“I used to watch the Nuggets and Avalanche play there,” Campos said. “And I heard Bruce Springsteen there once. Are you familiar with the rifle, Mr. Sato?”
Sato grunted and nodded.
Busy fitting the body armor over his genitals, Nick looked at the unloaded rifle that Sato was hefting. It was a basic M40A6 bolt-action sniper rifle of the sort the U.S. Marines still used. Nick could see that it had a five-round detachable box magazine. The range in Coors Field was relatively short—about one hundred eighty meters maximum—so it made sense that the prison snipers used the lighter 7.62 × 51mm former NATO cartridges rather than heavy, armor-piercing .50-caliber models.
Campos tapped the scope. “A modified Schmidt and Bender 3 – 12 × 50 Police Marksman II L with illuminated reticle. Daytime scope. You’ll probably be shooting into shadow under the second deck—that’s where D. Nigger Brown lives—but this will gather enough light to give you a clear shot, even if it gets cloudy.” Campos paused. “Have you used this particular weapon before, sir?”
“Yes, I have,” said Sato. He set the long gun down on its bipod on the table.
“We don’t want anyone dead,” Warden Polansky said tiredly just as Nick was pulling the K-Plus balaclava over his head. “Colorado abolished the death penalty years ago and never got around to reinstating it. So every prisoner you shoot creates a lot of paperwork for all of us. Actually, there’s more paperwork if a prisoner dies than if the visitor is killed.”
Sato nodded. Nick stared out through the eyeholes of his new headgear. His ears were covered but microphone pickups conveyed both external sounds and kept him in radio touch with Sato and others in the old press box. There was a 3D mini-cam and dual pickup microphones on the headpiece, so Sato and the others could monitor everything he was seeing and hearing… unless one of the inmates cut his head off and stashed it somewhere.
Nick started pulling on his outer clothes. The K-Plus gloves would be the last thing he put on.
Warden Polansky came over to Nick, turned on the cameras and mikes, stepped back, and folded his arms. He was scowling. “We want to accommodate Advisor Nakamura, Mr. Bottom, but is interrogating this particular prisoner really worth all this hassle?”
“Probably not,” said Nick. Fully dressed, he flexed his arms and fingers and moved his head around. He felt as if someone had sheathed him in metal-and-plastic shrinkwrap. The sweat was already pooling up under the K-Plus armor. “Let’s go,” he said.
NICK CAME OUT THROUGH the door in the centerfield wall and began the long walk across the playing field. Delroy Brown’s hovel was on the first level behind home plate, halfway up. Being a mere drug dealer in for a mere three-year fall, Brown wouldn’t warrant such a prime location, but he’d been in often and for more serious offenses and he had friends here.
Nick didn’t look over his shoulder but he knew Sato was up there behind the reflective, bulletproof glass of what used to be the second-level outfield VIP restaurant. Now it was a sniper’s roost.
In the early days of Coors Field’s use as an outdoor prison, the entire playing field was kept free for exercise purposes. Now outfield and infield—both grassless—were filled with blanket tents, cardboard and scrap-tin shacks, and junk-heap hovels. Those who lived down here were the newbies and nobodies, since their cobbled-together cubies suffered the full force of the weather. Coors Field had never had a roof, retractable or otherwise. The black prisoners had pride of place, owning all the covered area behind home plate and spreading to beyond both the first-and third-base-side dugouts. Whites owned the covered left-field areas on both the first and second tiers. Spanics had both tiers of right field and an uncovered part of the centerfield stands once called the Rockpile. It was still called the Rockpile by its inhabitants.
The expensive enclosed luxury boxes were now windowless hovels for the VIP prisoners—they paid the guards and warden a fortune for them—and the third-tier seats were a melange of shacks and tents for eccentrics and aging prisoners who just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
There was a sort of trail from the centerfield-wall door through the hovels to home plate and Nick kept to it. Sullen eyes glared out from under tents and cardboard shacks, but no one came close to him here. The understood shooting zone for visitors was six feet.
It was a long walk and the K-Plus armor made Nick’s body heat build up until he almost felt faint.
He knew the drill: if one or more inmates attack you with edged weapons, roll up in a ball, cover your face with your K-Plus hands, and let your sniper-second handle things while the inmates stab away at you. Then, when the attackers are all down, get up and run like hell for the nearest exit.
Only the nearest exit was now some four hundred feet away across the entire infield and outfield.
Nick paused about where home plate used to be and peered up into the stands. The backstop and net were right where they used to be before this felon-inhabited state began parking its captured felons here. The reality of the place surprised him since he was so used to seeing the digital version in the Rockies games he followed during the summer. Most people had thought that the death of public gatherings would be the death of professional sports, but televised 3D digital-virtual games, in all sports, were more popular than the original live versions. One reason was probably the better players: the new Colorado Rockies team boasted such players as Dante Bichette, Larry Walker, Andrés Galarraga, and Vinny Castilla, who had all played for the team more than forty years earlier. The only rule now in major league baseball was that the virtual player on the roster must have played with that team sometime in the past (and could only be digitally resurrected to play on one team), thus the joyous return of the Brooklyn Dodgers with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, and the rest. Those Dodgers faced a New York Yankees lineup that included Derek Jeter, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris (tuned to his best year), Lou Gehrig, Dwight Gooden, and Babe Ruth.
There was endless bitching about the fairness and accuracy of the virtual MLB players and teams, but baseball fans loved the resurrection era. Few would go back to the steroid-riddled players of the last, scandal-ridden decades of the live game.
Nick, like the Old Man before him, loved boxing and often watched Friday Night Fights, where a young Cassius Clay could be found fighting Rocky Marciano or Jack Johnson…
“Bottom-san, are you paying attention?” whispered Sato’s voice in Nick’s ear. “Man approaching from your right.”
Nick whirled.
The man coming out of the tent-and-shack village toward him was tall, thin, white-haired, black, and old. The old man wore baggy khaki shorts, sandals, and a spotless white shirt. He walked slowly but almost regally, stopping about seven feet away from Nick and opening his hands to show that they were empty.
“Welcome, sir, to our modest world of Coors Field, sans baseball, sans fans, sans hot dogs and Cracker Jack, sans Coors beer, sans everything but incarcerated felons, myself included, sir.” The old man bowed slightly but very gracefully. His voice was rich, full, deep, mesmerizing, in the way those of some Shakespearean actors and old-time sports announcers used to be.
Nick nodded slightly but looked around, his gaze flicking everywhere, wondering if this was the setup for some trap. Move on, his brain told him. Move on, idiot.
“My name is Soul Dad,” said the old man. “Soul with a ‘u.’ May I inquire as to your name, sir?”
Move on. Move on. Nothing good could come from Nick’s giving his name to some senile old felon.
“My name is Nick Bottom.” Nick heard his own voice as if from a distance. Something about his early-morning conversation with K. T. Lincoln had distracted him at a time when he couldn’t afford to be distracted. It was as if all this—the hovels and felons and sunlight and ravaged old ballpark, even the crazy old man with the amazing voice—was part of some flashback session and Nick was hovering above it all.
Hovering will get you killed, asshole.
Soul D
ad chuckled in the same resonant, rich tones. “Well, Mr. Nick Bottom, you left your ass’s ears at home today, sir.”
Nick glanced at the old man and moved slightly to his right, keeping the same distance between them but putting the old man between him and anyone with a gun in the stands straight ahead or to the immediate right, without blocking Sato’s shot.
When Nick didn’t reply, Soul Dad said, “I’ve always thought that when the awakening Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says, ‘It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death,’ the ‘her’ he’s talking about is Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare wrote the two about the same time, you see, Mr. Bottom… perhaps at the same time, although that would have been very unusual for the Bard… and I believe he allowed one reality to bleed over into another in Nick Bottom’s line there, just as flashback users often let one of their realities seep into another. Sometimes until they can’t tell the difference.”
Nick could only blink. It was odd that the Israeli poet Danny Oz had also brought up the question of who the “her” was in the “sing it at her death” part of that quotation.
Knowing he was wasting time and making himself more of a target, Nick said, “You seem to know quite a bit about Shakespeare, Mr. Soul Dad.”
The old man threw his head back and laughed deeply and delightedly. His teeth were large and white and only one was missing on the upper right side, despite his age. Something about the laugh made Nick think that the old man was Jamaican, although he had none of the accent. Whether he was laughing at being called Mr. Soul Dad or because of the Shakespeare compliment, Nick had no clue.
“I lived for more than forty years in a small railroad-yard shack in Buffalo, New York, with a sterno-addicted philosophy professor of great learning, Mr. Bottom,” said Soul Dad. “Some things rub off.”
Nick knew it was stupid to ask a question and drag things out with this old man, but sometimes one had to be stupid. “Soul Dad,” he said softly, “what are you in here for?”
Again that full-throated laugh. “I am in here for living under an overpass in winter and fouling the view of the Platte River for people paying much money to live in a tall glass tower along the river park,” said Soul Dad. “What, may I ask in return, are you here for, Mr. Bottom? Or, rather, whom are you searching for here?”
“Delroy… Brown.”
Soul Dad showed his strong teeth again in a broad grin. “How gallant of you to leave out the n-word, Mr. Bottom. And I agree with you on the choice. Of all the things I have seen and suffered in my eighty-nine years of life, my people’s return to the never-really-abandoned n-word of our centuries of servitude is the greatest self-inflicted folly.”
Soul Dad turned and pointed to a hovel halfway up the first tier behind home plate, where, of course, all the seats had long since been torn out. “Mr. Delroy Nigger Brown is there, sir, and expecting you.”
“Thank you,” Nick said absurdly and started to step forward.
Blocking the gesture from the sight of those behind him, Soul Dad held up a hand with one finger raised. “They plan to kill you,” the old man said very softly.
Nick paused.
“Not Mr. Brown, whom you seek, but a certain Bad Nigger Ajax. You know the man?”
“I know the man,” Nick said just as softly. He’d been the arresting officer and his testimony had sent Ajax away more than ten years before for repeatedly sodomizing a six-year-old girl. The girl had died of internal hemorrhaging.
“It will be like this,” said Soul Dad in the same quick, soft, reverberant whisper. “Mr. Brown will invite you into his tent-hovel. You will wisely decline. Mr. Brown will say, ‘Let us step up here where it is private.’ Ten steps up, Mr. Ajax will pop up from behind another tent and shoot you in the face. His friends—or, rather, his fearful acolytes, since Mr. Ajax has no friends here—will block the view of your sniper with their bodies while Mr. Ajax escapes into the crowds toward left field. The pistol will not be found.”
Nick stared at the old man. Eighty-nine years old. Soul Dad—whatever his original name was—had been born in the early days of World War II.
Before Nick could speak, even inanely to say “Thank you” again—although he had no idea if the old man was telling the truth or setting him up for some other form of assassination—Soul Dad put his hands together, bowed, turned, and walked away down what once was the third-base line.
Nick took two steps back while surveying the maze of tents and shacks filling the entire first tier behind home plate. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.
“We heard it,” came Sato’s voice in his ear. “I am looking at a photo of Ajax right now.”
Nick licked his dry and chapped lips. “Any suggestions on what I should do?”
“Mr. Campos suggests that you should come back through the centerfield fence, Bottom-san. He says to jog and weave. Ajax’s pistol is probably of small caliber.”
Sweat was running into Nick’s eyes but he resisted the urge to wipe it away. “I’m going to go up and find Delroy. Can you react fast enough to take Ajax out when and if he pops up?”
“It will be in deep shadow up there.” Sato’s voice was calm in Nick’s ear. “He will expose himself for only a second. And I have something to confess to you, Bottom-san.”
“What?”
“All American black men look pretty much the same to me, Bottom-san.”
Nick laughed despite himself. “Bad Nigger Ajax weighs around three hundred pounds,” he said, covering his mouth with his hand so no one in the stands could read his lips. How many pitchers have done that here with their mitts? he wondered.
“I confess, Bottom-san, that all three-hundred-pound American blacks look the same to me. So sorry.”
“Well,” said Nick behind his hand, “shoot the one aiming a gun at me. If you can.”
“Warden Polansky will not appreciate the paperwork,” Sato said with no hint of emotion. Nick had no idea if the big security chief was joking. And he didn’t care.
NICK WENT UP THE dirt ramp into the stands. Men outside their tents shrank away from him—or, rather, from the killing circle that moved with him. He felt their gazes on his back as he climbed the steps. The center railing that had been there in baseball days had long since been torn out.
Halfway up the first section, he paused near the tent that Soul Dad had pointed out. “Delroy Nigger Brown!” he shouted. His only satisfaction was that his voice still sounded strong, no quaver. Less satisfying was the sudden urge to piss down his own leg through the K-Plus armor. “Delroy Nigger Brown! Come out!”
“Who wants me?” came a familiar weaselly voice from inside the tent.
“Come out here and I’ll tell you,” said Nick, lowering his own voice a little but still using his never-take-no-for-an-answer cop tones. “Now.”
“You all come on inside the tent where it be quiet,” whined Delroy. “Nothin’ in here to be, you know, afraid of, cop-man.”
“Out here, now,” repeated Nick. Each syllable was flat, hard, and imperative.
Delroy Nigger Brown came wriggling out of the low tent-shack. He was dressed as Soul Dad had been, in shorts, shirt, and flip-flops, but everything on Brown was as filthy as Soul Dad’s had been immaculate. When he came closer and stood straight, he still barely came up to Nick’s shoulder.
“I ain’t done nothing, man,” complained Delroy. “I only be in here for eight months for selling a li’l flashback is all what it is. And that be ’staken identity.”
Nick had to smile despite his continued urge to run. “Nobody gets sent to Coors Field for selling flash, Delroy,” he barked. “You were hauling coke, X-H, heroin, flashback, and Terror up from New Mexico with you. And selling it to kids. I just have a couple of questions for you… not about any of the drugs or guns or other crap you got caught with.”
“Not about none of tha
t what my, you know, lawyer wouldn’ let me, you know what I’m sayin’ to you, talk about?”
“Right,” said Nick, not even sure what the sniveling dealer had said.
“All right,” said Delroy, brightening suddenly as if Nick were a friend or customer visiting. “Why don’t we, you know, go up there a bit where no one can, you know what I’m tellin’ you, listen and where it be a little, you know what I’m sayin’, out of the sun and like that?”
“All right,” Nick heard himself say. He grabbed Delroy’s upper left arm in a grip so tight that the little dealer let out a yelp.
One step up together, Delroy squirming to get free.
Two steps up. Three. Four.
There was the sudden stink of fresh urine. Nick realized that Delroy had pissed himself. The little weasel hadn’t planned to be next to Nick when the gunfire started.
Five steps. Six. Eight.
“No!” screamed Delroy and tried to pull out of Nick’s grip. He couldn’t.
There were blurs of movement all around. Men dodging, diving, shoving forward, pushing back, coming out of tents and leaping into tents.
The crack of the rifle shot echoed through Coors Field, sounding very much like the crack of a baseball on a wooden bat connecting for a home run. Nick saw the explosion of blood, brains, and skull fragments three rows up and fifteen feet to his right, exactly where Soul Dad had said Ajax would be shooting from.
Doesn’t mean that there aren’t three more waiting, Nick’s brain shouted at him as he dragged a soggy and sagging Delroy up the old seat levels toward the fallen shooter. Men were running wildly now, knocking down hovels and other men to get away from the killing zone that encircled Nick.
In the movies, someone always kneels next to a gunshot victim and puts three fingers against the fallen man or woman’s neck to see if there’s a pulse. Nick had never had to do that—after a while, you could tell at a glance when the person was dead. Of course, it helped—as in Bad Nigger Ajax’s case here—when a third of the man’s head had been blown away and his brains were spread across dirty concrete like so much spilled oatmeal.