Hitman's Baby (Mob City Book 2) (22 page)

I kept one eye trained on him, so that he couldn't help but stare back, but left my other peripherally tracking the movement of the ball and studying the opposition's body language. It spoke volumes.

The ball was three players to my left, almost behind me. I knew I had to spring into action. I turned on my heel and ran directly at the player with the ball. After so long standing still, he wasn't expecting the sudden movement and panicked, chipping the ball up and over my head.

Exactly as I'd anticipated.

Almost before the ball had left his foot, I was already turning, back to the young player I'd previously transfixed with my gaze. I could see the look of surprise as he saw the ball coming towards him, and saw that he wasn't prepared to deal with it. I saw the almost imperceptible bending of his knees as he prepared to head it, and remembered the way he'd been standing.

I knew where he was going to head the ball even before he did, my mind already having processed the fact that his slightly off-center position – body twisted almost imperceptibly to his right – meant that there was only one player who could possibly be the intended target – the grizzled old timer.

I was sprinting towards him before the ball had even hit the younger guy's head. I watched the flight of the ball over my shoulder, stretching out one long, powerful leg even as my opponent began to react.

He was too late. And I wasn't just going to beat him – I was going to make a statement.

I cushioned the ball down with my foot, watching all the way as the old timer tried to charge towards me and nick it back. He didn't have a chance. It was like playing soccer with my dad – he was in slow motion and I was sped up. I swiveled around my planted foot, turning counter-clockwise, and spun around the senior player. He opened his legs, trying to block me, but I read him like a book, brought the ball to ground and knocked it between his legs.

The circle erupted around me with cries of shock, surprise and astonishment.

"He just nutmegged Garcia!" someone whispered loudly.

The nutmeg – knocking the ball directly through a player's legs – is generally considered to be the most humiliating way for a soccer player to suffer. It shouldn't happen – first of all, the legs shouldn't be wide enough to present the opening; second, they should be able to snapshot in time to block an attempted nutmeg.

Garcia, which was apparently my nemesis's name, had underestimated me. He stared at me with eyes that were black with thunder. I took a pace towards him, closing the distance between us so that we stood with our noses almost touching.

"Let me know if you want me to stay late with you for some extra practice." I smiled nonchalantly. "I'm always willing to help out a teammate who needs it."

Garcia didn't say a word, but he looked like his anger was about to overwhelm him – his hands were bunched into fists, the knuckles white with effort, and he was trembling, almost as though every muscle in his entire body was keyed up and ready for a fight.

"You don't know who you're messing with, Alejandro," he grunted, an act which seemingly required a monumental force of will.

I flushed with annoyance. "I told you to call me Alex,
cabrón,"
I said, turning the Spanish slang he'd used earlier back on him.

"This is my team, Alejandro," he shouted, spittle flying from his mouth. "I'll call you what I want."

Two short, sharp whistle blasts broke up the impending fight, but left neither of us satisfied. This wouldn't be the last of it. I shrugged to myself. It wasn't ideal, but then again, there wasn't space for two leaders in this team. Whatever happened – one of us would need to go. I had no intention of it being me.

We trudged back towards the locker room after cooling down. I was lost in thought, but not so far as to not notice someone hanging around me. I snapped my head to my right, only to see the young Spanish player who I'd earlier transfixed with a stare walking awkwardly along beside me, clearly trying to figure out how to start a conversation.

"Hey," I offered. I had nothing against the kid, felt kind of sorry for him even. I had no doubt that Garcia would be giving him a piece of his mind later on for making him look the fool.

"Hey." He smiled, offering his hand. "Rodrigo."

I shook it. "Alex."

"Not Alejandro?" he said with a wry smile. "Nice to meet you."

"You too, buddy. Sorry about messing you around out there," I offered peaceably. I had nothing against this kid, just the asshole who thought he ran the place.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "My fault; I should have been paying more attention."

"You should," I agreed with a smile, "but I'm glad you weren't."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Go ahead," I said curiously. This was clearly the reason he'd come over to chat with me. I was intrigued to find out what exactly he wanted to ask.

"Why'd you do that to Ramon?"

"Ramon? Oh – Ramon Garcia?" I said, the pieces finally falling into place in my mind. I suddenly realized who the old timer was – Barcelona's captain, and their best player for almost a decade.

Rodrigo looked at me with shock, like I'd just tested the very foundation his world was built upon. To be honest, I probably had – this looked like a kid who'd been brought up in Barcelona colors and come through their academy. He looked like he slept in Barcelona bedsheets! "You didn't know who he was?"

"The name rings a bell," I said, "but I don't watch much soccer. I've heard of him, but I didn't know what he looked like."

Rodrigo's mouth hung open for a few seconds.

"How the hell did you get so good?"

I looked at him with surprise. "Playing, of course. How can you get good with your ass plonked down in front of the television?"

Rodrigo was still looking at me like I was an alien, but he'd at least managed to regain control of his jaw. "Fair enough, I guess. Hey, let me know if you ever want to do some of that extra practice," he said. "It looks like you could teach me a thing or two."

"Anytime." I smiled. "Hey, I'm gonna hit the showers, okay?"

We parted ways, and I had a few seconds of silence to process the morning. I'd made a powerful enemy, but it also looked like I'd made a friend.

"
S
o
, Diana," the tinny voice said in my earpiece, "tell us – how's Alex settling in in sunny Barcelona?"

The truth was, I had no idea. I'd only landed in Spain six hours ago, so I had no idea what the sports anchor five thousand miles away back home was expecting me to say. I mean, I could guess from what I’d seen on the news that he was a cocky, arrogant son-of-a-bitch.

But I couldn’t say that in front of a national audience, now, could I…

"Hey, Mike, good to speak to you." I smiled, concentrating on not squinting in the face of the impossibly bright light emanating from the camera shoved in front of my face. "I'm standing here in front of the Nou Camp, Barcelona's ninety thousand-seater stadium, which is where the club is playing tomorrow night."

"And what are Alex's chances of playing?" came the question I was dreading. I had no real answer. I was going to have to wing it.

"That's really up to Alex and the coach," I said, plastering a wide smile on my face. My boss, the sleazy Grant Adams, had made it very clear that he didn't care about soccer news – according to him, there were only going to be two people watching: men who cared more about ogling me than listening to what came out of my mouth, and women who just wanted to see footage of the stunning Alejandro Rodriguez on their screens. It was galling, and sure as hell wasn't what I'd studied journalism for, but at least it was a get out of jail free card. "Barcelona is a very closely knit club," I riffed, "and the noises I'm hearing," I didn't say that I'd read this in the newspaper just before coming on screen, "are that he might come on as a substitution, but he's unlikely to start."

"He won't start?" the anchor said, surprised. "Wasn't he a million-dollar signing? Can they afford not to play him?"

"You'd be surprised, Mike," I said. I still had a television smile plastered on my face, but inside I was seething. Mike, but really the whole of WBC, were treating soccer like it was some kind of niche hobby like curling at the Winter Olympics, when really it was the world's most played, most watched sport. "The two Spanish soccer clubs – Real Madrid and Barcelona – are both bigger in dollar terms than any US sports club. The question should really be not whether they can afford
not
to play him, but whether they can risk playing him at all."

"No way," Mike scoffed, "are they bigger than the Yankees or the Cowboys. Do your sums, Diana."

I bit down on my tongue to avoid spitting out an aggressive, if justified retort. I remembered that first and foremost, I was going out live to hundreds of thousands of television sets across America. I was right, but the viewers didn't want to see a fight between an anchor and a reporter. Well, they probably did – but there was no way I was going to let it happen – it’d be the end of my career.

"Maybe not, Mike," I smiled falsely, "but they're bigger than you think."

"Diana, I still don't get why he's not playing," Mike pushed. "I thought he was supposed to be the best soccer player America's ever produced?"

I bit down on a sigh. I didn't understand how he couldn't seem to get that there was a world outside of North America, and that nowhere in that world did people play baseball, American football or even basketball to anywhere near the same extent that we did.

"Yes, Mike," I replied with the same kind of exaggerated patience I'd have used when dealing with a toddler, "but Barcelona has a team full of thirty-million-dollar players. Alex is good, but he's not just going to walk into the team. He's going to have to prove himself, and that won't be easy."

"If you say so, Diana." Mike laughed. "Soccer, eh. Well, thanks for talking to us, Diana. I'm glad at least
you're
having a good time. Send us some pictures from the beach, yeah?"

I felt angry and humiliated – he'd just listened to everything I'd said and ignored it as easily as that, minimizing its importance. Oh, and then he'd thrown in a healthy dose of sexism. Naturally.

I wanted to scream. There were tens of millions of recent immigrants from Latin America living in the United States who watched soccer on a daily basis, many waking up early and staying up late to catch games streamed from Europe. Many millions more young boys and girls whose parents, worried about the risks of brain injury from contact sports, ferried them to soccer practice every weekend.

It might not be the biggest sport in America, but I was convinced that it deserved more than just this cursory, dismissive coverage. With a newsroom run by Grant Adams, and in which even young, ambitious women like me were just seen as eye candy, though, I guess I really didn't have much choice.

"You wish, Mike." I pretended to laugh. "And thanks from WBC in Barcelona." I paused for a couple of seconds until the red light on the camera flickered off.

"What an asshole," my cameraman – Tim – murmured.

"You're telling me," I replied, gently massaging my jaw. Every time I had to hold that false, rictus smile for the camera, I felt like my face was about to seize up! "You need any help packing up, Tim?" I asked.

"Don't worry about it." He smiled. "I'm fine – I've been here a few days already. You look like you need to climb into bed! Jetlag hitting?"

"Tim!" I exclaimed. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to say things like that to a woman?"

"She tried," Tim grinned, "but I guess I wasn't listening."

"No prizes for guessing why you're single then…" I said grumpily.

"Go get a night's rest," Tim said gently. "You'll feel better in the morning."

"Oh, alright then." I grimaced. "I'm going to take a walk around the stadium first, okay?"

"I'm not your boyfriend." He smiled. "You don't need to ask my permission…"

"I wasn't asking for it."

I walked away to the sound of Tim's infectious belly laugh, glad that he couldn't see the smile that was tugging at the corner of my lips. He was a good guy, even if he could be a little abrasive at times.

The stadium towered above me. As the evening drew to a close, lights all around the stadium began to flicker on. There would be workers in here late into the night, I imagined, getting ready for the first game day of the season. The stadium itself was behind locked gates, so I walked around the path that snaked around the entire circumference of the massive building. It was undeniably impressive; already the size of the Rose Bowl, I knew that there were plans to expand it even further in the next couple of years.

I kept walking around, imagining how monstrous a place it would be after the expansion, and finally came across a large set of gates, behind which I saw a merchandise shop, a couple of bars and a sign that indicated the place to buy tickets for the stadium tour.

"Can I help you,
señorita
?" a man, I assumed a security guard, asked me in accented Spanish.

"When can I take a tour?" I replied in that same language, my eyes still transfixed on the giant stadium that dominated the skyline in this part of Barcelona, already a relatively flat city. Part of my mind puzzled over where in Spain my conversation partner was from, because he certainly didn't sound like any of the native speakers I'd met so far.

Then again, I thought to myself, this was Catalonia, and Catalonia was different than the rest of Spain. They spoke differently, ate differently, and had huge pride in their region. To be fair, if I was from a place as beautiful as Barcelona, so would I!

"I'm not sure," he said, surprising me with his frankness. "I'm pretty sure you can't do them on match days, though, so you'll have to wait. How long are you in town?"

"Where are you from?" I asked, turning my head. "And how do you know I'm not a local?"

The man laughed. "Enjoying your holiday?"

"Uh, I guess…" I replied. Of course, I wasn't actually on holiday, but the moment of confusion set up the rest of our encounter nicely.

I had to blink in order to process the sudden, unexpected appearance in front of me of the man I'd been flown five thousand miles to cover. He was in shorts and a training shirt, both wearing the red cross and stripes of the Barcelona logo, and he was soaked with sweat.

"Alejandro Rodriguez?" I asked, feeling a sudden need to confirm what my eyes were telling me.

"Please, it's Alex!" He laughed. "How do you know who I am?"

"I knew you weren't from Barcelona." I laughed.

"Oh, my accent isn't good enough for you?" he asked with a smile on his face.

"No, it's fine," I said, "just different. Why did you speak to me in Spanish, anyway?" I asked, switching to English. "I don't look like I speak it, do I?" My mind was suddenly whirring at a thousand miles an hour, and the language change was a deliberate ploy to distract him and avoid answering his question. I had my reporter's hat on now, and the last thing I wanted was for him to close up after finding out who I was. This was the kind of golden opportunity to make a career that reporters dreamed about at night.

"You're right, you don't." He smiled confidently. "But can I be honest with you?"

He had the look on his face of a man who didn't need to ask permission.

I nodded.

"I was hoping to impress you with the fact I spoke both." He smiled. "I guess it's less impressive now I know that you do, too… Your turn."

"Turn to do what?" I asked, succumbing to his confident charm. I felt like I couldn't concentrate on asking the questions I wanted to because I was so swept up by his undeniable attractiveness.

"Answer a question. How do you know who I am? Even if you did get my name wrong…"

"Oh, that." I smiled. This was crunch time – I needed to make a decision: was I going to be honest, come clean and tell him that I was out here because of… him? Or was I going to play the part of the naive, attractive tourist and hope he let down his guard enough for me to find the kernel of the story?

Being a reporter on a national sports channel was all I'd ever dreamed of, and that cinched it.

"You're famous, you know?" I said, smiling. "You're in all of the papers over here!" Strictly speaking, it wasn't a lie. Alex
was
in all of the papers – driving an expensive looking sports car directly at a pack of photographers. It probably wasn't why he would have wanted to get his name in print, but then again, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

"Oh yeah, that." Alex smiled without looking remorseful in the slightest. "I was late for practice, and those guys…" He tailed off. "They’re like rats, you know? They'll do anything for a photo or a story, or better yet – a scandal."

"Photographers?"

"Yeah, them. The press in general." Alex grimaced. "They've been making my life a misery ever since I arrived in this damn city. The whole place is soccer crazy; I can't get a moment's peace. Hell, it's even the same at training!"

My ears perked up. I had the makings of half a dozen different stories here –
Alex Rodriguez admits the pressure's getting to him
, or
Rodriguez calls Barcelona ‘miserable’
. The one I wanted, though, was contained in the last few words of his rant – "It's even the same at training". For a quick half-second, I pondered how ethical it was for me to continue to allow Alex to labor under the false impression that I was a vacationer, rather than a journalist. Of course, there was only one conclusion to that question – it wasn't. But in that moment, as far as I was concerned, there was no way an inconvenient truth was going to get in the way of a good story.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"About what?" he replied. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come here and chew your ear off – I guess I'm just a bit more stressed than I thought."

"You said you were having trouble at training?" I asked, adopting a worried tone. "Is everything okay?"

He studied me for a second, as though trying to work out what my motives were. Apparently I passed the test, but somehow that didn't make me feel good – in fact, quite the opposite – I felt dirty, unclean. I banished the notion from my mind. After all, I reasoned, how the hell was I going to make a good reporter if I wasn't prepared to at least bend the rules?

"Nothing really," he sighed. "Just a bit of a," he paused, "what's the word – conflict, yeah – conflict, with one of my teammates. Nothing major, but I think he must be turning the rest of the squad against me because the boys haven't been passing me the ball much in training. That's why I was out here, actually. I figure that if I'm not going to be training much with the team, then I can at least be fitter than everyone else, so I've been running the steps in the stadium."

I was shocked – this was gold dust. This kind of scoop just didn't happen!

"Who did you fall out with?" I asked slyly. "Must have been someone important if it's not going so well for you with the rest of the team…"

Alex's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Do you know much about soccer?" he asked.

"Not really, no," I lied. "I'm more of a baseball girl myself. I don't really know the rules of soccer, to be honest."

The suspicion drained out of Alex immediately. I felt kind of sick at how good a liar I was quickly becoming, but I didn't let the internal turmoil show on my face.

"Sorry," he apologized, "I guess I'm just a bit on edge – I've gone from being nobody back home to some kind of superstar here, and I haven't even kicked a ball for the club yet. Just a guy called Ramon. I'm sure we'll work it out."

Holy shit – this was big. If Alex had got on Ramon Garcia's bad side, then it would take a lot to dig himself out of this hole. Ramon was Barcelona's captain, one of their most famous players, and a legend to the entire city. If I went public with this, they'd whistle Alex off the pitch. He wouldn't just have to win his captain over, he'd have to win over the entire city.

"Well, I hope you work it out," I said. "Listen, it's getting late – I should probably go."

"Oh," he said genially, "I'm sure it'll be fine. It was nice to meet you—" He paused. "What did you say your name was?"

"I didn't." I smiled. "It's Diana."