While the leagues were on, I was worse. No matter how tightly I held onto the edge of the desk, my hands still shook.
But I couldn’t hold the clock back. The diehards finally pulled out, the last of them, at quarter to two. I said to Johnson, “Game tonight?” I barely managed to keep the quiver out of my voice.
He nodded and went to get his ball and shoes. Somehow he’d managed to buy them out of his pay. When he came back, I said, “Back in a minute. Got to check the doors.”
Just the two of us were left in the place. I went to the side door, slammed it hard, then opened it silently and put the little wedge in it to hold it open.
The light controls were near my desk. I killed everything except the small light over the desk and the lights on the one alley we would use. My heart was swinging from my tonsils.
Johnson popped his thumb out of the hole on the ball, lined his sights, and swung a sweet ball down the alley. It made a low drone as it rolled. Then it hooked into the pocket, and the pins went down with a single smash.
The rack crashed down and I took my first ball. Even though I had used a lot of chalk, my hands were still greasy with sweat. The ball slipped, hung on the edge all the way down, and plinked off the ten pm.
Johnson said mildly, “Getting the hard one first?”
I laughed too loud and too long and stopped too abruptly. I got eight more on my second ball and Johnson marked the miss.
A nightmare game. I didn’t dare turn around. I was afraid I’d see one of the men slipping silently in, and my face would give me away. Johnson was bowling like a machine. I piled up misses and splits, and I even threw one gutter ball. Each ball he rolled was just right. Once in the sixth frame one pin wavered and threatened to stay up, but finally it went down.
We had never talked much while bowling. I had to bite my tongue to keep from babbling to him. It might have made him suspicious.
It didn’t hit me between the eyes until he marked up his eighth straight strike. And suddenly I realized, that if he kept on, I might see the first perfect game I have ever seen. It was a little bit easier then to forget the figures silently closing in.
He put in the ninth strike and the tenth. I had a miss on the ninth, for a score to that point of one-twenty-one. Worst game of the past three years.
After the tenth strike he said softly, “You know, this might be it. I never had one of those fat three-hundred games before. I’ve always wanted one.”
“Don’t jinx yourself talking about it,” I said.
He put the eleventh ball in the pocket for a clean strike. “One more,” he said. The ball was trundling back up the rails when I saw the little flurry of movement down near the pin setter. That was my signal.
I said, as nonchalantly as I could, “Wait a second. Got to get cigarettes.”
As I turned and walked up the stairs he took his ball off the rack, walked slowly back, and chalked his fingers, pulling the towel through them.
I ran the last few steps to the desk, wiped my hand across the light panel, turning on every light in the place.
They had crept up in the darkness. They were in a half circle around him. He looked very small and old and tired standing down there.
“Okay, Dan,” one of them said. “End of the line. All out. Put the ball down slowly and lie on the floor, your arms spread.”
A dozen weapons were pointed at him.
In a weary voice he said, “You win. Let me heave this last ball down the alley.”
Before he could get an answer, he moved over and turned to face the pins. From the angle where I stood, higher than the others, I saw his left hand flick from his belt up to his mouth. He swallowed something.
He stood for a long second, then started his stride. Half-way to the foul line his smooth stride wavered. The ball thumped hard, bounced, and he went down on his face across the foul line.
He was a dead man when he hit the floor. Even I knew that. I dimly heard the hoarse shout of anger and disappointment.
But I had my eyes on the ball. It rolled with pathetic slowness. It wavered in toward the head pin, hit the head pin on the left side. The pins toppled slowly, all but the six pin. It stood without a waver. A pin rolled slowly across the alley, nudged the rebel, and tumbled it off into the pit.
As though I was walking in my sleep, I went back down the stairs, took the black crayon, marked in the last strike, and drew the 300, making the zeros fat and bold.
I knew he was a crook. I knew he was cruel and lawless. They told me about the way he shot the Nevada bank clerk in the stomach. But I also know that he was a homesick guy who came back to the only thing he liked to do and scrubbed out lavatories for the privilege of doing it.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me.
Because I don’t think I’m ever going to like the game as much as I used to.
A Trap for the Careless
(aka The Judas Chick)
This James Garver drove out to Sharan Point with his problem on the afternoon of the fifth day of badminton, all set to lay it in Shay Pritchard’s lap. The court was set up in the lower garden about fifty feet from the pool. I saw Krimbow coming slowly down the steps, favoring his rheumatism, his mouth set in the perpetual lemon-taste, the sun gleaming on his bristling white Prussian haircut.
It was my serve and I was at the point where the bat weighed forty-nine pounds, my mouth was full of cotton, and the pain in my side felt as though it had always been there.
I held onto the bird and Shay glared at me. “Come on, Robby!”
There are a few Shay Pritchards in every generation. They are seldom happy. The fates give them a triple portion of energy, a restless mind, an enormous capacity for boredom, a measure of personal charm, and a hint of savagery. Three years ago I went to Sharan Point to write Shay up for a national magazine. By now the editors have written me off. I’ve wanted to leave a dozen times. But somehow...
Physically he is a big slope-shouldered character with a round, guileless face, baby-blue eyes, curly blond hair, and a shade more weight below the belt than above it. Dressed in his best he looks like an overgrown kid being sent off to a church social. Stripped down, his thighs are like beer kegs, and restless slabs of muscle crawl on his shoulders and arms with every movement. Through some alchemy of personality he can look one moment like a bashful farm boy on his first date, and seconds later like a demon avenger, a conscienceless tool of doom.
I have seen him kill. And I have seen women look at him.
Either I hate him or he is a combination best friend and employer. Someday I will have to make up my mind.
Shay Pritchard: fullback, Rhodes scholar, infantryman, sculptor. Man of colossal hungers, of gargantuan appetites — with the instincts of a crook, and of a cop.
A sweet son of a bitch.
Krimbow spat with precision into a circular flower bed and said, “He’s one of those people keeps cracking his knuckles.”
Shay sighed. “Who, Krimbow?”
“Drives an eight-year-old sedan and wears a ten-year-old suit and says he’s got to see you. Says that a Lieutenant Ryan sent him out here.”
“Ryan knows I don’t work for love.”
“I told this fella the usual fee for just talking to you, Shay, and unless he’s got the inside of that roll packed with ones, it ought to be enough for two — three new cars. Calls himself James P. Garver.”
At the mention of the roll the annoyed expression slid off Shay’s round face. He beamed. “Help all those who can pay,” he said. “Where’d you put him?”
“I was going to leave him in the hall, until I saw he was loaded, and then I moved him into the small study.”
“Go tell him to wait fifteen minutes,” Shay said.