Strike Three, You're Dead

by Josh Berk

  “I did notice the matching helmets,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” she yelled. “I want a biker nickname.”

  “Only if you can beat me!” Other Mike yelled.

  “No fair!” she called back. “I’ve got cargo.”

  “Ha-ha,” he said. “Lenny is cargo. Also you’re a girl.”

  “Oh, it’s on,” she huffed, accelerating quickly. I almost fell off the bike. My head was flung back like when you’re on a roller coaster. I had to hold on for dear life, which was hard because Maria kept smacking me in the back of the head. She was really fast and, even with her “cargo,” passed Other Mike easily. She held up her arms to celebrate.

  “Don’t let go of the handlebars!” I muttered. She paid no attention.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Your nickname is Armstrong.”

  “But I was using my legs,” she said.

  “Like Lance,” I said. “Lance Armstrong—the bike-riding guy?”

  “Oh yeah, him,” she said. “I only know baseball.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That was one heck of a weird ride. But the embarrassment, it was just beginning. Somehow I had forgotten that Courtney would be at my house. Of course she was.

  When we reached the Norbeck residence, there was Courtney, stretched out on the front lawn. She was wearing a blue bikini and sunning herself like a lizard on a rock. She looked at the four of us over the top of her large sunglasses as we teetered into the driveway. She didn’t say anything, but she flashed us a smile I found highly annoying. Then she put her head back down onto the lawn chair.

  I hustled the crew into the house. “Come on,” I muttered.

  “Who is that?” Maria said once we were inside. “Your sister?”

  “More like his sitter!” Other Mike said.

  “House sitter!” I shouted, blushing a little. “She’s sitting the house, not me!” The central air was gloriously cool after the hot bike ride home, but I still felt like I was on fire. My face was burning.

  “Ha-ha,” Mike said.

  “Shut up!” I said.

  “She’s really pretty,” Maria said.

  “I can’t say I’ve noticed,” I mumbled.

  “Then you need to get your eyes checked,” Maria said.

  “My eyes are fine. I just don’t like Courtney, okay? She’s, like, four feet tall and a pain in my butt. How tan does a person need to be? Just … just stay down here. I’ll go get my camera.” I ran up to my room and started looking for my video camera.

  “Is it okay if I grab a drink from the fridge? Okay, thanks, you’re the best,” Other Mike called after me while I was bounding up the steps. Idiot.

  I ran back down the steps. I basically flew down. I don’t know why, but the idea of Maria being in my house freaked me out. I wanted to get this over with. I brought the camera into the living room, where Maria was sitting on the couch. The Mikes were pacing around, sweating, drinking orange juice, and looking kinda awkward.

  “Here it is,” I said. “Let’s watch.” The camera had a cord that hooked it up to the TV so we could view it on the big screen. I worked the controls and pressed Play with a sweaty thumb. Bad idea. Somehow the camera starting playing the wrong movie. Specifically, it was footage I had made of myself singing a rap song I sort of like called “Fistful of Dollars.” And, yeah, maybe I was wearing some of my mom’s gold necklaces and a pair of my dad’s sunglasses because I thought it made me look cool.

  “Uh, never mind that,” I said. The guys were snickering a little. My face, it was burning. I pressed the button to jump to the next video, but it was another “Lenny alone” moment! This one was me attempting a dance move I had seen on a commercial. It did, shall we say, not go so well. You have to sort of run up a wall and freeze, but I kept just hitting the wall and falling over. The guys were at this point cracking up so bad that they had tears in their eyes. Maria was laughing pretty hard too. I thought they all might shoot orange juice out their noses.

  “Shut up!” I said. “Stupid camera!”

  Finally, I found the footage from last night. Thankfully, there were no more embarrassing freak-outs. Man, I’m an idiot. The footage included some of the ride to the park. I was messing with the camera as we rolled in.

  “Is that your dad?” Maria asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who else would it be?”

  “No, it’s just … He’s really bald,” she said.

  “Nice observation,” I said.

  I fast-forwarded through some boring footage of me walking into the game. It was funny—at the time I took the footage, it was, like, the greatest day in the world. Here’s me parking near the VIP entrance, getting ready to be a star. Here’s me walking into the VIP entrance, so psyched that I was going to have the chance to announce an inning. So strange how one moment everything can seem wonderful and the next moment tragedy strikes. Here’s me walking past Don Guardo in the hallway. I kept fast-forwarding, looking for something important. A clue maybe.

  “Dude, back up!” Maria said.

  “We’re not watching me rap again,” I said.

  “Thank heavens for that,” Other Mike said.

  “Fistful of dollars!” Mike yelled. “Hey, ho!” Then he got up and ran into the wall. Everyone laughed. My face burned again.

  “No, not that,” she said. “Was that Don Guardo?”

  I had to admit, I was pretty impressed. She had done her homework. This was a real fan. She wasn’t someone who knew only the good players—she knew everybody. She even knew the replacement catcher’s translator’s name. I thought we were the only fans that obsessive out there.

  “I love that guy!” she said. “He gets serious fashion points.” Is she kidding? Do girls like guys who wore tacky suits and smoked cigars?

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t get to talk to him or anything, though. I just walked past him in the hall. It was kinda cool to see him in person, but I didn’t think it was a big deal or anything—”

  “What was he saying?” she asked.

  “Beats me,” I said. “It was in Spanish. We took Spanish last year, but Señora Cohan was so boring! Pretty much the only words I learned are rosbif and matemáticas. Oh, and panqueques.”

  Maria gave me a quizzical look. “Roast beef, math, and pancakes?”

  “Yup, you know, the big three,” I said. “Kind of hard to imagine a situation where they’d come up, though …”

  “You don’t know anything else?” she asked. Then she sighed and tossed her hair. “Qué lástima.”

  “Hey, stop it. What does that mean? I just told you I don’t speak Spanish. Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Qué lástima,” she continued. “La persona que habla dos idiomas vale por dos.”

  “Stop it!” I said again. “What does that mean? I know it doesn’t have anything to do with roast beef, but that’s about all.”

  She laughed. “Ha-ha. It means ‘What a pity. The person who speaks two languages is doubly valued.’ ”

  I didn’t like feeling less than doubly valued. “I speak a little Yiddish,” I said. “Like, um, A chazer bleibt a chazer.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Something about a pig.”

  “You’re really great with languages, Lenny.”

  “Hey, guys,” Other Mike said. “If Maria here knows Spanish, why don’t we just play that part and see what Dom what’s-his-face was saying? Maybe it’s a clue or whatever.”

  “Don Guardo,” Mike, Maria, and I said in unison.

  “Okay, Cerberus,” Other Mike muttered.

  It wasn’t a bad idea, though. He wasn’t a great fan—he didn’t even know Don Guardo’s name or who he was. But maybe Other Mike was onto something. I rewound the footage (carefully) and started it up at the part where Don Guardo was talking. We couldn’t hear very much of his conversation, and we had to turn the volume up really loud.

  This is what the little man said, smiling into his pho
ne, chomping on his unlit cigar: “O, sí, estoy tan ocupado. He-he-he. Mi hermano— Lo siento— Señor Famosa no me necesita para nada. ¡Estúpido!”

  Maria’s hand went to her mouth, like she was trying to hold a gasp in. She failed, and gasped really loudly.

  “What?” the Mike-Lenny-Mike Cerberus said in unison.

  “This is huge,” she said. Then she repeated it. “Mi hermano— Lo siento— Señor Famosa no me necesita para nada. This is really huge.”

  “He said, ‘This is really huge’?” Other Mike asked. “What’s huge? He’s little. Maybe he was talking about his cigar.”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t say, ‘This is really huge.’ It’s me saying ‘This is really huge.’ What he said that was huge is ‘mi hermano.’ ”

  “Hey,” Other Mike said, hopping around. “I know what mano means—that means ‘hand.’ So hermano, that’s like … ‘air hand’? Oh my God, this is huge! Don Guardo invented an air hand!”

  We all squinted at Other Mike and cast him an epic side-eye. Maria raised one eyebrow. It was the appropriate response. Other Mike was out of his mind.

  “Please don’t tell me that Famosa killed Weathers,” I said. I really couldn’t handle the idea of my favorite catcher killing my favorite pitcher. “That will make my brain explode.”

  “No, it’s bigger than that,” she said.

  “Bigger than my brain?” I joked.

  “What isn’t?” she said. “Zing!” She really said, “Zing!”

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “Very funny.”

  “I know,” she said. “It was. Now, take a deep breath, because what I think you have accidentally uncovered here is a major scandal.”

  “I have?” I said. Then I added, “Oh yeah, sure, totally. All in a day’s work for the great Lenmeister.”

  “Um, whatevs. But, yeah. What Don Guardo—probably a fake name—was saying was that Famosa doesn’t really need him. Why would he say that? Clearly, because Famosa actually speaks English.”

  Now it was our turn to gasp.

  “Why the front, then?” Mike asked. “Why go to all the trouble of having to travel with his dad to translate?”

  Other Mike kept trying to reach over to the camera to rewind it, no doubt to replay the embarrassing moments from earlier. I kept having to slap his sweaty hand away. He giggled each time.

  “Famosa probably just didn’t want to have to talk to the media,” Mike said. “Get out of doing interviews with those jerks like the Philly Hillbilly.”

  “No, that’s not it,” Maria said. “It’s the other part. Hermano.” She pronounced it very carefully. Still, it did sort of sound like “air-mano,” but I’m pretty sure air hands aren’t, like, a thing.

  “Hermano,” she said. “It means ‘brother.’ ”

  Cue the second gasp. This was getting pretty confusing. “Wait, Famosa pretended to be Don Guardo’s son, but they’re actually brothers? Why?” I asked.

  “Okay, let’s think about this,” she said. “Famosa came from nowhere, right? Remember how the guys on the Bedrosian’s Beard subpage about the minor leagues kept saying that he didn’t have much of a history?”

  “Um, no, Maria,” Mike said. “Even we don’t read the minor league subpages on BB. That’s just, like, a level of nerd I can’t even begin to comprehend.”

  “Well, comprehend it, you turd bucket,” Maria spat. “Because it means something.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It means that Ramon Famosa is a fake identity. He could be anyone. He could be a Cuban refugee. He could be anything!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys,” Other Mike said. He had given up giggling and seemed to be zoning out for a while there. Hardly listening. Then he got really excited and hopped up, adjusting his shorts and smoothing his hair all at once. “This is exactly like Warlock Mizlon escaping from the Isle of Vor. In Warlock Wallop Five—the fifth book in the greatest warlock series of all. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  Everyone ignored this. But if you thought that would stop Other Mike, you’d be sadly mistaken. “Mizlon wanted to leave Vor because he fell in love with a mermaid who was living in Taklin under the sea, but he couldn’t leave because his father was the ruler of Vor, and if he knew Mizlon was leaving Vor to be in Taklin, he would declare war on the undersea city—war that would ultimately destroy the mermaid Mizlon loved. He couldn’t risk having the citizens of Taklin keep his secret, so he had to sneak out of Vor and live in Taklin under an assumed identity. Of course, he then gets found out and delivers the famous ‘for the honor of Mizlon’ speech, but then there’s a big fight and—wallop!” He slapped his hands together as if to say, “Well, that clears that up.” Needless to say, it didn’t really.

  “So, um, sorry about that,” Mike said. “You were saying? Why couldn’t he just sneak out like all the other Cubans? Take a boat or whatever?”

  I was thinking the same thing. I don’t know a lot about Cuba, but I do know that there are some Cuban ballplayers in the major leagues.

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s afraid of the Castros,” she said.

  “Juan Castro, the infielder?” I asked.

  “No,” Maria said.

  “Starlin Castro, the shortstop? Ramón Castro, the catcher?”

  “No! Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, you idiot!” she shouted.

  “Sorry, I just like baseball. I don’t really pay attention in history class.” It’s true.

  “It’s not history!” Maria said. “The Castros rule Cuba right now. They are dictators! Who knows how many great Cuban players we’ve missed out on seeing because of them.”

  It was silent for a moment. No one said anything. Mike tried to shake a final drop out of his glass, but it was clearly empty. I felt like I should say something, so I asked Maria if she was Cuban.

  “No, I’m Dominican. Well, half Dominican anyway,” she said.

  “That explains why you speak Spanish. Doesn’t explain why you’re the niece of a white librarian, though,” Mike said.

  “Mr. Bonzer’s brother married my mom. My mom is Dominican. It’s not rocket science, duh.”

  “So you really think Famosa is a Cuban escapee?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. And they’re called defectors. Escapee makes him sound like a lion on the lam from the zoo,” she said.

  “Sorry. I’m really not racist!” I actually felt like I kept being racist by accident. It’s a weird feeling. I’m totally not racist!

  “I didn’t say you were,” she said, which made me feel a little better.

  We all sat there in the big living room, with the white couches and the chilled air. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room. No surprise, I guess. We were looking at the paused image on the screen. It was Don Guardo, grinning, looking sort of shady. Was he really Famosa’s brother? And why was he traveling with Famosa? To keep a secret? To cover up a murder?

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Wouldn’t somebody notice such an awesome-hitting catcher leaving the Cuban league and showing up in the States?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought that too. But what I think is that they would not notice a not-catcher.”

  “Ah, I see. I mean, what? That makes no sense.”

  “Sure it does. Ever notice how Famosa kind of sucks as a catcher?”

  We had sort of noticed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, here’s what I’m thinking. They made him a catcher so he could be hidden. Maybe in Cuba he played another position so no one looked behind the plate.”

  “Or behind the mask,” Mike said.

  “Or behind the mustache,” Other Mike said.

  “Exactly!” I said. “I sort of knew anyone with a mustache like that probably had to be evil. I’m sorry—is that racist?”

  “What?” Maria asked.

  “To imply that a classic Mexican mustache is evil?”

  “It’s not a classic Mexican mustache, whatever that means. It�
��s a ridiculous mustache. And he’s Dominican, like me. Well, maybe … Anyway, the mustache rules.”

  “Finally, we agree on something. High five!” Maria did not meet my raised hand with her own. Totally left me hanging. Not cool. So not cool.

  “It makes a lot of sense,” I said. The pieces were slipping into place. “But how do we prove it?”

  “And more importantly, why do we prove it?” Mike said. “Seriously, Leonard. Who cares if Famosa is Cuban or Dominican or from Mars? What could it possibly have to do with RJ’s death?”

  “All I know,” Maria said, “is that if you’re willing to lie and change your identity and fool everyone around you, you’re no angel. And we’re looking for a murder suspect, so I say we start with someone we know has something to hide already. Besides, if a pitcher drops dead, wouldn’t you at least want to check out a shady catcher as a potential suspect?” There was a long pause.

  “A chazer bleibt a chazer,” I said.

  “Um, what?” Maria asked.

  “I remembered what that means,” I said. “ ‘A pig remains a pig.’ Seemed appropriate.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “So how could we possibly check up on this?” Mike said.

  Maria shook her head like she pitied us. Like we were first graders about to take the mat against the high school wrestling team.

  “What’s that look for?” I asked.

  “Qué lástima,” she said again.

  “Stop it with the Spanish!” Mike said. He cracked his neck like he always did when he was angry. Like a boxer, ready to punch.

  “It means ‘What a pity,’ ” I said. “She told us that earlier.”

  She looked impressed. “Maybe you are good at languages, Leonard.”

  “You don’t have the right to call me Leonard,” I said. “You have to earn Leonard-rights, kid.”

  She did not look impressed. “I’m just saying … you guys call yourselves real fans?”

  “Of course we do!” Mike said. He cracked his knuckles this time. A little extreme, but she was getting annoying. “What do you mean?”

  But before Maria could explain, Other Mike interrupted. “Eh, not really,” he said. “I don’t actually call myself a baseball fan. I mainly like warlocks. Warlock Wallop—you know, classic stuff like that.”