GPS (2 page)

He climbed gingerly out of the car and unzipped the snowsuit again, thankful for always keeping the quilted nylon suit in his trunk. He carefully slid the GPS into the long inner pocket that ran down the suit’s left side. He tucked the cords in as best as he could, knowing if he could get back out of here without breaking his neck, the day would take on a whole new glow, literally.

After crunching rhythmically up and down and back across the snow bank, trying to use his previous footprints as a guide, Burke began scaling the cliff back to the highway. By the time he made it back to the ledge he’d leapt to from the roadside, thinking this was where he would break his neck, there was Trooper Evans, smiling down at him.

“Never one to communicate, are you?” his former partner said, reaching his right hand down to help pull Burke back up to the shoulder on the side of the road. “Way to leave us hanging.”

Burke grunted in feigned laughter, taking great care to make sure he didn’t lean his left arm too firmly against his side as he kicked a leg up onto the ledge and pulled himself up with Evans’ help. He trudged back to his cruiser, unzipping the snowsuit one last time and popping his trunk. There were now five more cruisers lining the side of the highway behind his, lights ablaze, and an unneeded ambulance was pulling up behind them.

“Well, what the hell is going on down there? What happened? How many inside?” Evans asked as he walked up behind Burke standing and undressing at his trunk.

“Go see for yourself,” Burke said. “I barely touched a thing down there, other than the door handle.”

Burke was completely unable to fathom how there was nothing, no one, not even a speck of blood inside the car down there, and not a footprint outside of it either. He was anxious for the same shock and bewilderment to befall his fellow officers. As he slid the snowsuit off, the GPS was still hot to the touch in the inside pocket.

It didn’t occur to him until much later that the car down in the ravine matched the description of the one he’d heard about, the one that caused the big pileup over in Orem back in May.

The one that had allegedly just vanished as it did.

GPS

PART I

“
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
— A. Bartlett Giamatti

- 1 -

Somehow, things really would be different, if only for this year.

Somewhere right this second, there was a large, loud woman standing at a dead still on an airport people-mover. Only this time Jeff Delaney wasn’t the sucker stuck behind her, and that was all the difference in the world right now. At least it was supposed to be. But Jeff’s mental picture of her was real enough to put him right there behind her, and not in a paint-peeling wooden seat in the 12th row of a Savannah, Georgia, baseball stadium.

The man who once thought himself made for airplane travel was already screaming at her — inside his own head of course — to read the sign right in front of her, if she could read, and to please consider the name of the object she was standing on, which was struggling to serve its purpose at the moment. It’s a people-mover, for Christ’s sake, and it sure is tough to move people when a piece of livestock is parked right in the middle of it, rendering the entire operation to little more than a horizontal elevator ride that was even slower and therefore more annoying than just walking.

She’d be the same woman, certainly, who would be crashing down beside him at the Southwest gate 20 minutes later while cackling madly into her cell phone. Naturally, she would try to board the plane two zones early with too many bags, at least one of which would be too big for the overhead compartment, before cramming herself into the window seat — the one he’d requested and obviously not gotten — and needing two seat belts instead of one before drinking three screwdrivers instead of one. Except she’d call them vawdka-n-awnge juices, because that’s what annoying people do when given the chance. Like great hitters, they just deliver and deliver.

Riley’s voice — again, inside his head, since those were mostly the only voices available to him these days — came like it always did, just in time, begging him to take a breath and relax. Jeff found himself fretting and fidgeting so much in his stadium seat while playing out this contrived scenario, he was actually drawing attention to himself from the gum-smacking kid four seats down to his left, and now that kid’s mother, too. Both were peering out at him over a program scorecard the kid was undoubtedly butchering.

That’s how it was now. Like any addict, if Jeff couldn’t get his fix by living out stressful situations in person, he would daydream about them instead.

He was well past the eager, resume-building part of his life, a time filled with wishful thinking about only working in the majors. Now he sarcastically looked back to his presumptuous post-college days, when he believed someday soon he’d be Boston’s lead advance scout and would never set foot in a Class-A stadium like this one again. But it wasn’t about working for the team you loved, he’d figured out. It wasn’t about loving the team for which you worked either, sadly. He was working for the Mets, for God’s sake, the team that had broken his heart before any girl had.

Now he spent his baseball nights thinking about anything other than baseball. Tonight, that meant thinking about anything other than Felix Ascondo, the Savannah right fielder he was being paid to watch and provide some account of to New York after that stuffy, thundery spring night. Jeff was completely disinterested. Not just with baseball, either.

There was a time, hell five years ago in fact, when the mere chance to identify himself to a player or a fan as a major league scout made him squirm with delight. Now, there was the most certain divorce, the general boredom of thirtydom and the feeling of dread that accompanied the realization that his life’s work up to this point had added up to unhappiness and a shitty paycheck.

Jeff was at a point where he begged for distraction. Tonight, he prayed that Ascondo — allegedly developing quickly as a hard-hitting, fast-moving switch-hitter — would show him something that would get him out of there early, and maybe into something more dangerous and fun, but more likely into his hotel room drunk and alone. Again.

At the moment, Ascondo was showing him little more than a fan of sunflower seed shells streaming from the Dominican’s lips as he stood otherwise motionless in the outfield, a few thin clouds of the moths of summer performing their nightly ballet in the buzzing lights above him.

Usually in Jeff’s experience, early season minor league crowds buzzed much less than the lights as they spent the night in and out of conversation about life and the game, giving each an equal share all night long. The minor leagues sometimes worked in reverse from the big leagues. At the beginning of the season, there was still school, taxes and other bullshit for most people to worry about. It really took the boredom of summer sometimes to make the games interesting to fans.

To Jeff, baseball was now uninteresting from early April to late August. Only in the offseason did the game seem remotely appealing to him. This was no typical early-season crowd, unfortunately. Tonight was some kids night at the park, which meant Jeff got bumped back from his usual stoop 10 rows behind home plate — he spent his working life either there or in the 10th row down the first base side — and forced him to listen to more shrieks than a cave full of bats every time someone hit the ball.

The kiddies were out in force, ingesting sugar in seemingly lethal doses as moms doled out cash from purses like bookies. Needless to say, they were talking up a storm, reminding Jeff of how much kid-talking always got done on the airplanes on which he was trying to sleep over the years.

And then Riley’s voice was back again, his former voice of reason and now just his former wife. He could only bring himself to dial her number when he’d stared down a couple rounds of Bushmills these days. But even those bad decisions and awkward conversations had become less and less frequent with the maturation of Jeff’s relationship with Irish whiskey.

His estranged wife’s voice had never ceased to be the one inside Jeff’s head, until a new female voice began to dominate his thoughts that spring and summer. It was Riley that had been saying from their earliest days together that Jeff’s cynical view of people was dangerously close to too much, and that he needed to beef up his tolerance to pretty much everything. God, that had been forever ago.

And now, of course, he thought about that goddamn GPS, still sitting on top of the beer fridge in the garage at home, still in the box. He’d wanted to bring it to Georgia to help christen his official foray into car-only travel this baseball season, but had sped out of New Orleans way later than he’d hoped that morning after drinking way more than he’d hoped the night before. He had left the expensive — and ill-intended somehow, maybe? Maybe — gift from his almost-ex-wife right there in the garage.

Ascondo, he noticed casually, was standing on the top step of the Sand Gnats dugout now, waiting to scoot out to the on-deck circle and, Jeff hoped, do something that’s easy to scout, like hit a first-pitch home run. Not likely.

The GPS had come into Jeff’s life at a time when he’d started to scrutinize everything attached to Riley, and for that reason it didn’t shock him that it ended up being the last gift exchanged between the two before the split. It was so fitting, Jeff had found he rather liked the GPS now, or at least the idea of it, and had come to be almost giddy about using the thing, even if only to spite her in some ridiculous, Jeff sort of way.

For about 10 minutes last Christmas, he believed that thing he’d unwrapped, which had arrived with a tipsy Riley at about 3 that morning, was a symbol of some new, happier life for both of them. Not long after, he’d found the sarcasm he just knew was programmed somewhere into that magical direction-finding thing. Riley, putting her LSU education to work, had decided this piece of gadgetry was some sort of solution to Jeff’s hatred for plane travel and his constant, unrelenting stress.

He’d been scouting baseball talent in some manner and for various teams for 15 years — after his own playing career fizzled in a blink his sophomore year at UConn — and he had hated airports and the people inside them for almost just as long. The GPS, he imagined Riley thinking gleefully to herself, would rejuvenate his career, a big reset button he could plug into his cigarette lighter. Always the perfect little solution to Jeff’s nonstop problems.

The GPS symbolized the new leaf she was turning over for him. It was so simple to her. Those two-hour flights from Houston to Phoenix? Why not turn them into 16-hour drives instead? It was comical then, and as Ascondo waved pathetically at a high-arcing slider for strike three, it seemed more so now. He almost shrieked in delightful impersonation of the fictional airport lady he’d dreamed up.

Jeff shuffled up the stadium steps and through the sparsely-populated concourse toward the exit gate — it was only the bottom of the fourth inning, but it was clear Ascondo was pure shit and couldn’t hit a breaking ball if he ran one over with his car — and he wore a smile that was becoming more and more common for him, the kind worn by death row inmates who have long since realized every minute leading up to the last one will be a lot easier than the last one.

So find some way to enjoy them.

- 2 -

“
In four, hundred, feet, turn right … In three, hundred, feet, turn right … Arriving at destination, on left.”

Jeff was still smiling two days later as he drove through the crowded streets of the French Quarter, where he almost never went anymore unless his brother or one of his few remaining friends made it to town on a weekend he was actually in town.

He loved the city, had called it home for six years now and did so in a defining love-it-or-leave-it time for New Orleans. Far from a native, Jeff always felt when Katrina came blowing through in 2005 that, in some way, he became almost as important a resident as the ones he always listened to — either playing improv jazz or just drunkenly gabbing — in the Frenchmen Street bars he loved.

The storm forced every survivor that still had a front door to walk into to either find some way to stick it out or to cut and run forever. Jeff was one of those lucky ones whose life hadn’t been ripped in half by the storm, and he vowed to stick it out even if it meant three different addresses in the same part of town in less than three years, and it did.

Sticking it out also meant, as it turned out, scouting for the Houston Astros those first three seasons, then catching on with the fledgling Washington Nationals, with whom he spent two difficult years as a minor league advisor and regional scout right after the hurricane. Last season, he’d pulled off the trick a third time by catching on with the New York Mets, and all of it was made possible by his stubborn allegiance to the city of New Orleans and his connections to its Triple-A club, the Zephyrs, which had affiliations with those three clubs during those years. If what he’d heard at spring training was true, he’d face the challenge again next season when the Zephyrs were apparently set to align with the Florida Marlins. Yuk.

As was the case for millions of others along the Gulf Coast, the autumn of 2005 became a major milepost in Jeff’s life. Not because of any physical devastation, however, but because everything around him was changing and he wasn’t, at least not for the better. Instead of the annual January Dominican trip he’d twice dragged Riley on — kicking and screaming on the first one and then talking vacation home possibilities after the second — Jeff and his wife spent all but one of the post-Katrina months doing anything and everything they could to volunteer in the hardest-hit parts of their town. They lived mostly off her award-winning columns in the Times-Picayune.