The Fan (37 page)

Gil scanned the faces—just once, he wouldn’t do that again—and tried to prance around.

“Socko looks like he’s in the bag,” someone said. Laughter spread from row to row.

It was hot inside the costume. The sheath on Gil’s arm was slick with sweat. On the field, Zamora stepped up to the plate, and Lanz came out of the dugout, right under Gil’s clodhopper feet, and moved into the on-deck circle.

Up in the press box, someone said, “Fax for you, Jewel.”
A sheet of paper wafted down beside her notebook. It was from the editor at the
Times Magazine
.

Jewel balled it up and tossed it back over her shoulder. “What’s that?” said Norm.

“The end of my journalism career.”

“Huh?” said Norm. “What do you call this?”

“Hell if I know,” said Jewel.

Far below, Zamora singled off the third-baseman’s glove, and Lanz moved toward the plate.

“Hey, Socko, you’re stinkin’ up the joint.”

Gil, breathless in the yellow mask, saw Zamora safe at first, heard the voices. He realized he was supposed to celebrate the base hit. Pumping his three-fingered hands in the air, he tried prancing again, but tripped over his clodhopper feet and fell hard on the dugout roof, face down, yellow head hanging over the edge. Laughter rose around him, rolled through the stands.

“Son of a bitch earns his money,” someone said.

Bobby Rayburn came out of the dugout, the top of his batting helmet a foot from Gil’s eyes. Gil froze, right there on the dugout roof, his heart pounding on the cement. Boyle, sitting on the bench, saw his yellow head hanging there and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

Gil drew back, rolled over, sat up, took a few deep breaths. He gazed out at the field and all its shining colors, and the players, so dazzling. He gazed at Bobby Rayburn in the on-deck circle, swinging that swing, full of grace. Gil rose and walked—no prancing, but walking with dignity—to the home-plate end of the dugout roof.

Lanz laid a surprise bunt down the first-baseline and beat
it by a step. Rayburn knocked the lead donut off his bat, knocked the dirt off his spikes, and stepped toward the plate. The fans rose and cheered. The dugout roof trembled with the sound. And even down inside, the voices of his teammates called out, “All right, Bobby.” Bobby kept his head down and stepped into the batter’s box. I’ve made you a hero, Gil thought. He slipped out of the cartoon hands and dropped down off the dugout roof, onto the field. Even through the clodhopper feet, the grass felt special, like the ideal of grass. It made everything that was about to happen right, like a ceremony.

In the press box, Norm said, “What’s with Socko?”

And a VP of something or other said, “That fucker. If he goes up there and plants a kiss on Rayburn, he’s fired. He’s been warned a thousand times about this kind of bullshit.”

Down on the field, Socko kept going. He drew even with the umpire, about twenty feet behind him, turned, and took a step toward the plate.

Jewel rose. “Bobby?” she said. Then she saw Socko’s yellow hands, lying in the grass. She leaned out the open window of the press box, leaned as far as she could. “Bobby,” she called at the top of her lungs. “Bobby.”

Crouched behind the plate, neither the umpire nor the catcher saw Socko. Bobby, digging in, didn’t see him either. Socko broke into a clumsy run. Jewel saw something shine bright in his hand.

“Bobby.”

Down on the field, Bobby’s head shifted. He saw Socko coming, started to turn toward him. The umpire started to turn too, started to raise his hand. Socko, still running forward, drew back his throwing arm.

What happened next was clear only on the slo-mo replay. Socko threw a knife, which spun half a rotation and flew point-first at Bobby’s chest. At almost the same instant, Bobby stuck out his bat, as though he were trying to bunt a high, inside pitch. The blade sank deep into the center of the barrel, slightly below the sweet spot.

Then there was a gunshot crack from the press-box roof, and another from much closer. Socko fell, and cops rushed out of the stands.

Gil didn’t want to think about the implications of what he’d just seen. He wanted to lie in that perfect grass, safe from all the noise and yelling, safe inside the mascot skin. But too soon the yellow head came off, came off with a sweaty popping sound, and as it did his mouth filled with blood. The first thing he saw was Bobby Rayburn looking down at him.

Gil spoke.

“I can’t hear you,” Bobby said.

Gil cleared his throat—it took all of his remaining strength—and tried again. “You’re a bum,” he said.

“
W
ell, Norm, what can you say?”

“About a season like that, Bernie? I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Why not start with the Series?”

“Unbelievable. In case you’ve been on some other planet, folks, this team—”

“—dead last on the Fourth of July—”

“—has just swept the World Series in four games, with last night’s—”

“—this morning’s—”

“—right, the bags under my eyes have bags—this morning’s four-to-three ten-inning classic out on the coast.”

“And Bobby Rayburn—”

“—two-run double in the eighth ties it, solo home run in the tenth brings that long-sought championship home. And that catch he made in the bottom of the tenth, highway rob—”

“Whoa, Norm. What I was trying to bring up was Rayburn’s bombshell announcement in the winning locker room.”

“The retirement thing? Do you believe that?”

“He seemed pretty serious.”

“After a season like that? I’m from Missouri.”

“We’re trying to get some comment from him, of course. He’s said to be traveling right now and unreachable.”

“But I’m sure our own Jewel Stern will have the inside dope.”

“When she gets back from her brief vacation.”

“Brief vacation?”

“Didn’t Fred tell you? She called in late last night, early this morning, whatever. But, hey—don’t you think she’s earned it?”

“If anyone has. Whew. Don’t need that espresso to get the blood going today, Bernie. The phone lines are lit up like Christmas trees. How about we take some calls? Here’s Sal on the car phone. What’s shakin’, Sal?”

Please read on
for a sneak preview
of the newest thriller by Peter Abrahams:

THE TUTOR

Coming in hardcover in July 2002
from The Ballantine Publishing Group

1

L
inda Marx Gardner awoke from a dream and felt her husband’s erection against her hip. Not nudging it, not demanding; just there. Earlier in her marriage, or maybe more accurately very early, on predawn mornings like this, the bedroom dim and shadowy, Linda would have taken hold of Scott and started something. Those predawn somethings, their bodies still loose and heavy with sleep, would usually turn out pretty good, sometimes better than that.

Linda got out of bed. In her dream she’d been frantically erasing words from sheets of pink paper, but the words themselves were all forgotten. As she went into the bathroom, Scott made a little sound in his sleep, one of those soft grunts that indicate agreement. She had a funny thought, not like her at all: was he erasing something too?

Then she was in the shower, her appointment book opening up in her mind, time blocks dense with her neat writing. There was going to be an overrun on the Skyway account, most of it from the photography screwup, but not
all. Linda tried to figure out where the rest of it came from, letting go of everything but work so completely that she jumped as she caught sight of Scott through the steamy glass, his naked back to her as he stood before the toilet.

She called to him: “Can you wake Brandon?”

Scott said something she didn’t catch because of the shower’s noise, almost a roar—when they’d renovated instead of moving up from West Mill to Old Mill, they’d used nothing but the best, in this case the 10-Jet Tower from Kohler’s Body Spa collection—and when she looked again he wasn’t there. The water, hot and pounding, felt so good she could have stayed there all day. Linda turned off the shower at once.

She got out, reaching for a towel with one hand, flushing the toilet with the other. Scott always forgot, or didn’t bother, or something. Her watch, on the granite sink top—black granite streaked with midnight blue, the nicest feature in the whole house—told her she was running two or three minutes late, nothing to be all tense about. She took a deep breath.

“Bran? Bran? Bran? Bran?”

Over and over. The word penetrated Brandon’s dreams, twisted them out of shape, finally woke him.

“Brandon? You awake, buddy? It’s late.”

Brandon came awake enough to know he had the covers pulled way up, know that he was totally warm, totally fuzzy, totally unable to get up or maybe even move at all. He got one eye open, not much, just enough to peer at his father through gummy lashes. His father: towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on his face, razor dripping in his hand.

“I’m really not—”

“Forget it, Brandon. You’re going to school.”

“I feel like shit.”

“You’re going. And watch your language.”

Brandon didn’t say anything.

“Show a little life. Sit up or something. Don’t make me come back here.”

“All right, all right,” Brandon said, but the only thing moving was that one eyelid, closing back down.

“And this room is really getting out of hand.”

Brandon, almost asleep, barely caught that last bit. The inner fuzziness repaired itself quickly, knitting up the little hole poked through by his father and then some.

A cut-glass prism dangled in the window of the bedroom across the hall from Brandon, a window that always caught the first light. As Brandon sank back into deep sleep, the sun blinked up through the bare tree limbs out back, sending a ray through the prism. A tiny rainbow instantly printed itself on the calendar hanging on the opposite wall, and not only that, but precisely on a special square, the one with the birthday cake drawn inside, eleven flame-tipped candles burning on top. That rainbow, quivering slightly on her upcoming birthday, was the first thing Ruby saw when she opened her eyes.

She held her breath. This was proof of God’s existence. That was her first thought. She’d barely begun to deal with it, and its backpack—that’s how some thoughts were, they carried backpacks—that God took a personal interest in her, Aruba Nicole Marx Gardner, before her mind got going with the facts: sun, east window, prism, a rainbow that had to land somewhere, coincidence. That was the way Sherlock Holmes would see it, and she respected Sherlock Holmes more than anyone on earth. Didn’t love him—Dr. Watson was the lovable one—but respected him.

Still, coincidence could be tricky. Take that time she’d been eating a baloney sandwich and reading a story about a frog, she must have been four, when she’d suddenly puked all over the place, including on Brandon beside her in the backseat, frog and baloney getting all mixed up in some way. That was how she saw it, and hadn’t touched baloney since. But she could hear Sherlock Holmes: “A long car trip and a winding road? One could produce the same result with peanut butter and a penguin.” Elementary, my dear Ruby.

The rainbow moved on, sliding off her birthday, off the
calendar, ballooning along the wall, warping around the corner of her open closet, vanishing in the shadows within. The spinning earth did that, stuck the rainbow in her closet. There would be lots of backpacks to that thought, but Ruby didn’t get to them. Some commotion kicked up down the hall, only the sharp notes getting though her door, like when one earphone conks out.

“Scott? Didn’t I ask you to get Brandon up?”

Muffle, muffle
.

“Well he isn’t, as usual, and it’s five after seven. Brandon, get up now.”

Muffle
.

Then came sounds of movement, and Bran yelled, “Fuck. Don’t fuckin’ do that,” in that deep new voice of his, ragged at the edges, that vibrated the walls, and Ruby knew that Mom had ripped the covers off him, which always worked.

The sounds that followed—Bran getting up, banging around in his room, crossing the hall to the bathroom they shared, turning on the shower—faded as Ruby took
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
off her bedside table and found her place: “The Speckled Band.” Just from the title, she knew she was going to like it.

Speckled
. A word she’d never spoken. She tried it out loud for the first time. “Speckled. Speckled.” Her stuffed animals watched in silence from their perches on bookshelves. A strange word, with a kind of power, if that made sense, and maybe not power completely for the good.
Freckled
was on the good side,
heckled
a bit nasty,
speckled
different in some way she didn’t know. The garage door opened under her room and her dad’s old Triumph rumbled out, sounds that were far, far away.

I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him
.

Yes, that was it, what was so special about him. As Ruby read, her room went still, began to lose its physical properties, became less solid. The bachelor lodgings at 221-B Baker Street went the other way. Ruby could almost hear the crackle of the fire Mrs. Hudson had had the good sense to light, could almost—

“Ruby! Ruby! Ruby, for God’s sake!”

“What?”

“I called you six times.” Mom, probably dressed for work, probably standing at the top of the stairs, that impatient look on her face, when the up-and-down line between her eyebrows appeared. “Are you up?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t forget tennis after school, sweetheart.” Just from the change of tone, Ruby knew the up-and-down line had smoothed itself out. “See you tonight.” Mom’s voice trailed away as she went down the stairs.