert to explain pictures of my own body.

  “You’ve got a few lesions in that cervical area; a couple more down a bit lower in the thoracic,” he said. “My guess is that these are having a lot to with the numbness in your extremities.”

  “Lesions?” I dropped back lower on the table. Sounded like nasty critters that needed to be cut out immediately. “What do you mean, lesions?”

  “Tiny areas where the stuff insulating your nerves is breaking down. It’s a fatty cover called myelin. Think of it as the black and white stuff that covers the wires in a wall outlet.”

  He continued to swiftly shuffle the slides, this time checking out various images and angles of my brain. Given some of the lighter dots, there appeared to be more negatives ahead.

  “Now, these don’t bother me,” Dr. Crehan said. “No vision problems, right? Other symptoms?”

  “That’s correct,” I said. “Only strange stuff has been in my hands and feet.”

  “A lot of people, especially men, have these spots in their head and they never bother them at all. MEs cut ’em open after they’re dead, see the lesions all the time.”

  At that moment, I didn’t care about dead people and surprising factoids discovered in autopsies. “So, what does all this mean and what do we do about it?” I said.

  “Means I’m fairly certain you’ve got multiple sclerosis,” he said. “Those periodic symptoms in your hands and feet? Known as relapsing remitting, they come and go. I’m betting they’re caused by those lesions in your spinal cord.”

  It wasn’t cancer, but I knew it wasn’t good. Stunned, I laid back on the table, hands covering my eyes, harboring images of wheelchairs and walkers. Being carried into Washington High’s Crab Pot and secured to a seat behind the scorer’s table with the aid of a guardian. Or wheeled to a remote corner of the floor with a blanket on my lap, hiding a catheter and urine bag. Besides, I’d always been an ornery and nasty patient, upset that others had to care for me.

  “How long will I be able to scout kids, fish?” I said. “I was even thinking about getting back into coaching.”

  “Can’t say for sure, but how’s the rest of your life sound?” Dr. Crehan said. “Wouldn’t plan on major changes; probably won’t stop you from doing a thing. You might have to adjust an activity down the road. But, like I say, we just don’t know how this is going to go.”

  The relatively upbeat prognosis startled me nearly as much as black cloud that immediately arrived above the diagnosis. “I thought MS ...”

  “ ... hit young women in their twenties and thirties?” Dr. Crehan said. “Yeah, it does, a lot of the time. But it looks like you got it, so let’s deal with it. Suggest starting you on one of the new drugs soon. Getting some pretty good results, not like the old days. Back then, all we could do was plan a healthy diet.”

  While I couldn’t be certain, the first known onset of any lack of feeling occurred at Tony’s just hours before I learned of Linn’s disappearance. At the time, I chalked it up to the stress and anxiety. “Seems the initial numbness took place around the time I got some surprising news. Could that have started all this?”

  He placed my chart on the table next to me and conducted a cursory eye test, asking me to follow his ballpoint pen as he moved to different areas in front of my face. “Usually it’s not started by one acute incident, but we really don’t know.” He slid the pen back into his chest pocket. “I’d like to do another test. Get a spinal tap, check the clarity of your fluid. It might be some help, tell us more.”

  “I’d be up for anything that could help tell us what I’m dealing with.”

  “The MRI is the main indicator. Guys over fifty usually don’t get MS. You’re what? Fifty-one? Puts you at the bottom of the bell curve. Your symptoms, the period between incidents, could also be very different.”

  I gripped both sides of the exam table and stared into his eyes, amazed at the thickness of his frames and lenses. “Can I still play hoop on Saturday mornings?”

  “Play hoop whenever you want! Symptoms tend to exacerbate as body temperature rises. Be aware of your feet, hands. Don’t want you tripping or dropping passes.”

  “Most of those guys say I can’t catch anyway. So, what’s next with this?”

  “Let me ask my nurse when we can do this spinal tap. Maybe later today, if you’re available. Uncomfortable, but fairly quick.”

  “OK, I can be around. Then what?”

  “Then I was thinking about calling that guy at the Seattle Tribune. Smithson, is it? Tell him I heard on the street that Ernie Creekmore’s getting back into coaching.”

  I snorted, unexpectedly flattered and surprised. “Why don’t you hold off on that announcement for a while,” I said. “Especially after this.”

  “This,” Dr. Crehan said, “should not make a difference.”

  “Do you think some school or club is going to hire a coach with MS?”

  “Why not? If they know, they shouldn’t really care. Especially if they can get someone like you.”

  “Ignorance may not be bliss,” I said.

  “Thomas Gray,” Dr. Crehan said. “English poet. And he didn’t exactly put it that way.”

  **

  I headed back downtown toward the office. The session with Dr. Crehan produced a measure of clarity and understanding while also igniting a definite fear of the unknown. My way of handling similar feelings in the past was to start with a healthy dose of sugar, so I cruised the Calico Cupboard just off First Street. I could smell the fresh cinnamon rolls from the sidewalk and smiled at the cute baker as she inserted a new rack in the window display case. As I stood at the rear of the four-person counter line, I spotted Ronnie Garcia drinking coffee and buried in a newspaper at a table in the middle of the café. I ordered a cinnamon roll and coffee.

  “Breaking down those NBA box scores?” I said, approaching his chair from behind. His long black hair curled just above his shoulders. A long-sleeved linen shirt was rolled to his elbows.

  Startled, he had the look of someone trying to identify a face from a different place and time. He rose to shake hands. “Coach Creekmore! Man, it’s good to see you. How ya doin’ these days?”

  I smiled, struck by mounting number of possible responses to that question. “Good, good. Thanks. Actually had been looking for you earlier this week.”

  “Sit, sit. Please.” He removed his rain slicker from the seat of the facing chair and draped it over the back of his. “I guess you weren’t the only one. My dad mentioned that to me last night when I got back to town and stopped by his place. Said it had something to do with Linn?”

  “Yes, well, I was surprised that you guys ended up on the same Montlake team in Seattle,” I said. “Actually headed down there one night to see you. Kind of an interesting coincidence after all these years.”

  He took a sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair. “Actually, it was more on purpose. Coach, the whole deal with Linn and me, there’s a l
ot to it,” Ronnie said. “We weren’t best buds, didn’t hang out with the same crowd, but we still talked, remained friendly. Until, well, until that day on the mountain when he got hurt.”

  “Remember it well,” I said. “Hotter ’n hell. Best week of the summer, and he ends up in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, well, he never said anything, but that was because of me. That knee injury could have been avoided had I just done my job.”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t put what happened on yourself.”

  “Yeah, I can. And I’ll never forgive myself.” He took another sip of coffee and crossed his forearms on the table. “That day, we were paired as choker partners. Crew started early, and we were all pretty well fried by mid-morning. The sun was a demon; we went through most of our water by ten a.m. When the whistle blew for lunch, we scrambled to any shade we could find. When I found a spot between two downed trees, I was so gassed I didn’t even eat. Closed my eyes and didn’t wake up—until I heard Linn screaming. He’d set a choker around a log, but I wasn’t there to relay the mainline pull. When the cable moved, the log rotated and caught his knee.”

  “I knew you were partners in the woods that summer, but I didn’t know about ...”

  “Nobody knew. Still don’t. I mean, I ruined the guy’s career because I was asleep! Could never look him in the eye after that. I remember when he woke up in the hospital, leg high in this huge suspended sling. I couldn’t even talk, I just sat there. So what does he do? Says ‘Don’t worry about it, Ronnie. Those cables can be unpredictable.’ After what I did? Are you kiddin’ me?”

  Our waitress darted around the counter and slid a plate in front of me followed by a mug of steaming coffee. The pastry was big enough to feed a starting five.