Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  He was right—it was fascinating. Garrett listened, enthralled, piecing Kennedy’s story together with his own. Now he knew why Jenny had had the feeling she was being followed. Kennedy had put his man on her, hoping David Laird would contact her. There was anger in Kennedy’s voice when he told of the events at the slaughterhouse that had ended in Lindy’s death, but otherwise he was telling his story cheerfully.

  Garrett was queasy. The more Kennedy talked, the more it became obvious what was on the agenda for Cheryl and him. Kennedy wouldn’t be spilling all this stuff if he expected anybody would still be around to pass it on to Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan.

  “... but now,” Kennedy concluded, “after all these frustrations and setbacks, I’m going to accomplish my original objective. With your help, of course.”

  “My help?”

  “Yes, I’ll need you to get me into Yankee Stadium.”

  “What makes you think I can do that?”

  “You carry the authority of the Commissioner of Baseball, Garrett. You can do it. Besides, if you don’t ...” He shrugged and pointed the gun toward Cheryl.

  “Right,” Garrett said. He drove across the bridge at the top of Madison Avenue into the Bronx. The trouble was, he could get him into the stadium. The guards all knew him, and the place would be powered up and lighted for the ground crew to do their work.

  They drove on in silence until the stadium came into view. The lights made a heavenly dome in the hazy air above the rim. The Longines clock on the outside wall said it was 4:24. The message board next to the clock said the Yankees’ next game was against Chicago, Wednesday, at two P.M. Gennarro Kennedy said, “All right, Garrett, let’s park the car and go inside.”

  3

  Of all the things Cheryl Tilton might have been worried about, the one that bothered her most was the fact that she had to go walking around Yankee Stadium again in spike-heeled shoes.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She stopped, reached down, and slipped them off.

  “Leave them there,” Gennarro Kennedy commanded.

  Cheryl looked at him. “Do you know what these things cost? Are you crazy?”

  Gennarro ignored her question, but there was a tension in the silence that told her he was offended with the question.

  “Leave them, Cheryl,” Russ Garrett said. “Pick them up on the way out.”

  Cheryl shot him a look. She’d about had it with Mr. Garrett, too, the way he just rolled over and played dead for this Negro Napoleon, discussing the case on the way here as if they were colleagues, for God’s sake. Then Garrett had sweet-talked the guard into letting them into the stadium, saying Cheryl and Gennarro were reporters for the Post doing an article about ground-crew workers, and how the Commissioner of Baseball had sent him along to show them around. He made her sick. Why didn’t he do something? He hadn’t hesitated to belt her around when she threatened him. She’d thought this Garrett was something special. He was just another coward.

  Gennarro Kennedy was also disappointed in Russ Garrett. He wanted Garrett to have some appreciation of what was going on, how he was being used to get at his friend and how that would hurt his precious game of baseball. He wanted him, in short, to suffer. To lose control, maybe grovel a little.

  But he wasn’t doing it. He was calmly doing everything Kennedy told him. “What makes you think,” Kennedy asked, “that you and Miss Tilton can pick up those shoes later? That you’re coming out of here at all?”

  “It’s because you’re not stupid. The guard knows we’re in here—if we don’t come out when the ground crew comes out, someone will come to look for us. And if it’s Mickey you’re after you can’t hole up with us in here, alive or dead, because they won’t let the ball players in for tomorrow’s practice unless we’re accounted for first. You can’t kill us and sneak out yourself, because you don’t know the stadium well enough. You couldn’t hide our bodies where you could be sure they wouldn’t be found, and if they’re found, you’re back in the same boat. That leads us to the package under your arm. If it’s not a bomb, I’ll eat it.”

  Kennedy decided that Mr. Garrett’s death would be a lot slower and more painful than he had originally planned. Maybe the smug white bastard would watch the woman suffer first.

  “You may,” Kennedy told him, “eat it anyway.”

  “Ah, so it is a bomb. Maybe you plan to booby-trap Mickey’s locker.”

  “It’s the same kind of bomb,” Kennedy conceded, “that took care of your other friend, except for a different means of detonation. Too bad you won’t be around to see the effect.”

  Russ Garrett said nothing. His mind was racing, and his heart was pounding, and he was drawing on all his reserves to keep it from showing. He almost smiled. It was a baseball tradition. No matter how tense the situation was, you just spit on your hands and got down to it.

  Garrett was leading them to the Yankee locker room the long way, through the curving tunnel along the first-base side of the stadium; exactly one level below the corridor where David Laird (as Garrett now knew him to be) had attacked the hot-dog vendor. The corridor was dark and filled with echoes of his shoes and Kennedy’s; the illumination from the emergency lights was barely enough to proceed by. Cheryl’s bare feet were silent.

  He’d offered to take Kennedy out to the field and into the Yankee locker room by way of the team’s dugout behind first base, but Kennedy had just scowled at him.

  At least now he knew it was a bomb. To be placed, no doubt, in Mickey’s locker and wired to something he’d use tomorrow at practice. Mickey would pick it up, and he (and God alone knew how many others) would be blown to hamburger. And the newspapers would say ...

  “All right, Garrett,” Kennedy said. He pointed with the small pocket flashlight he’d been carrying. “The sign on the door says this is it. Open it.”

  Garrett started to laugh. “How?”

  “You work out here. You use the Yankees’ locker room. You must have a key.”

  Garrett kept laughing. “You’re a genius, Kennedy—you just tend to slip up on small details. What do you think this is, a country club, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Shut up,” Kennedy commanded.

  “The players don’t even have keys. The clubhouse boys get here early in the morning and open the place up.”

  Kennedy raised the gun. “I said shut up!”

  “Why don’t you use the bomb and blow it open?”

  Kennedy’s face seemed to glow with anger in the half-darkness. Sooner or later Garrett was going to have to do something about his situation, and his odds for living through whatever it was he did were very short.

  Garrett told himself he knew what he was doing. The odds might get a little longer if he could goad Kennedy into making a mistake. Unless he overplayed his cards.

  That’s what he thought he had done when he saw the gun come up, but Kennedy merely shot the lock open. The crack and whine were a physical sensation in the concrete corridor. Garrett’s ears were still ringing when the echo died away.

  “Think anybody heard that?” he asked.

  Kennedy motioned with the gun. “Inside.”

  Garrett went in, then Cheryl, then Kennedy. The man with the gun looked for a wall switch and found it. Light flooded the room, illuminating the lockers, which were really open cubicles about four feet across, each a combination closet and dressing room.

  Kennedy, to Garrett’s chagrin, seemed to know exactly what he was about. Before he even took a close look at the cubicle that contained the pinstripe shirts with the big number 7 on them, he grabbed a roll of adhesive tape and made Cheryl immobilize Garrett by taping him to one of the chairs. He watched her closely, making sure she didn’t cheat and make it possible for Garrett to get loose. Then he put the gun down in Mickey’s locker and attended to Cheryl himself, less elaborately but still securely.

  Then he went to work setting the bomb.

  Garrett’s chair was off to the side of Mantle’s locker, so he could see what Kennedy was d
oing. It was a trip-wire bomb, very simple, very deadly: a wire, a blasting cap, and three sticks of dynamite.

  Kennedy taped the dynamite to the wall with more bandage tape, well up the wall, where the shirts would conceal it. Then he ran the wire invisibly down the joint of the cubicle, strung it over the tops of Mantle’s baseball shoes, and attached it to the floor with two thumbtacks.

  Garrett shook his head in despair. Kennedy was smart. One of those pairs of spikes had to be Mantle’s practice pair—he’d be certain to take one of them tomorrow. Even if he didn’t, he’d very likely notice the wire and give it a tug.

  Kennedy finished; Garrett watched the black man’s broad back as he stood with his hands on his hips and inspected his work. Kennedy was wearing a smile as he turned and started to free Cheryl.

  Garrett was getting angry, very angry. This was wrong. Planting a bomb here was like planting one in the Vatican. Baseball was a kid’s game that some lucky men got to keep playing even after they’d grown up. Garrett hated what these people had done to it—Kennedy, the Simmons brothers, even Cheryl. They were all part of it.

  “You’re a real mastermind, Kennedy,” Garrett said. “Brilliant. What happens tomorrow when the clubhouse boy finds the lock shot off? He’ll call the cops, that’s what.”

  Kennedy freed Cheryl and went to get his gun. “Get him loose,” Kennedy told her. “Keep his hands taped together.” To Garrett, he said, “It was a padlock—now it’s in my pocket. They might not even notice it’s gone. If they do, they’ll just think someone forgot to lock up.”

  “Yeah, that would have worked,” Garrett sneered, “except you’ve made everybody nervous with your death-threat letter.”

  “I should have taped your mouth,” Kennedy told him.

  “It wouldn’t change the facts.”

  Cheryl was untaping Garrett’s legs from the chair. She looked at him. “Don’t antagonize him, Russ.”

  “Oh, to hell with him; I’m sick of him. He thinks he’s so goddam brilliant. He’s a horse’s ass.”

  “That’s enough, Garrett!” Kennedy’s voice cracked like splitting wood.

  “What are you going to do about it? You already know you can’t shoot me here. Why don’t you just shrug it off as the defiant ravings of a doomed man?”

  “That’s just what I’ll do,” Kennedy said. “Stand up.”

  Garrett stood. He was free of the chair now, though his hands were taped together, in front of him. He kept talking. “David Laird made an idiot of you, and you don’t have any idea of where he is or what the hell you can do about it. Detective Martin made an idiot of you. So did I. So did Lindy.”

  Kennedy’s face was impassive, but his free hand was making a fist. “All right, back outside now. We’ll even,” he said, “pick up your shoes, Miss Tilton.”

  Garrett got close to Kennedy and faced him. “You know what the funniest thing is? The funniest thing is that this is all a waste of time for you. They won’t even think twice about a Communist blowing Mickey up. This won’t even be tied in with the Simmons case.”

  And all of a sudden Kennedy started to lose control, like a pitcher who’s been left in the game too long. Garrett was back in business. He had to time this just right. Cheryl had to be smart, too.

  Kennedy’s black eyes gleamed red. He grabbed Garrett by the throat with his left hand. The right hand still held the gun. “Why not?” he demanded. “Why won’t they, Garrett?”

  In spite of the stranglehold Kennedy had on him, Garrett managed to laugh. “Because,” he choked, “they’ll pin it on me.”

  Kennedy’s eyes widened. He loosened his grip a little. Garrett kept talking. “You have files on me, haven’t you, genius? Okay, so do the cops. I’m a frustrated ball player, jealous of Mantle; I follow him around. I evolve theories about dead men trying to kill him. I talk my way into Yankee Stadium in the middle of the night. Then I either turn up dead or I never turn up at all. The same goes for the woman and the colored guy I went in with, though the colored guy just stays missing. The next morning Mickey Mantle is blown to smithereens. What do you expect the cops are going—Go, Cheryl, run for it! Go!”

  While Garrett had been talking, Kennedy had been gazing at him. Garrett recognized the expression. It was the look Garrett himself had worn that day in Korea when he reached around behind his leg, then brought his hand back to see the little slivers of bone gleaming through the blood on his fingers. Kennedy was seeing something just as horrifying. Maybe his own fallibility.

  Cheryl, meantime, had been inching her way behind Kennedy until she’d made it unnoticed to the doorway. She stood there a second, looking helplessly at Garrett. Garrett had tried a few subtle nods of the head to tell her it was all right, but Cheryl hadn’t gotten the message. So he yelled.

  Cheryl disappeared, the door banging shut behind her. Kennedy, startled, whirled around, cursing.

  Garrett knew he would never have a better chance. He jumped at Kennedy, chopping down with his bound arms at the hand that held the gun. The .38 hit the floor with a clatter. Garrett managed to kick it away before Kennedy hit him.

  It was a roundhouse right, powerful and fast. Garrett pulled his head back a little, but the blow still sent him staggering backward. Kennedy kept coming forward.

  Garrett could use his arms to block punches, after a fashion, but he couldn’t hit back. Kennedy, in no hurry, lined up each punch. Garrett shook his head to clear away the glowing spots in front of his eyes.

  He spoke, primarily to convince himself that he was still conscious. “There’s no future in it, Kennedy. Cheryl is halfway out of the stadium by now. She’s getting the cops.”

  “It won’t help you, Garrett.” He punched Garrett in the stomach. Garrett groaned and fell backward into Yogi Berra’s locker, shaking the walls of it and pulling Berra’s possessions down around him. His brain gave him a brief flash of what would have happened if he’d landed in Mickey Mantle’s locker, but he chased the thought away.

  “You can’t win, goddammit!” Garrett shouted.

  Kennedy shouted back. “I’m better than you are! Better! No one defeats me!”

  Garrett scrambled to his feet. Kennedy was rushing him—the patience, the control were all gone. Garrett had to do something or he was going to die. Right now.

  He did something. He raised his arms high over his head as Kennedy approached. When Kennedy was close enough, Garrett brought his arms down around the black man’s neck, with the tape that bound him making it a tight embrace. Then he pulled Kennedy’s head toward him, at the same time ramming his own forehead into Kennedy’s face. Kennedy yelled and drew back. Garrett raised a knee toward his opponent’s groin, but Kennedy twisted and went down, taking most (but not all) of the impact on his thigh. He would not, Garrett knew, be down long.

  Garrett took his arms from around Kennedy’s neck and ran for it in the other direction, through the tunnel, into the Yankees’ dugout, and out onto the ball field.

  4

  Darkness. The ground crew had finished and gone home. Garrett could count on no reinforcements until the police arrived. Assuming Cheryl could get away.

  Garrett cursed and looked around. His eyes were adjusting—he could see the playing field stretching out like a prairie before him and the grandstand looming silently all around.

  Well, Garrett, he told himself, this is where you always wanted to be. He treated himself to a sardonic snort, then got busy. It would only be a matter of seconds before Kennedy would start to follow him. The only place there could be any safety was in the stands. Quicker way to an exit, too.

  Garrett ran past the dugout, then scrambled over the low fence into the grandstand. He began running up the stairs, wondering what was keeping Kennedy and if he would remember to pick up the gun.

  The crack of a bullet answered his question. The wooden back of one of the expensive box seats flew apart in a shower of splinters. Garrett threw himself to the concrete steps, crawled behind some seats. He raised his bound hands to wipe the
sweat from his forehead, but when he pulled them away, the dim light from the emergency system showed him it wasn’t sweat. Blood. He must have cut his temple on Kennedy’s teeth when he’d butted him. Terrific. Now he’d be leaving a nice little blood trail for Kennedy to follow. Garrett’s mother had always told him to carry a handkerchief. He should have listened.

  Kennedy was still standing out on the field. Garrett could see him in dark silhouette, waving his arms against the purple-gray of false dawn and screaming something unintelligible. That much Garrett could be thankful for—Kennedy was not thinking clearly. If he had been he’d have gone after Cheryl for her hostage value or, better still, make himself scarce before the police showed up.

  Garrett wiped away a trickle of blood a fraction of a second before it went into his left eye. That was all he needed. If he was going to get out of this, he needed his sight.

  It occurred to Garrett that he might not have been thinking too clearly himself. He would have given a lot for a free pass back to the Yankee locker room, where he could at least arm himself with a baseball bat. Hell, the locker room had an exit to the street. He might even be able to get away. By his count, Kennedy had four bullets left. But somehow Garrett knew he wasn’t going to get away; that this was going to come down to close quarters.

  Garrett worried the tape around his wrists with his teeth until he had a good start at getting his hands free, then managed to get them loose in a matter of seconds. Now if it came to a face-to-face finale, he could at least throw a punch.

  He didn’t hear Kennedy shouting anymore. He put his head up above the seat and saw that his pursuer had come into the grandstand and was calmly making his way to where Garrett had gone down. Garrett cursed under his breath, wiped the blood from his forehead again, and began crawling on the concrete to the next aisle down, the one closer to home plate.