Hangman's Game (20 page)

“Hey, listen to this tweet,” he says, holding his phone up to reading position.
“Police source says charges against Carson ‘a matter of time.'”

“Who tweeted it?”

“A reporter,” he says. “Who is actually retweeting it from some other reporter, it looks like.”

“Is there a story link?”

“I don't see one.”

However muddied the sourcing, this is discouraging. It suggests that Rizotti has locked in on his target.

Meanwhile, Rizotti didn't bother to come to Samuel's funeral. He is too busy running in the wrong direction. Not that I saw anything down here worth seeing. But then, I really didn't have a chance to look. I feel like I often do on the sidelines during games, watching bad throws and missed tackles, and wishing I could run out onto the field and make the damn plays myself.

“So where are you going to get my ten million dollars?” Freddie says. “You better line up some seriously high-paying skills clinics. Maybe the sultan of Brunei wants to learn the coffin corner.”

“If the police actually had evidence on Jai,” I say, “they would have arrested him already.”

“Oh, it's coming, Hangman, it's coming,” he says.

“Freddie, why do you seem happy about this? Jai plays for our team. Your team, actually. You kind of own it. Remember?”

“Yeah, well,” Freddie answers sullenly, “who gives a fuck?”

“About what?”

“About any of it,” he says. He shoves himself upright in his seat. “You know, everywhere I go, all anyone gives a shit about is the goddamn Sentinels. Who you drafting? How's the team look? Here's all anyone needs to know: every year we put a bunch of guys out there and they play somebody else's guys and somebody wins and somebody loses and the next year we do it all again. That's it. It's all a giant pile of bullshit.” Freddie picks something out of his teeth with his pinkie fingernail. I hope he washed those hands well. “And no one even cares who wins,” he continues. “No one. The players are just here to make money, and the fans are just pretending to care so they don't have to think about their lives. It's like this huge Ponzi scheme of caring, of people pretending that something is extremely important when we all know that it doesn't matter one bit. I'd love it if the whole damn structure just collapsed. So if it turns out that Jai killed Samuel, and people have to think about that for a while, what kind of heads are underneath those helmets, what craven hearts beat underneath the uniforms they salivate at the sight of, maybe it would break the illusion, let everyone see what a big pile of crap it is they've been building their lives around.” He presses some buttons on his iPhone, toggling over from Twitter to a video game. I roll down the windows, but the heat only amplifies the odor.

“There's a shower on the plane, right?” I ask.

“Yup,” he says.

“Thank the lord.”

“You said it.”

*   *   *

We arrive at the charter terminal ahead of Tanner's party. Credit that to our head start, and my heavy foot, because I was not going to have an impatient Tanner waiting on me again. The terminal is a humble space with only a few banks of seats and a drugstore and a sandwich shop. Freddie and I take seats on the contoured plastic chairs.

“Wanna see some pictures?” Freddie says, holding out his iPhone. “From the funeral. Pretty good stuff.”

Before his bowels betrayed him, he had been collecting images of eye-catching characters. He has a few pictures of older women in ostentatious formal wear, complete with feathered hats and loud costume jewelry. He has a shot of a little boy in cornrows and a bright green tie. Then he shows me a sequence of pictures of a particularly rotund man: the first shot is a close-up of the back of his shaved head—specifically the collected rolls of fat, which look like a pack of hot dogs. Then come photos of the same guy as he turns around and smiles eagerly, his gold front tooth glinting in the sun.

“I really just wanted the neck-roll shot,” Freddie says. “But the guy heard the
click
sound effect on the camera and turned around. For a second, I thought he was going to pop me, but it turned out he was happy to pose.”

The poor guy had no idea he was a prop in Freddie's condescension. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

My hamstring, which had been quiet for the drive, is panging again.

Before too long, a swift-moving Tanner leads his crew into the terminal.

“Where the fuck did you disappear to?” Tanner snaps at me, with surprising anger.

“Helping out Freddie,” I say. “He wasn't feeling well.”

Tanner glares at me for a moment and then says, “I need to buy some antacid. Wait right here.” He heads for the terminal store, while O'Dwyer, Cordero, and Udall, in uncomfortable silence, quietly register Freddie's change of wardrobe, probably notice the smell, and try to act like everything is normal. No one, of course, says a disparaging word. Such are the privileges of ownership.

“Wanna see my pictures from the reception?” Freddie says to Udall, changing a subject that wasn't ever raised. “They're kind of funny.”

Udall takes the phone and thumbs through the pictures. “This is really unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head. He tilts the phone in my direction. “Do you know who this is?”

He is showing me a photo of the neck-roll guy who posed for Freddie. “Should I?”

“Not really,” Udall says. “But I scouted him. A couple years ago he was a quarterback. Now look at him.”

A quarterback? I am not surprised to learn that Freddie's objet d'art is a former player, but with his girth I would have guessed he was a nose tackle. “What the hell happened to him?” I ask.

“Samuel happened to him,” Udall says. “He's one of the infamous eleven. Samuel ruptured his spleen—in the last game of his senior season, too.”

“Really?” I say. “What's his name?”

“Herrold McKoy,” Udall says.

Herrold McKoy. I remember the name from that story that tried to track down the players Samuel had injured. McKoy was one of the two who couldn't be found.

“Was McKoy any good?”

“As a college player he was actually outstanding,” Udall said. “He put up some huge stats, made big plays, won a bunch of games. But I didn't see him as a prospect. His throwing motion was too long by half, and he took way too many chances. In the pros he would have been picked apart.” He shakes his head. “It's funny,” he says. “I counted five of Samuel's victims at the funeral today.”

“Five? Who were the others?”

He rattles off the names. The one that jumps out to me is Luke Reckherd—the other missing player from that story, the son of the great Wee Willie.

“Which one was Reckherd?” I ask.

“I bet you saw him, he was hard to miss,” Udall says. “Tall guy, white suit, shaved head. He was sitting and praying while everyone else was hitting the chow line.”

So that's who that was.

“Didn't he go to Langston?” I ask. Up in Maryland.

“Yup,” Udall says. “Just like his dad.”

“So he would have had to travel a ways to get here?”

“I guess so,” Udall says. “If he's still in Maryland.”

That strikes me as odd. Kaylee hadn't recognized Luke, which suggested he hadn't visited Vickers during the time when she and Samuel were together. And Samuel spent nearly every night of his life up until a few weeks ago sleeping under his mother's roof, so it was difficult to figure out how a relationship between he and Luke would have developed. There might be a simple explanation. Perhaps Luke and Samuel met in some setting that Kaylee wouldn't have known the details of—a photo shoot for conference stars, or something like that. I wish I had had time to ask Luke about it, so I wouldn't have to stand here and wonder.

“Were people still hanging at the church when you took off?” I ask Udall. “I was told the funeral could last into the night.”

“The reception was still going strong,” he says. “But Jerry wanted to leave. So we left.”

Tanner returns from the airport shop holding a roll of Tums. “You all didn't have to stand here and wait for me,” he says. “You could have been on the plane already. Let's go! Time to move out.”

Even if the funeral is supposed to go into the night, there is no guarantee Luke Reckherd and Herrold McKoy are still there. And there is a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance they would have anything useful to tell me. The easy choice for me is to climb into this private jet and go home. Tomorrow morning I could be at the team facility, having a trainer massage my panging hamstring.

Still, I linger as the others cross the tarmac.

“Gallow!” Tanner barks from midway up the plane's steps. “Let's go!”

Freddie, O'Dwyer, and Cordero all turn their heads, looking back at me, waiting.

“Actually,” I say, “you all go on ahead without me. I'll get home on my own.”

 

CHAPTER 14

I
RENT A
car and begin the drive back to Vickers. As I traverse these flat and featureless roads for the second time today, I immediately begin to question my choice—not just about staying in Alabama, but also about expecting to learn anything of value from talking to Herrold McKoy or Luke Reckherd. My justification for staying is: it is a starting place. They are two among the many people I can talk to, to learn more about Samuel and his life, and what might have really happened the night of the shooting.

Herrold and Luke and I also have something in common. Our quarterback careers ended with a hit. In my case, at least, it was a blow that indisputably changed my life.

I was a junior at Hudson Valley State, and it was our season opener, and I was starting my first game after having sat on the bench as a freshman. We were playing on national television, on a Friday night, against a school from one of college football's power conferences. We knew we were in for a beating—on the scoreboard, and physically. I had been making cracks around practice all week that the players should be getting a chunk of the athletic department's paycheck for this game—$400,000, according to the school paper—given that we were the ones who were going to be bruised and broken the next week.

Before the game our coach, Vernon Dorie, called me into his office. Dorie had coached at Hudson Valley State for thirty-two years after having played center there. The joke was that his parents dropped him off as a freshman and he never left. He was not what you would call a man of expansive interests, but he knew football, and how to handle young men.

I sat in Dorie's office, with its white cinder block walls, studying the Coach of the Year awards behind him—he had been winning them long enough that the certificates had gone from plain black-and-white lettering to color with hologram insignias. He was a potbellied man with thin black hair and age spots from decades of afternoon practices. He wore his authority lightly, but he was decisive in his pronouncements. If your effort at practice was sluggish, he would stand over you and, in a calm but firm voice, ask:
You're wasting my time, and even worse than that, you're wasting yours. Why are you here, if you're not giving your best? Seriously, why?

“This is going to be a tough one tonight, Gallow,” he said gravely from across his desk. “Ten minutes into this game we could be losing by three touchdowns.”

“We won't be,” I said. His eyelids lowered with my answer.

“I've heard the jokes you've been making around practice, Nick,” he said dispassionately. “Jokes have their place. But in the game tonight I want to see you lead. On every play, no matter what the score. I want to see you getting guys in the huddle, making sure they're lined up right, keeping everyone on task. You do that, and no matter what the final score is, I'll know I have my quarterback for the rest of the year.”

For the rest of the year
. Which implied that if I failed, he would give the ball to the next man in line. We had a freshman quarterback named Travon Turner, a kid from the Bronx who could run like a track star and sling it through a brick wall. Dorie historically did not play freshmen, but he was letting me know that if I gave him reason to, he would.

Cut to late in the fourth quarter. We were on the road, and playing in a stadium that held about eighty thousand people—as opposed to our home field, which accommodated less than a third that. And we were losing 53–0. We hadn't scored a touchdown, and I had twice been tackled for safeties. The stands, nearly full at the beginning of the game, were now half vacant. Many of those who remained were heckling to keep themselves entertained. And the stadium was empty enough that I could hear each lame taunt.

Hey, Gallow, I can see your vagina from here.

But I was doing what Coach demanded of me, rising above circumstance and situation. I was relentless in my command, even if that relentlessness had gotten us nowhere. With time for one drive remaining, I was determined to take our guys to the end zone. I strung together a few medium-length completions and first-down runs, and we had the ball down to the twenty-one-yard line with six seconds left in the game. We had no timeouts. I had one more chance.

I took the snap from the shotgun position and I looked to the right, where a flanker was running a corner route, but the defense had him bracketed. Then I looked to the tight end over the middle, but he was sandwiched between a linebacker and a safety. Another flanker was crossing underneath toward the left sideline—which was the wrong route. That wasn't the pattern I gave him. He was open, but if I threw to him, he would be tackled short of the goal. Dipshit.

But I saw that the tight end had gone to his secondary route, and he was breaking open along the back of the end zone and …

That's when it all went dark.

I know, only from having seen the film, what happened. A freshman linebacker, excited to be making his first sack, launched himself, and his helmet slammed me underneath my jaw. My head snapped back. I was unconscious before I hit the ground. I lay on the field for a good five minutes while the stadium emptied, the game over. When I eventually came to, I could not identify the man standing over me, who turned out to be Coach Dorie.