But as soon as the ball left the pitcher’s hand on the third pitch it was like we all knew it was the one. The ball cracked off the bat and headed right toward left field where we were sitting, and I stood on my seat and reached for Ruby’s hand and saw the right fielder backing toward the wall, and then he stopped and watched it fly just left of the foul pole and over our heads. I turned just as it bounced off the window in the skyboxes above us and fell right down in front of our seats and rolled toward the wall.
It seemed like everyone in the stands dove for the ball at the same time, including Wade. People pushed up against me, and I stepped down off my seat and grabbed Ruby and lifted her down too. “Hold on to me,” I said. But then it was over all of a sudden, and the guy who’d been sitting in front of us stood up and lifted the ball above his head, and everyone around us started clapping and cheering.
Wade stood up too. His shirt was smeared with mustard and ketchup from the hot dog he’d been holding, and his hair was sopping wet where somebody’d spilled something-maybe Coke or beer-all over him. But he was laughing. “I almost had it!” he said, lifting his hand and high-fiving me and then Ruby. “I almost had a piece of history.” He held his hand in front of me like he wanted me to see it, but I wasn’t looking at his hand; instead I was watching Mark McGwire as he rounded third and gave the third baseman a high five, and I watched when he crossed home plate, where his son was waiting for him in a Cardinals bat boy uniform. His dad picked him up and lifted him into the air, and I watched them, thinking about what it must feel like to have your dad reach down and pick you up, lift you up off the ground away from everything while everyone watched and everyone cheered.
“Look!” Ruby said, raising her hand and pointing at center field. “It’s us!” Me and Wade both looked up; she was right. The three of us were on the huge screen, standing in the row behind the guy who held the home-run ball over his head, high-fiving everyone around him.
Brady Weller
CHAPTER 30
At first my eyes had been locked on McGwire at the plate, but now I watched him as he rounded first. When he crossed second base, my eyes lifted to the Jumbotron in the center field, and that’s when I saw them just before the screen changed to replay McGwire’s swing. My hand immediately went to my back pocket, and without looking at it I unfolded the copy of Chesterfield’s mug shot. In slow motion, the screen showed McGwire’s home run flying just fair and bouncing off the skybox before dropping into the stands. In those couple of seconds, I got a quick glimpse of two girls who looked like Easter and Ruby, and then I saw Wade dive for the ball.
Beside me, an elderly man with binoculars stood by the upper-deck railing behind home plate. “Can I borrow these?” I asked, lifting the strap from around his neck without waiting for him to answer. McGwire had crossed home plate by the time I found them out in the left field, just two rows up from the wall. I pushed the binoculars back toward the old man and pounded down the stairs to the concourse tunnel.
It was empty; everyone inside the stadium had stayed at their seats or gone down the tunnels to watch McGwire at bat. I turned to my right and ran through the stadium faster than I’d ever run in my life, trying to remember the section number they’d been sitting in when I found them through the binoculars, slowing to look down the tunnels to get my bearings from what I could see of the stands. Each tunnel was a flash of sunshine and green grass and deafening cheers.
When I rounded the third-base line for the outfield, I took the first tunnel on my right, and when I saw the yellow foul pole I pounded down the steps toward the field, the grass rising up like the flat face of a green mossy lake.
The girls were alone.
Pruitt
CHAPTER 31
Her picture was in my hand when her face appeared on the Jumbotron, but my eyes were focused instead on Wade Chesterfield where he stood beside her.
But by the time I found them in the stands he was walking up the steps away from their seats.
The concourse was empty, everyone still cheering inside the stadium, the roar carrying down each tunnel where the light crossed my face and my feet hammered the cement on the way toward him. My hand reached back and cradled the gun against my waist, holding it to make certain it didn’t work itself free.
He probably heard someone running down the concourse toward him and thought they were rushing back to their seats to see the celebration, but if he’d looked up instead of ducking into the bathroom at the top of the stairs he would’ve seen me bearing down on him.
Wade stood in the first stall on the left, inside the empty restroom, his back to me, wiping at his shirt with toilet paper. My heart pounded in my chest and the blood surged through my body, and I felt a trail of it trickling from my nose and down onto my lips.
I stepped into the stall, and he turned around to see me standing right in front of him.
“Hey, Wade.”
He tried to squeeze past me, but my arms locked around his neck and pulled him back into the stall. He squirmed around so that his back was against my chest, and his feet pushed off from the toilet. We stumbled out of the stall and fell toward the sinks. My shoulder slammed against a bank of automatic hand dryers, turning a few on, the hot air blowing down my arm and across his face. He thrashed around trying to get free, but my arms tightened around his neck and lifted him off the floor, part of me hoping to feel his body go slack so that it would be done. “Do you remember me, Wade?”
“Wait,” he said, his voice barely able to make it all the way out of his mouth. “My girls.” He was covered in the smells of the ballpark-ketchup, mustard, beer, sweat.
“Where’s the money, Wade?” My hold on his neck loosened so he could get enough air to answer. But he squirmed free and faced me, his eyes looking right into mine. My hands flew to either side of his face, my thumbs forcing themselves into his eye sockets. He screamed out and closed his eyes as tight as he could, his fingers reaching out blindly, clawing at my face. His hands came away from me covered in the blood from my nose, and his fingers slid down my arms and to my wrists.
Suddenly there was the sound of my sunglasses hitting the concrete, and the dim light was now brighter in my eyes. My hands turned him loose and my knees bent so that my fingers could sweep the floor. Wade rushed past me, knocking me backward to the ground, the gun coming loose from my waistband and my hand sending it sliding across the room.
I grabbed hold of Wade’s ankles and pulled him to the floor, my body on top of him and my hands covering his just as his finger closed around the trigger and squeezed off a round. It skipped off the floor and ricocheted into the ceiling. The noise was deafening.
I got to my feet just as voices echoed outside in the concourse, and then a set of hands were on my shoulders, another set grabbing Wade and pulling him free. Someone yelled, “Gun!” before my fist crushed a jaw, teeth tearing into my knuckles.
“Let’s get some help in here!” another voice screamed.
Wade was still underfoot when my shoulders squared to the two guys in orange vests in front of me, my eyes trying to scan the floor for the gun. And then the Mace hit me, and they were on top of me. And in a few seconds there were others.
“Stop!” someone screamed, but they weren’t talking to me. From out in the stadium came the sound of people cheering once the game restarted. But my ears caught another sound: it was the echo of Wade Chesterfield’s footsteps running away from me down the concourse.