Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4) (38 page)

“I’ll work on it. Promise.”

“Not just with me,” he says.

“I know, I know.”

Hal glances over after I hang up. “Nice to have at least one supportive parent.”

“He’s changed a lot in the last two years. Went from not wanting to hear about my love life to encouraging me to get back together with Dev.”

“Uh-huh.” Hal returns his attention to the computer. “Sure he doesn’t just want more free tickets and invitations to owners’ boxes?”

“I’m not really sure of anything. But I have to call Gena.” I call up her number. “How’s that story coming? That still the injury one?”

“Part of it. There’s like five cases I’m writing up and then the overall frame. This one’s an old offensive line guy from the seventies.”

“Who?”

He glances at me again and his ears flick. “Can’t tell you. Confidential until the story goes live.”

“Fine, fine.” I thumb Gena’s number. While the phone rings, I say, “Is it Silva?”

“No.”

“Hi,” I say as Gena answers. “Thanks for the call.”

“Are you in Crystal City?”

“No, I’m in Yerba.”

She digests that for a moment. “Did you get lost?”

“I’m up here for a job interview. Don’t tell anyone.”

“With the Whalers? Good for you. You’re not missing much here. Well, I mean…there’s a lot going on, but the boys are all kind of crazy running around and focused and we’re just shopping.”

“I like shopping.” The traffic outside has picked up again.

“The stores here are amazing. So expensive!”

“That’s C.C. How are the wives doing?”

“Angela’s coming in tonight with the boys. Daria’s comparing everything to Freestone, and Penny—Colin’s Penny, the vixen—”

“Right.” I hate the fact that Colin is a fox.

“She’s been coming along with us, and I’m not sure she’s ever been in a city bigger than Chevali. We went to the South Center Mall and she got lost. Didn’t realize there’s a whole other section of the mall on the other side of Nordstrom’s.”

“I haven’t been to that one.”

She tells me about the mall for five or ten minutes, about all the specialty stores and the three levels and the bizarre hanging art and the movie posters and the fountain, and then I get to ask the question I’m really interested in. “How’s Fisher?”

“Oh, you know.” Her energy drops. “He’s…he’s focused on the game. I haven’t talked to him much.”

“So he’s going to play.”

“The doctors cleared him.”

She puts just the slightest emphasis on the word “doctors,” enough to get my ears perked up. “You don’t think he should play.”

“I wouldn’t dare try to stop him. It’s the championship. And he probably gives the team a better chance to win. He says so, and Dev said the team felt more energized with him in there. So I guess. I mean…how much more could he be injured in one game? And it would mean a lot to the city.”

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?”

“What?”

I shake my head. “Line from a movie.”

“Do you believe that?”

I stare out the window again, past my reflection. Do I? “I don’t know,” I say finally. “I don’t think it’s always that clear-cut. But you have to decide. I mean, if I knew that the Dragons were going to win a championship but that one of the players would be crippled for life…”

Hal’s typing stops. I turn, and he’s looking at me down his long, sharp muzzle. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know how I’d feel about that.”

“I don’t know what I can do about it.” She must have moved the phone mic away from her muzzle. She sounds distant, as though she’s talking from the other end of a long hallway. “He’s going to play. If I hound him about it, he’ll just resent me.”

“Yeah.” I wish there were more I could say. I wish I could tell her that he’ll come around, that he’ll see reason. I wish I could tell her that she would feel good about her decision to do the right thing for him, that the feeling she has of being trapped with no good way out is an illusion, that there’s a right answer and that she can choose it. Instead, I choose humor, or as close as I can get. “Men, right?”

The pause between trying to make a joke and the other person’s laughter can be the longest, most painful silence in the world. She does laugh, shortly, and bring the mic back to her muzzle, but her voice also feels close to an edge of some sort, as though she’s going to start crying or shouting pretty soon. “Every other wife is probably feeling that,” she says. “But I don’t feel like I can talk to them. They’ll just think it’s domestic violence or something. I wish you were here.”

I should be there. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“Oh, no, I hope you get the job. I know that’s important. It’d be nice if you could work for the same team, but…well, you don’t have a family to look after, so you need something to keep you busy, right?”

“I love scouting,” I say. “Since I can’t play.”

“When do you go in for the interview?”

“We’re going to watch the game tomorrow, and I think it’ll just be informal conversations. Get to meet the guys, and so on. They already have my work history and everything.”

“They know about Dev, I guess?”

“Yeah.” I still don’t know how much difference that’s going to make by the time I actually start the job.

We talk a little longer about Crystal City and the atmosphere surrounding the game. She thinks it isn’t fair that one team has home field advantage, and I say that’s how it’s always been done, that the better team during the season gets the home fans. “When we played the game in Highbourne, it was fine,” she says with a laugh. “But the away game was terrible.”

“You still won.”

“Yes. Hopefully we win this one and…everything’s fine.”

I tell her I’ll be wishing my best, and she wishes me luck again. When I hang up, Hal turns his chair to face me. “You know that’s how those Dragons championships were won, right?”

“Some things I don’t really want to know all of.”

“And all the championships, really. That’s what I’m writing about, the price that we pay for this entertainment.”

I turn so I’m sitting cross-ways in the chair, legs draped over the arm and tail hanging off the front of the chair. “I don’t know if I want to know these things. But I don’t not want to know them.”

“I know it ain’t gonna be very popular.” Hal sighs. “But I feel like I gotta write this story. This shit’s been covered up, whitewashed, ignored too long.”

“I think you should, too,” I say. “Sometimes you have to do the right thing even if it’s not the popular thing.”

“Just wish it wasn’t so damn hard,” he grumbles. “Half these guys don’t want to talk about their injuries. Don’t want people thinking of them as broken-down. Their games still play on cable sometimes and they want to stick in the public image that way.”

“People get stuck in time,” I say. “It’s hard.”

“And some of the rest of them say they’d make the same choices even knowing how it would turn out. They’d trade the chance to be healthy and happy for most of their life for those few years of glory.”

“You know,” I say, “I kind of know how they feel.”

*

I don’t call Mother that night. I’m not sure what it’ll accomplish to wait until after the game, but at least I don’t want to add any more emotional baggage to my life the day before the interview if I can avoid it. Hal and I drive up the freeway to a place one of his friends recommended, in a small neighborhood that looks like the main street of a small town. The whole Yerba area is dotted with these small towns that have fused together into one giant suburb, but still retained their own identities. The sheer volume of people in this area is overwhelming (though not as bad as Crystal City), but I like the fact that these small towns are surviving and recognizably different, even if I can’t tell one from the other.

Sunday, we drive down through a slightly chilly morning to the Whalers’ offices. Peter meets us at the door of the building sporting a maroon polo with the Whalers logo in gold over the heart. He grasps my chocolate-brown paw in his with a firm, warm grip, and matches my smile. We lean in to refresh our memory of each other’s scent, and then the other fox releases my paw. “Peter Emmanuel,” he says, extending a paw to Hal.

“Hal Kinnel.” The swift fox shakes. “We’ve talked once or twice.”

Peter holds the door for us to enter. “You did that piece on the Firebirds a few years back. Nice job.”

“Thanks.” Hal takes it in stride, and I raise my eyebrows. Peter hadn’t mentioned that on the phone; either he was holding back on me or he looked it up in advance of our visit.

It’s warm inside and has that clean smell that all office buildings have, though here it’s also tinged with a cloth-and-paper smell that I can’t quite place until I walk around a corner and into a gallery of uniforms hanging on the walls, a maroon and gold tapestry of famous Whalers players.

“Wow,” I murmur, going up close to the jersey of one of the quarterbacks I used to love watching when I was growing up. “He beat the Dragons in the playoffs in ’97. I still couldn’t hate him, he was so good and so much fun to watch.”

“Take a little time if you want,” Peter says, “but you can also look on the way out. I want to hurry back for some of the pre-game betting.” He glances at Hal. “Friendly wagering, of course.”

“Of course.” Hal keeps that polite smile on.

“We can go.” I step away from the jerseys. “We didn’t have a gallery like this in Hilltown, that’s all.”

“No trophy room?” The other fox seems surprised as he leads us up a staircase on the opposite side of the room.

“Oh, we had one. It was just smaller. Had the Super Bowl trophies, some pictures, a few footballs.” I think back. “We had Cunningham’s 300
^th
touchdown ball.”

Peter whistles. “Nice. Come on, everyone’s in here.”

He doesn’t need to say that, because the din of chatter is audible even before he opens the door to the second floor hallway. At the other end of the hall, past some office doors, a big double door with the Whalers logo on it stands half open, and beyond I can see a bunch of people, most dressed in maroon and gold.

“So what do you bet on, pre-game?” Hal asks as we come up to the room. “I mean, when we were down in Hellentown, I tossed a few twenties in on the Firebirds.” When Peter stops, Hal gives him a cocky, foxy grin. “Y’know, when Lee here got us into the owner’s box.”

Peter relaxes, shoulders losing some tightness as his tail swishes. “I’ll show you. You’re welcome to get in on it.” When Hal hesitates, Peter’s grin widens. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re a fox. They won’t take advantage of you too badly. Even if you’re not a red.”

Hal rolls his eyes at me as we walk into the mass of people. On one side of the large meeting room, the pre-game show is being projected onto a screen that takes up half the wall. The wall directly across from us is one huge whiteboard, where a bunch of prop bets are written for the game in blue and red and green and black: Firebirds number of interceptions over/under 1½, Sabretooths turnovers over/under 2½, Total number of plays for each team (Sabretooths over/under 62, Firebirds over/under 71), and of course there are bets on which team will have more tackles, sacks, interceptions, touchdowns, yards, first downs, and so on. There’s also a section for prop bets on the pre-game show and the hosts: how many times Archie (one of the broadcasters) will say “ultimate”; how many times John will use the telestrator; how many touching personal stories they will refer to. One of the bets is “Number of times Miski called ‘first openly gay player,’” and the number beside it is 12. On the far left side of the whiteboard wall, there’s another door; I see someone walk into the room through it carrying a hot dog bun.

A lemur with a marker poised in one paw stands near the board, watching the TV intently. On it, Archie, a polished, smiling raccoon in a purple tie, says, “this is the ultimate crucible for the UFL’s first openly gay player,” and the lemur makes a quick mark beside the “ultimate” bet and the “first openly gay player” bet, making it six for the first and three for the second.

I turn away from the TV as a picture of Dev comes up on it, and look around the room. There must be about thirty people here. Peter hesitates, maybe thinking I want to watch the bit on Dev, but when I turn away he takes me by the arm and walks me around, introducing me rapid-fire: Director of Player Personnel, Director of College Scouting, Director of Pro Scouting, West Region Scout, and so on. Jocko, the Director of College Scouting who was vaguely hostile on the phone with me, is indeed a brown bear; he takes me in with a neutral look and then goes back to his conversation. The others are wolf, stallion, bear, wolf (this wolf reminds me scarily of the beer-throwing wolf, to the point that I find it uncomfortable to talk to him), an array of familiar football species, and, incongruously, a fruit bat named Jalili.

She’s the assistant to the director, and we hit it off within about two sentences. “You didn’t play football,” she says, first thing.

“No,” I say. “Did you?”

She laughs and tells Peter, “I hope he’s the guy you told me about,” and he tells her I am indeed that guy.

“Good.” She takes a moment to glare at Jocko, but doesn’t say anything, and when he sees her he gives her a shrug. They both turn away from each other, and before I can ask her about it, I’ve got a leathery wing draped around my shoulders.

“So,” she says with a grin, “who you got in the game?”

“Oh, I, uh.” I look at Peter and then up at the screen. “Well, I’m kinda rooting for the Firebirds.”

She laughs, a high, sharp sound, and pats my shoulder. “’Cause of your boyfriend, yeah, I know, but who do you
think
is going to win?”

This becomes a theme as we go around meeting people. “Should we bet the over or under on INTs?” I’m asked. “Is Fisher a hundred percent?” people want to know. “Are they going to use Strike primarily as a decoy?”

“Come on,” I say to that last one. “I know the Sabretooths have a good corner, but…come on.”

His friends laugh at him too, and the little group disperses, Jalili with them. I look for Hal, but he’s mingling very well, over in the corner talking to two people who are—I press my fingers to my head and force my memory to work—a Contract Administrator and…Senior Personnel Advisor.