Canary (6 page)

“Heads up,” the catcher hunkering behind Valentine warned.

Valentine turned his concentration back to the pitcher—a tall, clean-shaven man with wavy hair who was one of the acting managers of the Eagle.

With a slight nod of his head, Valentine indicated that he was ready. The pitcher performed an elaborate windup, thrust forward, and sailed the ball toward home plate.

The ball thudded into Valentine's stomach.

Valentine groaned and let go of the bat. He pitched violently forward, throwing out his right hand to break his fall. Three of his fingers bent far back as he hit the hard-packed earth.

Valentine rolled onto his side, coiling into a fetal position and yelping as he tried to figure out which hurt more—his stomach or his hand. Niobe and Newt collided with each other racing to get to home plate.

“Water!” screamed Niobe, going to her knees on the ground next to Valentine. “Get me water!”

Someone thrust a half-empty bottle of Perrier at her, and she immediately upended it over Valentine's head. As the spring water splashed over his face, he expelled his breath in a single groaning blast. A wedge of squeezed lime popped out of the bottle and grazed off his cheek.

“It was an accident!” the pitcher pleaded. “I swear it was an accident!” He went to his knees at Valentine's side next to Niobe.

“Shall I call an ambulance?” Newt asked.

Valentine struggled to sit up, but Niobe immediately pushed him back onto the ground. “Stay put until I can figure out if you're going to live.” She took his injured hand into hers and turned it gently palm up. Valentine yelped. “There goes the ball game,” Niobe muttered with a doleful shake of her head. She looked up at the faces ranged in a circle around her. “Broken,” she said factually, then added less positively, “I think.”

“Oh, God, Val,” the pitcher moaned, “I didn't mean to break your finger.”

“You're a vicious beast!” Niobe snapped at the man. “You deliberately tossed a knuckleball, and you know it. I saw you.”

“You weren't watching me,” the pitcher shot back heatedly. “You were fighting with Newt. As per usual,” he added with a sarcastic grimace.

“I see everything!” She snapped her fingers at the man's face. “Knuckleballs can fly wild, and they're dangerous unless you're a professional, which you obviously are not!”

Valentine wrested himself out of Niobe's grip and came to a sitting position. Through gritted teeth he said, “It was an accident, and while you two have been arguing this thing out, I have been sitting here suffering. Sean, Niobe, help me up.”

As they were hoisting Valentine to his feet, a raindrop splashed against his cheek, and thunder rumbled ominously in the near distance. Valentine looked at the distressed pitcher. “If you'll drive me over to New England Medical, I won't sue.” The hospital was only a few blocks from the Common.

“I'm just parked on Charles,” the pitcher said.

“We'll all go,” Newt declared. The Slate team chimed in with firm agreement.

Valentine shook his head. “If all of you want to be a help,” he began just as rain began to fall in a light misty shower, “go over to Sailor's. I'll meet you there when I get done at the hospital and give you the damage report.”

Sailor's was a bar on Boylston Street just across from the Common. The drab, whitewashed exterior of the place could be seen from where they stood.

Thunder crashed overhead, and the mist of rain changed without warning into a sheeting downpour.

“Go on!” Valentine shouted. “I don't want those new uniforms to shrink!”

The Eagle pitcher, again apologizing profusely, rushed with Valentine down the slope of ground. They darted through traffic to his car on the other side of the street. The Eagle team and the two dozen sodden spectators dispersed in various directions, while the Slate team, gathering bats, balls, and mitts, rushed
en masse
across Boylston Street and then clamored through the door into the dim, cool, red-lighted interior of Sailor's.

Valentine joined the team an hour and a half later. Aside from the ballplayers who had gathered around the pool table, only a few customers were scattered throughout the bar at this early hour. Sailor's was a hustler bar. Valentine noted that on this rainy Saturday afternoon the avarice and energy seemed at a low ebb, with the half-dozen hustlers basking about in the red light, waiting for the advances of the johns slumped in the shadows. Valentine walked up to the long bar in the back and ordered a beer from a middle-aged bartender with bright bleached hair and an artificial tan. He slid two bills across to the man and picked up the sweating can of Miller in his uninjured hand. The two middle fingers of Valentine's right hand were bound together and held stiff by a splint. He made his way over to the pool table where Niobe was pitted against Newt. It was a long moment before anyone realized Valentine was there, but when Niobe looked up and saw him, she flung her pool cue in Newt's general direction and rushed over.

The remaining team members—the shortstop and one of the outfielders had gone home—gathered around, asking Valentine a hundred questions at once. Valentine could tell by the number of empty cans spread about that the thirst created by the aborted game must have been thoroughly quenched by now.

“All right, you guys!” Niobe yelled. “Put a lid on it!”

Everyone went silent.

“It's a bad sprain. Nothing's broken,” said Valentine. “But this hand'll be out of commission for a while—and I'll be off the team for the rest of the season.”

“
What
season?” said Sean, swallowing off the remainder of his beer. “With you
and
Jed out of the lineup, we're not going to have a
chance
at the play-offs…”

“I'm going over to see Jed,” said Valentine. “When he sees this hand, maybe he won't feel so bad.”

“It's still raining out,” said Sean. “Stay and have a beer.”

“Yeah,” said Newt, “you got to catch up with us.”

“He couldn't,” snapped Niobe. “You've had six in the past hour. It's four o'clock in the afternoon, and you're ossified.”

“I was just trying to keep up with you,” returned Newt. “I never could.”

“Rain makes me melancholy,” Niobe explained. “And if I weren't afraid of denting this fake diamond engagement ring you foisted off on me, I'd knock your face off right here and now.”

“Okay, you two, don't start,” Valentine warned. “I'm still going over to see Jed, rain or no rain. I talked to him yesterday, and he sounded pretty down.”

“We'll all go,” said Niobe expansively, having already forgotten the quarrel with her husband. “We all need cheering up.”

The team began to herd out of the bar. Sean lingered behind a moment with Valentine.

“Are we sure that Jed is going to welcome a drunk softball team showing up unannounced on his doorstep?”

Valentine nodded. “It's all right. He told me yesterday I should bring the team over after the game.”

Sean shrugged and smiled, tapping the brim of his cap. “You're the captain.”

“Not anymore,” said Valentine. “Not with this hand.” He snatched Sean's hat off his head and replaced it with his own. “You're team captain now.”

Outside, the rain had stopped. Clouds had torn apart, revealing wide patches of blue sky. The humidity had abated, and the air was cooler. The Slate team strolled down Charles Street, with Valentine and Niobe in the lead. Niobe was swinging Rodan's cage in a wide arc.

Jed lived in a spacious building on Mount Vernon Street between Charles and West Cedar. The team crowded the wide stoop, and Valentine depressed the buzzer for the fourth-floor apartment. A few seconds later a garbled voice rasped through the intercom speaker. Valentine announced himself, and the voice replied with another incomprehensible mutter before snapping off. Niobe peered through one of the side strips of glass at each side of the door.

“Ahh,” she announced after a few moments, “the Ice Maiden cometh.”

The main door was pulled open to reveal Jed Black's roommate, Press. He frowned slightly when he saw the number of callers. “Well, well, if it isn't Spanky and Our Gang.” Press had a pale but not unhealthy complexion, pure platinum hair worn in a longish slash cut, piercing blue eyes, and a drooping platinum mustache. His blue work shirt and jeans were streaked with paint. His feet were bare. Press's manner, under almost all circumstances, was fairly chilled, and Niobe wasn't the only one who referred to him as the Ice Maiden.

“Miss Manners maintains that civility is in this year, Press,” Niobe said.

The blond man tightened his mouth into a smile and then dropped the expression immediately. “How was that?”

“Enchanting,” Niobe said.

“We dropped by to see Jed,” Valentine explained.

Press drew a breath and released it with a hissing sound. “I thought you'd want to come inside. I suppose it wouldn't do any good if I told you I think Jed's napping.”

“No good at all,” Newt put in from farther down the stoop.

Press peered through at Newt. “You're drunk.” He swept his eyes appraisingly over the rest of them. “In fact, I think you're all drunk.”

“Val's not,” said Niobe. “But he's injured. Show Press your hand, Val. Now let us in before I make a scene on your doorstep.”

“Before?” echoed Press skeptically, stepping aside. “All of you look like you've just made a mass escape from the detox ward.”

As the Slate team filed in, Valentine automatically headed toward the elevator at the back of the entrance hall, but Press waved him away from it.

“Elevator's out,” he said, starting up the staircase. “Follow me—if you're not all too drunk to hold on to the banister, that is.”

“I
am not
drunk!” Niobe screamed.

“You're plowed,” said Newt, right behind her, poking her sides playfully.

On his way up, Press looked over his shoulder at Valentine. “What happened to your hand? You pick up some rough trade?”

“Game injury,” Valentine said shortly.

“Injuries on the ballfield, deaths in the barroom,” Press sing-songed as they crossed the second landing. “You ought to put a sign up over the door of Slate—‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.'”

“Press, you have wit as well as good looks,” Niobe said sarcastically.

“I hear,” Press said, “that the county coroner is about to open a branch office next door to your bar. You're providing so much of their business nowadays.”

“Sic 'im, Rodan,” Newt said, joggling the canary's cage.

Upon reaching the fourth-floor landing, the team gathered outside the door of Press and Jed's apartment. Niobe, wheezing dramatically, fell against the wall. “I'm exhausted! I hate climbing stairs! Whose idiotic idea was this, anyway?”

Press opened the apartment door and led the team into the living room. Sunlight poured in through two high windows overlooking Mount Vernon Street. In one corner a color television was turned on at low volume, showing hordes of frightened people fleeing before an angry dinosaur crashing through Times Square. To the right of the main door was an archway leading to a wide, short hallway with three closed doors. In one corner of the living room the rug had been thrown far back and furniture moved away. There a metal easel supported a large rectangular canvas. The painting bore a portrait of Jed Black standing against a wintry view of the Public Garden. Press had evidently been interrupted in his work on the painting, for he strolled back over to the easel and picked up his palette and brush from a table scattered with tubes of paint.