Once inside, I headed straight for a bathroom and locked the door behind me. I took off my Kevlar gloves and set them on a sink, then bent down to splash water on my face.
My hands shook, but only a little. Adrenaline was still surging through me, making me jittery and angry. I took a few deep breaths, stared hard at myself in the mirror.
“Need to trim your beard,” I said to my reflection. I tended to let it grow out, but Gen had expressed an admiration—not necessarily a preference—for the short trim I’d gotten just before our first date.
I took a couple more handfuls of water and splashed them into my eyes and top of my head. Then I picked up my gloves and went back into the office.
Jason waved me to his door and shut it behind him.
“Coffee?”
“Don’t think I need anything to jangle my nerves any more than they already are,” I answered.
“Let me rephrase,” Jason said, opening a drawer in his desk and coming up with a bottle of Wigle organic corn bourbon. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
He retrieved a couple of mugs from the sideboard where his coffee supplies resided. He sat back down, uncorked the bottle, and poured careful measures into each. We clinked mugs.
I took a sip. I didn’t drink this early in the day, as a rule. But the smooth sweet corn notes of the bourbon was just the thing for the anger that kept ticking over in me.
“What was that about?”
“Asshole followed me. And by ‘followed’ I mean ‘tried to run me off the goddamned road.’”
“I wonder how he spotted you,” Jason said, with a slight grin.
I eyed him over the rim of the mug. I was drinking his bourbon so I couldn’t afford to get too smart in reply.
“Could it possibly be the helmet.”
“I paid good money for this helmet.”
“I don’t doubt that you did, but there aren’t too many of those.”
“Hey.” I set the helmet on my lap, tapping the green side. “For what I paid for this Blue Squadron paintjob, you better not see any others.”
We shared a laugh and both sipped more bourbon.
“So,” my boss said, as he leaned back in his chair, “how many people is that trying to kill you in the last couple of months?”
“How many do the Aesir count as?”
“Too many,” he said. His smile had vanished and his face had gone a little grim, like he was studying me, or adding up some things only he could see. Then he took a letter off his desk and handed it over to me.
It was addressed to me, care of the firm, in careful, if not especially neat, handwriting. Where the return address would be, there was a large logo in three big, blocky letters: DWF. Underneath that, it read Delmarva Wrestling Federation.
“Delmarva wrestling?” I looked at Jason, and he shrugged, then handed me an opener shaped like a Civil War cavalry saber. I cut the envelope open. A letter wrapped around a pair of smaller pieces of paper tumbled out.
I took a look at the letter.
Jack,
Heard you were back in this area. I’m in a show on the Wilmington Riverfront this weekend. Thought you might like to come by and watch, maybe catch up. Hope to see you there,
Grant
One of the smaller pieces of paper was a ticket with this Saturday’s date and RIVERFRONT RUMBLE on it. The other was an all access pass, the kind meant to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and worn on a lanyard. It had my name and “Comp/Talent” with initials GA on it—standing for, I presumed, Grant Aronson. I hadn’t thought about him, or any of the rest of my college wrestling teammates, since the day I’d walked off campus and found myself at an enlistment center. I was so lost thinking about it—bus rides, plane rides, meets, training, sweating, being miserable more or less twenty-four hours a day—that I didn’t hear Jason until he called my name twice. I finally looked up, blinking away college memories.
“Yeah?”
“So what’s all this about?”
I looked up at him. “I guess one of my old college teammates is, uh…still in the wrestling game. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
I held out the letter and he took it and glanced over it.
“Delmarva Wrestling Federation?” If anything, he was more puzzled than I was.
“Professional wrestling,” I said.
“The fake kind.”
“I wouldn’t call it that around the folks who do it,” I said. “Not unless you want an earful. At the least.”
He shrugged. “Why’s this guy reaching out?”
“Don’t know. We were friends as teammates, I guess. But that was almost ten years ago now. We don’t talk a lot. Facebook friends. That kind of thing.”
Jason lowered his head and looked at me over the rim of his spectacles. “You have Facebook.”
“It’s a useful investigative tool.”
“I know that, but you can use a dummy account for that.” He tapped his lip with one finger. “Is it mostly artful pictures of cocktails on the deck of your boat in the sunset?”
“It is sometimes that.”
“Oh ho. And what else? Pictures of carefully staged plates?”
This was getting a little much. “I eat almost all of my dinners out of a jar,” I said, and I could feel some heat creeping into my cheeks. “Can I have that back now?” He set it down on the desk.
“Speaking of dinner, you owe me one, remember? We made a bet on the Kennelly kid.”
“Right.” I stood up, pulled out my wallet, and dropped three twenties and a ten on his desk. “There. That’ll cover you for Prost. Enjoy.”
I snatched the letter off his desk and wrapped it back around the ticket and the backstage pass as I walked out of his office. Behind me I heard him sputtering some kind of uncertainty or apology, but I didn’t care. I tucked the letter into the interior pocket of my jacket and went straight out the door. I wanted to climb back on to It and ride straight back to the Belle. I could see the afternoon and evening stretch out before me. Going from one book to another, reading a few pages before setting it down. Pacing, not that a thirty-four-foot houseboat offers a lot of room for that. You’ve got to be prepared to make a lot of turns. Then eventually making a cocktail that would turn sour with anger in my mouth.
It was going to be a classic evening at home alone, is what I was thinking.
Then I felt Mr. Jackson’s keys in my pocket and realized that I would, in fact, be committing grand theft auto, more or less, if I sped away. I was not necessarily opposed to treading on the rules when I needed to but major felonies were a bit out of my line.
So I paced in the parking lot for a few minutes, then sheepishly went back into the office, took as isolated a cubicle as I could find, and sat down. I made sure the Jackson file was completely closed, though I also added in a note about her husband’s attack. Needed to be documented in case any of us got involved in the divorce proceedings.
Then I started flipping through old case files I’d worked on to see if there was anything interesting in them. There wasn’t. Just a litany of broken promises, cheating partners and spouses, lying employees, lying bosses, the usual.
I got the letter and tickets back out and decided to check out the Delmarva Wrestling Federation. Their website was slickly made and contemporary looking, which I didn’t expect, but the instant I opened it the speakers on the computer I was on began blaring heavy metal. Startled, I knocked the mouse clear off the desk and fumbled with the keyboard for a few moments before I got the damn thing muted.
Red-faced, I grabbed the mouse off the floor and slunk down in the chair, hoping no one had noticed.
It looked like a pretty standard wrestling company, I guess. Good guys, bad guys, lots of music, chanting crowds, arenas that looked full, if a bit on the smaller side. I’d had my pro wrestling phase as a kid but had moved on once I discovered combat sports like boxing and mixed martial arts. I assumed everyone else had moved on as well, but that wasn’t the case. Grant had followed the stuff well into college and, obviously, beyond. I remember him trying to tell me about the terminology, but I didn’t remember any of it. He recorded any of the weekly shows he missed when the team traveled, obsessively read wrestling blogs, and had a collection of old shows on his computer, on DVD, even on VHS.
On the website’s roster, I couldn’t find “Grant Aronson,” but I did find “U.S. Grant,” and there he was, my old teammate. Instead of the orange and blue wrestling singlets and headgear I remembered him in, he was wearing star-spangled blue trunks and boots, a Civil War-era black cavalry trooper’s hat—I thought so, anyway, I’m not any kind of expert—and a black vest.
Grant had been the kind of cornfed, all-for-the-team guy I’d encountered a lot in my wrestling career. They took every motivational slogan every coach gave them and stirred it into a fiery slurry in their mind that made them good wrestlers, perfect teammates, and excellent partiers—but strictly in the off-season.
Sometime around age sixteen, I had stopped being one of those guys. Convinced I was smarter than them, I had taken every word a coach said that didn’t directly pertain to technique or training and discarded it as misguided advice at best, open psychological warfare at worst. I spent the bus trips to meets reading fantasy novels—or, worse, the books that were a part of my philosophy major—and ignoring everyone else. I had looked on coaches and teammates alike with a mix of pity and scorn, secure in my superiority.
And yet there Grant was, smiling widely, traveling the country—or at least the mid-Atlantic and the south—doing something that he seemed to love. Here I was, stuck in an office, waiting for an afternoon drunk to come get his keys. He’d finished his college education with, presumably, his degree in communications, psychology, or exercise science. Those are what I remembered every teammate majoring in.
I had two years worth of credits towards a philosophy degree that had probably expired. Who was actually the smart one here?
He had the same crew-cut blond hair, blue eyes, and bluff Scandinavian features that girls in college had loved. If his cheekbones were a little more prominent, his neck thicker, his skull a little wider than I remembered, well, that wasn’t necessarily the work of PEDs. I wasn’t in any place to judge anybody’s personal use of pharmaceuticals, not really. Not with a reminder to call Eddie pinging around my brain.
I couldn’t tell from the website what Grant’s role was, whether he was a good guy or a villain or just a fill-in, but there was a lot of info. He was billed as from Point Pleasant, Ohio—which a quick dip into Wikipedia confirmed was the real Ulysses S. Grant’s birthplace—though I knew he was damn sure from Indiana. It had a list of his signature moves, none of which made any sense to me. There were some embedded video clips of moves, and one of him giving an interview. I didn’t quite have it in me to click on them just now. Besides, it was about time for Donald Jackson to come looking for his keys, so I wandered back outside.
I found him lurking around the edge of the parking lot, a large Wawa coffee cup in one hand and a pastry bag in the other. He set the coffee down, pulled a chocolate chip muffin out of the bag, and took a huge bite.
I felt a surge of overwhelming hunger as I sidled up to him. He devoured the thing in three or four messy bites. A scattering of crumbs and chocolate smears around the sides of his mouth were the only remaining evidence of its existence by the time he saw me.
“Gimme my keys back,” he said. I stared at him. He picked up the pastry bag and held it out as though it might appease me. “Pumpkin spice. Can’t resist that seasonal stuff, you know?” He let out a weak chuckle. “Want it?” I said nothing, still, watching him with what I’d describe as a zoo-goer’s curiosity.
I stared at him till he lowered the bag, shrugged, pulled out a second muffin, and ate it. Finally I pulled out his keys.
“I hope that a walk, a coffee, and fourteen hundred calories worth of sugar has sobered you up enough to drive,” I said as I held them out.
He took them tentatively. “Who counts calories?”
I had done it for so long I hadn’t even needed to look up what those muffins weighed in at, but I didn’t see the need to unburden myself to a drunken philanderer.
Donald Jackson was the kind of asshole who apparently could not abide silence.
“Well, whatever, I took a walk, it balances out.”
“That’s not how that works,” I said. “And you’d have to walk ten or twelve miles to burn off the calories you just ate, even if it did. You’re not really big on accountability or self discipline, are you?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Look,” I said, waving a hand at him, “I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Get the hell out of here—but I swear to God if you’re still drunk and cause an accident on the way home because of it, and hurt anyone other than yourself, I’ll…” I stopped myself from finishing the sentence. Directly voicing threats was a bad move, especially since I had been employed by his wife. I quickly switched gears.
“How’d you know to look for me, anyway?”
“My wife told me you were the guy who tailed me…put a tracker on my car, said I could find you here. That car tracking shit ain’t even legal…”
That’s what he said. What I heard was, My wife tried to set me up for the ass-kicking she had thought she could purchase.
“Your wife’s name is on the car registry. She owns it the same as you. Means she can track it if she wants to.” And judging from the way things were developing, my guess is she would own the car entirely by herself in a few months.
He snorted and stalked away. “You’re easy to find with that dumb Star Wars helmet. Nerd.”
That was his big parting shot. As he walked away, having been humiliated, to the overpriced car he didn’t know how to drive, probably to go see the girlfriend who was going to cost him the ability to afford that. I rode a motorcycle I owned free and clear. But somehow I was the nerd.
I sighed, went back into the office, and made the executive decision to skip lunch so that I could stop at Capriotti’s and get a sub for dinner.