Page 3 of The Battery
“You gotta brush it off, Hill,” Romo said. “Accidents happen, all right?”
“Okay. Yeah.”
“Why don’t you head home? Take the night. Rest up. We still have another game against the Brawlers tomorrow.”
My mouth had dropped open. All I could think about was the other relief pitchers and their snide remarks at my inability to handle emotion. They’d use it against me. I’d get knocked down a peg. They would—
“Jeez, Hill, I can practically hear your seething from here,” Romo said. “Calm down. We’re not holding this against you. It’s all good. Just get home and get some rest. That’s an order.”
I couldn’t help but smile. He really was the heart of the team.
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER TWO
Leo
My shoulder wason fire. Not to mention the—quite literal—pain in my ass. Cody Hill had a helluva fastball.
I sat hunched over in the guest locker room. Plum purple and ashen green had already blossomed on my shoulder, but most of my tattoos had it masked. I used my right hand to rest the bag of ice on my left shoulder to lower the swelling. Around me, Brawlers milled about to clean out their spaces. We lost, nine to twelve.
A fraction of my ego cared. A greater portion pushed through the upset and focused on what lie ahead.
Kid had a hell of an arm, though. Althoughkidmay have been slightly degrading—he was twenty-six and I was thirty-three. Rookies and veterans always seemed to create a greater age gap than there actually was. But hisarm. His concentration—the way I watched in real time as he pushed out the noise. He had talent, that much I could see. I understood why they put him in as a long reliever, though hell if I knew why they dropped him on a Brawlers vs. Riders game. He handled it mostly well. At five ten, maybe five eleven, I dwarfed the kid with my six-foot-three frame. He was lean, though. Toned. No fat. Cute, boyish face…
I looked down to snap myself from fantasyland. I stared at the underside of my left forearm. A full sleeve of tattoos ran the length of my arm and extended to the first knuckle of my hand. Within the swirling patterns and iconography were three flags interwoven, almost hidden. Three pennants. Three championship wins for three souls lost almost twenty years ago.
And now a fourth.I hadn’t found the space, or the right artist for that matter, to ink in a blank spot. Two of the three had the Brawlers red, the other the white and blue stripes of the Ann Arbor Lions. The fourth, hopefully…
I looked up as the primal sense within me flared. Two former friends walked by giving me daggers. They lived up to the name of our team and had cursed me out when I called off the fight. That pitcher, Hill—I could see the truth in his innocent eyes. He didn’t mean to strike me like that. Hurt like hell, but it was an accident.Twice, though that was harder for others to swallow. I knew my size and reputation intimidated, but that much?
“Got something to say?” I said as I stood and squared off my shoulders. I may have flexed. The tattoos extended across my shoulders and down my chest, filling in most of the skin with a variety of patterns. The most prominent was the uppercase Greek lambda, a massive chevron with the pinnacle that reached the middle of my pecs.
“Ain’t got shit to say,Spartan,” one of them, Quinn, said. He stood near my height, though had nowhere near the weight I did. He alone was responsible for the brawl last year that emptied both our team and the Riders into the field for an all-out battle royale. Thankfully, my ACL tear kept me from attending.
“Unless,” Quinn said, “you want to let the Riders walk all over us again?”
The ice bag fell from my grip. In four steps I would be in his face. At three steps I would have my arm craned back to really lean into the throw like I was little ol’ Cody back on the mound. This one would absolutely be intentional.
But after two steps, the manager’s voice crashed into the room. One by one, the circular array of television sets at the center of the ring winked off. He tossed the remote onto a nearby chair.
“Everybody, calm the fuck down. Quinn, you start shit again and there’s gonna be hell to pay. Leo, come with me. The rest of you, get the hell outta here.”
My eyes stayed locked with Quinn as I reached down to grab the ice bag. Quickly, I slipped on a black V-neck, pushed inside too-tight slate-gray chinos, and toed on a pair of white Vans. I grabbed the wax stick from my locker and rubbed some in my hands, then finger-combed my hair forward and to the side. The bald-faded sides were a fresh cut like my beard, the hair the color of wet sand.
I followed the manager down a short hallway into a private conference room with frosted glass. A laptop connected to a snaking black cord sat on one side of an oval table. A wall-mounted television showed five familiar faces in little boxes. My eyes dropped to the webcam seated just below the TV, then back to the screen.
The manager stood by the laptop and gestured for me to close the door. My stomach became the panhandle of Oklahoma in May. A fleet of twisters spun about, churning up nerves and anxiety like trailer parks and farmhouses. But my face was a mask of calm with a nip of “piss off,” which people had told me was my signature.
I stood beside the manager and stared at the screen where I saw the general manager for the Brawlers, my agent, our PR chick, and the director of baseball operations. Only one of them was smiling—my agent.
Turner, you son of a bitch, you did it.His smirk. It was almost infectious. My fingers itched to pull out my phone and text him.
“Leonidas Papadopoulos,” the general manager opened. He was the whitest rotund man I have ever seen, with cheeks redder than Santa’s. He had always called me by my full name, as if it were amusing to him. “Sorry about the circumstances here, butTurner insisted we contact you ASAP. We’re here to inform you that as of this moment, you are being traded to the New England Riders. You, ah…” He looked down and I heard the shuffling of papers. The man popped on some glasses and looked down his nose through them. “You’ll continue to earn your eighteen million a year for the remainder of the three-year contract. Sarah?”
A petite woman with raven dark hair and light brown skin leaned toward the camera. Behind her, a tabby cat leaped atop a table and meowed ceremoniously. “We’re making the official announcement in a joint statement tomorrow at noon. We’re asking you to keep this confidential until that time. Until then… Turner?”
Turner had been rubbing his hands and grinning. “All right. I’ll be in touch later, Leo. But basically, you’re gonna chat with the Riders’ manager in a bit. I got all the transfer stuff set up for you. You can be out of your place in Brooklyn and into a rental there in Lexington by tomorrow evening. First game will be on the eleventh. I think the Riders are playing the Winds.”
