Smith Billy Crawford's Double Play

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-998408-48-1
Verlag: James Street North Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

Everything is legal - if you can get away with it.

Billy Crawford is a hero. The star of the Rose City Rounders, the baseball player has been thrilling fans of the city for years. But Billy's not as young as he used to be and his tendency to play hard is catching up with him. A string of losses for the Rounders puts his position at risk as the team's owner, local developer Carroll Miller, doesn't like being associated with anything that loses. Miller's thinking of making changes, and not just at the team. When he decides to enter politics Billy suddenly finds himself facing an offer he can't refuse.

In this wise-cracking, fast-paced novel, Brad Smith lampoons today's scandal-ridden politics and politicians. But among the laughter, Smith also shows us there can be hope, and even integrity, where we least expect it.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Brad

Leseproben

One

The moon is nearly full as the boy and girl drive along Riverside Drive. It’s late, nearing two in the morning, and they are heading for an after-prom party at somebody’s place on the river. They’re in the boy’s father’s car, a newer model Nissan SUV. The boy had wanted to drive his own vehicle, but the girl had nixed the idea, saying she didn’t spend three hundred dollars on a dress and another hundred on hair and makeup to show up in a GMC four-wheel drive pickup with blatting mufflers and a decal of a half-naked cowgirl in the rear window.

The boy had reluctantly agreed. He’d been reluctantly agreeing to a lot of stuff since he’d (reluctantly) agreed to escort the girl to the prom. He hadn’t wanted to borrow his father’s Nissan and he hadn’t wanted to rent the too-tight-in-the-crotch tuxedo he is now wearing. He’d gone along with the whole miserable enterprise in the hope that the girl would offer a little payback after the dance and agree to go “parking” in the woods by Turtle Creek.

“If you think I spent the last two days getting ready for tonight just to go out to dirty old Turtle Creek, you’d better think again. This dress cost three hundred dollars.”

The boy is well aware of the cost of the dress. The cost of the dress has been mentioned roughly twenty times since the evening began. Even the cashier at the convenience store where they had stopped for Tic Tacs earlier had heard about the cost of the dress.

“Besides, everybody’s going to Melissa’s,” the girl is saying now. “Everybody’s going swimming. Her parents are away in Europe or one of those countries. I bought a brand-new bikini from Couture’s. It cost seventy-eight dollars plus tax.”

“You could model your new bathing suit for me in Turtle Creek,” the boy suggests.

“If you think I paid seventy-eight dollars to swim in a –”

The boy doesn’t hear the rest of the prattle. They are approaching a curve in the narrow road, and as the headlights sweep through the turn, he sees a car in the ditch on the outer arc of the curve.

The car is on its roof.

“Holy shit,” the boy says. He hits the high beams and coasts to a stop thirty feet short of the wreck. The lights from the overturned car shine across the field to the south, illuminating an expanse of ripening wheat. “You think somebody’s still in there?”

He gets out and slowly approaches the car, extremely nervous of what he might find. It’s a red Camaro, fairly new. The odour of spilled gasoline and oil hangs in the air. When the boy gets close, he can feel the heat from the engine. The wreck obviously happened very recently. Ducking down, he sees a man sprawled in the driver’s seat. The airbag has inflated and then deflated, and now half-covers the man. The girl comes up behind him and has a look.

“Oh my God! Is he dead? We need to call 911.”

She turns and hurries back to the Nissan for her phone, but the ground is rough and she isn’t used to walking in high heels. She catches her foot on a root and falls, dirtying the front of her three-hundred-dollar gown.

“Sonofabitch!”

When she returns, the boy is kneeling in the grass, his head cocked toward the driver’s window of the Camaro. The glass is lowered maybe two inches. The girl crouches beside him as she punches in the number. She’s not pleased about her tumble in the dirt.

“Well, where the fuck are we?” she asks. “They’ll want to know where we are.”

“Shh!” the boy says. “Listen.”

“What?”

“He’s snoring.” The boy turns and smiles at the girl. “Fucking guy is sound asleep in there.”

The girl hesitates, phone in hand. “Do I still call 911?”

“To report a guy snoring?” The boy hammers on the window. “Hey, buddy, wake up in there!”

After a bit, the pounding wakes Billy Crawford from his nap inside the Camaro. It takes several moments for him to realize he’s still in his car and another moment or two to figure out that the car is on its roof. Twisting his head toward the sound of the rapping on the window, he sees in the bright moonlight a youth dressed in a tuxedo, looking in at him.

“The goddamn door locks won’t work,” he yells through the gap in the window.

“I know!” the kid replies. “I been trying them.”

Billy rubs his head and finds a knot above his right eye. No blood, just a lump the size of a walnut. “You got a crowbar?” he asks the kid.

The boy grins. He’s relieved that the man is alive. “I left my crowbar in my other suit.”

Fucking wiseass, Billy thinks. He sees that there’s a girl behind the boy, dressed in a fancy pink dress. She’s looking at Billy as if he has landed in the ditch from outer space. Billy looks back at the boy.

“You must have a tire iron in your trunk,” he says. He has a better look. “Hey – you wearing a tuxedo?”

“I am.”

“What are you, a maître d’?”

“Nope,” the boy says. “You want me to call the cops?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Billy tells him. “I been drinking a bit.”

“We have to call the police!” the girl hisses.

The boy waves her off. He reaches in through the gap in the window and pulls on the glass, to no avail. He sees there’s a guitar on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

“Look out of the way,” Billy says. He manoeuvres himself around, so his back is to the passenger door. “I’m going to try to push the window out with my boot.”

“Watch out for your guitar,” the boy tells him. “What are you anyway, a musician?”

“Hell no,” Billy says. “I’m a ballplayer.”

The ball comes off the tee low and screaming, hit thin off the titanium club face. It starts out dead straight and then the spin takes over, the face of the driver having cut across the ball, causing it to careen crazily to the right as it rises into the wind. The classic slice, bane of many a duffer. Carroll Miller stands on the tee box and watches as the ball heads for the line of trees – and the area marked out of bounds – down the right side of the fairway. When it finally lands, the ball takes one huge bounce, projecting it even farther to the right, then disappears into the long grass.

“Should be all right,” Carroll says to the others, his eyes fixed on the spot where the ball vanished.

None of the three offer any comment on this. Not one of them is convinced that the ball didn’t bounce out of bounds, yet none is willing to suggest as much. They’ve played enough golf with Carroll Miller to know better.

Carroll is the alpha male in the group, or at least he regards himself as such. In fact, he regards himself as the big dog of any group. He takes his golf game seriously. Today’s foursome is his regular game; they usually play three or four times a week, except for the frequent times when he is out of town. Carroll’s partner in the matches is always Dale Gosling, who runs CM Enterprises, the development company that has built over a thousand new residences in Rose City over the past two decades. Dale is a lousy golfer, maybe even a terrible one, which means that the other two players in the foursome – Tony Vortman and Stan Chandler – are required to give Dale strokes, to offset his handicap and make the matches, on paper at least, more even-handed.

Carroll Miller needs no such crutch. He considers himself a scratch golfer and is the best player of the group by a large margin. It’s Carroll’s nature that he won’t play with anyone better than himself. He’d started playing the game with his grandfather when he was five years old and had taken lessons off and on in the fifty-odd years since then. He drives the ball far off the tee, the odd banana slice notwithstanding, hits his long and short irons extremely well and possesses a fair touch around the greens. However, he is a barely average putter on his best day, a fact that aggravates him to no end and one that has led him to buy and discard dozens of putters over the decades, seeking one that would somehow overcome his failings. As with many a golfer, he is not willing to accept that the problem lies not in the club but in the hands of the man holding it. Most of the “failed” putters end up in a garbage can, or in a pond alongside a green, quite often with the shaft bent into a horseshoe. That concern aside, his other strengths in the game mean that he is a tough player to beat out on the course.

The fact that he cheats regularly makes beating him even tougher.

The game of choice for the foursome is Nassau, a two-man team game also known as high/low. A lone low score on a hole secures a point while a lone high number relinquishes one. So, if a player and his partner both make par and their opponents make bogey, the first team gets two points. Four pars – or bogeys or others – is a push, no points awarded. They play for twenty dollars a man for every nine holes. There are also “presses.” A press can be called at any time during the match, effectively starting a brand-new twenty-dollar game, while the previous game is ongoing. By the end of a round, there are often six or seven or eight wagers at once. Golfing with Carroll Miller can be an expensive proposition.

The cheating, of course, makes it even more expensive.

Dale and Stan are up next, and both manage to hit the fairway, although neither ball travels very far. Tony steps up and hits a low hook off the tee, the ball heading for a deep elongated pond, down the left...