by Stephen Frey
The guy frantically pushed open his door and tumbled to the street as Johnny fired two more times. But both shots missed.
Johnny jumped on the Impala’s roof and scrambled across to the driver’s side, aware that the guy had grabbed something from beneath the seat as he tumbled out. Assumed it was a gun. Johnny held the pistol over the side of the car and blindly popped off four more rounds at the spot on the street where he figured the guy was lying, then inched forward and peered down.
The first bullet from below tore through the roof and missed Johnny, but the second caught him in the left shoulder. He screamed and half-slid, half-rolled down the windshield onto the car’s hood as more bullets exploded through the roof. For a split second he saw the guy’s bloodied face through the window of the open driver’s side door. Despite the searing pain in his shoulder, Johnny raised the gun smoothly, aimed, and fired, blowing a hole through the guy’s left lung.
He jumped down to the street, groaning in agony as the impact of hitting the pavement ripped through his body. He hustled around the open door as best he could, gritting his teeth, aware of blood dripping down his chest inside his shirt.
Ricky Strazza lay sprawled on his back in front of Johnny, arms above his head, pistol a few inches from his twitching fingers, a pool of blood spreading out quickly beneath him. His eyes were open, and Johnny thought he saw him take a shallow breath.
“Strazza!” Johnny hissed. He recognized the guy from a meeting in Manhattan a few months ago. “You fucking bastard.”
Strazza’s eyes fluttered shut, but then he groaned and suddenly reached for the pistol lying on the pavement.
Johnny kicked it away quickly, stomped on Strazza’s fingers, breaking two of them, then knelt beside the dying man, making certain to avoid the spreading pool of blood. “Who?” he demanded. “Who?”
Strazza gazed up at Johnny with glassy, melancholy eyes but said nothing.
“Tell me or I’ll make your last few seconds worse than you could even imagine,” Johnny threatened, pulling a pen from his pocket and pressing the sharp tip against one of Strazza’s open eyes. “I’ll push this thing down into your brain so slow, Strazza. Now tell me who.”
“Marconi,” Strazza gasped. “Marconi. Now kill me. Please.”
Marconi. Angelo Marconi. Holy shit.
Johnny stood, aimed carefully, and fired one bullet, this time directly into Strazza’s heart. There could be no chance of him surviving long enough to whisper his assassin’s name into some Good Samaritan’s ear while he or she was kneeling next to him, keeping him company during his last few moments.
Certain Strazza was dead, Johnny stumbled toward the Seville, holding his left forearm in his right hand, his shoulder on fire. He’d been shot before, in the lower leg a few years ago, but this was different. It was a more intense and frightening pain. This was a bullet, not buckshot.
He couldn’t go to a hospital because all emergency room cases involving gunshot wounds had to be reported to the police. He just hoped he could stay conscious long enough to get home. When he reached the Seville, he fell inside behind the steering wheel and took several deep breaths, then finally managed to get the key in the ignition and go, driving one-handed the whole way. Almost losing consciousness several times.
When he got back to his apartment, Johnny applied a dressing to the wound, stumbled to the couch, and fainted.
A few hours later he awoke and managed to make it back to the bathroom, crawling across the floor until he reached the sink, somehow pulling himself to his feet after a few tries. He stood before the sink, wavering unsteadily, gazing at his blurry image in the mirror. Then he gingerly started to remove the dressing he’d applied when he first got home. It was time to change it. Fortunately the bullet had gone straight through, missing bones. But it had done a hell of a job on the soft tissue. He couldn’t move his arm at all. At least it was his left arm.
He pulled the tape back from the sides of the square white dressing, groaning loudly and gritting his teeth so hard he thought they might crack when his chest hairs snagged. Then he pulled the tape from the top of the gauze, and the dressing slowly folded down—still held to his body by the tape at the bottom—revealing a dark red stain on the inside of the gauze and a perfectly round red hole a quarter of an inch in diameter in his shoulder. The wound was oozing now that he was on his feet again.
He closed his eyes and grabbed the sink, dizziness and nausea overtaking him, then slowly sank to his knees. For a full five minutes he knelt on the tiny black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor, hugging the porcelain, sweating profusely, trying not to puke. He desperately wanted to crawl back on the couch and stay there until the pain eased—or he died.
But he had no choice. He had to get out of here. If he wanted to maintain that code of honor. And get the girl.
35
BAD VIBES WERE coming from every corner of the Tarpon locker room as MJ hustled through the door. They’d just lost a 4–3 heartbreaker thanks to Mikey Clemant dropping a routine fly ball to center with the bases loaded and two out in the top of the ninth. The error had allowed the other team to score twice, and the Tarpons had done nothing in the bottom of the ninth—three up three down—and that was that. Game over. End of story.
But it wasn’t. Not for some of the players, anyway.
MJ heard the grumbling as soon as he pushed through the locker room door; he’d been cleaning up the dugout after the loss and was the last one in. The insults grew louder as he spun his combination lock right-left-right and yanked. As he opened the locker, he glanced over at Clemant, who was sitting in front of his. He’d already showered, had a plain white towel wrapped around his waist. Clemant was closer to his hecklers so he had to be hearing the insults: loser, quitter, steel hands, asshole, moron. But the Kid didn’t seem to care. He was leaning back in his chair, enjoying a Milky Way bar, smiling serenely after each bite.
“Goddamn it! What the hell?”
MJ’s eyes flashed toward the voice. Reggie McDaniel, the Tarpon first baseman, was furious. His street clothes and a few personal items lay strewn in front of his locker—now empty after he’d rooted through it violently.
“My wallet’s gone!” McDaniel roared. He was a big man, almost as big as Clemant, with a fiery temper. He’d been ejected from four games this season, three more than anyone else on the team, including Lefty Hodges, the Tarpon manager. “I want it back, and I want it back now!” He glared around the room, his broad, bare chest heaving. All he had on were his uniform pants and game socks. “If I gotta go through every locker in here and shake everybody upside down by the ankles, I will. And when I find it, I’ll kill the bastard who has it.” McDaniel was only slightly more popular in the clubhouse than Clemant. “But if you give it to me now, there won’t be any questions.” The room had gone deathly still; no one was even moving. “Just toss it in the middle of the floor then walk straight outta here,” he ordered. “But don’t come back. I ain’t puttin’ up with no thief on my team.”
MJ glanced at Zack Whitney, the guy he’d seen going in McDaniel’s locker before the game. Whitney had been hurling some of the loudest insults at Clemant. Well, he sure had a hell of a poker face. If he hadn’t seen Whitney take the wallet himself, he never would have guessed the guy was the thief.
“I had three hundred bucks in there,” McDaniel muttered angrily, moving around his chair toward the middle of the large room so everyone could see how pissed he was. “And I’m gonna find it.”
“He took it, Reggie!” Whitney shouted suddenly, pointing at Clemant. “Me and Hector saw him going through your locker right before the game. After everybody else was gone.” Whitney jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Hector Rodriguez, the third baseman, who was standing a few feet away from MJ. “We forgot a bag of practice balls, and we came back to get it. Everybody else was out on the field. At least we thought they were. When we looked in here through the door window, Clemant was closing your locker, Reggie. We didn’t actually see him ta
ke anything because he was standing in front of your locker. So there wasn’t anything we could say. But it sure as hell looked like he was going through your stuff. Right, Hector?”
“Right,” Rodriguez agreed, nodding at McDaniel. “He didn’t see us. We didn’t want any trouble. Sorry. We shoulda—”
“You son of a bitch!” McDaniel yelled, rushing Clemant.
Clemant was out of his chair instantly and easily sidestepped the lumbering McDaniel, who slammed into the locker behind Clemant, bashing a huge dent in it. Several teammates tried restraining McDaniel, who was a raging bull, but he shook them off easily and made a second charge. This time he managed to grab Clemant’s left arm on the way by, but Clemant countered with a lightning-fast right cross to the chin that sent McDaniel crashing to the carpet.
“He didn’t take your wallet!” MJ yelled at McDaniel, who was staggering to his feet. “He didn’t have anything to do with it.” The locker room went still for a second time, and MJ felt every pair of eyes in the room race to him. “Whitney’s lying his ass off.”
“Keep your mouth shut, boy!” Whitney shouted across the room. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“I’ll say what I have to say,” MJ retorted evenly. “And don’t ever call me ‘boy’ again.”
“I’ll call you whatever the hell I wanna—”
“He stole your wallet, Reggie,” MJ interrupted calmly, pointing at Whitney. “I was coming out of the bathroom, and I saw him do it.”
“Stay out of this,” Whitney yelled, veins in his neck bulging. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”
“You stole it. It was you.”
“You got no proof,” Whitney said with a hiss. “But I do. I got another witness. Right, Hector?”
Rodriguez nodded hesitantly, his eyes quickly moving from Whitney to McDaniel to Clemant.
“See,” Whitney said confidently, folding his arms across his chest. He broke into a thin smile. “Maybe you were in on it, too, MJ. Maybe that’s why you’re sticking up for Mikey. We all saw you take his stuff out to him last night for the top of the ninth, you little ass-kisser. He has one good game,” Whitney sneered, “and you decide to be his slave.”
“I didn’t take the wallet, Reggie,” Clemant said loudly. “I may not be the best teammate in here, but I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”
“Liar!” Whitney yelled. “You’re a goddamn liar, Clemant. We saw you in front of his locker.”
“Check his pocket, Reggie!” MJ yelled to McDaniel, stabbing in the air at Whitney. “The right front one.”
“This guy’s insane,” Whitney retorted, pulling the stretch-tight game pants around his right thigh. “No wallet. See?”
“I’m not talking about his wallet,” MJ said. “There’s a piece of paper in his pocket with the combination to your lock on it, Reggie.” MJ knew he was taking an awful chance. Whitney could easily have thrown the paper away. If McDaniel checked and there wasn’t a piece of paper with a lock combination on it, this could get very ugly very fast. “Go on, Reggie.”
Whitney eyes widened as McDaniel made a move at him. So he made his own move—at MJ. “You little shit!” he yelled, dashing across the locker room. “I’m gonna kill—”
But Clemant caught Whitney before he’d gone three steps and hurled the smaller man over a chair and into the lockers, splitting open a deep cut on his forehead. Then Rodriguez and another player jumped Clemant just as McDaniel made it to Whitney. McDaniel clamped one huge hand around Whitney’s neck and pinned him to the floor while he stuck the other into Whitney’s right front pocket, searching for the telltale piece of paper.
Clemant was almost free of his attackers when two more guys piled on. Then everything went crazy, and it turned into an all-out brawl. Half the guys in the room were throwing punches.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Lefty Hodges shouted from the doorway. The Tarpon manager was a stubby, potbellied, white-haired Irishman. Fifty-eight, he was still feisty. Still not afraid to mix it up with the young guys if that was what the situation called for. And a lot of times in Single-A, it did. “Everybody stand down!” he yelled as his four assistant coaches waded into the melee, pulling combatants apart. “The next guy I see throw a punch is gone. I mean it!” Within a few seconds order had been restored. The players didn’t like Lefty much, but they respected him. “That’s better. Now somebody tell me what’s going on.”
No one said a thing.
Lefty spat chaw on the carpet and cursed under his breath, then pointed at Whitney. “You got the most blood on you, Zack.” The right side of Whitney’s face was wet with blood from the cut on his forehead. “Means you probably got the most to say.” Lefty motioned inward with one hand. “Come on. Out with it.”
Whitney picked himself up off the floor. He glanced uncertainly at McDaniel, who was holding a small piece of paper. “Clemant stole Reggie’s wallet out of his locker,” he said, sticking to his lie, “then he tried to pin it on me. He had MJ say I stole it.” Whitney pointed at Rodriguez. “But Hector and I saw Clemant take the wallet. Clemant and MJ are lying. They’re in it together. They probably split the three hundred bucks Reggie says was in it.”
MJ spied the paper twitching in McDaniel’s fingers, and he gave the big first baseman a what-the-hell look. But McDaniel didn’t speak up. Maybe McDaniel hated Clemant more than he hated knowing Whitney was guilty. Maybe McDaniel figured this was a perfect way to finally get Clemant kicked off the team. The Kid didn’t have any friends in here. That was more obvious than ever.
“I didn’t take anything. These guys are—”
“Shut up, Mikey,” Lefty snapped. “Put on some clothes, then get to my office.” He gestured at MJ. “You, too. Move it. Both of you!”
It was almost seven-thirty, and the evening shadows were getting long. Jack was irritated and disappointed. Irritated because the game had ended more than an hour ago and MJ still hadn’t appeared at the clubhouse door—usually he didn’t take more than thirty minutes to shower and dress. Disappointed because Mikey Clemant hadn’t copied Mickey Mantle at the plate today.
Before leaving for the stadium, Jack had checked Mantle’s box score on the Retrosheet website. On May 31, 1968, Mantle had gone oh-for-two, grounding out in the fourth and striking out in the sixth, sandwiched between two walks. Clemant had gone oh-for-four today, and they’d all been lazy pop-ups to the infield. Nothing like Mantle’s May 31 in 1968. On top of that, the Kid had made a horrible fielding error out in center in the top of the ninth that cost the Tarpons the game. He’d jogged apathetically out to the warning track beneath the long fly, then just dropped it. It was one of the easiest plays ever. It was almost like he didn’t care about catching the ball, or he was drunk or on drugs.
Ooh. He’d never considered that possibility. Maybe the can’t-miss-kid was an alcoholic or a druggie. Maybe some days Clemant came to the stadium under the influence. Maybe a lot of days. Able to convince Lefty Hodges he was fine, but unable to play anywhere near the level he was capable of. Some of the older guys like Hodges didn’t get the drug thing, or looked the other way if they suspected anything because they didn’t want to have to deal with it. Jack cursed under his breath. That could be it, all right. And nine times out of ten you couldn’t reach a guy who was into drugs.
He’d seen it too many times, especially in the past few years. Guys who thought they’d go right to the Show after only a few weeks in the minors quickly tired of hanging out in bush-league towns like Sarasota when a few weeks turned into a few months. When it did, some of them headed down the path to ruin. To keep from going crazy, they told themselves, they rationalized. When the reality was they were buying themselves a first-class ticket on the express train out of baseball. Cocaine seemed to be the drug of choice because guys could still play while they were on it—sometimes pretty well even. But it could be anything: liquor, pot, XTC, crystal meth. Eventually cocaine caught up with them, too.
He flipped off the car radio, twisting the dial
violently. He’d been listening to the postgame show on the local AM station, but he couldn’t take any more. The on-air guys were hacks.
He banged the steering wheel impatiently. “Come on, MJ. Come on!”
MJ and Clemant had been sitting in Lefty Hodges’s office for fifteen minutes, fidgeting, waiting for the old man to show. MJ was wondering if he would, or if this was, in fact, their punishment. To sit in the bowels of Tarpon Stadium like a pair of morons until they finally figured out an hour from now—or whenever it was—that Lefty was not going to appear.
The office was small, just bare bones. Furnished only with a metal desk in front of a beat-up old chair that rolled on three squeaky wheels, the two rickety wooden chairs MJ and Clemant sat in, a fake plant behind the door set in a large tan-colored pot, and a bookcase next to the plant on which there was a bare-bulb lamp that was even dustier than the fake plant. The desk resembled a battlefield. It was booby-trapped by a platoon of large white Styrofoam cups half full of stale black coffee hidden among wadded-up sports sections, old lineup cards, and a big ashtray overflowing with cigarette and cigar butts. Lefty chain-smoked cigarettes before games—and after if they lost—and smoked one big, fat cigar after a win. All the way down to the nub.
MJ put his hands behind his head and leaned back. He and Clemant hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the locker room. “I wonder if the old guy’s gonna show,” MJ finally muttered. Funny how he thought of Lefty Hodges as older than Jack, even though Lefty was actually five years younger. Jack seemed more on the ball, more aware of the bigger picture, more into what was going on around him. All Lefty cared about was the Sarasota Tarpons. There was a rumor he had a wife, but no one had ever seen her. He was a laser-focused man, but it wasn’t like all that focus did him much good. In seven seasons Lefty’s winning percentage was below 50 percent. He’d probably lasted this long because he made only forty-five grand a year. “Maybe Lefty’s just screwing with us.”
