Curveball (24 page)

Cat tried to feign innocence. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s your game here?”

“Um … baseball?” She continued her act with a curious half smile.

His face dropped into a stern, resentful look. “Don’t play dumb with me. I know exactly
what’s going on here.”

“Well, would you enlighten me? Because I’m very confused right now.” Cat took a painful
gulp. She rubbed her trembling hands together on her lap and wondered where they’d
messed up.

The
team. He must’ve known Junior isn’t on the team. Chance probably lurks outside of
the Diablos Locos clubhouse like a perv outside of a Zumba class
.

Chance pointed toward the door with a firm index finger. “I recognized him.”

“I know. You must—wait. You recognized him?”

“The other night? At the ballgame?”

“Oh.” Cat closed her eyes and cursed their stupid plan.

That thought had occurred to her, but only for a split second before she’d dismissed
it. She figured Chance had been too distracted with Paige’s lap dance to take note
of Junior three box suites down, but apparently he was more observant than she’d given
him credit for. Before she could fess up, he continued.

“You are schmoozing that kid.”

Cat’s head jerked up. “Why—” At the sight of his cocksure expression, she recovered.
“How did you know?”

“
Please
. I’m an agent.”

Cat tried to play along, mimicking his thin-lipped gotcha smile as best as she could.

“I know you want him to think he has a chance and I know you want me to think he has
a chance.”

Chance leaned in; his chest was pressed into his desk so that he could get as much
in her face as possible. She pulled her head back as far as her neck would allow.

“What I don’t know is why you are playing middleman.”

Cat shook her head and readopted the big, round eyes of virtue. “Hey, I’m down here
in a strange city in a strange country; I’ve got nothing else to do. Why not help
someone else?”

“Uh, because it’s a crock.” Chance opened up his bottom desk drawer and pulled out
a sheet of paper. “I’ll tell you what.”

He stood up and walked around his desk. She watched him with bewilderment, taking
his lead and rising to her feet. He handed her the piece of paper.

“That there is a list of every other agent in town.” He opened the door. “Why don’t
you go try your little scam on them? I’ve got a legitimate business to run.”

Cat stared at him blankly.

That
came out of left field
.

“Chance, this is for real.”

He threw his shoulders back and crossed his arms, looking every bit the bouncer. “Remove
yourself from my office.”

She tried one more pleading look. “Fine. If you change your mind—”

“I won’t.”

She stormed past him out the door. Junior wasn’t in either of the three plastic chairs
in the lobby so she picked up her pace and hurried outside, not looking back to see
if Chance was watching through the glass door. She was embarrassed enough at the turn
of events.

The convertible was in the back of the parking lot but she could see Junior’s dark
head popping up over the passenger seat.

She threw her purse in the backseat and opened the door, slumping into the seat. The
stench of failure was even more overpowering than the dry cleaner’s vapors.

“It didn’t work.”

Junior’s face fell. Even slack-jawed, he was gorgeous.

“What’d he say?”

“That he recognized you from the other night.”

He threw his head back onto the seat rest. “Oh shit. I screwed up, didn’t I?”

She waved her hand to dismiss his anguish. “No, your cover was fine. He thinks I’m
some double-dealing mouthpiece that’s trying to schmooze you into a scam.” She started
up the car. At the blast of hot air that pushed out the vents, she slumped back in
the seat, waiting for it to cool before putting the car into drive.

She turned to him with a pout. “It’s a little insulting.”

“Well, it’s more or less true.”

Cat sat up in the seat. She jerked her head over to him and demanded clarification.
“Excuse me?”

He chuckled at her indignation. “I just mean, the game was that I was a juicy piece
of bait dangling on a hook. That’s still on.”

Her resentment melted. She nodded slowly as her mind caught up to his. “You’re right.
We just need to change the play.”

She eyed the empty office through the rearview mirror.

“Are you going back in?”

“Not yet.” She put the car in gear and began to reverse. “Come on, I’ll buy you a
cheeseburger.”

“No, you hang up.”

Paige’s giggle flittered through the office.

What
could they possibly have to talk about this early in the morning?

Cat had come back from burgers with Junior early enough to watch an episode of
Las Chicas de Oro
, a Spanish adaption of the
Golden Girls
, and be in bed by the credits. Paige, on the other hand, had stumbled into the hotel
room around three a.m. after “dinner” with Chance and had only been at work for an
hour before she dialed him up.

“I will if you will.”

Cat narrowed her eyes and scooted closer to her computer screen, trying to tune out
the infantile conversation. Since the other half of that phone call had showed her
the door, she was back to researching on her own. She was now on Hour Two of trying
to dig up dirt on the Worldwide Baseball Talent Management. In the endless World Wide
Web, Worldwide Baseball Talent Management wasn’t even an amoeba. They didn’t have
a website, let alone any social networking accounts. How a business, legitimate or
otherwise, could expect to thrive a decade into the twenty-first century without so
much as a single tweet was beyond her. She gritted her teeth and stewed.

“You first.” Another giggle followed.

One pet peeve was exchanged for another as Paige continued to argue over who should
hang up first. Cat toyed with solving all their problems by smashing her cell phone
with the autographed George Bell bat that hung on Joe’s wall.

Cat rubbed her temples and sighed. She had a bigger problem than Chance and Paige’s
gigglefest. She’d forked over her Paige-sitting money to gain access to an online
sports agent directory, only to find a useless listing with the agency name, address
and phone number. Even after the three hundred dollar charge to her nearly-maxed out
credit card granted access, she wasn’t any closer to insider information on He Who
Would Not Hang Up.

“I’m really going to hang up now.”

Hearing this, Cat breathed a sigh of relief. The George Bell bat got to continue collecting
dust and she didn’t have to explain to Roger Aiken why she’d pulverized Paige’s five-hundred-dollar
cell phone.

Cat refocused on her latest blog entry:

The Game Behind the Game

Santo Domingo requires all practicing scouts to be registered, but these rules—designed
to protect players—don’t extend to agents. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows
how the business works in the United States, where over thirty thousand fast-talking
suits claim to be sports agents, despite the fact that the domestic registry only
shows fifteen hundred of them as being certified. It is as though everyone in baseball
just accepts the scams and expects twelve-year-old boys to be able to protect themselves
because the league passed out a Do’s and Don’t brochure.

Hmm. This wasn’t ready to be published; it was only half of the story. Chance Hayward
was hiding the other half.

“Okay. I’ll see you at seven sharp … Okay. Bye!”

Cat exhaled with the click of the phone, grateful for the silence. The serenity didn’t
last long. Paige bustled over to her table, her stilettos clicking rapidly across
the tiles. A hand came across the front of her desk and slammed her laptop shut.

“Hey!” Cat said with a frown of annoyance. By now, Paige was surely beginning to think
of that frown as her natural expression. If she were to go missing and Paige had to
describe her to a sketch artist, she had no doubt that milk cartons all over Santo
Domingo would be plastered with a pasty, flat-haired, furrowed-browed, scowling caricature
of herself, probably clad in a barrel and suspenders.

“Guess what?” Paige hopped on the desk, crossing one leg over the other and clasping
her hands on her lap.

Cat took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t know. Chance hung up first?”

“No. Well, yes. But guess where he’s taking me tonight?”

“The airport?”

She frowned. “No, Miss Forgetting Who Holds Her Future Job In Her Awesome Hands. We’re
going to the Tea- Teat- Teatr-…”

“
Teatro Nacional Eduardo Brito
?”

“That’s it. He’s got tickets for some Circus Elmo’s thing.”

Cat sighed. “
Cirque Éloize
.”

“Whatever.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Something Spanish.”

“It’s French.”

“Whatever again.” Paige huffed and heaved herself up off the desk. “God. Who cares
what it’s called?”

“You had the wrong language. I didn’t want you to sound like an idiot.”

This seemed to catch her ire. Paige tilted her chin up. “Well, while you’re at home
romancing your Rosetta Stone, I’ll be in the front row romancing Chance’s bone.”

It never ceased to amaze her how some people could have so much money and so little
class. Here was a woman who summered in the French Riviera, yet couldn’t speak a word
of the language, and saw front row seats for an award-winning Québécois production
as an opportunity to spend two hours groping her sleazy boyfriend. Instead of telling
the upper trash exactly what she thought of her, though—“upper trash” pretty well
summed it up—Cat was handcuffed into polite chitchat and courtesy smiles.

She forced her lips into a closed smile. “Sounds like fun.”

“Don’t wait up.”

“Yeah. I bet it will be a late night.”

Translation:
It’s Chance’s turn to take the trash out
.

Paige bopped back over to her desk. Cat lifted the laptop lid to continue doing fruitless
research and writing unpublishable blog entries.

Cat smiled at the blinking cursor as though they were sharing the same sneaky thought:
tonight she’d get the other half of the story.

A second later, the charge of stilettos sounded again and the laptop lid banged shut.
She jerked her head up, fully ready to forgo niceties and let her have it.

Paige spoke first instead. “Ohmigod!”

She waved her hands in the air like she was on fire.

If
only
.

“What?” Cat scooted back in her chair. Paige looked like she was about to burst and
the last thing Cat needed was a dry cleaning bill to get the blood and mascara out
of her beige dress.

“Ohmigod, ohmigod!”

“What, what?”

She bounced on tippy-toes. “I just got a text from my Alpha sister, who is interning
as a buyer for none other than Gisella Trevisan.” She paused for Cat’s reaction. Judging
from her star-struck eyes, she expected gushing.

Cat disappointed her with a blank stare.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Of course you don’t.” Her eyes deadened, before rolling in a slow, emphatic circle.
“Gisella Trevisan is one of the biggest fashion buyers in New York—at Saks Fifth Avenue.”

Paige always had a way of edging her words to give the impression that everyone was
beneath her, but now she also slowed her delivery to a condescending pace.

“That’s a store where you can buy clothes but—unlike where you shop for apparel—they
don’t change your oil and rotate your tires at the same time.”

Anger swelled inside of Cat, who replied in an equally haughty tone, “I know what
Saks is.”

In
theory
.

Cat had never been to the store, not even to the one in Vegas, despite the fact that
it was in the same mall as Benji’s favorite vegan sandwich shop.

“Hmm.” The earlier disdain had melted from her face and left behind nothing but glee
once again. “Anyway, she told me that she saw on a shipment list that there is a Prada
store in Santo Domingo!”

She clapped her hands together and grinned.

Oh
no
.

Cat gave Paige’s eyes a double take, almost certain that gold flecks had changed into
dollars signs. She might have signed on to monitor Paige, but she drew a hard red
line at ensuring the Aiken American Express balance stayed under the Dominican Republic’s
GDP.

Cat tried to downplay the discovery with a nonchalant shrug in hopes of dampening
the girl’s enthusiasm. “There’s a big upscale shopping area in the
Piantini
sector of town.”

Paige eyes doubled in size, just as her wardrobe was surely about to do.

Double
oh no
.

Cat made a feeble attempt to change the subject. “There’s actually a lot of tourist
attractions we can try this weekend if you want. There’s the Columbus Lighthouse and
the National Aquarium or they’ve got so many museums—”

Paige let out an exaggerated yawn, patting her mouth with her manicured fingers.

Cat rolled her eyes. “Didn’t you read the travel materials the team gave us?”

“Noooo. I was busy having a life, for which I want new clothes.”

Deterrence wasn’t working. Cat decided to try a straight-on counter-argument.

“How could you possibly need any new clothes? Our closet is stuffed as it is.”
Our
was being generous, considering Paige’s closet commandeer had left Cat with only
three hangers for her own wardrobe.

“Stuffed with dresses from last season designed by washed-up skags.”

“Washed up? Paige, you have brands I haven’t even heard of.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And yet somehow you always know exactly what they are.”