Double Switch

by T. T. Monday

  “It can be, if you don’t know the right people.” La Loba looks at me and then begins to pull up her turtleneck.

  “Hold on,” I say. “You don’t have to do that.”

  Tiff stops me. “No, let me take a look at her. Go ahead, Enriqueta.”

  Putting the e-cigarette behind her ear, Tiff uses both hands to help La Loba pull the shirt over her head. She’s wearing a black demi-cup bra, which Tiff helps her unclip.

  Tiff says, “That’s better, isn’t it? We have all night to talk. Let’s take some time to get to know one another.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Enriqueta asks.

  “Nothing too serious. We’ll just play around and see what happens.”

  La Loba looks at me. “What about him?”

  “Join us, Johnny. Don’t be a spoilsport.” Keeping one eye trained on La Loba, Tiff walks over and unfastens my belt. Then she tugs the hem of my shirt and makes a little thumb gesture as if to say Take it off.

  I obey. A minute later, the three of us are naked (or I suppose Completely Naked!!!) in the empty skybox. I’ve never felt more awkward. A Twister mat would be a welcome addition at this point.

  “Give me a hand with the sofa,” Tiff says. “These things turn into beds, if I remember correctly.” She begins tossing cushions over the back of the couch. Sure enough, there’s a handle.

  Foldout beds: another must-have for the billionaire’s tree house.

  “We’re going to play before we talk?” I ask Tiff, who is now kneeling on the bed with an unmistakable look in her eye.

  “Why not?” she says. “I’m in no hurry.”

  I don’t understand why she’s pushing this angle. She knew La Loba was going to be playing the part of a prostitute, but that was only a ploy to get her up here. Maybe Tiff was concerned that La Loba would be carrying a gun and wanted to orchestrate a strip search? I should have told her about the metal detector at the VIP entrance.

  La Loba follows Tiff onto the bed. “I prefer dark,” she says.

  “Johnny,” Tiff says, “would you mind turning down the lights?”

  Against my better judgment, I lower the fader, and instantly I regret it. Before my eyes can adjust to the darkness, someone sweeps out my legs, and I fall to the carpet on my hands and knees. Then I feel the pinch of a zip-tie around my ankles. I eventually struggle to my feet, but I’m hobbled and I can’t see a thing. I smell perfume—Tiff’s and La Loba’s—and I hear a struggle somewhere to my left.

  In Spanish, I say, “Enriqueta, where are you?”

  “Here, papi,” comes a voice below me and to the left. I lower myself in that direction, but find nothing.

  “I have something to ask you,” I say.

  Suddenly there’s a palm on my chest, and I’m knocked backward. With my ankles tied, I topple like a bowling pin. I hear a voice to my right: “Where did you go, Johnny?”

  I roll to the spot where I heard the voice. Again—nothing.

  “Who is Pascual Alcalá?” I ask the darkness.

  Hands emerge to grab my balls. The voice whispers, maybe six inches from my ear, “Who told you about Alcalá?”

  “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” I whisper.

  Enriqueta squeezes my junk. “It’s not what you think,” she says.

  “What, Alcalá?”

  “Yes.”

  She releases me, and I hear footsteps on the carpet.

  “Tiff!” I shout. “Turn on the lights!”

  I stumble around blindly, chasing the sound of the footsteps. Then a voice in my ear—a very different voice—says, “She’s got Tiff.” It takes me a second to remember the earpiece. “In her hand,” Briggman says calmly. “It looks like a noose of some kind.”

  I hear the struggle in front of me, and this time Enriqueta is too preoccupied to play hide-and-seek. I grab both women—one arm around each—and pull them apart, pinning them to my sides.

  Through the earpiece, Briggman guides me: “Suspect is in your left arm.”

  I let go of Tiff and pin La Loba to the bed. Tiff switches on the lights. In La Loba’s left hand is a miniature garrote made of fishing line and a three-inch length of what looks like a broken chopstick. I take the weapon and twist her arm behind her back. She resists, but when she realizes she can’t overpower me, she screams.

  Try to imagine what this scene must look like to Briggman, alone in his control room in Salt Lake City: three naked humans in the dark, a virtual flashlight lighting up the one with the biggest hair. OmniSentry’s sales rep said he didn’t know if the system would work with remote feeds, and he didn’t know about darkness, either. I think we have answers to both questions.

  Tiff takes a knife from the bar and frees my legs. Then she stands in front of La Loba, both of them naked, Tiff’s eyes big and glossy like she’s going to cry. “Did you get my messages?” she says. “Didn’t Yonel tell you? I’m done. You win.”

  La Loba shakes her head. “It doesn’t work that way, Teef.”

  “But you have to believe me!”

  “You say you’re sorry, and I believe you. You say you won’t do it again, and I believe that, too. But you made me look weak. Too many people know what you got away with. They are like cockroaches now, all over the island, looking for players to sign. I will not fight pests. The world must know what happens when you fail to respect La Loba.”

  She wriggles free, but I don’t bother to seize her again. I’ve already taken her weapon. What harm is she now? She shakes out her arm.

  “I didn’t mean to disrespect you,” Tiff pleads. “Had I known you were operating in Cuba, I never would have approached Yonel.”

  La Loba snorts. “I should let you live, just to see what happens when the truth comes out.”

  “What truth?” Tiff asks.

  “Ask the detective!”

  Tiff looks at me, but before I can answer, the door of the suite flies open. I recognize La Loba’s assistant from the warehouse, the guy with the harelip scar. He stands in the doorway with a pistol. I dive behind another section of the sofa, but Tiff is slower to react. There’s a loud crack, and she collapses onto the Berber carpet.

  35

  La Loba covers herself with a sheet, grabs her clothes, and leaves with the driver while I’m scouring the floor for my pants. When I find them, I dig out my phone and call 911. Tiff is unconscious and bleeding heavily. The bullet hole is on the right side of her chest, just below the clavicle.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  “My friend has been shot.”

  “Is the victim conscious?”

  “No, but she’s breathing.”

  I hear typing. “I’m showing that you are at the ballpark downtown. Is that correct?”

  “Yeah, we’re on the club level. Suite Eighteen.”

  More typing. “A paramedic unit is on its way.”

  Almost as soon as she says it, I hear a siren, and then another. I dress hastily. Tiff’s breathing slows. I kneel over her. Thanks to baseball, I never had to learn CPR. I’ve had highly trained professionals within earshot at all times since I was in my teens. I apply pressure to the wound, but that does nothing but cover my hands in blood. Real blood this time, Tiff. Real blood.

  Then I hear voices in the hall. The door opens hard and slams into the wall. It’s not just the cavalry but the whole damn army: two EMTs with a stretcher, two firefighters, and four uniformed police, plus a couple of frightened stadium-security guards.

  The EMTs rush to Tiff’s side, perform a quick assessment, and lift her onto the stretcher. One hangs a plasma bag, another inserts an IV. Away she goes. Nobody makes much of the fact that the victim is stark naked—or that there’s a foldout bed with rumpled sheets in the middle of the room—but it can’t look good for me. I find myself walled off by cops.

  “Are you Rockenbush?” the police sergeant asks me. He has a thick mustache, and a throbbing vein on his right temple.

  “I’m Adcock. I work here.”

  Th
e sergeant frowns. “That’s how it goes, huh? Anybody gets to use these rooms when there’s no game?”

  “There was a game tonight,” says a deputy with a white notepad. “Dogs won, 6–4.” The deputy looks at me. “Hey, wait a minute. You’re that reliever. Remind me your name?”

  “I told you, it’s Adcock.”

  “Adcock, right! The lefty.”

  The sergeant is unimpressed. “Mr. Adcock, we’re going to need to ask you some questions. But before we do that, I need to know if you’d like to have an attorney present.”

  Someone pushes through the wall of cops—a familiar lantern jaw perched atop a navy-blue suit. “Sergeant Fahey, correct?” Feldspar shows the cop a badge—a badge!—and shakes his hand with brisk professional vigor. “I’m Jim Feldspar, Director of Personnel Security for Major League Baseball. If you wouldn’t mind, sir, may I have a word with Mr. Adcock real quick?”

  Fahey must be on the payroll, or at least in the ticket pool, because he takes his men and retreats into the hall. I mean, there is blood drying on the carpet and a suspect in the room. That’s how good Jim Feldspar is. It pains me to say it, but it’s true.

  As soon as the cops are out of earshot, he lays into me: “You’ve got to be kidding—what the hell are you doing? You’re like what’s her name…Typhoid Mary? Everywhere you frickin’ go, somebody turns up dead.”

  “Did she die?” Barely a minute has elapsed since the EMTs whisked Tiff away. It’s possible Feldspar overheard something in the hall.

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that you’re finished. Do you understand? I’m going to recommend the strongest sanctions possible. You should be banned, full stop. No contact with baseball players, no coaching or scouting. Definitely no playing. Now, maybe the commissioner in his infinite mercy will disagree, but I don’t think so. We can’t have people getting shot in luxury boxes. You had fair warning, my friend.”

  “You did warn me,” I say, “but I just walked into this mess….”

  “You walked into nothing. You don’t even have your shoes on.” He looks around the suite at the sofa cushions flung willy-nilly, the pullout bed. “I don’t even want to know what was going on in here.”

  “You have every right to be suspicious. But the thing is, that was my fiancée they just wheeled away.”

  “Spare me the bullshit, Adcock.”

  “Please. I need to know if she’s going to make it. I need to get to the hospital.”

  Feldspar shakes his head. “Not going to happen tonight, big shot.”

  “Have a heart, Feldspar. Imagine your wife got shot. Please, I’ll sign whatever you need me to sign, but let me go. You know I didn’t shoot her.”

  Feldspar thinks it over. Toeing the carpet with his wing-tip oxfords, he discovers a condom wrapper, which he pins in place, holds for a moment, then kicks under the sofa.

  “I’ll talk to the cops,” he says. “But as far as all this goes”—he waves his hand to indicate the stadium—“you’re toast.”

  36

  Feldspar pulls strings, and the police let me go. After a quick stop in the clubhouse for a change of clothes, I retrieve my bike from the players’ lot. I head south, toward the hospital, in case any of the cops are watching. As soon as I’m safely out of sight, I pull over and check my phone. When I contacted Briggman to ask about putting cameras in the skybox, he insisted that I take two wireless tracking fobs, just in case. Now I’m glad I did—and glad the meeting with Tiff and Enriqueta got as touchy-feely as it did. The fobs look like tiny nicotine patches, perhaps a centimeter in diameter, and they contain sensors that allow them to be tracked by GPS. When the meeting took its carnal turn, Briggman (in contact through my earpiece) urged me to go ahead and stick the fobs. I did my best, sticking Tiff’s to her bra and Enriqueta’s inside her left shoe.

  I pull up the OmniSentry app and see a map of San José. Two red dots appear. The first is not moving—that’s Tiff, or her clothing; she’s inside a large outline labeled SILICON VALLEY MEDICAL CENTER. The second dot is moving south along the 101. I put the bike in gear. Five minutes later, I’m doing ninety, racing through the hills south of town. On a straightaway, I steal a glance at the phone. The red dot has stopped moving. It’s fixed at a spot labeled SOUTH COUNTY AIRPORT. I know the place, a little airstrip right off the highway, full of hobby planes and crop dusters serving the garlic fields of Gilroy. It’s maybe twenty miles from my current position, so I pick up the pace. I’m doing a hundred, 110, 115….Then, just as I enter Morgan Hill, I hear a siren. Red-and-blue lights appear behind me. There are others vehicles on the road, but none speeding like I am. There’s no question he wants me. The cruiser flashes his brights and pulls me over just before the exit for the In-N-Out.

  Then everything grinds to a halt. The patrolman takes his sweet time getting out of the car. He puts on the dome light, pretends to call something up on his computer screen. Great time to check Facebook, right? Why not?

  I look at the phone. The dot moves slowly across the airport property. La Loba might be looking for parking, but more likely she’s in a plane, and I’ll bet a braid of Gilroy’s finest that she isn’t planning to spray any fields once she’s airborne.

  Finally, the patrolman walks over. “Please step off the bike, sir.” He’s a young guy, tall and strong. He reminds me more than a little of Thick Will Cunningham. “Stand next to the bike with your hands out to the side, like this.”

  I do as he says. He frisks me and finds nothing. Then he asks for my license and registration. I hand them over, along with a friendly smile.

  “You think this is funny? I got you doing a hundred ten miles per hour in a sixty-five zone. That’s reckless driving, thirty days minimum and a thousand bucks.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t paying attention to my speed. I’m in a hurry to get somewhere.”

  “We’re all in a hurry.” He looks at my license. “Do you like to gamble, Mr. Adcock?”

  “What kind of gambling?”

  “I like to bet on sports. I’ll bet on football, basketball, horses, dogs. Even golf. But my favorite is baseball. Every year, during spring training, me and my buddy go to Vegas and put money on different teams to win the World Series. Last year he picked the Red Sox, and he won some dough.”

  “Losing always hurts.”

  “It does. And the year before, when the Giants won it all, he picked them, too. He’s like a freakin’ oracle, this friend of mine. We’ve known each other since grade school, and we’ve been scrapping ever since. You got any friends like that, Mr. Adcock?”

  “I’ve had a few.”

  “What pisses me off is that my buddy is no smarter than me. He works graveyards at the 7-Eleven in King City. Is that the job of an intelligent man? But he keeps winning, which makes me think: Shoot, I should be able to do what he does. So, this year, when we took our trip to Vegas, I brought some swagger, some confidence, and when I made my World Series bet, I felt like, damn it, this is the one. You ever feel like that, like you just know something good is going to happen?”

  I think about Keith the driver’s parting words, back in Denver. He was so sure good things were coming to me. Then again, that might have been something Tiff paid him to say.

  “I tend not to believe in that type of thing.”

  “I’m going to make you a bet, Mr. Adcock. Hopefully, what I just explained helps you understand how important this bet is to me. See, every year I pick the same team, my home team, the team I’ve loved ever since I was a kid. I’m talking about the Bay Dogs. Every year I pick the Dogs to win the Series, and every year I lose. Sometimes my buddy wins, and sometimes he doesn’t, but I always lose. So let’s make a deal, you and me. Let’s agree that this year I’m going to win my bet. This year, the Bay Dogs are going to the Series. You think you can cover that bet, Mr. Adcock?”

  “I can try.”

  “Well, I hope you do more than try, because, if I lose, then you lose. I’m going to write up this little incident here, this
little reckless-driving felony, but I’m not going to put it in the books. I’m going to keep your name and address and registration and all that, and I’m going to wait until October to decide what to do. How does that feel? Does that seem like a fair deal to you?”

  It’s a rhetorical question. He doesn’t even wait for me to respond. He walks back to his cruiser, presumably to copy down my information, and returns a minute later with my license and registration—and a baseball. It’s covered with signatures, and I recognize many of them: Modigliani, Ordoñez, he’s even got Will Cunningham. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he says, handing me a ballpoint pen.

  “More bets?”

  “Nope. That’s just for you.”

  After twenty minutes by the side of the highway, the cop finally turns me loose. I check my phone, expecting to see the dot sailing away over the hills. Instead, I find that it’s still flashing at the airport. I put the bike in gear.

  I obey the speed limit until the patrolman is out of sight, then I haul ass. Before long I’m turning off in San Martin, where I park my bike and run up to the little terminal building. It’s smaller than most bus stations, and there is no staff on duty at night. There are no lights out on the airfield, no planes taxiing.

  I return to the phone map and zoom in as far as it will let me. The dot appears to be off to the side of the terminal, in a bank of lockers accessible from the outside.

  Suddenly a text comes in: Número 54, 26-3-31.

  37

  The nurse at the desk tells me Tiff is due to have her surgical dressings changed, but I talk her into letting me visit.

  “You’re not from the police department, are you?” She’s chubby but cute, wearing scrubs decorated with Grateful Dead bears.

  “No, why do you ask?”

  She rolls her eyes. “They were here all morning. She was so exhausted, I had to kick them out.”

  “I won’t be long, I promise.”

  She leads me to the end of a long, curving hallway. Tiff’s door is half open, and the nurse knocks perfunctorily before pushing it open. Tiff is awake and sitting up in bed. She has another visitor, as it turns out, a burly Latino in a dark dress shirt with several pounds of gold around his neck.