GPS (21 page)

They spilled the blood of more than a hundred men, women and children in a matter of an hour that Saturday morning, probably wishing at first they’d never fired the first shot but being quickly overcome by a feeling of no-turning-back-now with each one that followed. The men didn’t say a single word to each other in the immediate minutes that followed. They spun their tires in the sand in the blazing mid-morning sun, got out of there and ran back to their caves to hide as planned. Each of them knew as they did, and for the agreed two days of hiding afterward, that they could only go one direction from there, and it sure as hell wasn’t back home to the office.

They never buried a single one of the bodies they’d created that day, never even really stopped to see if they were all dead or not. They just kept blasting, reloading and laughing demonically as they went. Charles led the barrage, at once taking the reins of the other nine men who all previously thought themselves worthy to be the leader of the group and whatever it was set to do. Five minutes into the killing, it was Charles who was screaming in delight, pushing the others to keep on moving, to keep on shooting.

“The clock only winds one way, gentlemen!” he kept shouting that day, and it became the man’s euphoric mantra as he became more and more unglued from reality and stuck more and more tightly to his idea of taking over an entire country one pitiful village at a time.

If each of the men could have been interviewed just before they romped down into the town in two crammed SUVs, they likely would have described the overwhelming feeling of power and dominance they hoped to get from just the looks of the shocked villagers as they drove in on the sand streets. They would not necessarily have predicted bloodshed, despite their repeated claims to one another to do just that when they’d gotten out. At most, they might have admitted to having some sort of Clint Eastwood Western fantasy of laying waste to a whole town and simply riding back out unharmed.

But they were heavily armed, and the action had started almost immediately. A man standing in front of a rundown general store had rushed out when he saw the gunmen standing in the street. The Freemen could not speak a lick of Spanish, so although the shopkeeper was merely pleading with them to please not shoot their guns in the street, when he grabbed the arm of the man closest to him — Simon Charles — the other nine began firing at his beckoning.

If they were interviewed immediately
after
the hour-long carnage in the town, the Freemen might not have remembered going back to their SUVs dozens of times to either move onto another street or to pop open a new box of shells. They might not have remembered the smiles on the faces of their friends, as door after door was kicked in and gunshots were sent flying in every direction.

It might have been true that people killed people and not guns, as the bumper stickers suggested. But on this day, had the triggers not been so close to the people looking to squeeze them and the shells not so readily available to them, the 10 men might not have found much more than a bar fight in that village. In reality, the guns themselves had provided a good deal of whatever bravery they might have lacked.

More than a hundred dead towns and villages and even cities later, the same men who had taken to hammering a large posted sign into the main street in each town in the middle of the night to warn of the coming carnage —
“Simon says, you’re next!”
— had all the courage they needed.

- 24 -

“
Jeff. Sandy here. We miss you, dear friend. Can we please communicate at once? Thank you. Good day.”

Jeff had sat at Zephyr Field a mere two times in the last two weeks and had done absolutely no communicating with the Mets during that time. Even on those two nights, his attendance at the ballpark was much more a matter of being seen than actually seeing. Sandy’s message — his first attempt at contacting his scout since Felix Ascondo had been traded — carried with it the ever-polite tone Morino always used when he was trying to exercise patience.

While the Mets player personnel director surely understood Jeff was feeling sour over the way the trade with Texas had gone down, he wasn’t likely going to be sending his scout any flowers over the transaction. There were many more irons in the fire. The Mets were still in last place and fading. Atlanta and Philadelphia were fighting it out for first place in the National League East while Florida and Washington struggled to keep pace and New York was being helplessly marooned at the bottom, already nine games adrift of the Braves and 10 behind the Phillies.

For the first time in his life, Jeff could identify with the Mets.

He was finding it increasingly harder, now that he was totally alone, to not just drink himself right out of this world forever. He knew the booze had played a role in everything — Riley had left for Africa with a bad taste in her mouth about him, Lefty was gone and Ascondo had been traded. Each of them, it seemed, had no more time to waste with Jeff when they went, and he realized he hadn’t given any of them the time of day when he still could have.

It was only the Bushmills that had gotten his undivided attention, and that had only further divided his attention.

Jeff thought about them all constantly, now that they were all out of his life. Each of them, he knew, had every reason to erase Jeff from their own minds now and simply get on with their lives. Yet still, he wondered if Riley or Felix had thought much about him. If they did, they likely thought about how much he had changed and how unraveled he had gotten.

Despite all the things Jeff had learned to live with regarding Riley, he still couldn’t get past those sighs of hers, and still heard them whenever he thought of her. They spoke louder than words about how far she’d come with him and how disappointing of a ride it had been. She’d let one last big one go right before she’d kissed him on the cheek that last night and walked down the stairs. He wouldn’t have expected to hear much from her in Africa even if they were still happily married, and as things were now, he didn’t expect to hear from her at all. He wondered if, or more likely when, he would be hearing from her attorney regarding the divorce. Hiring an attorney for himself hadn’t crossed his mind.

Jeff thought constantly about the revolucion and what, if anything, it had all meant. He had dreamed about it in frightening detail almost every night for the last couple of weeks, despite a waking feeling that he should just forget about it for his own wavering sanity.

Until this morning, April 30, the name Sandy Morino hadn’t crossed his mind much lately, not more than a couple of times. When it had, it was quickly dismissed. But he dialed Sandy’s number after playing the message from him because even if drinking himself to death was all that was left to do, he would at least need more money than he had right now to do it. And the apartment he was developing a strange affection for would no longer have his name on the lease if he didn’t come up with May’s rent, so he needed his job even though he didn’t want it.

The Celica, fresh from a visit to the Lube-Right on Rampart Street and a diagnosis that it needed a lot more than just an oil change, was coming to a stop in front of the apartment. Before he walked in, and as his phone started sending out its rings toward New York and Sandy’s office, Jeff cast a few pathetic, now habitual glances up and down the sidewalk for any signs of Lefty. The cat had apparently moved on, evidenced by the giant green dish still mostly full of food sitting next to the front step.

“Jeff, Jeff Delaney? Is that really you? Tell me Jeff, what have you been up to?”

“Hey Sandy, how’s it going? What’s happening in the Big Apple this morning?”

“Oh, you first, Jeff, you first! Please do tell me what you’ve been up to in the Big Easy. Sounds like it’s been really,
really
easy lately.”

“Man, I know you don’t want to hear any excuses.”

“Oh, sure I do! I’d love to hear something from you every once in a while, so excuses will do just fine for now! Your Zephyrs have really been on a roll, haven’t they? Funny, isn’t it? I’m told you even made it to a couple of games in person! Were those fireworks nights, or what? I hear they have an exciting new guy, let me see, what was his name? Oh, it’s Mack. Tyler Mack. Very promising I’m told. I hear the New York Mets might want to call him up, but I can’t be sure.”

“Sandy, I know you could replace me in a heartbeat, and you should if I don’t get my shit together. But please understand, as a friend, I’ve been through some weird shit the last few weeks —”

“Do tell! Me too, Jeff! Me too! I’m the proud player director for a last place baseball team, and it’s been a fascinating ride so far. Isn’t it funny how when one thing starts to go to hell, often many other things will follow right along? For example, Jeff, as this baseball team has become the laughing stock of the entire sports world — did you see that Sports Illustrated story, by the way? — lots of other things have followed. You know that if they fire a team’s manager, like the Mets are about to do, they often fire the whole front office too? That would include you and me, my friend. Maybe we could get jobs together! Do they need any oyster shuckers at any of those killer seafood joints in New Orleans?”

“Man, I don’t want to add to your troubles any more than I already have. What can I do?”

“Your job, friend. Please just do your job so I can do mine.
Please
. This thing is a goddamn unmitigated disaster, and it’s my fault more than yours. But I sure don’t need any help making it worse. This team is a disgrace. For everyone’s sake, just let me know what’s happening with young Tyler, so we can start putting IDs on who we even still want around this time next year. I can’t keep sticking my neck out for you, Jeff, because my head’s going to get chopped off one of these days. I don’t want to replace you. I want you to help me replace these idiots who wear our beloved Mets uniforms every night and get booed off the field. But if you leave me no choice, well then…”

“Got it. I’ll be in Tyler’s face all weekend, I promise. Look man, I know you don’t want to hear it, but Riley’s gone to Africa, and my damn cat even left me, and well, this Felix thing kind of messed me up a little bit. But I’m back.”

“You’d better be. And forget about Felix, because you’re going to have to stroke your pal Ainsley’s ego when he comes back down to Triple-A. And I can assure you, if Mack keeps on keeping on, Ainsley’s coming back on a one-way ticket. The only thing he has in common with the New York Mets right now is that he is brutally bad. Awful. We need to start movin’ up and movin’ out with the whole lot of them. We also need you, dear Jeff, to get your ass back on the road next week, so please don’t just hang out all week watching Mr. Mack. There are plenty more fish to fry, Jeff the chef, and the oil’s just getting warm. You remember the kid Cintron we talked about out in Utah? We think we want him, and God knows, now we need him. And then there’s another new one we need to look at, maybe even sooner. The kid in the Texas League, left fielder, ripping it up. Ellis Denson. Gotta see something concrete on him by the end of next week. I just heard he was on the table for the trade with St. Louis that never happened. They might not want him, but I have a feeling we do.”

On Jeff’s table was a yet unopened fifth of Bushmills. He’d been spinning it around and around without opening it ever since he walked up the stairs and sat down next to it. There was an increasing number of those bottles, empty ones, filling the recycling bin next to the kitchen fridge, and Jeff was pondering whether or not he would try to add this one to the pile by tomorrow morning.

Jeff was on the movin’ up or movin’ out train himself, more than even Sandy knew. He’d watched enough of the addiction and rehab shows on TV to know polishing off a fifth of brown liquor a night was venturing into Ty Cobb territory, but still didn’t care.

“I hear you, Sandy. I’ll be out there early next week, I promise.”

“Don’t promise, Jeff. Just do.”

- 25 -

The brown whiskey had vanished out of the sloped neck, the top of the liquid now resting in the squared body of the Bushmills bottle on the kitchen table as Jeff tooled around indifferently on the Web site of the Corpus Christi Hooks. He was sitting in the courtyard on a typically steamy, late-spring Wednesday night in New Orleans.

It was evident in just a cursory glance that Ellis Denson would catch the eye of any scout. He was hitting with uncanny power for Double-A. But whether or not he was hitting the ball right this second actually counted, didn’t it? It used to. When Jeff cared. Yet, the more he looked, the more he began to stir up a familiar question, and that was what purpose he was serving the Mets, or what purpose any scout for any team really served.

Did they really need him to drive all the way to the Texas Gulf Coast just to see what this online stat sheet could see for him? Did he need to see the tree falling in the forest just to prove it actually made a sound? Of course he did, actually, he reminded himself, taking a long pull off his glass with one hand while scrolling the Web pages with his other.

No one usually got the chance to hit very many home runs in High-A or even Double-A ball, whether it was the Texas, the Florida State, the Carolina or the California league. When they did hit them, even a small handful of them, players quickly moved on, even this early in the season. And if Jeff did his job, this was essentially it, scouting the really good, really exciting ones. He worked well with the fast movers when he worked, and in the scouting business, his was a job most would have felt lucky to have.

When the guys Jeff usually scouted had even a couple of big weeks in the minors, chances were the experiment would move on to the next level rapidly. Yet somehow, there were always guys like Denson stuck out there somewhere they didn’t want to be, and somehow, Jeff and hundreds of other people across the country were pulling regular paychecks to make sure the stats, the raw and simple facts of the matter, weren’t somehow untrue.