Outlaws

by Tim Green

  The coach smiled broadly when he caught Cody's eye.

  "How's it feeling?" the young coach said in his southern twang.

  "Fine," Cody said. He didn't really have much more to say.

  "Good, we can't play the game very well without a free safety, can we?" Dryer said, then leaned closer to Cody, putting his arm around the veteran player's shoulder and dropping his voice as if he were confiding in a lifelong friend. Cody could smell pistachio nuts on his breath.

  "Now I want you to know," said the coach, "how much we all appreciate what it is you're going through. We all know, and I know, that the pricks upstairs made it hard on you as far as your contract this year."

  Cody nodded. He didn't mind looking the coach straight in the eye. What he said was true.

  "Well," Dryer said, "I want you to know that what you're doing ..." and he waved his hand across the air above Cody's drained and injected knee as if he were shooing away a fly, "we won't forget it; the team won't forget it." Then the coach looped one forearm around Cody's neck and pulled him into a hug, suggesting that bigger and better things always came for those who waited.

  Cody nodded. He would like to see how well they didn't forget. It seemed to him that they had forgotten him once, this past offseason. He imagined they just might do the same again, so he simply kept his gaze at the coach steady as she goes.

  Dryer looked for something more, maybe acknowledgment, maybe even gratitude. Nothing was forthcoming.

  "Okay," said the coach, backing away, "let's go out there and kick these guys in the teeth, right?"

  Cody nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said, thinking that college was too many years ago, and so were the days that he got psyched up for a game because of some coach's macho bullshit.

  "Okay," said the coach enthusiastically, smiling once more and giving Cody a thumbs-up before he turned and walked away.

  "Okay, my ass," Cody said under his breath, and then hopped down off the table to test his knee.

  It was a strange feeling, but one he'd felt before. It was like everything was normal, except his knee felt like a blob of dough. It worked, though. He could move. The signals from the joint to his brain telling him that something was incredibly wrong were silenced and would be for the next four hours. The only thing bad was the little gremlin sitting patiently in the comer of his mind. He knew it was there, an ugly little demon with a big, crooked, toothy smile. It was just waiting. It knew that sooner or later the drugs would have to wear off, and then it would rule his mind. It would dance and sing and moan and drag chains up and down the corridors of his brain until he knew nothing else but the agony of an injury that had just been exacerbated in the name of winning a game of football. The knee would end up being twice as bad as it was only this morning.

  Cody now knew the season would be an unending battle with that gremlin. He would drug his body and it would wait. The drug would wear off. The gremlin would torment him. Then he would spring some new kind of painkiller or anti-inflammatory on the little horror. They would go around and around until one of them finally quit.

  Cody dressed himself as quickly as he could. Then he sat. He had some minutes, and he used them to work his thoughts into another mind game. The pain was put aside; now he had to whip himself into a frenzy to play. He took all the poison that was in his life at that moment and emptied it into one enormous mental cauldron. He thought about Jenny. He knew something was wrong. He wasn't quite sure what, and he didn't want to know. For his purposes now, he imagined the worst. She hadn't answered the phone last night. He imagined her naked and fucking some specter like a frantic animal in heat. It was sick, but it worked. That went in the pot.

  He thought about Board. The sloppy, greasy bag-of-shit with his octopus skin, bald in front with long greasy hair hanging over the back of his collar. He was the perfect image of a witch's toad. He put that in.

  Jail? That was possible, or so augured the toad. He thought about that, the humiliation, the confinement. In.

  Then he thought about the Outlaws, about Dryer and his words only moments ago. He thought about how he was nothing more than a disposable part for them, like a razor, and a cheap one at that. He thought about being used for eight years, now nine. He put that in the pot.

  Money? He had almost none. In it went.

  His body? It was being ruined. That went in too.

  'Ten minutes!" came the call from the weight coach, who was counting down the minutes before the team took the field.

  Cody stirred the poison. He let it fester together, all the bad thoughts, all the anger, all the resentment, all the fears. It made him mad, and it made him mean. Someone looking in his eyes would look twice and see that in fact their depth had become the bottomless void of a madman's. A strange light emanated from his eyes, and the walls of those infinite tunnels seemed to spin with hatred and rage. Cody never heard the call to the field. Instead he was swept up with the surge of energy when the rest of his teammates sprang from their places and charged for the door. Cody was with them, at the center, and soon they were on the field, and the entire team orbited him like a mass of lesser panicles, like the electrons around the nucleus of an atom.

  Cody spoke, he ranted and he raged. They listened as they milled about him. He was their leader. He was the one to take them into the game that was so much like a battle. The mass of players suddenly exploded as if Cody had released his energy and burst them apart. Each one of them, each individual electron particle, would now go on to wreak as much chaos as he possibly could.

  The Outlaws pounded the Vikings 28-3. Cody was penalized twice foi unnecessary roughness and once for a face mask when he brought Warren Moon down by the head. He also had one interception, thirteen tackles, and a quarterback sack on a safety blitz. It was a game commensurate with the internal rage of the player who played it.

  Afterward, after the slaps on his back, after cutting the tightly bound tape from his ankles and wrists, after the interviews with TV, radio, and newspaper people, and after a shower, it got quiet. When it was quiet, Cody left the locker room and found Jenny waiting there dutifully for him. He was glad to see her. She was acting strange, but she was there. It was something. He was ashamed of the things he'd thought of her, the things he'd mixed into h:s poisonous mental brew. But that was how he did it. That was how he got by. That was why he was Cody Grey. He was sorry, but he reasoned that no one got hurt by it, except maybe him, where he'd torn the fiber that held his soul together.

  Then a practical question popped into his mind, where the hell was she last night? He wouldn't ask. In a strange way, he knew it didn't matter. His marriage was like his knee. If he numbed it up good, he could get by.

  They kissed briefly and walked for the exit. Cody was already starting to limp. They went to dinner. They drank heavily. The needles wore off, but Cody kept the gremlin down with alcohol. Talk came easier with drinking anyway. At home he tried to make love to his wife. She let him. It was nothing special, but it was something. They slept. In the small hours of the morning, when it was no longer night,but not quite dawn, there was a knock at the door. Cody stumbled downstairs and opened it. He was bleary-eyed, and at first he saw nothing. Then he saw him. The gremlin sprang at him with a fury and tore into his knee like a rabid dog with burning teeth and nails.

  Cody shot up from the covers with a scream.

  "What is it?" Jenny said, frightened.

  Cody made the noise an animal might make, fearful, hurt, angry.

  "Are you all right?" she said, and in that moment, with those words of concern, Cody didn't think he could love a person any more than he loved her. It was because she was there. She was with him. The gremlin was killing him, eating his flesh from the inside out, but he wasn't alone.

  "Get me my black bag and a glass of water," he said between his teeth, groping at his knee with both hands to try and choke off the pain.

  Jenny hurried. Cody tore open his black leather shaving kit, tossed two bottles down on the floor but stopped with the
third. He twisted the top and shook three Percosets into his palm, gulping them down with the water Jenny held for him in her steady hand. Then he lay back to grit his teeth and wait.

  He thought about what the week was going to be like. He wouldn't be able to practice. That was okay. He'd played well enough that they wouldn't think of not starting him, despite his absence from practice. He thought about the pain. It would be bad. He would do the same thing next week, take the same needles, the same drugs. He wished the drug he was using now would hurry up.

  It really didn't take long, and once the drug set in, all else was forgotten. The gremlin was tossed into the comer like a battered rag doll, harmless and spent. Cody rolled over toward his wife and fell into the nirvana of an opium derivative.

  The yellow tape stamped Police Crime Scene--Do Not Enter was still mostly intact. It was tattered here and there, floating lazily in the hot summer breeze, but that wasn't much considering the investigation had taken place months ago in the spring. It was now the second week of September. The Outlaws had won their first game, and Alice had won her bet with her boss. If the Vikings had won, she would have had to buy him dinner at his favorite restaurant. She even gave him seven points. But the Outlaws beat the spread, and she got a morning off the following week. Madison made time in her own schedule even though she didn't have it.

  The ground was strewn with rusted junk and rubble, and Madison did her best in her blue suit and pumps to keep up with Alice, who had worn tennis sneakers and peds to complement her wild floral sundress and hat. She looked around at the surroundings. It wasn't really a wonder that something like this double murder happened here. It looked like a war zone. People scurried like rodents up and down the street to what little shade their decrepit porch roofs provided. Obviously they didn't have jobs. It was Wednesday morning at ten o'clock. Madison wondered what her own son would turn out like if he was forced to grow up in a place like this. It made her glad she had taken this case. She was giving someone a chance who wasn't going to otherwise get one, just because he didn't have the right parents or live in the right neighborhood. She'd have to remember to thank Walter for his insistence.

  Inside the abandoned garage, the concrete floor, despite its cracks, made the footing much easier. It was hot and dusty. Four broken windows boarded up with heavy vertical slats of graying wood blocked out what little breeze there was. It was a poor man's sauna.

  "Okay, honey," Alice said as she stood between a ratty armchair and the feet of a chalk outline that could still be seen on the concrete floor. "Here's where old Ray-man got his final wake-up call. BANC) So ..."

  Alice consulted the report the way she would the map in a treasure hunt.

  "You be the mystery man in black, sweetheart. You came in from that door. Stand like you're on a corner of a triangle connecting these two bodies. It sounds like from everything the kid said that that's about where you'd be. That's it, right there, your second calling."

  Alice turned around and with fingers splayed open wide indicated the portion of the wall that was behind her. "This is the spot," she said. "Come on over here and give me a hand. I know better than to think you're just another pretty face."

  Madison smiled and took the magnifying glass that her friend had held out to her. Alice began unwinding a thin, sticky string that looked like orange dental floss and marked out a grid on the wall, dividing it up into small rectangular sections. They were wider than they were tall because, as Alice explained, to shoot the boy, who was sitting in the chair, assuming the man was somewhere between five-eight and six-eight, limited how high up the bullet could get lodged in the wall.

  "Just a hole is all we're looking for. It might not look like too much depending on the caliber of the gun. When you check a square out real good, mark it with an M," Alice said, handing her a piece of chalk. "That way I'll know if it was you or me who checked the square. If we get done and we've got nothing, I can go back and check yours first. No offense."

  "Please," Madision said, "I don't care. You can't offend me. I just want to find out if this kid is lying to me or not."

  'That's why we're here," Alice murmured. She was already intently examining a square in the far comer of the grid with her magnifying glass.

  Madison began her own meticulous search from the other end of the grid. It was tedious. Twice Madison thought she saw something, both times Alice shook her head solemnly and told her it was nothing. After a half hour, Madison began to feel as though either they were looking in the wrong place or the kid was just plain lying to her. That seemed more and more likely as they worked on in the dry heat.

  "Got it!" Alice said suddenly.

  Madison stood straight up and focused her attention where Alice had stopped her glass.

  "It's doesn't look like anything," Madison said.

  Alice was already carefully digging away, forming a larger hole than the one she'd found, so she could extract the bullet without making a mess of it for ballistics.

  "It's not a real big one," she said as she dug. Madison could see the tip of her chubby friend's tongue sticking out of the comer of her mouth as she worked away at the wall. Carefully, Alice took a rubber-tipped pair of funny-looking tweezers and removed the lead.

  "Well, damn," Alice said, more to herself than to Madison.

  "What?" Madison asked, trying to peer over Alice's hands for a clear view of whatever it was that was so spectacular.

  Alice held up the spent slug before dropping it into a plastic envelope.

  "This is a .22 slug. That's strange," Alice said. Then she gave the entire area a cursory scan.

  "Why's that?" Madison asked. "What's a .22 have to do with it?"

  Alice looked at her with impatience.

  "Madison," she snapped, "honey, when was the last time you heard of one of these kids whacking another with a .22-caliber gun? Never, right? Sure. Honey, in this neighborhood you like a lotta bang when you fire a gun. The noise is almost as important as the bullet. They don't carry around guns like the one this came from, small and quiet. You can't be sure a bullet from a gun like this will do anything. To use a gun with this small a caliber requires an extreme amount of accuracy with your shot, otherwise your victim just might walk away laughing at you or shoot you back. I'm assuming that if your boy is telling the truth, whoever was here that night knew where he was going, knew what was going to go down, and brought a twenty-two anyway. That's no amateur. And I'll bet if you check your autopsy reports, you'll see those boys weren't killed with a twenty-two. Even the rough boys, the mob, and the heroin dealers are using large-caliber guns these days. I've probably only seen three or four slugs this small in my last hundred corpses, maybe more. The last one was a fourteen-year-old kid up on Lake Travis, the one who killed his parents with his squirrel gun."

  "Maybe the bullet didn't come from that night at all," Madison wondered out loud.

  "Maybe you're right," Alice replied. "But if it did, it's a real humdinger that someone who was obviously bent on doing some killing was walking around this neighborhood with a .22. I'm just saying that if this bullet was fired the night of the murders, then it sure goes a long way toward substantiating your boy's story. It might not be enough to get him off, but it might just raise enough doubt to keep him off of death row."

  "But the only way to know if it was fired that night is going to be by exhuming Ramon's body and looking at his ear," Madison said, her mind already whirling with the legal arguments she would use to unearth the corpse.

  "That's your department, honey," Alice said. "But if you can dig Ray-man up before he gets too rancid, I can tell you for sure whether or not this bullet went through his ear."

  Chapter Seventeen

  JEFF Board hadn't poured himself into something like his investigation of Cody Grey since he'd prepared for his accountant's certification test. He had boasted to many people, from his boss to people in the U. S. Attorney's office. Now he had to deliver. He wanted more on Cody Grey than just a five-thousand-dollar yearly dis
crepancy. He knew there had to be more. There always was. If you could look hard and long enough, Board knew you could get the goods. The tax code was in a constant state of flux. It was too complex and too irregular to allow perfect compliance. Most agents would be satisfied with what he'd already found. He would normally be satisfied too, if he hadn't done so much talking. But after his meeting with Grey and his assurances to everyone all around, he wasn't taking any chances. So, he dug.

  He started eight and a half years back, when Grey first came to Austin. Then he worked his way forward, examining every check that was written, every deposit that was made, and searching for any bank accounts that the player might have had but not claimed. That was always a trick people liked to use. If they deposited less than ten thousand dollars in cash into a bank account, there may not be an electronic trail. Banks were only required to report deposits of over ten thousand dollars. But a careful agent could access different banking systems and run a check by social security number. If more money turned up, the taxpayer would have to explain where it came from. It happened all the time with people who had cash businesses. They got away with it until someone had it in for them. Board was hoping that Cody Grey had some outside endorsements and had taken cash payments, then stashed the money away in a hidden account, never claiming the income.

  For a week. Board lived the last eight years of Cody Grey's life. He got copies of every check, deposit slip, and pay stub. He worked twelve hours in the office, and then took more work home with him. On his refrigerator door and the wall of his cubicle, he tacked a publicity photo of his quarry: Grey was frozen in a moment of triumph and exultation on the football field. His arms were raised high over his head and his face was ecstatic. This picture drove Board forward when he would have otherwise quit. Cody Greys downfall would be his own moment of triumph.

  He knew every penny Cody spent and every penny he received, at least everything that was in his name in any lending institution in the United States and most of the world. Board found a few checks here and there that he figured were unclaimed income, but after deductions the discrepancy would probably only amount to a few hundred dollars. After a week, Board began to worry. He wanted more. He needed more, not to make trouble for Cody Grey--he already was in trouble--but to live up to all his promises he'd made about jail and scandal and headlines to his boss, the U. S. Attorney's office, and everyone he'd happened to bump into in the Federal building over the past few weeks.