Deep Zone
Page 16
The only consolation was that it would soon be over. He could stop being afraid all the time, and he’d finally be with his parents. Ty shut his eyes as tight as they would go and prayed to God there was a heaven and that he really could be with his mom and dad. But he was afraid of even that. Afraid heaven wasn’t true. Afraid God was just words. He didn’t think that, but he couldn’t help being afraid.
That was how he lay, barely aware of the noise below him, overwhelmed by his fear and squirming in torment from his duct tape bonds as well as the thought of his certain death. Ty didn’t know how much time had passed before he realized that it had gone quiet again downstairs, but it had. Another eternity seemed to pass before he heard the soft creak of footsteps on the stairs. Slowly they came, and with them Ty’s belly filled with poisonous dread, absolute horror.
The door creaked as it swung open. Ty’s eyes widened in terror as the shadow of a man slipped inside. The slick sound of a blade slipping free from its sheath was followed by the glint of that metal weapon as it caught the moonlight spilling in through the window.
Ty could hear the man’s heavy breathing as he knelt above him, blocking out the moonlight but not the glow of the long knife blade.
Ty’s body bucked uncontrollably, fighting the bonds of tape. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, spilling hysterical tears down his cheeks. A sobbing groan filled the cavity behind his nose as he felt the unmistakable chill of the blade against his skin.
Ty knew he was about to die.
Chapter Sixty-seven
“SH.”
The sound whispered in Ty’s ear confused him, even as he heard the slicing sound of the blade.
“Sh.”
Nothing hurt, and Ty wondered if that was why desperate people sometimes cut their wrists, because it didn’t really hurt. In fact, Ty felt nothing at all until the pressure of his duct tape handcuffs was released. He flexed his hands and grasped for the floor as if the whole building tilted beneath him.
He blinked as the dark figure bent now to his feet, cutting them free as well. Ty’s hands went to his mouth to remove the tape, but the hand without the knife held him at bay. The man shook his head no, and Ty saw now that it was Troy’s father.
Troy’s father held a finger to his lips, signaling complete silence. Then he removed the finger from his lips and signaled for Ty to stay still. Ty rubbed the feeling back into his wrists and ankles as he sat on the floor, waiting. Troy’s dad wasn’t gone long before he returned with Troy and Tate in tow, both of them moving awkwardly as they, too, tried to regain the feeling in their hands and feet. Their mouths also remained taped shut, and Ty realized it was to ensure everyone’s silence.
“Okay.” Troy’s father spoke in the faintest of whispers. “Let’s go.”
Troy turned toward the stairs, but his father stopped him, shaking his head and pointing to the window. Troy’s father eased it open and whispered, “I’ll go first. You climb down my back. Hang on to my collar, then my belt, and then my feet. It’ll work.”
Ty and Troy looked out the window. The swamp boat had been tied to a pier.
The sheet ladder had been disposed of by Pete Bonito before, while Bennie the Blade taped Ty up, but now Troy’s father would be their ladder. The big man climbed out the window and clung to its ledge with thick, bony fingers. Tate went first, scrambling down his back and into the boat. Ty went next, dropping into the bottom of the boat and looking up at Troy’s dad as he hung like a man clinging to a burning building. Troy came out and started down.
His father’s arms began to shake, and one hand slipped from its grip on the window. Troy fell the final eight feet and collapsed into the bottom of the boat with a snap.
A low, painful sound bubbled up from Troy’s gut as he grasped his ankle. Ty helped him out of the way, and Troy’s dad dropped down, too, landing more skillfully with a thump and a groan.
Instead of starting the motor, Troy’s dad removed an oar from beneath the seats. He untied the boat from the pier and slowly paddled them down the channel. Not until his father had paddled them across the man-eater pool and into the creek did he bend over and yank the motor to life. When he did, he stayed heavy on the throttle, telling them all it was safe to remove the tape from their mouths. All three of them carefully peeled back the tape as they surged through the mangrove creek and out into the next channel, racing north and swishing into the second creek.
They hit the open canal, and the boat motor whined ever louder. The hotel rose up above the trees, a beacon in the night, shining bright and white and growing ever taller, as if it were rising up out of the earth. When they broke into the body of water behind the hotel, Ty looked back over his shoulder, past Troy’s dad, past the foamy wake of water, half expecting to see the mobsters hot on their trail.
All Ty saw was the moon, the water, and the dark shadows of the trees.
They had made it.
Troy’s dad pulled in to the marina and helped them up onto the deck. Light from the VIP party glowed above the gardens, and music thumped the night air. Troy had to be lifted up and left to sit on the dock’s edge because he could put no weight on his ankle. His dad stepped back in the boat and looked up at them all, smiling awkwardly.
“This ought to take care of us winning the Seven-on-Seven championship.” Troy’s voice was less bitter than Ty would have expected.
Troy’s dad held out a hand, and Troy shook it before letting his dad pull him into a tight hug.
“I’m sorry, Troy.”
Troy let him go and shook his head, obviously not even knowing what to say.
“Thanks.” Ty startled himself by breaking the silence.
“Yeah, thanks. You saved us, Mr. Edinger,” Tate said.
Troy’s dad nodded. “I never thought in a million years you two kids would get involved or those nutcases would start talking about killing people. It was all business to me. It was a great shot to make a ton of money and dig myself out of this hole. I hope you know that.”
“We know,” Tate said.
Troy’s dad scratched his head, then reached out and gave Troy’s shoulder a squeeze. He laughed in a lighthearted way, even though his face was sad. “Well, gotta go.”
Troy’s dad pressed his lips tight and gave one final nod before firing up the swamp boat. They stood watching as the Everglades swallowed him up and even the sound of the motor was gone.
“What do you think will happen to him?” Tate asked.
“I hope he’ll be all right,” Ty said. “Those people are pretty bad and they’re not gonna be happy when they wake up.”
Troy kept staring out at the big swamp and he sighed. “He’ll be all right. He always is.”
Chapter Sixty-eight
THE GEORGIA TEAM DIDN’T give up, and neither did Troy.
Ty’s cousin stood on crutches beside his coach, feeding his teammates information, sometimes even shouting out to them the play that was about to be run. Somehow it didn’t seem fair to Ty, but Coach Bavaro scoffed at that on the Raptors’ sideline.
“That kid is just doing what we do with our film study and hours and hours of meetings,” Coach Bavaro told his team. “He just does it in a split second. I’d do the same thing if I were them, so you guys stop complaining and let’s beat them anyway.”
That had been early in the game, and now “beating them anyway” wasn’t looking good. There were only five seconds left. The Raptors had used their final time-out and the ball rested on the forty-yard line. There was time for one last play. Ty looked over at Troy White, who studied the Raptors with a calm eye from the Georgia sideline. Beyond him sat a crowd of several thousand people, not enough to make a place like the Dolphins’ stadium look even close to full, but enough to add noise to the excitement of playing in a championship on ESPN 2.
David Bavaro took the signal from his father on the sideline and called the play.
“Wait!” Ty said.
Everyone froze.
“Let’s not run that play.”
“Let’s almost run it.” Ty’s voice sounded confident, even to himself.
“Almost?”
“Strahan, don’t run the corner route.” Ty felt in command. “That’s what they’ll expect from that formation and in this situation. Run a comeback instead. Even Troy White won’t guess that’s coming.”
“He won’t guess it’s coming because why would Strahan run a comeback?” Bavaro said. “It’s the last play. We need to get into the end zone.”
“But if they know it’s coming, they’ll defend against it,” Ty said. “He can run the comeback, and I’ll do an out-and-up right behind him. Michael, catch the ball, and pitch it back to me.”
“Hook and lateral?” Strahan said, the gap in his teeth showing with his smile. “We never ran that before.”
“Exactly,” Ty said. “We never ran it. He’s never seen it. He can’t predict something that’s not even in our playbook, right?”
“Maybe he can.” Bavaro looked doubtful.
“Pitch it to me and I can race right up the sideline and into the end zone,” Ty said. “Come on. What have we got to lose?”
Everyone agreed and David Bavaro nodded, repeating what everyone would do before breaking the huddle. Ty lined up inside of Michael Strahan Jr. at the slot position. He kept his eyes ahead, afraid that Troy could somehow read his mind. The ball was snapped and Ty took off.
Strahan broke off his route and caught the ball. Ty cut out, then surged up the sideline with blazing speed. As the defenders closed on Strahan, he flicked the ball to Ty, and two seconds later Ty held the ball high in the end zone.
His team mobbed him, whooping and hollering and laughing out loud.
When the craziness settled, they lined up and shook hands with the team from Georgia. Ty and Troy brought up the back of each of their lines, working their way through until they found themselves standing together on the Georgia sideline. Troy leaned on his crutches to free a hand so he could shake with Ty. Tate ran up to them both.
She patted Troy on the back. “Sorry, Troy.”
“It’s okay. That’s the game.”
Tate turned to Ty, beaming. “Congratulations, Ty. You were incredible.”
Ty felt his cheeks burning. He couldn’t speak, only shake his head.
“How’d you do that, anyway?” Troy asked. “You never ran that play before. I can’t believe your coach called that. He never calls plays he doesn’t practice.”
“How do you know?” Ty asked.
Troy shrugged. “I can’t really explain it.”
“It’s like the weather; he just gets a feeling,” Tate said.
“I made it up,” Ty said.
“You?”
“In the huddle.”
Troy grinned. “Don’t you tell a soul.”
“I won’t. I’m rooting for the Falcons tomorrow, and then after that, it’s J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets.”
Troy laughed and Ty did too, then they hugged each other.
“I’ll see you in New Jersey, Cousin.”
“I can show you around,” Ty said. “Both of you.”
Troy and Tate looked at each other. “We’re counting on it.”
“You’ll come see me—us?” Ty asked Tate.
“Of course.” She tucked a loose end of hair behind her ear. “You couldn’t get rid of me in an endless swamp, you think I won’t find you in New Jersey?”
Ty hugged her too, then jogged back across the field.
When Ty returned to his bench, Thane was waiting there with a surprise.
“Agent Sutherland?” Ty said, not sure if the man with blond hair was really the agent in disguise or just a twin with hair.
“He came to apologize,” Thane said. “They got it wrong, again.”
Sutherland’s face went red. He took off his sunglasses and nodded. “We had the wrong guy.”
“What do you mean?”
Sutherland sighed and said, “I couldn’t tell you the truth because we didn’t want to compromise the operation, but we knew they were down here. We thought it was your brother they wanted, so we tracked every move he made.”
“Tracked my brother? On the beach?”
Sutherland nodded. “I almost lost my pension for that one.”
“That was you?”
Sutherland nodded and replaced his sunglasses. “All’s well that ends well, though. We nabbed them this morning. I wanted to tell you personally. They’ve all got prior felonies. They’ll go away forever with this kidnapping charge.”
“Troy’s dad, too?” Ty asked.
Sutherland shook his head. “Him we didn’t get, but we will. He’s not the dangerous one, though. You got nothing to worry about, Ty. It’s over for Bennie and Bonito.”
Ty’s heart began to soar, but then it came back down. “But didn’t you say that they’re like roaches? Squash one and there’s always another to take his place?”
Sutherland nodded. “That’s true, except this thing could bring the whole house down. Word on the street is that the D’Amico family bet everything they’ve got on tonight’s game. If the Falcons win and cover the spread, the D’Amico organization will not only lose everything they have, they’ll owe the other families a ton of money, and that won’t go over well.”
“So, they’re not going to have time to worry about me or Ty or even Uncle Gus,” Thane said.
“No. Their problems will be a lot more serious than you folks.”
When Ty spoke, it was almost to himself. “I never thought I’d root so hard for a team to win the Super Bowl.”
And so, when Troy helped the Falcons win it that night by a score of 31–10, Ty felt like someone had truly and finally set him free.
About the Author
TIM GREEN, for many years a star defensive end with the Atlanta Falcons, is a man of many talents. He’s the author of such gripping adult books as the New York Times bestselling THE DARK SIDE OF THE GAME and AMERICAN OUTRAGE. Tim graduated covaledictorian from Syracuse University and was a first-round draft pick. He later earned his law degree with honors, and he has also worked as an NFL commentator for FOX Sports and NPR.
His first book for young readers, FOOTBALL GENIUS, inspired in part by his players and kids he’s met while reading in classrooms, became a New York Times bestseller and was followed by FOOTBALL HERO, FOOTBALL CHAMP, THE BIG TIME, and now DEEP ZONE. He drew on his experiences playing and coaching Little League for RIVALS and for two more New York Times bestsellers: BASEBALL GREAT and BEST OF THE BEST.
Tim Green lives with his wife, Illyssa, and their five children in upstate New York.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
ALSO BY TIM GREEN
FOOTBALL GENIUS NOVELS
Football Genius
Football Hero
Football Champ
The Big Time
BASEBALL GREAT NOVELS
Baseball Great
Rivals
Best of the Best
Credit
Jacket art © 2011 by Joel Tippie
Copyright
Deep Zone: A Football Genius Novel
Copyright © 2011 by Tim Green
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-06-201244-9
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062093226
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FIRST EDITION
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