When she came upon Luis Pena, he was sitting in the dark alley, alone, his blue jeaned knees drawn up toward his chin, his back resting against the hard brick wall of an apothecary. It was late, of course, the darkest part of the night.
The sight of him, clearly having imbibed too much, made her take a deep sigh.
“Oh, Luis,” she said.
She knew the score. The dashing young shortstop with a smile so bright it might as well fluoresce across the baseball landscape, the kid, still only 22 though he’d been in the league for now going on three seasons, he was supposed to have it all, right? And on the outside, sure, he did. The Zimmer his rookie year. The Landis appearance.
But the heart does strange things.
As Heidi reached to wrap an arm across his back, and gave a push to get him on his stumbling feet, she went over the missives that had set her to this task, following the young shortstop the past several weeks—even before he’d strained his back so badly he couldn’t even swing a bat for three days. She knew his girlfriend had broken up with him just before spring training, apparently even throwing the fact that he’d lost (almost certainly unfairly) his second Zimmer last fall. It was the loss of the girl that had sent the Venezuelan into a tailspin that was showing up in his numbers—not defensive, of course, there was literally nothing on God’s earth that would make Luis Pena at age 22 anything less than the best defensive shortstop in the league—but the average was down, and the power, too. He’d slipped from being essentially a league average offensive producer to a bit of an anchor.
As she lifted him to his feet, the two-hundred pound weight of his trim body, nearly toppled her over. He moaned, and she felt his natural balance come to play even through the haze of rum that floated around him. Luis Pena was a brilliant athlete. On the field he was poetry, and she could feel the verses run through his muscles as the strained to keep him upright on his own.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m going to get you home.”
“Matti, baby. That you?” he said.
“No, Luis,” she said as she got him into the auto-pod that pulled up to the curb at her command. I’m not Matti.”
She’d done her homework now, though. Mathilde “Matti” Giaconni, he meant, and she knew just who “Matti,” was. Italian and Irish by descent. Chicagoan by birth. Double Agent by the gift of one Benedetta “Benny” Vitale. Heidi thought about the woman as she stuffed the young shortstop into the pod and got in after him. And she thought about the string of women she’d tracked down when, one after the other, they’d “found their way” into Luis Pena’s life at the edge of a barstool as the lovelorn shortstop tried to drown his sorrows.
Benny had done her homework.
Matti Gicconni had wrapped Luis Pena around her little finger, just as Benny had planned it. And she’d broken the shortstop’s heart, and with it his bat. Then to ground the kid’s nose in it, she’d sent a string of Chicago tramps into the path of the broken-hearted Pena. One after the other, they took him down another notch before leaving him alone again, this time with his injured back pressed against the cold hard brick of a back alley.
She pressed the command that would send the pod back to Luis Pena’s Yellow Springs Apartment.
The team had benched him the past three days, and would keep him off the field again tomorrow—so that was good. But he’d be back playing soon.
As the shortstop slumped against the corner of the auto-pod, Heidi Hickman, known elsewhere as Hellscape, paged through the reports and email chains that showed the connection. She would send a partial report to Collins, because that’s what he was paying her for. And she’d sit up in the shortstop’s apartment until he came to because there were things he needed to know—things that would start the healing process—things that, if Luis Pena was the man she thought he was, would get him back on track to winning that “third” Zimmer he was already working toward.
But some of it she’d keep to herself.
There were links there, after all, she thought as she recalled the bobblehead that now sat safely on the corner of her secret desk in her secret home. Links to follow.
And a girl has to keep a few things to herself.
