AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If he’d been with Laura on the day she ovulated, he approximated when she would have menstruated—if she was going to. Those five days had come and gone. If she’d had a period, and if his calculations were correct, he should have heard from her three days ago, when she should have been ovulating again.
But she hadn’t summoned him back to the house on Windsor Street. So did that mean she hadn’t had a period and therefore had conceived? Maybe she was holding off breaking the glad news until she’d had her pregnancy confirmed by a doctor. Or maybe, because of what had happened the last time, she didn’t intend to call him, ever again. But wouldn’t he have been notified that the deal was off?
Not knowing was making him crazy, but all he could do was wait.
As he did every morning, he made a notation on the calendar, then showered. When he stepped out of the tub, he heard his newspaper being thunked against his front door. Disinclined to dress yet, he wrapped a towel around his waist. He retrieved the paper from his small porch, went into the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee.
While waiting for it to brew, he perused the front page and drank orange juice from the carton. He flipped the paper over, read the headlines beneath the fold, and finding them relating to the same world crises that they’d related to yesterday, he pulled out the sports section.
The headline caused his heart to stutter. Blood rushed to his head and made him momentarily dizzy. “The fuck is this?”
BURKETT QUESTIONED IN DEATH OF BOOKMAKER, the headline read.
FURTHER WOES FOR FORMER COWBOY?
VETERAN COACH DENOUNCES FALLEN STAR.
Recognizing the stories, he looked at the dateline. Not this morning’s issue. It was five years old, and though it was well preserved, he saw now that the paper on which the sports section was printed didn’t match the rest of the newspaper. It had yellowed some with age.
Rodarte.
He knocked over a kitchen chair in his rush. In seconds, he was out of the kitchen, through the living area, and flinging open his front door. He charged out onto his narrow patch of yard and scanned the street. He didn’t really expect to see the green sedan, and he didn’t. Rodarte had given himself time to get away.
“Son of a bitch!” Griff grabbed the towel, which was slipping off his waist, and stormed back inside, slamming the door behind him. Rodarte hadn’t reappeared in almost two months. Now, just when Griff had begun to think—hope—the bastard had given up and gone away, this.
Clever of him, planting this old sports section in today’s newspaper where Griff was certain to find it. Rodarte was rubbing his nose in the shit he’d made of his life five years ago.
When he felt composed enough to confront the fine print, he righted the chair and poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat down at the kitchen table and began to read. Every word was like a blow, hurtful because it was true.
Not since Pete Rose’s gambling and Jose Canseco’s admission to using steroids had a professional athlete scandalized himself as much as the record-breaking, all-star quarterback Griff Burkett had. Media coverage had been extensive and pervasive. The story had made headlines internationally. ESPN had dedicated hours of programming to it.
But Rodarte had done well to choose this particular issue of The Dallas Morning News, because these stories were summarizing chronicles of his long, inexorable fall.
The gambling had started small, but it grew like a creeping vine he couldn’t kill or control, until it dominated, becoming more exciting for him than the Sunday games. Winning big on a wager was more thrilling than winning big on the gridiron.
It had evolved into an addiction. Before it had got out of hand, he should have been smart enough to recognize the danger signs. Maybe he had. Maybe he had just ignored them.
He got caught up in a dangerous but exhilarating spiral. If he won, he raised the stakes of the next bet in order to win more. If he lost, he raised the stakes to recover the loss. The spiral became a maelstrom that eventually sucked him under.
Bill Bandy looked more like a tax accountant than one’s idea of a bookie. He was a slightly built man who probably had weighed no more on the day he died than on the day he graduated high school. He had thinning brown hair, a small face with a pointed chin, and a sharp nose. His pinched nostrils and pale blue eyes waged a constant war with airborne allergens. His hands were as soft and white as a woman’s, and one got the sense they would feel moist if touched.
No one would have pegged him for a mobster. Yet that was exactly what he was. It was rumored that, back in St. Louis, before he’d been relocated to Dallas, he had poisoned an uncle who had double-crossed him. Griff never knew if that was fact or fiction.
Bandy worked for Vista, the syndicate’s dummy corporation that ostensibly ran a tin-mining operation somewhere in South America. The actual location and other details were vague. Vista’s real enterprises were high-stakes gambling, money laundering, and, Griff suspected, drug trafficking.
Vista’s miners in the Las Colinas high-rise wore designer suits and diamond-studded Rolexes. They packed heat even when they went to the men’s room. They had bodyguards with automatic pistols and cars with bulletproof windows.
You did not fuck with them.
That was what Bill Bandy had told Griff over a plate of chicken enchiladas one night at his favorite Mexican restaurant. Griff was midway into his fourth season with the Cowboys. Bandy had invited him to dinner to discuss business, specifically the repayment of his gambling debt, which was now three hundred thousand and change.
“You don’t fuck with these guys, Griff. If it was me, I’d extend you some more credit. Hell, you make millions. I know you’ll be good for the money in a few months. But these guys?” He blotted his dripping nose with a damp white handkerchief. “There’s no charity in their hearts. Believe me.”
Griff dunked a tortilla chip into the salsa and munched it noisily. He took a sip of frozen margarita and winked at the starstruck teenage girls staring at him from the next table. “What are they going to do? Send some guy with hairy knuckles to break both my legs?”
“You think this is funny?”
“I think you’re about to panic when panic isn’t called for. They compound the interest every week, making me a profit center for them. So what’s their problem?”
