Racing the Rain

by John L Parker

  “So then you told him all about it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He didn’t know Mrs. Chillingworth was going to be there, or so he said. He thought the judge would be alone. But he told us in the beginning that if we found anybody else there, they had to go too, or we’d all get the chair. So that’s what we did. So be it.”

  Lucky got up from the table, swaying, and staggered to the bed.

  “Man, I hardly slept a wink in the slammer. I’m going to sleep forever tonight,” he said.

  “I doubt that,” said Trapper Nelson.

  Then the door exploded off its hinges, and before it hit the ground seven armed men were in the room.

  CHAPTER 62

  * * *

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  The Bambi Motel was south of Kernsville on state road 441, unpretentious and tiny, a little cartoonlike fawn on the marquee just above the NO VACANCY sign.

  Demski’s snoring had driven Cassidy outside to one of the concrete tables in the courtyard, but he couldn’t sleep anyway. He liked Kernsville. It was cooler in this part of the state, with a lot more trees and seemingly more oxygen in the air. Distance runners, he thought, have an understandable affinity for oxygen.

  The preliminary round had been anticlimactic. He almost wished he had had to run harder so that he’d be sleepier. Stiggs didn’t need to qualify in his event, but Ed had a tough round, needing a PR 1:58.9 to make it to the final. But at least he was able to sleep. Hell, he sounded like a cement mixer.

  In retrospect, all the trouble with Trapper had been a kind of strange blessing. It had kept his attention diverted enough to make those last few days bearable. It was hard to get overly excited about a race you were sure you were not going to run.

  But then one little trip to the jail and all of that went away. And now here they were in Kernsville. Mr. Kamrad showed them around the campus—he had taken summer courses there—and their eyes got steadily wider as they took it all in. Southeastern had started in the 1800s as a theological seminary with a tiny student body. Now twenty-five thousand students walked to classes under the moss-draped live oaks scattered around the two-thousand-acre campus. As Mr. Kamrad pointed out the hundred-year-old brick building where he had taken psychology courses, then the cavernous gymnasium, then the awe-inspiring seventy-five-thousand-seat football stadium, the boys got steadily quieter. When they pulled out of Citrus City Thursday they had been something of a big deal in their own minds, regional qualifiers for the state track meet. Now that they were here, they were looking around at a place that could absorb thousands of high school track and field athletes without even noticing them. Stiggs had clammed up completely. They were all feeling pretty insignificant.

  Mr. Kamrad noticed and cut the tour short.

  “We need to grab some lunch and get checked in to the motel. We’ll continue the tour later,” he had said.

  Now here he was the night before the race, and he had tried everything he could think of to distract himself. Mr. San Romani had counseled him that there would be plenty of time to get his mind in gear when he started his warm-up—they always did a lengthy warm-up. He understood the concept—keep your powder dry and all that—but it wasn’t easy to put into practice. In the station wagon on the way up he would willfully put it out of his mind and go back to The Catcher in the Rye, but after five minutes of Holden’s bitching he would catch himself mentally right back in the thick of the race in his head, pulling up to the leader as they were going into the gun lap, or fighting out of a box before the last turn. His mind was like a puppy, easily distracted but always returning quickly to the toy. Now he longed for sleep just to put an end to his misery.

  It should have been a perfect night for sleeping. The pastoral quiet on this side of town was interrupted only by the occasional car hightailing it down 441 to Ocala, and by the ever-present buzz of the motel air conditioners. The place was filled with track guys and coaches, but Cassidy was apparently the only insomniac among them.

  He heard a room door opening and figured Demski had awakened to find him gone. But it was Mr. Kamrad, dressed in an Edgewater crew sweat suit and an incongruous pair of flip-flops. He sat down in the lawn chair across from Cassidy.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Oh, I just can’t sleep, is all. I’m not worried or anything.”

  Mr. Kamrad nodded.

  “You know, I remember the first time my little college rowing team went to nationals. Here we were, a bunch of athletes in an obscure sport that no one even knew existed back where we came from. All of a sudden we’re surrounded by hundreds of guys like us, except the names on their singlets were famous: Harvard, Yale, Boston College, Cornell. We looked around at these guys and every single one of them looked like an Olympic contender. Nobody said anything, but you could just feel the air going out of us. It didn’t matter that we had come through the prelims just fine. We just kept ogling everyone, and by the time we backed into the starting dock, we had convinced ourselves that we didn’t belong there.”

  “Wow. What happened?”

  “We finished third. But I’ve thought about that race pretty much every day of my life since then, and although I’m not a what-if kind of guy, I’m pretty sure we could have won that race. All we had to do is pull from the start like we thought we had a chance. Instead, we hung back, surprised that we were doing as well as we were, not wanting to push our luck. We came on like gangbusters at the end, but we had let ourselves get too far out of it. If the race had been ten meters longer we would have passed both those boats. As it was, they had to look at the photographs, it was so close. But there was no doubt about it. There it was, obvious even in the negatives: we were third. We were third then and we will always be third. You can look it up in the record books right now and there we will be, third.”

  “Wow.”

  “But that’s what it means to be an athlete, Quenton. All the civilians see is the triumphant moment, the victory lap, the fulfillment of the dream. They don’t pay much attention to the also-rans and the missed-by-inches, the great majority of us who go on with the rest of our lives drawing whatever comfort we can from the fact that we were close. That we were among those who at least tried, were willing to put ourselves at risk. That we would live with the results, whatever they were. But always to try. That is what makes an endurance athlete, Quenton, the contract you make with yourself that you will try and not give up. And if you are lucky enough to be among those that finish at the top, that’s a great thing that you get to live with for a long time.”

  “I never thought—”

  “But there’s something else.”

  Cassidy looked at Mr. Kamrad, his familiar horn-rimmed glasses, his sad, empathetic smile.

  “There’s winning. Don’t ever forget that!” he said with a laugh, aware he had gotten pretty solemn. “Hey, wait here a second. There’s something I want to show you.”

  He came back from his room carrying something in his right hand. Sitting on the same bench with Cassidy, he placed it on the table between them. It was his stopwatch.

  “I didn’t clear it after your time trial. Look at what it says.”

  “I know what it says.”

  “It says 3:07.2., Quenton”

  “I’m aware—”

  “It says more than that, Quenton. It says that—if by some miracle of persistence or training or luck—if you could somehow extend that one lap farther, if you could possibly add a sixty-second quarter to the end of a time like that, you would be a 4:07 miler. You would be as fast as Archie San Romani was at the height of his career, and less than a second from the world record at that time.”

  “There is no way in the world . . .”

  “I know, it’s crazy to think such things. That was an all-out time trial, and a sixty-second quarter on top of that is ridiculous to think about. But it’s not ridiculous to dream. A little crazy extrapolation like that makes for the best kind of dream.”

 
; Cassidy waited. He wasn’t really sure what Mr. Kamrad was saying.

  “But that 3:07 tells you something else. It tells you that you belong out there, Quenton. Right now, at this moment in time, you belong on the track with Mizner and Hosford and all the rest. You haven’t run the times they have, maybe, but you’ve got those times inside you. You’re not some weird accident, some dreamy guy who wandered into a situation he can’t handle. It’s your race tomorrow. It’s yours as much as it is anyone else’s.”

  Cassidy nodded. He had not thought of it that way. He had been more like Mr. Kamrad’s poor crew teammates, happy to be tagging along with the real players.

  “All right, enough of this pep talk business. This is exactly what Archie didn’t want me doing to you before the race. Time to get some sleep. We have a surprise visitor coming in the morning—several, in fact. And then we’re going to do a little jog and some striders at the P.K. Yonge high school track after breakfast.

  “Who’s . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it. Go back to trying not to think about the race and get some sleep now. Tomorrow, to put it mildly, is a big day, my friend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Strangely enough, he actually felt a little sleepy.

  CHAPTER 63

  * * *

  SPRUNG

  The phone blasted them awake at eight the next morning. Demski answered in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else, someone older and less healthy.

  “Okay, I’ll tell him,” Demski said, sounding a little more like himself. He hung up and dove back under the covers.

  “Tell him what?” Cassidy was fully awake now.

  “Report out front. We have v-v-visitors. And we’re gathering for the breakfast expedition. I think I’d rather sleep, but I’m pretty darned hungry.”

  Trapper Nelson was sitting at Cassidy’s table in the courtyard.

  He stood, huge grin on his face, and gave Cassidy a bear hug.

  “Didn’t think I was serious, did you?”

  “How in the world . . .”

  “I brought something for you,” he said, handing him the morning edition of the Kernsville Sun. “I wasn’t sure if it would make the papers up here, but it did.”

  The headline read, “Trio Arrested in Chillingworth Case.” Stunned, he read on:

  By Ron Wiggins

  Special from the Palm Beach Post

  West Palm Beach, FL—A former West Palm Beach city judge and two Riviera Beach men were arrested yesterday and charged with the kidnapping and murder of Circuit Judge Curtis E. Chillingworth, 58, and his wife, Margorie, 56, from their Manalapan beach home earlier this year.

  The former judge, Joe Peel, 36, of West Palm Beach, was arrested at his downtown law office. Floyd “Lucky” Holzapfel, 36, of Riviera Beach, was arrested without incident at a West Palm Beach motel. Bobby Lincoln, 35, was arrested at a cabstand he owns in Riviera Beach, where he also resides. Only hours earlier the two had been released on bail from the Palm Beach County jail in connection with other charges. According to sources close to the case, Peel was not present at the scene of the kidnapping but was charged with conspiracy and first degree murder. Peel had a pending disciplinary hearing before Chillingworth and feared disbarment. He had had several grievances filed against him while practicing law.

  State Attorney Phillip O’Connell said the trio was indicted by a direct information filed by his office, bypassing the grand jury. O’Connell said little else at a hastily convened press conference at the Palm Beach County Courthouse.

  Police sources close to the case who asked not to be identified said one of the men had divulged details of the crime in a police sting operation involving a confidential informant.

  Cassidy sat across the table—mouth agape—and looked at Trapper Nelson, who couldn’t suppress a grin.

  “Phil O’Connell may refuse to say who snitched on them, but I won’t. It was me!” said Trapper.

  “I gathered that,” said Cassidy.

  “It was Peel behind it all along,” Trapper said. He took a deep breath. “But I knew the other two were involved. I knew it in my bones.”

  “I never thought for a second that you—”

  “I know, but lots of people were ready to believe I was a real bad guy, including those two. There were plenty of people years ago who thought I had something to do with shooting Dykas, too. That’s why it wasn’t such a far-fetched scheme Phil came up with after I told him what you saw that night on the bridge.”

  “Wow. You mean I actually started this whole thing?”

  “Well, actually they suspected Peel from the first, but they didn’t have a scintilla of evidence against him, and he had set up an ironclad alibi. They also figured Lucky and Bobby were involved somehow, but they had to figure out a way to get me close to them in some way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Then I’d make friendly with them and supposedly get Joe to help them with their bail situation. They made sure it was late at night when we got out, so I proposed that we get a motel and celebrate being at large. Lucky’s a talker anyway, and a bottle and a half of bourbon does wonders for a fella’s sociability. I’m still a little hungover, but we got them, Quenton, we got them on tape! It’s open and shut.”

  Cassidy felt light as a puff of down.

  “But why did you put yourself on the line like that?” Cassidy said.

  Trapper swallowed. “Curtis was my friend. He helped me get my original property on the river. Then he showed me how to get the rest of the land by buying default tax deeds. Even before that, he kept Charlie, Dykas, and me from starving when we first jumped off the train in Jupiter with no money and no prospects.” Trapper swallowed again and looked off down 441.

  Cassidy didn’t say anything.

  “I still can’t believe what those animals did to Curtis and Marjorie,” Trapper said.

  They sat in silence for a while, Cassidy reading the newspaper story over again.

  “Come on, let’s go roust Ed out,” said Trapper finally. “We’re due at the Flying Biscuit, and your whole cheering section is there!”

  CHAPTER 64

  * * *

  THE RACE

  The grandstands at the Percy Beard track stadium held several thousand people. Cassidy had never seen anything like it. Nor had he seen so many hundreds of athletes in uniforms of every description, stretching, jogging on the outside of the track, or doing run-ups at the jump pits. Cassidy’s race wasn’t until three o’clock, and he knew he had to get out of the place for his own good. It was nerve-racking in there.

  He followed some other runners who seemed to know their way around. They jogged by the varsity tennis courts and the law school, then entered a little path through some woods that came out in a married students housing area. From there they skirted a small body of water marked by signs that said LAKE ALICE—DO NOT FEED THE ALLIGATORS. Cassidy wasn’t sure if they had gators this far north and thought the sign might be some sort of college prank.

  Cassidy kept trying to figure out how he felt but finally gave up. He felt restless but blah. He knew that he was truly well rested for the first time in months, but he’d had trouble sleeping for several nights now and didn’t feel particularly spry. All the time they had been “running through” races, he had assumed that when he really cut back and tapered for a big race he would have a hard time stopping himself from turning cartwheels.

  But he didn’t feel that way at all. He felt perfectly fine, but not like he could leap tall buildings in a single bound. He had almost started feeling better during his prelim race the day before, but Mr. Kamrad told him to run only as hard as he needed to safely qualify. He finished well back in third place, thirty yards behind the Nubbins kid from Orlando Evans, who set a PR.

  “Maybe he d-doesn’t understand that you don’t get extra credit for winning a p-p-prelim,” said Demski.

  So Cassidy had coasted in with a surprisingly easy 4:35, feeling like he hadn’t really even loosened up.

  “Don’t worry about
how you feel,” Mr. San Romani had told him on the phone last night. “You might be all over the place. Some of my best races came on days I felt really unexceptional. Just get your usual good hard warm-up and don’t worry about it. Halfway through the race is when you want to be feeling good.”

  So he quit trying to gauge his internal workings and concentrated on the race. He knew Mizner and Hosford were the runners to watch out for. He had thought Nubbins, though just a freshman, might be pretty tough, too, but he probably had taken himself out of it with his crazy prelim race.

  Cassidy had almost reached the turnaround point at the end of Lake Alice when he heard a familiar voice.

  “I’d recognize that red-and-white flying eagle anywhere,” said Jerry Mizner, running toward him, big smile on his face.

  “That tornado is hard to miss, too. I wondered where you were hiding.”

  “Isn’t this just the most amazing place?” said Mizner, gesturing around at the campus.

  “Yeah, it’s kinda overwhelming. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to go here,” said Cassidy.

  “I can. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it for a while,” said Mizner.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m only a junior.”

  “Holy crap. You’ve been drubbing me all this time and you’re a junior? I didn’t need to hear that right now.”

  Mizner laughed. “Hey, that Nubbins kid is only a freshman!”

  “Yeah, and he sure ran like one yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but he’s getting damn tough all the same. I heard he was telling someone he was putting in fifteen miles a day.”

  “That doesn’t sound possible,” Cassidy said.

  Mizner shrugged. “Well, I need to keep moving. If you’re looking for a place to do striders, there’s a nice grass field over behind the tennis courts.”