“Why the sports store?” Griffin asked.
I smiled. “We’re going to try for a few homers. And I’m not telling you anything more, Griff. It’s a surprise. It’ll work off some energy for you two.”
Griffin gave in to the inevitable of that easily enough. He’d known me for ten years. He knew how much I loved my surprises and went on to answer my question. “We have been practicing. We’ve been out a few times. The last time went flawlessly until a female eagle took a liking to Zeke. She either wanted to do him or eat him. He does look like an overgrown robin with those copper brown feathers of his.”
“A falcon or a hawk,” Zeke growled. “Not a robin.”
“And you weren’t attacked by any horny birds?” I asked Griffin, laughing.
“No,” Zeke answered for him. “He’s not a bird. He’s a dragon. When the light hits his wings, it’s like”—he paused—“like the sun falling out of the sky.”
I would’ve patted his knee again. It sounded simple, was simple, but that was beyond poetry for someone like Zeke. It swelled your heart and broke it all in one. But although Griffin looked tired, his hand beat my own to Zeke, so I turned my full attention back to driving, my smile turning from cheerful to affectionate. I continued to smile to myself, smug as a cat with his own personal sushi chef, as I drove to the nearest sports store and with the guys’ help, discovered that you could fit fifteen baseball bats in the Cobra’s trunk. Louisville Sluggers, satiny smooth wooden works of art. When you taught those who needed it a lesson, you taught it with style.
Next I pointed the car toward Fifth Street. It was where the homeless had congregated in Vegas once they had been kicked out of the parks. Rows and rows of them lining the sidewalks, some even with tents. There they lived and there they sometimes died. I’d seen it in the news the past few weeks. Three men, bored with all the drinking, gambling, and strippers that Vegas had to offer, decided that beating up people down on their luck would be the next-best alternative. Monopoly . . . Grand Theft Auto—that wasn’t enough for these guys. And the homeless were easy targets. Some were hiding from things they’d done, things worse than beatings, but most were only people who’d lost their jobs and homes or those who were mentally ill. Then there were those that just didn’t understand life. Or maybe more accurately, life didn’t understand them. That was a hard road to walk and these people didn’t need homicidal asses making things any worse for them.
The police made an effort. They cruised Fifth Street, but bullies in baseball hats and sweats weren’t easy to pick out from the homeless who surrounded them, and there was plenty of crime elsewhere in Vegas to keep them busy. Even when one of the lost was killed, beaten to death by three baseball bats. The police came and went more frequently then. I watched from one of the stores in a strip mall that lined the street, but that lasted only about a week, and it was business as usual . . . except to the men and women who huddled on the sidewalk in the night. Waiting—for the next time, because, as they knew, there would be a next time.
They were right. There was going to be a next time, hopefully tonight. We tricksters had a sort of knack for choosing the right moment. A physicist had once tried to explain it to me . . . about how time wasn’t linear, that it was happening all at once, from beginning to end, but there was no beginning or end. There was only now, a billion nows, and that maybe tricksters could sense those other nows. That at some level we knew even if we couldn’t see, and that was our knack for showing up at just the right moment.
It was an interesting theory, especially as he told it to me as I dangled him over the edge of a volcano. It had been intriguing enough that I let him off with a warning about staying away from na?ve virgins in the future instead of dropping him in lava like an ancient one himself.
Now though, the subject was still baseball and baseball bats. But this time, it was going to be just like real baseball. All-American fun—hot dogs, apple pie with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream, blue skies, and hitting one out of the park. The lost would only be lost for now, not lost forever.