The Final Play

by David Baldacci

  “By the way, the police have Belichek in custody. He confessed to having switched places with you in the medical tent behind the Mighty Johns’ bench. And he also told the police that Draven paid him well to do it. And that you’ve also been paying him all these years to keep his mouth shut. That was the phone call I just got.”

  “I see,” said Peter. And he truly did seem to finally see.

  “Whether she knew the plan was to murder Ruggles or not, Daughtry had a lot less to lose than you did. She was definitely the weak link in your chain. And from the little I saw of her and what I found out subsequently, she struck me as a woman shrewd and daring enough to take advantage of that opportunity, especially after you became wealthy. And you paid her, and continued to pay her, just like you did Belichek. A very close examination of your financial records will show the trail, no doubt. And that will also solve the mystery of why the owner of a second-rate wig shop in a blue-collar town could afford such a nice house and a luxury car. But then perhaps you became tired of paying. Maybe you felt she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut if the case was stirred up again, and if she started to feel too much pressure. So down went the chandelier and up went Linda Daughtry.”

  Peter leaned forward. “If you have so much evidence, why aren’t the police here to arrest me?”

  “Because I asked for and received permission to talk to you first.” North’s voice quavered as he said this, but he kept his gaze directly on his father. The man at least deserved that. No averting eyes from a disloyal son. This was going to be man-to-man.

  To his credit, Peter absorbed this stunning information in a calm and dignified manner. “I see,” he said again, this time with a lingering finality. He reached into his desk and pulled out a pistol, a large one.

  “This is what I wanted to show you, son. This is the gun I brought back from Vietnam. Nasty thing. Take your head off if you’re not careful.”

  They all three stood and backed away from him.

  “Jesus!” said Swift, who placed himself between McIntyre and the gun.

  “Jesus, indeed,” said Peter North, who aimed the gun at Swift and fired right as McIntyre cried out.

  The shot tore into the young man’s thigh and he dropped to the floor, screaming in pain. He pressed his hand against the large hole in his leg where the chalk white tip of his shattered femur poked through. A stunned North and McIntyre rushed to their friend’s aid. North tore off a piece of his shirt and used it and a letter opener he grabbed off his father’s desk as a tourniquet to stop the loss of blood. While McIntyre kept the tourniquet in place, North ripped open Swift’s pants leg and was able to see that the bullet had fortunately missed the critical arteries located there, or else his friend would have bled to death in minutes. The bullet had gone through his leg, thankfully missed McIntyre, and was embedded in the floor. Swift kept screaming and thrashing, while McIntyre held him tightly, tears streaming down her face as she tried to calm the wounded man.

  North glared furiously at his father, who just stood there, the gun still in his hand. “Why the hell did you shoot him?” he screamed. It was the first time he had ever raised his voice to his father.

  Peter looked surprised at the query. “Well, I couldn’t very well shoot my own son, now could I? Or the pretty gal. And I had to shoot somebody. I’m angry, Merl. You just screwed up my whole life.”

  “Well, dammit, be angry at me. Not him. Not anybody else,” North shouted back.

  “There are some clean clothes in that closet over there. And you might want to get him some water, fluids to keep his blood pressure up,” advised Peter. “Learned that in ’Nam. Or perhaps he could use that stiff drink now.” He grinned and sat back down. “After a particularly tough game, Ruggles and me would knock back two six-packs to make the pain go away. God, we had some great times together.” He smiled even as Swift bled and moaned.

  It was then that North realized his father had completely lost touch with reality.

  “Jimmy needs an ambulance! Call an ambulance!” cried out McIntyre.

  As North quickly made the call, his father said, “Forget him, he’ll be fine. Hell, you should have seen the hit Ruggles took his sophomore year against Notre Dame. Four men plowed into him at the same time, I mean helmet to helmet. And what do you think happened?” Peter slapped his leg in glee. “The four went down and he didn’t. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not in my entire life. He spun around and then catapulted backwards over them. Backwards! And scored. The guy was a cat, you couldn’t knock him off his feet.” He shook his head. “Why the hell did God make that bastard so perfect? So lucky?”

  North finished the 911 call, grabbed the cloths and some water, and helped Swift to drink it. He said, “Jimmy, the ambulance will be here in four minutes. I told them about your injury. They’ll be prepared to take care of your pain and everything. The hospital is only twenty minutes from here. It’s a really good one, with a trauma center. I should know, my father helped build it.” He gripped his friend’s shoulder. “You’re going to be fine. I promise you.” North’s eyes glistened with tears. “And I’m so sorry this happened. I…I never should have brought either one of you here. I’m…sorry, Jimmy.”

  Swift thanked him with a forced smile and then went back to grimacing, while McIntyre continued to hug him tightly.

  North rose and faced his father. “A friend wouldn’t have betrayed a friend. Yet you did. And for what? All of this.” He looked around the expensively decorated room. “A large sum of money was Draven’s reward for your complicity, wasn’t it? A stake you used to build an even greater fortune. I always thought you had made it all yourself. But you made it on the blood of your friend. You became rich and he became dead before he had even lived. Now tell me, who’s the lucky bastard?”

  “I named the goddamn stadium after him, didn’t I? That cost me a million bucks, sonny boy! And I live with my guilt every day. You don’t know the half of it, you little asshole.”

  “You created the source of your own guilt. Through your jealousy and your greed. So don’t try the ‘poor me’ plea!”

  “Ruggles had lived his entire life already. That was all he was good for, running with a football. Well, he had his great run and then it was time to move aside.”

  “Why, so you could take your rightful place as the anointed one? You were a mediocre lineman with marginal athleticism, just like me. You made a fortune using someone else’s money, which you obtained by helping to coax a man you called a friend to his death. And you murdered your accomplice because you were fearful your guilt would become known and you would lose all you had acquired so dishonestly!” North hesitated as he watched his father’s face go from lightheartedness powered by insanity to an ashen countenance governed, if not exploited, by returning reason. He didn’t know which one scared him more, the insanity or the reason.

  North continued, “I always envied you. I aspired to be like you in a way I thought I never could because you seemed so special. You were voted ‘Most Honorable’ of your graduating college class. Was there ever any greater irony? I wanted to make you proud of me, because I thought earning your respect and your acclaim was a good thing. God, I don’t even like football, but I played it because you did.” North’s shoulders dropped. “I feel like I’ve wasted my life, seeking approval from a man I should have loathed all these years instead of loved.”

  His father’s expression had darkened to such a degree that North had no reason to believe that the man would not break his rule and shoot his son.

  “Merl!” exclaimed McIntyre. She glanced at the gun Peter still held. “Be careful.”

  And yet North stood his ground before his father because it was finally time that this confrontation took place. Merlin North, in all his athletic ineptitude, yet with all his intellectual preeminence, felt as though his greatest role right now was as the proxy for Herschel Ruggles finally facing down his Judas.

  Instead of raising the pistol on his son, Peter set it aside and lit a cig
arette, picking a flake of tobacco off his tongue.

  “All you just said was true, Merl, right down to the tiniest detail. I would expect nothing less from a genius.” He said the last with not quite a sneer, yet not with love and kindness, either. “I was jealous of Ruggles down to the last fiber of my soul—and my soul runs deep, boy. On a football field, there was none better than the great Ruggles. Off the field Herschel wasn’t a ladies’ man, like all the rumors said. And he wasn’t a dumb jock, either, which actually would have made accepting his success a little easier for folks like me. We cannot accept people without flaws, Merl. Whenever we find them, we either stone them to death or make them flawed, one or the other. He was a good man, but with an abiding distress, a personal impotency that ran far deeper than I think even he realized. After every game he kept telling me, ‘Pete, this is it for me. I don’t like hurting people. I don’t like performing for the crowds. I don’t like having to be unconquerable on every play.’ He would say this while we’re drinking our beer and mending our wounds, and then come the next Saturday he would suit up and do it all again. Why, I don’t know, other than he didn’t have anything else in his life that rivaled what he could do on the field. But he didn’t crave that level of success, not like most people would have. And yet it was like he had nothing to replace it with, so he kept doing it. But I’ll tell you for a fact that Ruggles could have walked out that locker room door after scoring that touchdown and never looked back. And he would’ve died a happy man.”

  “It’s too bad you didn’t let that happen.”

  Peter stubbed out his cigarette on the top of his leather-tooled desk. “I almost did. That’s the one part you couldn’t find out, not with all your brains. Ruggles came into the tunnel after the touchdown run because I’d earlier given him a note that said Gloria would be there waiting for him if he scored. You were right; I acted as a go-between for them because they trusted me. Daughtry dressed up as Gloria and was waiting for him at first near the entrance, so he could see her, and then she slipped inside and went around the corner and a little way past the locker room. Draven and his goons were waiting farther down the tunnel.”

  “But your whole plan was based on his scoring,” said North. “What if he hadn’t?”

  His father gave him a disappointed look. “Up to that point in the game Ruggles had only scored one touchdown, Merl. He’d never scored less than three in any game. And with the inducement of the note? I knew the man was going to make it to the end zone. Hell, he could score whenever he really wanted to. And I knew he would really want to after I gave him the note, right before the start of the fourth quarter. And then I switched places with Ed and left the game right after. Kyle Stevens took Ed’s spot at left tackle. He knew nothing about any of this; he was Ed’s regular backup.”

  “Why did Daughtry have to impersonate Gloria if you had already induced Ruggles into the tunnel with the note?”

  “That was Draven’s doing. He wanted Ruggles to believe that Gloria had betrayed him. That she really didn’t love him at all. See, the old bastard was just that kind of a man. When he destroyed you, Draven destroyed you.”

  North shook his head. “And he has a university named after him.”

  “I was the one who initially told Draven about Ruggles and Gloria. Draven was worth more than God. I thought there might be something in it for me, and boy was there. Draven made me a rich man before I’d even left college.”

  “I hope the blood money was worth it,” North said as coldly as he could.

  His father ignored this and said, “I had the Mauser pistol Draven had given me in case I needed to persuade him even more. Ruggles came in, not even out of breath after that touchdown run, which to this day I’ve never even seen. He passed the locker room, poked his head in, and was surprised to see me. Like you found out, he thought it was Belichek in there, not me. I made some stupid explanation. He didn’t care about that. He said he’d seen Gloria. I told him she really wanted to see him and had taken a great risk to come here. See, those were my lines, my paid lines. I told him to go after her, that she was waiting for him down the tunnel; I told him I’d cover for him.”

  Here Peter paused and fingered his gun. “You know what he said to me? He said he wasn’t going to do that. He loved Gloria, he said, but it would never work. She would never leave Draven for somebody like him. You have to understand that he didn’t have a real high opinion of himself. Everybody talked about him playing professional ball. Back then those guys made jack shit. But he never would’ve played after college. His heart wasn’t in it. Hell, he would’ve won the Heisman that year, and probably never touched another football after that.

  “And then I got the surprise of my life. It seems Ruggles wanted out right then and there. He made a proposition to me, in the middle of my little scheme with Draven, he made me a proposal, can you believe that?” Peter chuckled while shaking his head in disbelief. “He said he wanted to disappear, and do something with his life that didn’t involve toting a ball along with all those impossible expectations. He could grab his street clothes, pop the lock on the exit door, and change out of his uniform before he got to the parking lot; it would’ve been easy. He was going to hitchhike over to the bus depot in the next county and grab a ride out west, start over. I could make up a little cover story for him and that would be that. He wanted to go out on top, because he said, ‘Pete, you should’ve seen that run. My lord.’ He said, ‘Pete, even for me it was something to see. It was something really special.’” Here, Peter stopped to dab at his eyes, but the tears were coming too fast to be swiped away by his shaky fingers.

  “And what did you do?” said North. He could barely breathe, looking at his father slowly dissolving in front of him.

  “I smiled at my friend. Said I’d be glad to help. I walked over to his locker, grabbed up his clothes. Then I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him.” Peter shook his head violently, presumably at the image this conjured for him. “God, you should have seen his face. He had finally made his decision, and the burden of the world had been lifted. And then here I came with my gun and my greed and my jealousy and blasted it all to Hell and back.” He stopped once more and looked squarely at his son. “I could have let him go, but I didn’t. Instead, I took Herschel Ruggles, the mightiest of the Mighty Johns and a man whose cleats I didn’t deserve to lick, and I delivered him to the devil bastard of all devils. I presented him to a man whose heart was even blacker and colder than mine, if you can believe it.”

  “What did Ruggles say to you if anything?” The tears were now streaming down North’s face, matching his father’s drop for drop.

  Peter took one long breath. “He said…he said, ‘You have a good life, Pete. And never forget your old friend, Herschel Ruggles.’” He looked up at North. “And damn if I ever have. He’s been right here with me, all the way through my good life.” He glanced at his son, his face heavy with anticipation. “Tell me something…where’d you find the wig?”

  “A special friend led me to it,” North said. “And just so you know, the police are on their way here.”

  Peter stood, straightened his shirtsleeves, and buttoned his collar button. He picked up the gun.

  “Better let me have that, Dad.” North reached out for the weapon.

  “You’ll have a good life, Merl. Because you deserve it. And if you’ll do nothing else for me, do this. Forget your old man. Don’t carry me around your neck all your life, because that’s not your burden. That one, son, that one is all mine.”

  North reached out for the gun again.

  But his father placed it in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 21

  T​HAT FOUL EAST WIND was blowing when, almost four years later, North came back to Draven University. He had graduated with the highest honors, had earned his PhD at MIT, and was now teaching in his beloved field of physics at a prestigious college in the west, far away from the troubling east wind here and all the stench it carried.

&nbs
p; Jimmy Swift had recovered from his wound, though he would never play football again. He had gotten a good job with a senator on Capitol Hill in Washington and was moving up the ranks swiftly. There was even talk of his running for office in the future. He had the looks and an outgoing personality. People loved being around him. And he had enough brains to complete the package.

  He had, with North’s great appreciation and encouragement, made a decision not to live in the past, but to forge ahead with the future that could be his, bum leg and all. And he had done so with Molly McIntyre, now his wife. She had ridden with him in the ambulance that awful night while North stayed behind with his father’s body and dealt with the police. Perhaps their shared experience of the Herschel Ruggles journey had been the catalyst for their sudden romance. She and North had remained friends, though, even as her love for Swift sparked and then flourished. He had just visited them on this trip east. They were expecting a child, they had told him. They were very happy and he was happy for them. They wanted him to be the godfather, a role he accepted with pleasure and honor.

  Now North had returned to the home of the Mighty Johns before heading back west. After his father had died, Casa North had been sold, and North had given the proceeds away to charity, along with the rest of the money his father had made. He didn’t want it, for he knew it now to be blood money overlaid with a coat of filthy coal dust.

  North had kept his promise to Gloria Draven and told her the truth, or at least his version of it. All Gloria found out from North was that Herschel Ruggles loved her, had run into that tunnel to be with her, and would have gone anywhere with her. He no doubt would be awaiting her in Heaven, North had said. With that knowledge, the woman quickly had left this life, on her terms, dying less than a month later. She had been found in her little sanctuary of a room with the news clipping of her and Ruggles lying across her body.

  North had told a lie, he knew. He had deviated from the facts, an unforgivable act for a scientist. Yet for North, there was absolutely nothing wrong with that in this instance—to hell with the pristine requirements of science. Perfection was not life, life was living with the flaws we all had, he now believed.