The restaurant was one of those places that tried too hard to be rustic. Walls of something close to a natural wood tone, ceilings buttressed with timber girders, and a fireplace off somewhere giving fake flames and piney air freshener. Pictures of baseballers and other paraphernalia cluttered the walls. Behind the bar was a sadly drooping banner proclaiming “Welcome Feliciano!”
Like one worn-down pitcher was going to make a difference.
Heidi Hickman stepped into the waiting area and spotted her … um … client in a booth toward the back.
Walking toward the woman, Heidi went over details. Kate Fiscus, assistant to the Assistant GM of the woeful Portland Lumberjacks, a team that had hired and fired a feeble-minded manager, and fielded a pitching staff that wouldn’t even have cut it in Madison, where the GM—and Kate, for that matter, had come from. Nearing the booth, the woman’s face came into better focus. She was blonde, the platinum kind that almost certainly came from a bottle. Age, indeterminant in that way of beauty and makeup, but clearly older than Heidi. Thin. Proportioned. Wearing a white shirt unbuttoned in a way you could read as either confidence or purposeful misdirection. Kate Fiscus had a pure magnetism around her that Heidi suddenly found somehow both intensely interesting and extremely annoying.
She shucked her maroon trench coat off her shoulders and laid it on the bench as she slid in opposite the woman.
“Heidi,” Kate said, leaning across the table and holding her hand out. “So good to meet you.”
Heidi took it, noticing things that were impossible not to notice given Kate’s posture and positioning. Then she slid her hands down her legs to get wrinkles out of her tan pants, and straightened her sweater, which was black and form fitting. She’d picked the red-rocked necklace in hopes it gave her a bit of a professional flare and spoke quietly of her affiliation with the Nine. Now she was worried it made her appear too put together.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” she said.
“Not a problem at all, Honey,” Kate said, straightening up. “Us baseball girls gotta stick together, right?”
“That is so true.”
The waiter came to the table with glasses of water. Heidi ordered grilled salmon and a cobb salad. Kate took the ribeye (Medium rare, Honey, but hold the medium), and fruit (Gotta store up on the energy, glancing at Heidi, right Babe?). A Cabernet for Heidi and an IPA for Kate rounded out the order.
“So,” Kate said when they were alone again. “What brings you all the way out to the Pacific Northwest to talk to little ol’ me?”
“Straight to business. I like that.”
“You strike me as a girl who doesn’t flirt around.”
Heidi smiled, then felt the heat in Kate’s direct gaze. Yes, this was a woman with enough magnetism to stick to Teflon. Flustered, she took a breath.
“Any idea why dudes in Chicago want to know who you are?
Kate’s eyes got who me? wide, and her smile grew a little more crooked. She squared up her shoulders and the shirt tightened over her body in ways that took breath away from 50 paces. “Well, I couldn’t possibly imagine why a man might want to know me, could you?”
“I can take a guess,” Heidi said.
“And that’s a problem?”
“Not at all.”
Heidi was pleased to see that the firmness of her response set Kate back a notch. This had always been inportant to her. It was 2040 and women were still held to impossible double standards--especially by assholes like Vinnie Vitale.
“A woman gets to choose what she does,” Heidi said. “From what I can tell, you do what you want, which I admire. The fact that you’re knock-down gorgeous is just icing on the cake.”
Drinks came, and Kate settled back into her seat, staring intently at Heidi as she sipped her IPA.
“I like you,” she said.
Heidi smiled and tipped her glass to Kate.
“They didn’t call you directly, Kate. So I figure it’s something else they want. Adding up a few things, I’m thinking that maybe it’s got something to do with the pig shit thing?”
Kate gave a literal double clutch. “The pig shit thing.”
Heidi leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands folded in front of her while Kate processed the question. “Someone’s chasing you down, Kate.”
Kate's nod was more fatalistic than knowing.
Heidi waited still, an eyebrow cocked. “Us baseball girls gotta stick together.”
It came out, slowly at first, then in a rush. Kate wasn’t used to being the one listened to, after all. It took some practice. But over the course of the meal, the facts added together.
Her husband, Dan Fiscus had been with the Madison club when Kate met him, then went to seven years in purgatory with Edmonton before moving on to Louisville under a cloud of dirt. “It was a bad time,” Kate said. “I thought I’d lost him.” He’d gotten caught up in the inner workings of the Sluggers back in the day, a group that had gone mostly underground since @sjshaw had taken over, but was still the same collective as when the team was run by the Genius cartel. There was a shooting somewhere in there, and Fiscus the masculine was cut loose.
“Everything was great then. All the way until Chris asked me back.”
Kate, it turns out, couldn’t avoid the allure of the game—or the young men of it, for that matter. Her and Dan had always been open in their arrangements, and the game suited her. It was a family thing, it turns out. “I love baseball,” she said in a tone of voice that made Heidi’s insides churn. That was why she was here, too. The game. Something special about it, something magical about a simple double play, the timing, the pace, the man-on-man battles that added up to teamwork. “I understand,” Heidi said, wondering suddenly what Kate looked like without the shirt on. There was something natural about the game. Something basic. Something human as it reached back into the ages when this country was still being built.
Anyway, Heidi snapped out of her fog to listen to Kate finish.
“I think Genius was pissed,” she said. “He hates Dan. Didn’t want him back in the game in the first place, but really didn't want him together with Chris again. But I figured he was a business man.” She sighed a sound of the deepest regret possible.
“You made a deal.” Heidi shuddered, thinking about a “deal” with the bloated beluga whale that might be the Genius.
“I thought so. I thought it would get Dan into the clear. But a week later I get a call and the Genius says he had something else he needed—said he’d promise to leave my husband alone if I did him this one more gig, and this time it didn’t have anything to do with…” her chest flushed against the white shirt as she sighed again “…this time it was just money, you know? Deliver a satchel of cash to a guy named Ronny in Chicago. Tell him to change where he was dumping a load that night. Tell him there was another bag just like it when it was done.”
Heidi nodded. A smile came to her lips. Ronny O’Malley, Black Jack Billy. Kate had given him a bucket of cash to dump the shit in the Little Cal. He’d have told Triple Axe about it. Which is how TA had known to cue her in. Which is when she’d taken the video.
It all added up.
“The money came from Louisville,” Kate said. “I’m pretty certain of that. Genius still basically runs finances under that table there, and all his machine is still operating. But clearly, the Wichita franchise is footing parts of it too. Put it all together and you’ve probably got one big money laundering thing. My guess is the cash actually came from Nicaragua.”
“That’s intense.”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder how the Chicago gang picked up on you,” Heidi said, finishing her salad. “Vinnie isn’t a Rhodes Scholar, and his tails are almost impossible to not lose. There had to be something obvious for them to pick up on.”
“It’s got to have been the business card,” Kate said, ducking her head in shame.
“Business card?”
“I felt sorry for the guy. It was clear he wanted out from under Vinne—I mean, who wouldn’t—so after I gave him the money bag, I slipped a card into his pocket that promised him a plane ticket and that said I knew I could get him a job out in Portland.”
“I see,” Heidi replied.
She sat back, feeling pleasantly full from dinner, but edgy on the … um … edges. Kate, too, seemed an off-kilter combination of satisfied but anxious. Heidi bit her lip. Could she trust this woman with her secret? If she did, what would she hope to get from it. Kate was clearly a mover and a shaker. She’d been getting things done, and in that way could be a useful friend. Her husband had been connected on the dark side of things Heidi wasn’t sure she wanted to know about, but that, yes, she would need to understand if she was going to be serious about this crime fighting thing.
The BBA was a rip-roaring success, it seems, but it clearly had a dark underbelly.
It would be dangerous to branch out, dangerous to add a sidekick as it were, but sitting in the warm aroma of steak and baked potatoes, Heidi felt the world shift.
“It sounds like your part of this is over,” Heidi said.
“I thought it was over after the first thing,” Kate spat back.
“Yes. That’s what I was going to add.” She sat forward. “I’m going to chase this down further,” she said. “On top of everything we’ve been talking about Vinnie ran a revenge op on Yellow Springs, and then tried to sic the Feds on Portland. I need to understand more. And I’ve got friends I think can help.” Heidi paused there, pursed her lips, and swallowed. “I need to ask how far you want to go into this.”
“You want to know if I want to get back at the bastards?”
“I’d understand if you just wanted to sit it out.”
“Oh, Honey,” Kate said, leaning forward to bring her face close to Heidi’s, then whispered. “If you think I ever sit anything like this out, you don’t know me anywhere close to well enough.”
Heidi flushed, feeling the heat of Kate’s nearness. “That’s good to hear.”
“So what do you say we split this joint and get to working on that?”
Heidi smiled. Yes, she thought. There was something about Kate that went deeper than the body and the hair and the...everything else. There was something stronger. Something more primal.
Something she definitely wanted to know.
