Parker Field

OTHER BOOKS BY HOWARD OWEN

Littlejohn

Fat Lightning

Answers to Lucky

The Measured Man

Harry and Ruth

The Rail

Turn Signal

Rock of Ages

The Reckoning

Oregon Hill

The Philadelphia Quarry

A WILLIE BLACK MYSTERY

PARKER

FIELD

HOWARD OWEN

Copyright © 2014 by Howard Owen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

For information, address:

The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Owen, Howard—

Parker Field : a Willie Black mystery / Howard Owen.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-57962-361-6
eISBN 978-1-57962-394-4

1. Sportswriters—Fiction. 2. Baseball players—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Sports stories. I. Title.

PS3565.W552P37 2014
813'.54—dc23

2014007556

Printed in the United States of America

As always, to Karen

Chapter One    

T
HURSDAY
, A
PRIL
5

T
here was only one shot. Everybody was in agreement on that.

Nobody knows why he was in the goddamn park. Early April felt more like the middle of March. The wind stung like an inside pitch on an aluminum bat. Even the usual suspects wearing somebody else’s clothes were hanging out around the homeless shelters or hunkered down where the sun could reach them but the wind couldn’t. A week before, it had been eighty degrees. A balloon stuck in a tree and an abandoned Frisbee attested to Richmond’s faithless spring weather.

I wasn’t there. Mal Wheelwright had called a staff meeting at two, and attendance was not voluntary. These days, staff meetings are never called to announce we’re getting raises and adding to staff. No refreshments are served. Still, you don’t want to be counted “absent” and find your ID card doesn’t work the next day.

This one was relatively painless. We’re reducing the business section to three days a week to save newsprint. No jobs lost this time, Wheelie assured us, but the business news reporters and editors don’t look so sure. Might be a good time to take that PR job, guys.

So I was in the newsroom when Sally Velez got the word. The police radio is pretty worthless these days. We get most of our tips from Twitter or our “friends” on Facebook, which is where this one came from. Sally was seated at her desk, half listening to Wheelie drone on about doing more with less while she scoured the electronic waterfront.

“Shit,” I heard her say. I walked over and saw the tip:
Shots at monroe park. man down. what’s up.

“Better check it out,” she said.

Chip Grooms from photo and I were more than happy to skip the rest of the meeting, now that we knew we weren’t losing our jobs, taking pay cuts or getting more “furlough” days.

Since I had walked to the paper, we took Chip’s car. We parked next to the Prestwould, where I live, and crossed the street. Ninety percent of the ether tips we get lead nowhere, but this looked like the one in ten that beat the odds. An ambulance and six squad cars were in and around what was obviously a crime scene, having driven over the grass’s first pitiful efforts to paint the park green again.

I spied my favorite doughnut-eating flatfoot and walked up, hoping to get inside the yellow tape.

“Damn, Gillespie,” I said. “I didn’t know they made pants that big.”

“Fuck you, Black,” he said by way of greeting.

Then I saw the body.

I ran past Gillespie before he could catch me, and two other cops had their hands on each of my arms, trying to haul me away before I convinced them that the man on the ground was a friend of mine.

They were putting Les onto the stretcher. At first, I thought he was gone. But then I called his name, and he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Willie,” he said. “What the fuck?”

Chapter Two    

F
RIDAY

F
or once, I don’t need the alarm. I’ve been up since six, an hour I rarely see in the
A.M
.

Yesterday was wall-to-bleeping-wall.

I rode in the ambulance, almost getting arrested before the EMTs relented. I reached Peggy on the cell phone on the way to the hospital and told her, as gently as I could, that Les had been shot, but that he was OK, he was going to be fine—something that I wasn’t in the least sure of. As I looked down at Les, lying there, with two guys trying to keep him from bleeding out, his eyes blinking at me but not definitely registering what was going on, I figured lying was my best strategy.

“What hospital?” Peggy yelled three times before I could cut through the hysteria and tell her.

“VCU. The big one.”

She hung up in the middle of my baseless assurances. Neither my mother nor Awesome Dude, the guest who never left, has a car. They and Les usually depend on feet or buses or the occasional taxi—or, if all else fails, me and my hard-ridden Honda—to get them where they need or want to go. I wondered how she was going to get to the hospital, but I was focused on Les.

They separated him from me for a few minutes after they wheeled him in. Even in Richmond, shooting victims get the kind of prompt attention that the medical profession rarely affords us, and a small army of competent people whisked Les away to try and save his life.

By the time they let me come back, they had him sedated, which meant Les was more addled than usual. He’s been slipping into some kind of dementia for the last three years at least, and the combination of being shot in the shoulder by what seems to have been a high-powered rifle, finding himself surrounded by a horde of strangers and being heavily medicated was making him a little wild.

By the time I got to his bedside, he was trying to rip the damn tubes out and get vertical.

I said his name four or five times before he finally looked at me, blinked twice and said my name, repeating the same question he’d asked me in Monroe Park.

I didn’t know any other way to say it.

“Somebody shot you.”

“Who?”

I had to tell him I didn’t know. No one saw anybody anywhere around him before he reportedly collapsed on the park bench like, well, like a man who had been shot. A student fifty yards away thought Les had had some kind of seizure, then called 911 when she got close enough to see the blood.

“You’re going to be OK, though,” I told him, continuing my policy of constructive lying. I persuaded the nurses not to strap him down, assuring them this would only make his confusion and terror worse.

They rolled him up to his private room as I followed. I was having flashbacks to the scary time last year when Andi, my daughter, spent several days up here after getting T-boned by a careless driver. There are few places I’d less rather be than a hospital.

A doctor came in and asked me if I was a relative. I told him yes, which isn’t much of a lie. Les Hacker has been more of a husband to Peggy than her three actual, legal husbands were, and saying he’s been more of a father than my asshole stepdads is damning him with very faint praise.

I walked out in the hallway. Just because Les was addled and had lost a couple of quarts of blood didn’t mean he was deaf.

I asked the question everyone asks when someone they love is hanging by a thread. “Is he going to be all right?” really means, “Please, please, save him.”

The doctor didn’t jump right in with a hearty affirmative.

“He needs some time to recuperate. He’s had a terrible shock to his system. We’ll know more in a couple of days.”

I explained to him, as quickly as I could, that Les sometimes isn’t hitting on all cylinders upstairs.

“Has he been seen by a specialist?”

No, I told him, we’ve been meaning to, but …

“Well,” he said, looking a little impatient, “we’ll need to look into that, too. We have some medications we can give him.”

I figured the meds were going to be more to make Les behave than to really help him, but I wasn’t sure giving the good doctor medical advice was going to be in Les’s best interests.