Love Bats Last (The Heart of the Game) (8 page)

“It’d take more than poor manners to make either of you look bad.” Bev chuckled as she rose to talk to a volunteer calling to her from the next table.

“You look like you could use a break,” Alex said. “I can get you tickets to the Giants game next week.”

A ballgame was the last thing she needed.

“
Giants
game?” Gage said as he forked in a mouthful of lasagna “You’re on!” He looked from Alex to Jackie. “That is, if I’m invited?” He shot Jackie a pleading look. “The Giants are in the running for the pennant, boss, but of course you wouldn’t know that.”

“You’re both invited,” Alex said.

“Boss?”

She looked back to Gage. The yearning in his face was almost boyish. What was it about sports that turned men to mush?

But Alex was right—they did need a break. Against her better instincts, she nodded.

Gage let out a whoop of delight.

“But I’m
not
eating any of that food you come back here talking about,” she said. “Hot dogs and cheese on corn chips and the like.”

“Nachos,” Gage said, still grinning. “They’re called nachos.” He shot a sheepish grin to Alex. “Never had a player invite me to a game before. It’ll be great to see you in action.”

She stopped chewing. Surely she hadn’t heard right. Michael had told her Alex was a vintner.

“The game looks pretty much the same no matter where you get the tickets,” Alex said with a light laugh. “My tickets are just closer to the field.”

He looked from Gage to her. Her confusion must’ve shown because he looked quickly back to Gage.

“Thought you knew, boss.”

Heat flamed up her neck and into her face. “You knew?”

“
Everybody
in San Francisco knows.” His brow wrinkled. “I assumed you did.” 

“Dr. Brandon!” one of their volunteers called out to her as he rushed up to the table. “I was out checking on Charley in pen six, and I saw the door to the necropsy lab was hanging open. It looks an awful mess in there, Dr. Brandon.”

“It’s usually an awful mess in there,” Gage said as he forked in an enormous bite of cheesecake.

“
Your
mess,” Jackie said as she stood, grateful for the diversion.

“Women never seem to appreciate the nuanced elegance of my style,” Gage said with a shrug. “Want me to come with you?”

“You’re doing what you do best,” she said, nodding toward his piled-high plate of food. “I’ll page you if I need help. It’s probably just the wind.”

Without looking back at Alex, she headed for the door.

“She has her good moments,” she heard Gage say behind her. “But if you blink, you’ll miss them.”

As she stepped into the cool, dark night, Jackie wondered if those moments really were all that rare.

It hadn’t been the wind.

Jackie stood at the door to the necropsy lab and blinked. Cabinets gaped open and her scalpels and saws were strewn across the floor. She opened the freezer and gasped. The top shelf was empty. The tissue samples she’d so carefully collected from the North Bay harbor seals were gone. So were the water samples.

“We should call the cops,” Gage said as he came up behind her.

“No.” She swallowed hard, but it didn’t ease the lump of tension in her throat. “An investigation will alert the Department of Agriculture. Though
we
know we’re up to snuff and good enough for the animals, the USDA inspectors might not think so.”

She’d sweet-talked her way around the regulations for the fish kitchen and had ramped up the filtration system for the pools, but they needed more time and money to address the other items on the USDA’s list and the necropsy lab was at the top of it. Just because she thought their complaints were nitpicky didn’t mean the Feds wouldn’t shut them down.

Gage walked toward the cabinet where they kept the drugs locked up. It too gaped open, and the contents were strewn across the floor. He sorted through the cabinet, then turned and scanned the vials and bottles on the floor. Shards of glass surrounded wet spots where some of the vials had shattered.

“The lock’s been forced, but it doesn’t look like they came here for the drugs,” Gage said.

She turned and shut the door to the freezer.

“North Bay samples gone?” He wasn’t asking.

“All of them.” She leaned against the steel table next to the freezer and put her head in her hands. The darkness and pressure helped calm her.

“Want to tell me exactly why anyone would be hot to get at those particular tissue and water samples?”

She pulled her hands from her eyes. He had a right to know, but there was still so much that was just conjecture. “I’m not sure.”

She lowered her hands to the cold steel of the table, pressed into it, and then met his stare. “It’s a nitrogen-based fertilizer causing the diatom bloom.”

“Last I checked, agricultural runoff isn’t a punishable offense.”

“At the levels our samples tested, it would be. It’s not runoff, it’s dumping. Or maybe it’s both. I don’t know.”

She leaned away from him and took a mustering breath. “It’s what I asked Bradley to help with. There’s not much to go on, not yet. But the water samples tested positive for radioactivity.”

Gage stared at her, his eyes growing wide.

“This tells me we might be onto something.”

“
This
,” he said, nodding to the mess on the floor, “is out of our league. Radioactive
anything
is out of our league.”

“Bradley’s not sure. He’s having the samples retested.”

She knelt and began to sort through her scattered instruments.

Gage knelt beside her and sorted through the drug vials that hadn’t broken. He stopped and leaned back on his heels.

“The cops, Jackie. This is serious.”

“I—
we
—need a few more months,” she said firmly, “to get this place into shape. With all the animals pouring in, we can’t afford to get shut down on a technicality.” She felt his protest coming and grabbed his arm. “They’ll all die, Gage. We’re all they’ve got.”

The solemn look on his face wasn’t one she was used to; she needed an argument to forestall his good sense.

“Whoever they are, they wouldn’t try this again. They got what they came for.” The declaration didn’t come out with the confidence she’d intended.

“You don’t have a criminal mind,” he told her. “You don’t know what they’ll try next.”

He had her. Evidently the press conference had caught someone’s attention. No matter how concerned she was about the USDA shutting the Center down, it wasn’t fair to endanger the volunteers. She looked out the lab window and over to the main building, heard the laughter coming from it as the crews and newbies enjoyed their meal.

“I’ll hire a night watchman,” she said. “We can say it’s support for maintenance. There’s no need to spook everybody.”

She grabbed a steel tray and started stacking her scalpels onto it.

“And, Gage, I see that you like him, but if Alex Tavonesi misses more than three shifts, he’s out of here.”

“Got through to the impervious Dr. Brandon, did he?”

“He gets the same treatment as everybody else. If you don’t tell him, I will.”

Chapter Six

You’re in for a treat,” Gage said to Jackie as they made their way to their seats in the ballpark.

The stadium wasn’t as she’d imagined. Built so that it edged the San Francisco Bay, it had sweeping views of the water, and the light reflecting from the bay was amplified by a wide-open, clear-blue sky.

A few children clustered near the row of seats bordering the field, grinning and boasting as they compared player autographs.

“How do you get an autograph?” Jackie asked Gage. “I mean, when?”

“A perk of arriving early. The players sign before and after batting practice.”

One little boy had a glove so big it nearly covered his whole arm. She watched as the boy clutched the autographed glove to his chest as if it were a precious talisman. The stadium might have surpassed her expectations, but the look of rapture in the boy’s eyes she’d seen before, in a different stadium hosting a different game. She wished it was a time she liked to remember.

“Here, hold this.” Gage handed her a cardboard tray of the foulest-looking food she had seen in weeks. Some of the food that passed through the volunteer kitchen was close, but the plate of sticky orange cheese with triangles of chips floating in it won the prize. She couldn’t smell it though. The tray Gage held in his other hand reeked so strongly of garlic that it overpowered any other scent within ten feet. He balanced the tray of fries and a plastic cup of beer and pulled the stadium seat down with his free hand.

“Finally a realm that services your taste in food,” she said, handing him the tray.

“We missed the top of the first,” he said, not bothering to conceal his disappointment.

“I understand there are nine innings.”

They’d tried for an earlier start, but a fresh wave of rescues had thwarted their plans. Gage needed this break as much as she did, maybe more.

“You never know. But with no rain in sight, we’ll see eight and a half at least.” He waved a French fry at her. “Hey, nice shirt. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you in real clothes.”

She tugged absently on her shirt. It unnerved her that she’d spent time that morning sorting through her closet. It was just a sports event with her assistant, but she’d chosen the shirt carefully all the same.

“Speaking of shirts”—he waved his beer toward the field—“see the guys in gray, those shirts that say
Braves
? That’s the other team.” He took a big swallow of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The guy in the middle of the infield, on the mound, he’s the pitcher. The guy in the white shirt preparing to bat—he’s on the home team.” He took a swig of his beer. “The home team always gets to bat last. It’s their last chance to win if they’re behind.”

He held out the tray of nachos, offering them to her. She started to refuse, but then lifted one out of the cardboard container, scraping off some of the cheese. It was delicious. She helped herself to another as Gage told her the rules of the game.

“What’s really amazing,” he said, pointing toward the guy standing ready to bat, “is how the best of these guys can react to a visual stimulus in two hundred milliseconds. They’ve got half the time it takes an eye to blink to see the ball after the pitcher releases it. The remaining time—three hundred milliseconds—is the time they have to react, to physically adjust to what they know about the ball’s path and hit it. For the best players, it’s a decision, but it’s a fast one.”

She reached over Gage, grabbed his beer and took a swig. The crowd booed and she lifted her head to see the man who’d been standing in the batter’s box now walking back toward the stands.

“Called strike. Bummer way to go down,” Gage said, as if she understood. “You need three things to be great at this game,” he lectured in a tone that was suddenly serious. “Fast hands, fast feet and fast eyes, but it’s eyes that are probably most important. Fast eyes means a hitter can focus on the ball and then transform that focus into an attack.”

He scooped up some of the cheese from the nachos with a couple of the garlic fries and popped them in his mouth, swallowing in a gulp.

“My theory,” he continued, “is that the hitter, when he stands facing the pitcher, is tapping into the most primal parts of his nervous system. It mimics a fight to the death, like two lions poised to launch at each other’s necks—one watches the other move, then instantly reacts. It happens below the level of conscious awareness. A millisecond can mean the difference between whiffing a strike or blasting the ball over the center field wall.” He grinned at her. “See, it’s more than a game. It’s
science
.”

She ignored his lighthearted jab at her seriousness and watched one of the hitters swing and miss a pitch. “How often do they manage to hit it?” she asked.

“Depends on the player. The guy batting right now usually hits and gets on base in one out of three at-bats.”

“That’s good?”

“Better than good.” He munched down a handful of chips. “Few sports demand reactions as quick as what a guy needs to hit a major league fastball. Well, there’s tennis, and fencing, but that’s about it. Football, basketball, soccer—they’re fast but they can be played in seconds. Nope, when it comes to speed, baseball’s right there at the top.”

She squinted out at the field. The players were standing, unmoving. She tried to get a sense of the speed Gage was talking about.

The afternoon was warming; the fog had burned off and it was a beautiful day. She peeled off her jacket and dropped it onto the empty seat next to her and settled back. Theirs might be a world-class stadium, but the seats were rigid and uncomfortable. She grabbed her jacket, folded it and put it under her, cushioning her backside.

“Where’s Alex?” She tried to sound casual. But just being in a stadium once again made her nerves jump.

“He’s right there.”

Gage pointed and she followed the direction of his finger. Standing in a circle, Alex was studying the pitcher and the field.