LITMIR.BIZ

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a way she wouldn’t deny, and she knew he wouldn’t either.

      “Listen, uh, my daughter’s asleep. I want to take this downstairs. Can you call back in a minute or two?”

      The woman—what was her name, Turkey? Surely not. Turkel, that was it, said, “Fine, Mr. Teach. It’s eight forty-five. I’ll call at eight fifty. Will that be all right?”

      “Tell you what, give me ten minutes. I’ll make a cup of coffee. Wake up a little.”

      Marlie Turkel said ten minutes would be fine with her, but now her tone said, You won’t fuck with me if you know what’s good for you.

      Downstairs, Teach put the coffee on. With a cup in his hand, warm and reassuring, he considered simply refusing to talk to the woman. She had probably seen the police report, knew what he’d told Aimes. Elaborating might get him into more trouble than letting the facts speak for themselves. And it would be easier, at least for the time being, to ignore her.

      When the phone rang again, he snatched it from its cradle thinking of Dean upstairs. She’d wonder who was calling so early on a Saturday. Teach decided that elaborating a bit would serve him better than the bare bones of a police report. And he had no idea what the cop, Aimes, had written. He said, “Hello, Ms. Turkel. What can I tell you about yesterday?”

      “Anything you want to tell me, Mr. Teach. I’ve got Mr. Battles’s side of the story. I thought it was only fair to call you.”

      Fair? Teach thought. Right. He told her what had happened: the good fellowship of two men who liked football, the necessary but regrettable trip to the men’s room, the boy coming in, calling them . . . Teach faltered. Should he say the word to a woman? Hell yes, he should. If she was any kind of journalist at all, she’d want the facts. So, he told it: the boy calling them white bitches, telling them to give it up. He told her about his certainty that the boy had a weapon, the probability that he would use it.

      He told the woman he believed Tyrone Battles had planned to take their money and leave them dead in a men’s room. He painted the picture vividly for her, thinking that he might appeal to a woman’s fear of just such an encounter in a parking garage, on a dark street. As he talked, she murmured, “Yes, uh-huh, yes, I see,” and he could hear her fingers chattering on a computer keyboard.

      Teach finished with, “So you see, there wasn’t much I could do. I mean, except what I did. I think any man . . . Well, I mean it seems to me to be a natural reaction to the situation. The only reaction, really.” He should have stopped, but let himself say, “If you’d been there, you would have been glad I did it, Ms. Turkel.”

      “What about the other man? Why didn’t he react like you did?”

      Teach thought about it. From where he stood, the only true response was: Who the hell knows? He said, “He just froze, I guess. It happens.” And pissed himself.

      Should he tell her that? Teach let his answer stand. And he doubted that Mr. Pee Stain would elaborate the matter much if Marlie Turkel found him.

      The woman cleared her throat again. “Mr. Teach, when you saw the boy, did you have any idea who he was?”

      “Uh, no. No, I didn’t.” Teach thinking: For bleeding Jesus’ sake, what do I know about high school superstars?

      “I see.” That purring voice, keeping him at ease, opening him up, going for the deepest part. “You’d had something to drink, is that right?”

      “Yeah, sure. I had a couple of drinks. That’s what you do in a bar.”

      “A couple? Do you mean two?”

      “Two, three. I’m not sure exactly. I wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

      “The bartender says you had five bourbons.” The claws out now, flashing, then resheathed. “He said he remembered that pretty clearly.”

      Teach told her his memory was as good as a bartender’s (hoping this thing didn’t get to cash register tapes, records of bourbons sold), and he remembered two or three drinks.

      “I see. You were a football player, weren’t you, Mr. Teach, a long time ago? Weren’t you a very good football player?”

      A long time ago? Not so long, Teach thought. He didn’t tell Marlie Turkel that he still couldn’t walk into restaurants in Tampa without some stranger waving to him, calling, Go Gators! “Sure,” he said, “I guess you could say that.”

      “You know, I got interested in you when this thing came across my desk. I looked you up in the files. You had quite a career. A conference championship and two bowl victories. Pretty impressive. And then the Atlanta Falcons.” Something hard happened to her voice when she mentioned the Falcons.

      “Yeah, well, I had three pretty good years in the NFL, but it ended, and . . .” Teach summoned whimsy, regret with a little sweet nostalgia, “what can I tell you? It was a great ride while it lasted.”

      “What about Nate Means? Can you tell me about that, Mr. Teach?”

      Jesus, Nate Means. How had she, what did she . . . ?

      Teach repeated what he’d told the press twenty years ago about Nate Means. It was a speech he’d memorized. “It was a clean hit. Nobody in the league ever accused me of anything illegal. It was just bad luck. If the guy with the video camera hadn’t been too close to the sidelines, Means wouldn’t have hit his head like that.”

      In his third and last year in the NFL, James Teach had been moved to special teams, a wild band of suicides who ran the length of the field on kickoffs and punt returns and collided with whatever waited at the other end. That night, Teach had hit the kickoff returner, a million-dollar, first-round draft pick out of Michigan. Nate Means was a supertalent. It had been a bone-bending, white-light explosion of a tackle, and Means had caromed into the steel frame of a TV camera dolly. His third and fourth cervical vertebrae were crushed, and Means was rendered a paraplegic.

      The referee had thrown no flag that night, but the instant replay had shown that Means was inches out of bounds when Teach had hit him. The press had been divided: half calling it a late hit, even an intentional maiming by a frustrated former star, the other half saying that football was a contact sport and Teach’s hit was mean but clean. Journalists said what they said, and Teach knew you just had to keep your feet under you in the storm of ink.

      “But Mr. Teach, isn’t there a pattern of violence in your life?”

      “Football’s a violent game, Ms. Turkel. You don’t survive in it very long without being violent yourself. But that doesn’t mean you play dirty.”

      “It’s too bad your career ended that way.”

      It was her first comment. Teach wasn’t sure if she meant too bad he’d gone from backup quarterback with prospects for a starting role to free safety (where he’d lacked the speed for success) to special teams, or too bad about Nate Means, or all of it. Teach considered his pro career all of a piece and all too bad. When he thought about football, he concentrated on his college days.

      It occurred to him that he might try something different with this woman, maybe yet find a way out of this thing. Hadn’t she said she was interested in him? “Listen,” he said, “why don’t we have lunch? Talk about this face-to-face.” He was about to say, Maybe have a couple of drinks, get to know each other better, but recognized in time the stupidity of mentioning alcohol. “I’d like the chance to explain what happened a little more fully before you . . .” the phrase was cold in his mouth, “print this.”

      Marlie Turkel sighed. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Teach.”

      He kept trying: “Look, maybe there’s, you know, not really as much of a story here as you think. Maybe this thing doesn’t really have to be in the paper.”

      “Mr. Teach, race relations have deteriorated in Tampa in the last five

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