Titans

by Tim Green

  His stomach growled. He flicked off the projector and left the dark meeting room. The locker room smelled of stale sweat and wet towels. It didn't bother Hunter. He put on his jeans jacket and stopped at the phones on his way out to call Rachel.

  "Where have you been?" she asked. "Bert was home two hours ago."

  "Bert," Hunter huffed, knowing Rachel had gotten the information from Bert's wife, "is a defensive lineman. No one wants to interview defensive linemen, and they don't have to study game film. All they have to do to get ready for a game is eat raw meat and grunt. Yours truly, on the other hand, is the prima ballerina of the gridiron ... a quarterback. I have to--"

  "--I know," Rachel interrupted, "use my mind, my body, and my soul." "Did you play QB in high school?"

  "When are you coming home?" Rachel said in a flat tone.

  "On my way," he replied. 'Just checking in."

  "Well, I don't like you so late, but I'm glad to hear you getting back to normal," she said.

  "Have I been abnormal?" Hunter said in mock surprise. "Me? I can't figure out why. I have no pressure on me or anything. Hmmm ..."

  "I hear you. Come home."

  "See you in a few."

  "Oh, Hunter."

  "Yeah?"

  "Stop at the Food King and get decaffeinated coffee, will you?"

  "Got it. Love you."

  "Love you, too."

  Hunter hung up and pulled his jacket up over his head. He ran through the lot to his car. A steady, heavy rain fell from the dark gray sky. The air was cool for September. It felt more like November. Hunter made his way through die late rush-hour labyrinth of headlights, taillights, and dented bumpers. Even the air was wet and Hunter had to turn on the defrost. People hurried in and out of the Food King to and from their cars. There were no spaces close to the entrance and Hunter toyed with the idea of bagging the whole thing and getting home. Maybe he'd make a fire tonight. Sara would like that. He'd make popcorn, too. Coffee was a must.

  He parked on the outskirts of the lot and stepped close to his car to avoid being hit by a van that had pulled in next to him. The passenger door of the van opened before it stopped, and a large man in a long black raincoat jumped out in front of him. The side door swung open and another large man, dressed the same, only younger and more stupid-looking, got out to block his retreat. Hunter's mind raced with the possible mistakes that were being made. It wasn't an instant before he knew that this had to do with Tony Rizzo.

  "Get in," Angelo Quatrini growled with a malevolent smile.

  "Why?" Hunter heard himself saying.

  "Get in. Tony wants to talk to you," Angelo said.

  Carl took Hunter's arm in a firm grip and helped him into the back of the van. Humer would later think of all the things he could have done but instead, he was like a barely animated puppet. Carl got in next to him and sat with his hands in his pockets. Angelo got in, too. At first Hunter thought it was Rizzo driving the van, but Angelo called him Mikey, so Hunter knew it wasn't. They rode in silence. Hunter thought of trying to escape, hitting the man next to him in the head and jumping out of the side door, like in the movies. But his limbs felt heavy, fear oppressed him.

  In five minutes they pulled down a broken road amid the wetlands that separated the Five Towns from Rockaway. A limousine sat like an angry monster in the rain; its red-eyed taillights shone through the puffing smoke from its exhaust. The van pulled up behind the long black car. Angelo got out and opened the side door. Carl got out and they stood waiting for him.

  "Come on," Angelo said.

  Hunter got out into the downpour. It was almost completely dark now. Across a field of cattails, Hunter could hear wet tires hissing on the pavement of Atlantic Avenue. The two men walked on either side of him as they approached the limousine. Hunter's whole torso was constricted with fear. His mind drifted as if he were breathing nitrous oxide. The three of them stopped outside the rear window of the car. It opened about six inches.

  "Come here" came the muffled voice from within the car.

  Hunter tried to peer into the gloom. He could see nothing. The window opened a little more, and he moved his head closer and closer until his wet head was out of the rain. Tony Rizzo sat in the dark staring straight ahead. His hands were placed carefully on his knees. Under his dark raincoat he wore a dapper suit and de with a white shirt. He looked like a Wall Street executive.

  The two men beside Hunter each grabbed one of his arms and held him where he was. Tony calmly pushed his finger forward, raising the window until it jammed itself up under Hunter's chin. Hunter's instincts took over and he struggled in vain to extricate himself, kicking viciously at the men that held him and cursing Rizzo.

  'You fucking son of a bitch!" he bellowed.

  The two men outside tightened their vice grips on his shoulders and jammed their fingers painfully into his armpits. The pain was so great that Hunter could struggle for only a few more moments before his body went limp.

  That," Rizzo said, "is what you don't do. You don't fight me. You do as I say, when I say." He turned on the light and stared wickedly at Hunter. "You got that?" Tony asked in his thickest Brooklyn accent.

  "I said, 'You got that!'" Tony screamed.

  "Yes," Hunter managed to squeak out. The feeling of confusion was back, confusion swimming in fear and shame. His armpits and his throat hurt. The rain had completely soaked through his clothes. This wasn't supposed to happen to someone like him.

  "Good. Now I ain't gonna say this twice to you"-- Tony reached up and placed his palm against Hunter's cheek--"so you listen carefully. You play Detroit this weekend and you're favored by eight. Here's what you do. You can win the game. I wouldn't ask you to lose, that would be criminal." Tony chuckled through the nose at his own humor.

  "I can't," Hunter heard himself say.

  Tony's eyes flashed with an insane light. He pulled a pistol from his jacket and pushed the barrel against Hunter's upper lip. He could feel the metal against his teeth. Hunter's eyes spun with fear.

  "You're past can and can't, big shot!" Rizzo bellowed. "I'm not fucking around. This is the real shit. You got nothing to worry about. You ain't even gonna let anybody down. You just make fucking sure as your life that you don't win by more than a touchdown. You fuck this up and you won't see us coming next time. You got that?"

  "Yes," Hunter said.

  The window opened and Rizzo pushed his face back out with the barrel of the gun. The window hummed shut again, and the limousine rolled away slowly in the darkness. The two men beside him were already halfway to the van. Hunter just stood in the road until the van lurched toward him as though it might run him down. He jumped to the shoulder of the road and slipped in the ditch. In a moment of toughness anger he grabbed a rock and rifled it at the van as hard as he could.

  The rock clumped loudly off the back door. For an instant Hunter was afraid at what he'd done, but the van never even slowed. He was sure he'd seen the faces in the van howling with delight as he sprang from their path. Hunter pulled himself up and sat cross-legged on the shoulder of the road. Rain and night were all around him. He put his face in his hands.

  "My God, Jesus." he growled in anger and frustration. The helplessness in his voice made him choke and almost vomit, and he clenched his fists, uttering guttural noises like a cornered animal.

  He let a cold resolve fill the void of fear and agony. However much he didn't deserve this, it was his. It wasn't going away. He'd deal with it and be done. His mind made up, he rose and walked briskly back into Cedarhurst. He found a cab and got in.

  "Damn," the driver said, "got a little wet?"

  "Take me to the Food King," Hunter said.

  Hunter kept a sweatsuit in his trunk. He put it on in the car and even went into the store for the coffee. His story was simple. He went over it in his mind again as he drove through the harbor. He'd gotten to his car when he realized he'd forgotten his bag. The doors were locked and everyone had gone. He'd walked back to the car and realized h
e'd locked the keys in it. He had only one quarter and used it to call a locksmith from a pay phone down the street. Hunter waited at the car so he wouldn't miss the guy. By the time the guy got there, Hunter was soaking wet. It was a good story and it would work. It was no longer a matter of Rachel being mad at him for gambling with Metz on football games. He didn't want Rachel to know the shame he'd endured-More than that, he never wanted her involved. He would just take care of it and make it go away. It was a nightmare, and he wanted to keep it his nightmare.

  By the next morning the gray sky had spent its moisture. Dirty puddles at every street corner rippled in the warm breeze. Tony Rizzo steered his Benz around the corner of a burned-out Brooklyn factory and drove until the street ended at the edge of the East River. Even though it was a side street, it was lined with cars, so Tony parked in front of a hydrant and let himself in through a gate in the dirty chain-link fence that surrounded what looked like an old warehouse for an adjoining factory. The warm breeze off the water was fetid with the rotten smell of river fish. Wet garbage of various colors stuck to the ground like mold on month-old Wonderbread.

  Tony pranced through the garbage and hopped over puddles until he reached the concrete steps that led to the loading dock, where years of loading and unloading toxic chemicals from out-of-state tractor trailers had left cracks and stains in the concrete. With his knuckles, Tony rapped a code on a steel door whose blue coat of paint bled rust from multiple wounds. There was no sign of a handle. It looked like the kind of door that was never meant to be opened. Tony repeated the code, and the door did open, just a crack. The pockmarked face of a greasy-haired man in his forties stuck out and murmured, "What?"

  Tony's expression was malignant until the man realized who the knocker was.

  Tony," the man said deferentially, pushing the door wide open and stepping aside so the man could enter with ease.

  "Where's your gun, Pete?" Tony said coldly to the man.

  Pete shrugged apologetically and said, "In my car. Aaron doesn't like guns. He made me leave it. He says it makes everyone nervous. He told me to push that button there if there's ever any trouble, and he'll take care of things better than any gun could. You told me to do what he says, Tony, otherwise I'da told him to kiss my ass."

  Tony tightened his lips. He left Pete standing in the doorway and made his way through an inner door into the open warehouse. Two rows of desks facing one another went almost from one end of the warehouse to the other. At every desk sat a man or woman who wore a headset like an AT&T operator and punched away at a computer keyboard in front of them. At the opposite end of the warehouse was a glass cubicle that contained a single desk and chair. On the desk sat two phones and a laptop computer. In the chair sat a skinny young man in a wild shirt. His curly black hair was receding quickly up his skull. The shirt, the wild, half-bald head of hair, and a thick pair of round spectacles gave Aaron Weiss the look of a mad clown. His eyes were narrowed at a Rubik's cube, which he spun wildly in his hands. By the time Tony reached the glass cage, the puzzle was solved. Aaron looked up with a goofy smile and pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and hopped to his feet.

  Tony," the clown said with an uncertain giggle, "what brings you here?"

  "I wanted to see how things are going," Tony said, sitting on a corner of Aaron's desk.

  Aaron pulled down the corners of his mouth and said, "Fine, fine. How's it going with you?"

  "Good. I just want to go over these numbers again," Tony said. "I don't want any fuck-ups. Sit down."

  Aaron sat down.

  "Tell me again how this shit works."

  "Well," Aaron began, "by integrating our variables by computer, we can actually predict the resultant ratio given the existing odds at any--"

  "Not that shit," Tony said, waving his hand impatiently. "Tell me how you make sure we take more money on the Titans than the Lions. I don't want any fuck-ups on this."

  Aaron seemed to consider the tip of his nose. He took a deep breath, considered how best to communicate the complex system that he'd devised to a guy who hadn't finished high school, and started again.

  "All we want to do is achieve a ratio of approximately three to two. We take three dollars on the Titans for every two on Detroit. Since we know the Titans will lose, we put the imbalance in our own pockets. I adjust the line hourly to achieve that ratio at all times. I can give you any ratio you want, Tony. All the computers out there feed information into this one here on my desk. It's simple, really. There's a mathematical formula that adjusts the line to keep a one-to-one ratio of the bets that we've been using for the past three years. All I had to do was change the ratio in the formula for just the Titans games. I do it by adjusting the line. I don't know how you're doing it, Tony, but if you deliver on this game, we're going to have a serious cash problem. I mean as in what to do with it all."

  "So we could end up with four or five million after the game, right?" Tony asked.

  "Like I told you before, the lower the line goes on the Titans, the more aggregate action we get on the game. It becomes a favorite bet when people know that the line is, say, nine in Vegas and we're giving eight. Based on the past numbers and my projection for what the false line will do, and figuring in the juice on top of it all, we should have no problem bringing that kind of money in. Just lowering the line by a single point brings 'em out of the woodwork. It's like a fire sale."

  "Speaking of fires," Tony said, glaring at Aaron, "what's the deal with you telling Pete to leave his gun in the car?"

  "Really, Tony," Aaron said. "I've got people out there who lead normal lives. They don't want some guy waving a gun around at the door. They're nervous enough as it is. And you know as well as I do that Pete can't have a gun and not wave it around."

  "Yeah, well, I want this place secure. We got a lot into this opera-don."

  Tony, I told you before . . . Any irregularity at the door, Pete pushes the warning button, and I dump every bit of information into a security file. By the time anyone could get from the door to this desk, every record we have would be beyond anyone's retrieval but mine."

  Tony grumbled but got up off the desk and ambled out of the office. Aaron got away with things other people wouldn't dream of. But Aaron was a genius. Three years ago Tony had hired him to overhaul the family's gambling system. Since then, all they had done was grow. Bookies everywhere wanted to lay off with the Mondolffis. Since Aaron had arrived, it was a no-fuss, no-muss operation. Everything always balanced--until now. But now the imbalance would make Tony richer and more powerful than ever before.

  He watched his employees carefully as he sauntered past them through the warehouse. Most of them, he saw, despite being busy fielding calls and punching information into their terminals, warily observed him from the corners of their eyes. He was the big boss to these people, someone to be feared. He liked that feeling and took his time getting out.

  He chucked Pete on the shoulder as he passed through the outer office, but said nothing to him about getting his weapon back. The older man looked at him sadly and shrugged, a toothless dog without his gun.

  Later that same day, across the river and all the way downtown, Ellis Cook sat looking out through the blinds of his office window as the workday drew to a close. Past some old buildings and a decrepit water tower, Cook could actually see a slice of the Hudson River.-It wasn't much, but it was the closest Cook had ever come to an office with a view in his entire life. Of course, he hadn't chosen the building for that reason, but when he had been on site one day last winter with the designer who was helping him with the renovation, he'd seen the view out of the then cracked and dirty window and asked that she put his office there. As time went by, Cook noticed that a multitude of pigeons lived in the air space between him and the river. Often, especially in the evening when the sun was going down, the birds animated the squalid scene of broken-down buildings and a dirty river with magnificent aerial feats.

  On his way out, Cook stopped by Duffy's office
.

  "You got the stuff?" Cook asked.

  "Yeah, I got it," Duffy said. "You gonna tell me what you want with it?"

  "No."

  Duffy nodded with a thoughtful look and said, "Good."

  Duffy picked up a briefcase from beside his work area and laid it out on a table in the middle of the room. High-tech electronic equipment of all kinds winked like Christmas lights behind him as he bent over the open case. Then he held up a metallic wafer about the size of a quarter. One side was covered with smooth white paper.

  "It's magnetic," Duffy said, "but you can peel this paper off and there's some sticky shit that will bond to a fish's belly. There's another one in the case. I'll show you."

  Duffy handed Cook the disc and popped up what looked like a notebook computer inside the leather case.

  "Here's the other disc. I've got it set up so you just put this little switch here on the side to COMPORT 2, and you'll home in on this other one instead of the one in your hand. I don't know if you'll need it, but in case Rizzo, or whoever it is you're following, buys a new car or something, you can switch over and you'll be OK. You can even go back and forth between the two if you need to.

  "Power is here," Duffy said, flicking a little switch on the side that lit up the screen. "I've got it programmed for a fifty-mile radius from this office. It's as simple as turning it on and looking for the red dot of light. Used to be you'd have two antennae on your car and they'd triangulate with the disc. With this new setup though, the case triangulates with a cellular phone cell and the disc. A computer program gives you a map location. It's the latest ... I ordered it from Washington when we were having problems keeping tabs on Rizzo. See here, it's on our office. If you have to go outside the radius, you'll have to tell me where you want to go. I'd have to set up the reception center in that other place. I can do it, it's no problem. The phone dishes we use to pick up the signal are just about everywhere these days. That's all you need."