Perfect Pitch (18 page)

Fighting a heavy heart, Anna crossed the room to plant a kiss on Gramps’ temple. The old man patted her arm, but he was already gesturing for Rob to roll him toward the front of the suite.

“I want to keep an eye on Ormond tonight,” Gramps said, clearly bristling for an argument.

Anna nodded, hiding the automatic flip of her belly as she spread a red and blue blanket over the old man’s lap.
She
wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on Zachary Ormond herself. She always had—from the moment she’d first met the catcher, when she’d been a star-struck ten-year-old with scabs on her knees from learning how to slide into home plate. Then, he’d been her hero, a twenty-two-year-old switch-hitting rookie who’d gone first in the draft and was already called up from the minors because the Rockets needed his defensive arm behind the plate as much as they needed his bat.

In the intervening fifteen years, Anna had become interested in a lot more than Zach’s legendary on-base percentage. Even before she’d truly understood the challenges of marriage, she’d watched him succumb to an ill-fated union with a surgery-enhanced bimbo as fake as the silk-wrapped nails she sported on national television. As a high-school student, Anna had watched Zach’s marriage fall apart; she’d daydreamed about the then-available star taking her to Homecoming, to Prom, to all the other high-school dances she skipped. In college, Anna had majored in Sports Management, and she’d written her senior thesis on the potential economic disruption of one player’s blockbuster long-term contract, using Zach’s ten-year deal with the Rockets as her primary example.
 

And all the while, Anna had found herself wondering how it would feel to have the legendary Ormond charm directed at her—Zach’s famous chivalry, his gentlemanly goodwill.

Okay, truth be told, Anna had wondered about a lot more than
chivalry
. She’d lost herself in more than one daydream about those Gold Glove hands, about…

She shook her head. She’d known Zachary Ormond for fifteen years. He’d watched her grow from a little girl to the woman she was today, and he’d never given her the slightest hint that he thought of her as anything other than Old Man Benson’s granddaughter.

She kept her voice carefully neutral as she responded to Gramps. “With yesterday as a travel day, his knees should be in good shape.”

“But that motherf— mummy Cranston is the ump behind home plate. We’ll be lucky if he only fu— fouls up half the calls.”

Anna swallowed her smile as her grandfather scrubbed his language. The managers and coaches who worked for him often remarked that the old man had taught them compound nouns they’d never imagined. But Gramps took preternatural pride in the fact that he’d never sworn in front of his wife, not once in the sixty-two years they were married. And Marty Benson would rather be confined to a hospital bed than defile the precious ears of the orphaned granddaughter he’d adopted twenty years before.
 

As Gramps went on to castigate the opposing team’s owner, the lack of double-salt pork rinds, and—yes—the glacial temperature in the suite, the room began to fill up. Anna smiled at the Vice President of Operations and the Director of Public Relations. She distributed stacks of papers to each staff member who arrived, efficiently explaining problems that needed more detailed attention.

As a barbershop quartet sang
The Star-Spangled Banner
, everyone took a respectful break from business, but after the anthem they returned to the serious work of managing a baseball team. The suite door opened just as the Rockets’ pitcher threw his first fastball over the plate, and Anna glanced up at the disturbance with a quick frown.

Gregory Small eased into the seat next to her. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was on the phone with Cincinnati.”
 

She nodded, accepting the excuse, even though the general manager should be offering it to Gramps and not to her. Small had been her grandfather’s right-hand man for nearly a dozen years, exercising ultimate power over all new contracts and trades. The man had a computer instead of a brain, and he’d long ago replaced any semblance of a heart with a 108-stitch baseball. But he was good at his job, the best Anna had ever seen.

And she’d seen a lot.

With the exception of the four years she’d spent at University of Michigan, Anna had practically lived at Rockets Field. Her parents had been killed by a drunk driver when she was only five, and her grandmother had surrendered to a torrent of illnesses, all tied to severe depression over losing her only son. Gramps had made the best of a terrible situation, keeping Anna close every waking moment that she wasn’t at school.

At her grandfather’s side, Anna had learned the ins and outs of baseball, the highs and lows of team ownership. She’d watched silently as Small argued for multi-million-dollar contracts, and she’d learned to predict how her grandfather would invest the profits from his furniture manufacturing empire.

When Anna had first returned from college, she’d worried about the Rockets’ management, about their accepting her as a valuable member of the behind-the-scenes staff. But after three years of hard work—years when she had steadfastly refused to rely on her family name to win even a single argument—her co-workers had come to accept that Anna was the real thing. She had baseball in her blood. She was respected for her business acumen, completely separate from her position as Gramps’ heir apparent.

And now it was time for Anna to give back to her grandfather. The old man might be grumpy. He might complain about everything in sight. He might be dictatorial as he gestured from the stiff seat of his wheelchair.
 

But Anna knew that Marty Benson loved two things in this world—the Raleigh Rockets and Anna herself. And she was determined to give him confidence that his beloved team would survive—would
thrive
—even after he was gone. She was going to prove to her grandfather, no matter what it took, that she had the grit to own the Rockets and to make them succeed.

DJ Thomas rang up his third out, a great start to the game. Anna watched Zach straighten from his catcher’s crouch and walk back to the dugout. He was moving easily, without a hint of the lower-back tightness that had kept him out of the last two games.
 

Pulling her scorecard in front of her and selecting the bright green pen she always used to record Philadelphia’s moves, Anna settled back in her chair. This was a perfect night for baseball.

* * *

This was a perfect night for baseball.

Out of long habit, Zach tapped his batting helmet twice before he stepped out of the dugout. He took a couple of practice swings from the circle plastered with the Rockets’ logo, watching the Philadelphia pitcher deliver his fastball to Cody Tucker.

Damn, Tucker was a cocky son of a bitch. He stood on top of the plate, daring the pitcher to brush him back with a hundred-mile-an-hour ball. The kid had already been hit by pitches half a dozen times in the two-month-old season, but he was leading the league in home runs. And he wasn’t even legal to drink yet.

Zach took another practice swing. With Tucker in front of him in the line-up, Zach’s own stats were shaping up. He was on track for 125 RBI. Maybe that would get the goddamn press to give it a rest about the eighth year of his contract, about whether the Rockets were really getting their money’s worth.

Another practice swing. Zach could feel the tightness in his lower back, the nagging ache that never really went away. But he’d babied himself for long enough. Rockets fans came to see him play, not to watch him huddled in the dugout, spitting sunflower seeds and squinting at guys who were younger, faster, and a hell of a lot more limber. Zach had spent his entire career with Raleigh; there were grown men in town who had never known another catcher behind the plate.

Not that he could put off the inevitable much longer. Two more years, after this season. Two more years of proving he was worth every penny he’d negotiated so long ago. He wanted to make Raleigh proud. Wanted to make Old Man Benson say that Zach’s contract was the best piece of paper he’d ever signed.

Even if Zach couldn’t help being jealous of the speed and strength and downright
ability
of a kid like Cody Tucker.

Crack!

The ball flew off Tucker’s bat, shooting down the first-base line. The right-fielder took a shitty read on it, missing the rebound off the wall. Tucker flew by the bag, easily rounding toward second.

The right-fielder finally got his glove on the ball, but he made an awkward pivot back to the diamond. He bobbled the ball on the transfer, and Tucker exploited the mistake, turning toward third with a burst of fresh speed.
 

Zach moved with the ease of many years of practice, darting toward the plate to pick up the bat Tucker had flung away. The throw in from right was impossibly high; the cut-off man had to waste time leaping up to snag the ball.

Tucker barreled into third as the first-baseman recovered. The third-base coach made a split-second decision, windmilling his arm, sending Tucker toward the plate and an inside-the-park home run. The kid lowered his head and drove forward like a missile.

The ball came hurtling toward home, hitting the catcher’s waiting mitt. He was too far from the plate, too far down the line to tag up, so he planted himself squarely in front of the charging Tucker.
 

“Back off, asshole!” Zach bellowed to the other catcher. Tucker barely hitched his shoulders as he braced for the collision, even though the opposing player outweighed him by thirty pounds, and that was before the leather and steel of protective gear was taken into consideration.

The impact sounded like a side of meat dropping onto a steel table. Zach’s retinas registered the carnage before his mind was consciously aware:

The Philadelphia catcher, knocked back on his ass, sliding all the way behind home plate.

The ump, his hand already folding into a fist, his thumb extended, calling Tucker out.

The kid, jaw set, legs extended, sliding in hard.

The ankle, twisted to an impossible angle, 180 degrees from normal.

The crowd, frozen in immediate silence, still on their feet from cheering their hero home.

The kid again, screaming through clenched teeth, curled into himself, stretching for his foot, craning his neck to see something he should never see.

Zach hollered for the trainer even as he threw himself to his knees beside Tucker’s head. “Look at me,” he shouted, desperate to make contact through the kid’s wall of pain.

Tucker whined in high-pitched agony, writhing like a speared fish. The motion was the worse possible thing he could do; he was twisting his foot even more, forcing it further in directions it was never meant to move.
 

Zach swallowed hard, banishing the bile from his throat before he planted his hands on the kid’s shoulders. “Tucker! They’re coming out now.” Nothing. The kid couldn’t hear him. Zach leaned in, putting half his weight on Tucker’s chest. “Cody,” he snapped. “Stop!”

Even though it seemed like a century had passed since the collision, the ballplayer’s clock inside Zach’s head told him it had scarcely been thirty seconds. The trainer was already shouldering Zach aside, waving out another one of the team’s medics. As the medical professionals executed their quick triage, Zach shifted toward Cody’s head. His fingers were firm on the other man’s chin as he forced the kid to meet his eyes. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, power-driving certainty into his tone. “Let them do their work.”

But Zach knew the kid wasn’t going to be fine. He was out for the season, at least. Maybe forever. An ankle like that, his foot at that impossible angle…That had to mean surgery, pins, a plate…

“How bad is it?” Cody gritted, involuntary tears mixing with the red dirt of the playing field.

“They’ll take care of you,” Zach said, unwilling to tell a complete lie.

The trainers pushed him out of the way before Tucker could demand more information. The two sturdy men wedged their shoulders beneath Cody’s armpits, pulling the kid into a standing position by brute strength. As Zach watched, Cody tried to touch his toe to the ground, but he gave up as the pain bleached his face to a transparent sheet. The trainers hustled him off the field before the kid could try again.

Zach whirled on the Philly catcher, who was hovering several steps behind the plate. “You were blocking the goddamn plate!”

“I made a baseball play.”

The adrenaline buzz in Zach’s ears ratcheted up an octave. “Asshole! You didn’t give him a chance!”

“Cocksu—”

Zach didn’t wait to hear the rest of the retort. He planted both hands on the other guy’s chest, pushing hard to make sure he got his momentum past the insulating pads.
 

The other guy’s eyes flashed in surprise, the emotion quickly replaced by a shit-eating grin. His fist sailed out of mid-air, connecting squarely with Zach’s jaw.
 

Zach’s own left hook was automatic.

He barely saw the benches empty. He was only marginally aware of the men at his back, his teammates pushing against their Philadelphia counterparts. A couple of Rockets threw their own punches, but he couldn’t tell if his guys were actually escalating the fight or merely retaliating against Philly’s aggression.

Umps wasted no time wading into the scrum. Zach had enough presence of mind to edge away from the black uniforms. Nevertheless, it took Coach standing in front of him, shouting directly in his face to get him to stop shoving against the piece of shit Philadelphia catcher’s chest protector. He looked toward home plate just in time to see an ump pointing at him, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

Zach was tossed.

For the first time in his fifteen-year career, he’d started a fight on the field. Sure, he’d joined in melees before, supporting his teammates when they’d been driven too far by one opponent or another. But he’d never been the one to deliver the first punch.
 

What the hell. There were some records that were meant to be broken.