The Franchise (55 page)

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

It was the question she had feared. She liked Ginny Hendrix and enjoyed her company, but she hadn’t seen Ginny since Bobby’s death. It was fact, but until Wendy saw Ginny and looked into her face, the horror of death was not yet reality.

“I don’t want to go,” Wendy replied. “I don’t want
you
to go to the Union meeting especially. Let someone else—Screaming Danny Lewis, Margene or Ox Wood—be the player rep.”

“If you plan to take the Franchise away from A.D. and Suzy and your father, you’re going to have to deal with the Union and Terry Dudley.”

Wendy huddled on the rug. The fire was flaming and sparking. “A.D. bought Speedo off with a new contract,” Wendy said. “Why take the job just because Speedo Smith sold out?”

“Speedo deserves the money, the mink coat, the red convertible and Flawless Jade just for what he does on the field every Sunday from August to January. He shouldn’t have to be player rep.” Taylor shrugged. “Besides, there is power there somewhere, so I should see what it’s all about.” Taylor was tense and talking hard—not yelling, yet straining. He could taste blood again. “We have to decide who the game really belongs to. Rich promoters—men like your father and Dick Conly? Second-rate hustlers and swindlers like A.D. and Suzy?”

“I plan on it belonging to me,” Wendy glared at Taylor. “For our son. I want it to give to him. He’s your child too. Don’t you want him to have it?”

Taylor shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t want him to have it even if it were ours to give. Which it isn’t. It belongs to all the players who ever played anywhere who broke up, crashed and burned or were just whittled down to nothing, trying to make it and never did.” Taylor relaxed. Talking was a cure for tension, confusion and fear. “It belongs to those players who made it and never recovered from the success and sacrifice. The families that were blown apart by fame or sucked under by fear. The old players, wrinkled old beauty queens. The drunks, the maladjusted, the beaten, the murderous. Everyone who left their humanity in the game.” Taylor watched Wendy growing increasingly irritated with him. “Every player dies a little in every game. Win or lose ...”

“The
players
are going to own the game?” Wendy’s question was derisive. “They are all such
good
businessmen.”

“Some are stupid and greedy, but many suffer from the fatal flaw of
trying
to be honest and fair without learning how. It makes them the perfect victims.” Taylor paused. “The system has finally created the perfect player, right down to the brass ring in his nose. The problem is anyone, even Suzy and A.D., can grab that brass nose ring.”

Wendy looked back to the fire.

Taylor watched her. “I want to see how Dudley and the Union use the players. Terry could drop a loop through the brass nose ring just like anybody else,” Taylor said. “If he does, then we have more problems. If he doesn’t, we got more help. And we are going to have to know what we’ve got and what we’re going up against. This franchise is worth billions; we better know how to protect it or at least how to lose it and stay alive.

“Only players really know what happens out there,” Taylor continued. “It’s the guys you play with and the money you leave with. I want to see what kind of guys I’m playing against and what size nose rings they wear. And why twenty-two exquisitely skilled men between the white lines can’t apply those skills outside the lines.”

“Maybe they don’t want to.” Wendy faced the fire and spoke through clenched teeth. “Or maybe they know better.”

“Maybe. But you’re not a player,” Taylor replied softly. “You want to be an owner. I am a player and I don’t want my son to be a player or owner. I want him to have different, better, choices.”

“The middle-class dream.” Wendy was openly sarcastic, shaking her head and watching the fire. “The fucking All-American dream. Well, I want a little more than that in my life.”

“That’s what Speedo said. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Taylor remained calm. “But if you want more, you have to create it; you can’t take it out of another person’s hide. If a football game is created—truly created—each Sunday, who are the creators? The players? The coaches? The guy who owns the television network? When rich people want something, they peel some bills off their roll. When an athlete wants more, he has to peel it off his hide—a very expensive price. Does he deserve a reward for that sacrifice? That price? Or is the pain its own reward?” Taylor watched Wendy glare into the fire. “If the game is played for the audience and not the player, it is spectacle. And the ultimate spectacle is death.”

“Please spare me the moralizing on the ultimate meaning of professional football,” Wendy said. “The ultimate meaning to my old man was the tax shelter.”

Taylor walked back to the kitchen and looked out at the bunkhouse. The light was on inside. He couldn’t hear the typewriter. The rain was still heavy. He walked back to the doorway.

“If we start the Franchise takeover, never look back or question an order. Once the fight starts, if it hasn’t already, we do it by the numbers and the book—my book and my numbers. We can’t quit. Now, I’m going to Houston to the Union meeting and to see Ginny and her kids,” Taylor announced with finality. “I wish you would come with me.”

Wendy slowly shook her head.

Taylor walked to the kitchen. He gazed at the bunkhouse.
Women
, he thought,
they want everything, all the time, no matter what the cost. Fight her daddy, fight the League, the Mob, the Cobiancos. We’ll take ’em all. Then she breaks a fingernail and the whole thing is off.
“Quit?” Taylor thought aloud. “It’ll be a cold ...” He stopped, his eyes drawn to movement in the lighted bunkhouse.

T
OMMY
M
C
N
AMARA WAS
dead. His face was battered and bloody, featureless, the eyes, nose and mouth caved in; white bone splinters stuck through the chopped flesh. His fingers, cut off, lay in neat rows of five on each side of the typewriter. His Santa Fe Opera T-shirt knotted around his neck, he hung from an open beam, his bare chest and stomach covered with cigarette burns and razor cuts. His ears were cut off and a large strip of adhesive tape covered his mouth.

The bunkhouse was torn apart. His killer had searched for something, probably notes and tape recordings.

Taylor stood outside in the driving cold rain, looking through the screen door at the battered man dangle and twist, fixing his eyes on the bony naked feet and dangling toes, just inches off the floor, an eternity away.

“Taylor?” Wendy called from the kitchen. “Taylor? Is that you out there? What are you doing?”

Taylor stared at the ravaged meat hanging from the beam, a pop T-shirt for a noose.

A Santa Fe Opera T-shirt.

“Taylor?” Wendy called again from the ranch house kitchen. “What is it?”

“Call Bob.” Taylor opened the bunkhouse door. “Tell him to get here quick. We just lost one of the guys on our team.”

“Oh, God. No.” Wendy said it softly, like God was there in the room with her and could be prevailed upon to change things. The radio was on the kitchen table and she called Bob Travers to the bunkhouse, then wrapped herself in her blue wool poncho and watched it all from the kitchen.

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster
. The words were typed on the paper Taylor found in Tommy McNamara’s Royal 440.

Bob was at the bunkhouse in two minutes. Toby went to the kitchen to stay with Wendy.

“It looks like they took a long time killing him,” Bob said as they cut Tommy McNamara down. “They must have wanted some information, or they just enjoy their work.”

“Why do you say
they?
”

“I don’t imagine this young fella cooperated any.” Bob studied the cut, burned and battered flesh. “And when you start doing this sort of shit, a fella will get plenty hard to handle. See.” Bob pointed to large half-moon-shaped contusions on both shoulders. “Somebody was holding him here. Pretty big fella by the size of those bruises ... fingers made them. He was keeping your friend still while his partner was working on him. It looks like he squeezed the shoulders out of the sockets.” Bob’s flat voice rose slightly. He was surprised by the dislocations.

“You seen stuff like this before?” Taylor was horrified, shocked, numb, calm.

“On the border and in Mexico and South America,” Bob nodded. “And more and more frequently around here.”

Taylor leaned over to peel the white tape off Tommy’s mouth.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Bob said. “As it is they’re gonna give us hell about cutting him down. And all you’re going to find in there are his ears.” Bob pointed to the ragged bloody stubble hacked off at the skin line. “Is this the guy that federal marshal had the subpoena for the other day?”

Taylor nodded. “They were going to immunize him, take him to the grand jury and make him name his source. They wanted his notes and tapes.”

“Deep Threat?” Bob asked.

Taylor turned with surprise.

“I read the papers, just like real people.” Bob began to run his eyes slowly around the bunkhouse. “So the feds put him between a rock and hard place. I wonder what got him? The rock? Or the hard place?” Bob continued to look over the room. “I wonder if they found what they were looking for. Or if the poor son of a bitch even had it.”

Suddenly the wind changed, swirling through the bunkhouse and blowing the death and decay full into Taylor’s face. The smell of a man rotting away. Taylor vomited, emptying his stomach onto the wooden bunkhouse floor. He retched and coughed and spat. Bright red blood mixed in with the foaming brown Carta Blanca. Bob brought him a wet towel from the bunkhouse bathroom.

“Chop a man up like that”—Bob looked at the body—“he’ll turn bad real quick. You’re spitting up blood.”

Taylor nodded and wiped his face. He was soaked in sweat.

“When it’s someone you know, that smell is too familiar.” Bob picked up a blanket from one of the other four beds and covered Tommy McNamara. “I have worked for Wendy since she started junior high school,” Bob said, looking at the abstract dead form beneath the blanket. “But ever since her father bought that damn football franchise, my work has gotten harder and dirtier every day.” He looked at Taylor. “What the hell is the matter with people in your business?”

“They get to keep changing the rules. So they have no respect for them. There’s no rule book. For them, making the rules is the game.” Taylor looked at McNamara’s dead shape covered by a brown wool blanket. “How long you think he’s been dead?”

“Not very,” Bob said.

“Then, with the low-water crossing flooded ...” Taylor tried to organize his thoughts.

“They may still be around.” Bob reached into his coat and came out with the small transistor walkie-talkie. “Toby? Toby?” Bob spoke into the radio.

“Yeah, Bob?” The voice crackled back.

“It’s Red, Toby, Bright Red.”

Bob reached into his pocket and pulled out a white envelope. Inside was a radio crystal, a different frequency. Bob inserted the new crystal and waited on Toby, who was doing the same.

“If these guys are professionals,” Bob said to Taylor, “they know about us and probably monitor our usual radio frequency. So we carry different crystals randomly. If they were scanning us, they just lost us.” Bob put the radio back to his lips. “Kill the lights, Toby, and zip up to the house. I’ll call on the radio before we approach. Shoot anybody else and apologize later. We are going for booger bears.”

Bob turned out the bunkhouse lights.

“Lie down on the floor and close your eyes for a couple minutes,” Bob ordered. “Let your eyes get used to the dark. I’m going to the car.”

The door opened and closed quietly and Taylor kept his eyes shut until Bob returned, a binocular case around his neck. In one hand he held a metal case. Inside was his AR-15 with a Starlight Night vision scope cushioned against the foam rubber lining.

Taylor opened his eyes and sat up. He could see better; his eyes were adjusting. Bob handed him a long-barreled Colt Python revolver. “Let’s hope they don’t get close enough that we need it.” Bob began checking over his assault rifle. Five fully loaded thirty-shot clips were in a covered pouch that hooked to his belt. A clip was already inserted in the gun. A second magazine was taped upside down to the first, so Bob had sixty rounds quickly available. Holding the scope up to his eye, he wrapped the leather sling around his arm for stability, fingers gripping the stock, the gun held steady. The AR-15 shot a fifty-five-grain slug at 3,300 feet per second, and when it hit, the slug tumbled like a tiny buzz saw, ripping and tearing awful wounds. Bob brought two camouflage rain ponchos and tossed one to Taylor, then filled the pockets with loose .357 ammunition—hollow-point, soft-nose lead, steel-jacketed Magnum cartridges. He showed Taylor how to release the chamber, swing it out and eject the spent brass to load fresh ones. One-hundred-and-twenty-five-grain lead slugs with a flat nose and a hollow point at 1,350 feet per second.

“Use both hands and point like it was your finger,” Bob explained. “The muzzle blast kicks up and to the right and it is sighted for dead-on at twenty-five feet. Now, let’s not shoot each other.”

Taylor looked the massive pistol over and felt the weight of the cartridges in his pocket.

“I checked around and up behind the oak motte with the infrared glasses.” Bob pointed at the binoculars hanging from his neck. “Didn’t see anything.”

“Earlier tonight,” Taylor recalled, “I thought I saw someone off to the east of the house near that old fence line that follows the road.” He shrugged. “But I don’t know....”

“We got to start somewhere. How’s your vision?”

“I can see you”—Taylor squinted—“not much farther.”

“It’ll be worse in the rain. I better handle all the gear and you stay close to me. I look far, you watch up close.” Bob pointed at the pistol. “If you think it’s time to shoot, don’t think,
shoot.
”

“That must be them,” Bob said.