GPS (25 page)

Jeff had bought two guns to represent his most outward change. The Ruger he had picked out at a pawn shop on Rampart Street, and then, later that same day, Saturday, he went into an outdoors megastore over the lake bridge and bought himself a deer rifle with a big scope. He paraded around the apartment with both of them for the rest of the night, posing in every reflection he could find. The guns weren’t loaded but Jeff was staggeringly loaded at the time. He kept on drinking until it was getting light Sunday morning, and he’d passed out and forgotten the details of it until now, as he and the GPS aimed the Celica down the Gulf shore toward Corpus Christi.

To top it off, hadn’t he also been drunkenly doing push-ups and sit-ups those last few days before getting wrecked with his buddy Nifty and spending 36 hours completely passed out? It seemed he had, and Jeff flexed his sore biceps as proof.

“What the hell for?” he asked the empty car with a shrug, now speeding out onto 1-10 west to begin the eight-hour steer around the Gulf. He suddenly saw a flash of memory of his late father trying to show two rail-thin boys how easy push-ups were on the living room floor. Then, his eyes were drawn back to the GPS, tracking innocently away for the moment and lighting a simple-looking path down to Corpus Christi. He looked at the screen and thought of the countdown clock. Had he missed it? Was it over? What had happened?

“Think about baseball, idiot,” he said, interrupting himself.

Jeff had vowed sometime after Riley’s departure for Africa, the Ascondo trade and Lefty’s disappearance that there would be no more drinking on road trips, not even beer. There would be work. It was the least he could do, he’d told himself during an attempted moment of clarity, which guys like Jeff always seemed to have when blasted off their rails. It was a typical drunk’s compromise, a way of still being drunk most of the time, just not all of it.

“I knew I would hate this idea,” he said, unable to shake the pestering suggestion in his mind to just stop and find something at a package store along the way, check into a hotel and at least get a little burn in the back of his throat before he trudged off to Whataburger Field that night.

“Whatatimeforadrink,” he said.

He’d bought bullets as well, Jeff remembered, pulling his brain back out of the bottle. Plenty of bullets, or shells. It was more official to call them shells. Or slugs. The clerk at the Outdoor Megamart scoffed at Jeff when he’d asked him — while Jeff was being outfitted with his very first hunting rifle, but not a hunting license or any other pertinent hunting gear — what kind of slugs he used in his Blackhawk. Jeff didn’t know enough to even make up a lie, so he didn’t. The guy snickered at him, even as Jeff was spending on ammunition the money that would have covered the electric bill. And for weapons he would likely never need except to cause himself more trouble.

As he now peered through the windshield and into Louisiana skies that carried the promise of late-afternoon storms, Jeff wondered if he would be graced with his first rainout of the still young season. Not tonight, he hoped. He wanted fair skies, and he hoped Ellis Denson and the Hooks had brought their best stuff. Just because he was going to work didn’t mean he wanted it to be difficult work.

Getting on the road by 4 tomorrow morning (no drinking tonight), he thought as he drove, would give him a slim chance, if he hauled some serious, serious ass, to be in Orem, Utah, some 1,500 miles across the American Southwest (without a hangover), and into one of likely hundreds of choice stadium seats (without having a drink first) in time to file a report on the new kid, Willy Cintron. He figured with a quick nap after tonight’s game (and not a single drink), plus a good four or so hours sleep after tomorrow night’s game, and he would be eastbound on a major highway by Friday morning, and home some time within the parameters of the weekend.

And then what?

Go back to being drunk and depressed, Jeff supposed, something he knew was true but something he figured would either just work itself out or, or ... “Or maybe something else will happen,” he said, looking away from the road and back to the GPS. And for the first time ever, it did something when he acknowledged it, coincidence or not.

For all the times Jeff had spoken to the machine on the windshield, it never seemed to respond. It always just did what it did, blinking and spinning, zooming in and back out, and then suddenly something strange would happen when it saw fit and when Jeff least expected it. This time, Jeff was looking right at the thing, expectantly, when the Warren woman spoke.

“
In, 36, hours, begin training.”
Then the little counter, the one Jeff had thought about hundreds of times the last few weeks, appeared on the 8-inch screen. In his own defeatist mind, Jeff had always seen the clock in his thoughts as reading 0d0h0m0s. Time’s up. This one, which immediately started to elapse when it popped up along the right side of the screen under DESTINATION, began at 1d12h0m0s and counted down.

“Yes!” Jeff shouted with sudden, unexpected glee. “Finally! Unete a la revolucion, godammit!” He took both hands off the wheel and triumphantly balled them into fists, flexing his arms and gritting his teeth with that deranged smile that he again glimpsed in the rearview mirror. He was exhilarated. But that was just 10 or so seconds in the life of a man who was always looking for the other side of the coin.

Very quickly, the smile was gone. Part of him wanted to scoff, and part of him wanted to scream. Was the thing really talking to
him
? Was it really giving instructions meant for
him
? This was his trip, after all, she was interrupting. But hadn’t the GPS been acting weird since pretty much the day he started using it? Of course. It was the thing that had taken him across and there was no denying it. It was his only way to get back. But what did this training, or this ticking clock, have to do with anything he’d seen that first time, or anything he’d been dreaming about ever since? Wouldn’t he trash the car and himself this time if he did go back? The first time had been rough enough.

For the first time, Jeff thought of the GPS as something other than a machine. Not a person, necessarily, but not
not
a person either. A persona, perhaps. He was suddenly overcome with the somebody-else-is-in-the-room feeling, and it made his back and his jaw tighten in fear. While he tried to keep the car moving inside the painted lines of the highway, he collected his courage and gazed dubiously at the GPS screen in front of him. He spoke to it with sarcasm. He didn’t know it, but he regressed from 75 miles per hour to about 58 in just the time he spoke.

“I can’t really train tomorrow, I don’t think. You see, I’m a baseball scout. Well, sometimes I am, and I just don’t think I can do any training right now, or, I guess, in 36 hours,” Jeff said with a nervous grin, all the while feeling his throat clench with anticipation. He imagined a horror movie scene where the wires of the GPS suddenly burst out of their jacks and start snaking their way toward him, wrapping around his neck while he tries to keep the car on the road. All the while, the speaker would be bleating out at him,
“Insubordination, insubordination, insubordination…”

But there was none of that. There was no answer at all. The little talking contraption was here to give him information, not to answer his questions or reconfigure its schedule to suit him. After about two minutes of Jeff veering the Celica to the far left and far right borders of the right lane as he stared at the screen for some further response, speeding up and down erratically as he went, the clock simply blinked off and the GPS resumed its normal programming. Typical.

Jeff zoomed across the Texas border, and it was becoming more and more evident the dark, thickening clouds in the distance would be exploding through the horizon soon. He could even see a section of sky over the water that had that odd, textured look of heavy rain sheeting to the earth. The GPS continued to disappoint, just doing the usual business again. Jeff even scrolled through the various option menus when he’d stopped for gas near Wharton. He rifled through all of the GPS’s bells and whistles on the main menu screen, all of which he’d done before, and found nothing of any great interest. Nothing about training either.

The clue Jeff continued to miss was the strange, coded address that had been burned into the unit’s memory when he’d crossed over during his trip to New Mexico. But that only would have confused him further. When he steered back onto I-77 South, he drove into torrents of late spring rain which, in these parts, had trouble finding a place to go when they landed, so the water tended to just slosh around in deadly ponds on the tops of the roads. Jeff was slowed to a crawl for the next 30 minutes.

The Celica was herded in with dozens of other cars performing a ritual, rolling dance, windshield wipers bashing away in unison at the buckets of rain beating them. Everyone but Jeff was blinking their emergency flashers to help light the way. His flashers, he’d just discovered, no longer flashed, even on the dashboard. Apparently, neither did his turn signals. He was never so grateful for functioning headlights in his entire driving life, but began fearing what would happen if they, too, simply blinked out on him.

Even with the angry weather and Sandy Morino’s far-reaching baseball eye to worry with in Corpus Christi — not to mention the almost constant itch to steer the car into a liquor store parking lot and relieve some stress — Jeff thought about the ticking clock, and the most recent GPS announcement.

What time was 36 hours from now? Or no, it was more like 33 hours now, he supposed. And what was the time difference in Utah, where he vowed to be tomorrow night? What time zone were the GPS demons in? He couldn’t do the little bit of math required to figure any of that out at the moment, especially with the asshole riding his brakes dangerously in front of him. He drove nervously the rest of the way into Corpus Christi, wondering about the countdown and forgetting to turn off his windshield wipers until they screeched dryly at a stop light in town, the rain already a memory racing off into the distance.

The storms had gone and the sun immediately elbowed its way through the layer of steam above the Texas Gulf Coast. By Tuesday night, a throng of fans filed into the Hooks’ ballpark with umbrellas they wouldn’t even need.

Jeff sat through actual moments of mild enjoyment that night at the game. Denson was the real thing, a tall skinny guy with uncanny plate presence. Every at bat, he was digging pitchers into deep holes by waiting for his own pitch and swinging a ferocious bat at the ones he liked. It was an easy night, as it happened, as Denson was simply his kind of player. Perfect. Jeff even called Sandy at the end of the game just to make sure the boss knew his scout was doing his job for a change.

Afterward, he felt like a person stuck in rehab with nothing to do. A sober Jeff spent an hour or so filing a scouting report from his laptop at the Villa Del Sol Hotel and doing as much of tomorrow’s work on Cintron as possible. He would give the fine hotel just one hour of his slumber, then leave the key in the room and roar off into the night at breakneck speed. He would face an unbelievable race against the clock to have even a shot at seeing a few innings of Wednesday night’s game in Utah.

Jeff didn’t know what would happen when the clock reached zero — he pictured that little GPS counter, which he presumed was now ticking quietly to itself, zipped up in its little sleeping bag on the other hotel bed — and at this moment, he didn’t care. In truth, by the time he went to sleep, he’d convinced himself he didn’t believe the messages were even intended for him. Who would want him? What did they need a 38-year-old drunk for?

Jeff closed his eyes and thought of the men in the desert, the first time he’d spun around and seen them all standing behind him with their guns at their sides, ready to flee the scene. He’d done something crazy out there, and their astonished looks said so. And they wanted him, and maybe that’s why the clock seemed to be ticking on his haunted GPS. But why? For what? More insane behavior?

He slept for nearly one hour, until 11:48 p.m. Though Jeff didn’t dream at all, he could sense the presence of the GPS on the other bed. He could feel it still thinking, processing inside its case. He’d fallen uneasily asleep imagining himself creeping over to the Warren case in the dark room, unzipping it and being blinded by the rays of light as the GPS inside ran on its own power.

- 30 -

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button…”

Jeff’s face was flushed with sweat as he swerved back into the right lane, the Celica’s left-hand turn signal clicking inside the car but still not actually blinking on the inside or the outside. And now, even as he flailed his left arm stupidly out the window to try to make his intentions to change lanes known, he was flatly ignored by all of the drivers in the left lane — and seemingly every motorist in the entire Beehive State, which seemed a fitting nickname as he and the other workers buzzed aimlessly from light to light.

They were creeping along on West University Parkway in Orem. They were somewhere in the reaches of Home of the Owlz Stadium and the Pioneer League game between the Orem Owlz and the visiting Casper Ghosts. Because he could find KALL-AM and the Owlz broadcast on the car radio but could not for the life of him find Home of the Fucking Owlz Stadium, Jeff already had begun his night of scouting while still in the car. Thanks to the radio, he knew that Willy Cintron had bounced out to short in his first at bat after looking at two strikes and then swinging at a ball.

What a fair city, Orem, Jeff thought ruefully, simultaneously reaching for the third time in 10 minutes into the car’s middle console, where he knew the Ruger would be waiting, ready to spring into action. He didn’t dare pull it out, at least not right now. But it just felt great to hold, and he’d developed a habit of sliding his hand in there while he drove. It sure beat one of those squishy stress balls Riley had routinely given him as a Christmas stocking stuffer.