The Prophet (3 page)

They ran the naked bootleg for the last twenty minutes of practice.

Kent didn’t have any intention of beating Spencer Heights on Friday night with this play, but he did intend to beat Spencer Heights, and this reminder of the things that his boys
couldn’t
do well was important. This unbeaten team needed to leave the practice field with a sense of fallibility. The attitude you needed
to win football games was a difficult balance. Confidence was crucial; overconfidence killed. Success lived on the blade’s edge between.

Up in the bleachers, thirty people were watching. It was cold and windy, but there they sat anyhow. Talents like Mears and Ritter and McCoy were on their way out of the program, and their like might not pass through Chambers again. This much Kent understood better than anyone. He’d been the head coach for thirteen seasons now and had reached the state championship game twice. He had never had a team like this.

Watching them now, he wanted the lights on and the ball in the air. Wanted game day. That was unusual. Like most coaches, he was always wishing for one more practice day. You were never prepared enough. This week, though, this season, this team? He found himself wanting to be under the game lights. Wanted it over, so he could begin wishing that it had never ended. Because if he couldn’t close out that elusive state championship with
this
kind of talent?

It’s a game played among boys,
he reminded himself while Matt Byers, his defensive coordinator, walked into the middle of the field to make a point about leverage,
and the reason you’re here is to use this game to help these boys. You’re not here to put a trophy in that case. Never were, never will be. That trophy’s absence doesn’t say a thing about your measure as a man, and its presence wouldn’t, either.

This season, though? This season that was difficult to remember.

He let Byers say his piece and then he called them over, everyone circling around him, forty-seven players and six coaches, and told them they were done.

“Keep your heads down,” he said, the same thing he said to end every practice and locker room talk until the season was finished. Then he’d tell them to lift their heads up and make sure they held them high. Only then.

The practice officially over, Kent walked to midfield and most of the team followed. He offered no instruction for them to do so, and this was critical—the school board had required this of him after a complaint from a parent four years earlier. Praying with a public school team, he’d been told, was a violation of the separation of church and state. He couldn’t require it of his players. And so he did not. He prayed to end every practice, but participation was voluntary.

The players took a knee and Kent offered a short prayer. Football was not mentioned. Never was, never would be, never should be. The closest he came was when he prayed for their health, though he caught himself drifting too close to the game sometimes this season even as the words were leaving his lips. A swift, sharp desire to make it specific:
Not Damon’s knee, Lord, not his knee. God, please watch over Lorell’s throwing shoulder…
Silly things, desires for which he would chastise himself privately, but still they arose.

Because this season…

“Amen,” he said, and they echoed, and then they were on their feet and headed for the locker room at a run—no player walked onto or off of the field, ever. Kent watched while Colin Mears made a beeline to where his girlfriend, Rachel Bond, waited at the fence. One kiss, quick and amusingly chaste for hormonal teenagers, and then he rejoined the others. It was a deviation from the team-first routine that Kent ordinarily wouldn’t have allowed, but you needed to understand your players as something beyond cogs in the gridiron machine. That girl had been through a great deal, and Colin was a light in the darkness for her. He was what Kent wanted them to be so badly: not only about more than football but also about more than the self.

Kent let the assistants follow the team to the locker room while he headed directly to the parking lot. This wasn’t standard, but today he had places to be. A prison waited.

Standing behind the end zone, hands tucked in his pockets, was Dan Grissom, a local minister. Together, they would make the drive down to Mansfield, to one of the state’s larger prisons, and there Kent would speak to a group of inmates. There would be some talk of football; there would be more talk of family. Truth be told, Kent had winced a little when he saw Grissom arrive, the reminder of his required task. He wanted to put it off until after the season, after playoffs. But responsibilities were responsibilities. You weren’t allowed days off.

“They’re looking good!” Dan said, gushing with his usual enthusiasm, and Kent smiled a little, because Dan didn’t know the first thing about football. He knew plenty about encouragement, though.

“They should be,” Kent told him. “It’s that time of year.”

“I can’t believe you have a crowd in the stands just for a practice.”

Kent turned and glanced into the bleachers, saw the faces, some familiar, some not. The watchers grew as the season went on, as the wins stacked up and the losses stayed at bay. Definitely more strangers on hand. Curious about what the Cardinals had. What they could do.

“It’s a big deal in this town,” he admitted.

“Alice and I would like to have you and Beth and the kids over for dinner,” Dan said. “To celebrate the season.”

“Let’s wait until the season’s done.”

“I mean to celebrate how well it’s gone so far,” Dan said, and Kent wasn’t sure if he imagined the uneasiness, the sense that Dan didn’t expect it to close out as well as it had begun.

“I appreciate it. But dinner right now, it’s tough. With practices, you know.”

“We can eat late. Be fun to get the kids together. Sarah’s the same age as Lisa, you know. I think they’d get along well.”

“After practices, there’s film,” Kent said. And then, after
catching a glance between disappointment and reproach from the minister, he said, “I’m sorry, Dan. But this time of year I get a little… edgy. I’m not much of a dinner companion. So as soon as we’re done, okay?”

“Sure thing,” Dan said. “Win, lose, or draw, we’re doing that dinner at season’s end.”

But there are no draws, Dan,
Kent thought.
Not in the playoffs. It’s win or lose.

They were in the parking lot when they passed Rachel Bond, who caught Kent’s eye and smiled, lifting a hand. He nodded and tipped two fingers off the bill of his cap. She was a prize. A convict for a father and an alcoholic for a mother and she’d risen above it all. It was unbelievable how much some of these children had to bear, so young.

But life? It didn’t card you before it sold you some pain. Kent had been given the most personal of examples in that lesson. It was why he devoted so much of himself to a game. Sometimes a game was what you needed—mind, body, and soul. That much he’d known for years.

T
HERE WAS A TIME
when Chambers County had produced more steel by itself than forty-six states. It had been home to mills for five major companies that exported worldwide, and the steel industry had employed more than half of the county’s workforce.

That time was a whispered recollection now.

The steel industry was gone, and a decade since the last plant closed and two decades since the writing on the wall had been clear, nothing had been found to replace it. Chambers had boasted one of the highest unemployment rates in the state for years, and most of those who could leave did. The population had dropped by twenty-five percent since 1950, one of the few places in an always-growing country that had experienced such a thing. A manufacturing town that found itself without anything to manufacture.

While the census reported a declining population, the county jail reported a rising one. It had been remodeled and expanded twice. The core of the town’s troubles—economic woes and absence of jobs—also provided the core of Adam’s business.
Only two things were flourishing in Chambers of late: high school football and bail bonds.

Because he was busy, he had to determine focus areas. Nature of the beast, simple as that. A skip with a $10,000 bond was a priority. A girl with a hundred bucks and a missing father was not. April Harper got one call, and one call only, from Adam on the morning after her visit. She didn’t answer her cell phone, so he left a message informing her that there was only one Ruzich in town who might own a rental property. Her first name was Eleanor, and she owned two homes: one that was assessed at three hundred thousand, pricey for Chambers, and another well outside of town, a place on a small private lake that looked like a seasonal property. If she was renting out a place with a leaking roof and a failing furnace, he told her, it was probably 7330 Shadow Wood Lane, the lake cottage.

He told her to call with questions and then hesitated for just a moment, tempted to remind her again that if her ex-con father wanted communication to be a one-way street, she might be well advised to agree. Then he remembered that the hundred dollars in his pocket had been paid for an address, not advice, and he disconnected the call. He hadn’t allowed himself to look up Jason Harper’s criminal record, because he knew what he’d think if he did, knew what he’d be tempted to tell his client:
Your father is toxic, and you need to stay the hell away from him.
Unlike his brother, he wasn’t in the pro bono therapy business.

The average person—hell, the average client—viewed Adam as part of the criminal defense system. You needed an attorney to beat your charges, but you needed a bondsman to pop the locks on that cell while the attorneys played their games. In that part of the role, and only in that part, did Adam live up to the standard perception: he helped secure temporary release.

Emphasis on temporary. Adam did not view himself as any part of the criminal defense side of the spectrum. He viewed
himself as a free-world jailer. Convictions might not yet have been made in the cases, but charges had been. After the good felons of Chambers County scraped together enough money to secure a surety bond, they walked back into the free world, entering a process of trial delays and plea bargains designed to keep them out. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t. But during that process? During that process, they belonged to Adam. They weren’t free, they were his. In nineteen years, more than three hundred of his clients had jumped bail. He’d found all but four. It wasn’t a bad winning percentage. Those four, though? There were days he’d catch himself grinding his teeth over them.

The entire bail process was uniquely American. There were only two countries in the world that allowed a private businessman to pay to secure a prisoner’s release—America and the Philippines. Criticism of the idea lay in the fact that defendants paid a nonrefundable sum to get out of jail, presenting an unfair burden on the innocent. Adam wasn’t interested, and never had been, in the moral merits of his profession. What he was interested in was the promise made with every bond he posted: he’d see that his wards faced their day in court. It was a small role, maybe, and hardly glamorous, but it counted. He knew just how much it counted.

Any curiosity he had over April Harper faded as the week progressed. On Thursday, which was a busy day on the Chambers County criminal court dockets, two of his own failed to show up for their hearings. One was facing his third round of charges for drunk driving. The second had a more serious charge, prison time likely, for selling OxyContin and Vicodin. Many people couldn’t fathom the idea of simply failing to appear for a court date in a criminal case. They expected that the police would come after you then, expected SWAT teams kicking in doors and detectives sitting in surveillance vans, everyone vigorous
and vigilant until the missing offender was caught. Much of the time, though, that would never happen. There were too many warrants, too many inmates, too many active cases. Police were overworked, prisons were overpopulated, and if you didn’t show up for your court date, law enforcement wasn’t necessarily going to come looking for you unless you were a high-profile offender. Enter Adam Austin, owner and operator of AA Bail Bonds.

He’d come for you.

The class of people Adam posted bond for didn’t work nine-to-fives and didn’t own alarm clocks. They didn’t go to sleep; they passed out. They didn’t fear missing a court date, because they were in no hurry to listen to their public defender explain why a plea bargain was the best option. Most of them simply paid their surety and walked out the door, and then they either showed up for court or they didn’t. When they didn’t, Adam got the call, and went hunting. Like with most forms of hunting, you had your best luck if you understood your prey and knew their territory. Adam was an excellent hunter. He’d float between bars and trailer parks and he’d intimidate when he could and open his wallet for bribes when he could not and he would work every angle until he got a lead that counted. It was a game of diligence, and Adam had diligence to spare. That had been put in him long ago, and it hadn’t faded over time.

Never would.

On Friday after April Harper’s visit, Adam learned that he had one skip missing, a painkiller-dealing gent named Jerry Norris. It was the third time Adam had held a bond for Jerry and the third time he’d gone missing. Adam wasn’t overly worried about tracking him down, but he did know it would make for a late night, because he wouldn’t be able to start until after the football game. The last place he wanted to be was at Chambers High School, but tonight was a playoff game, the first, and
he would not miss a playoff game for his brother. He had never missed one before and he would not start now. Marie wouldn’t let him. Marie might not have approved of what Adam was, but he attended to the things he knew she’d have demanded, and watching her little brother’s team take a run at the state championship was one of them. Marie wouldn’t allow Adam to miss the playoffs, no matter the circumstances. He’d tried it once, but he’d felt her ghost heavy around him, and the most frightening of ghosts is a disappointed one.