Stuart Kaminsky - Midnight Pass

I had made a rough two-page drawing of the inside of the house, but Snickers had said he didn’t need it. He had been here before. All he needed was to know which room we were going for.

“Windows are wired,” Snickers whispered. “There’s a door back here, back of the garage, and a big door to the house. We go in back here.”

The back door was on a broad, covered porch with wooden deck chairs padded with plush turquoise down pillows. The windows off the door were dark. Snickers moved to one of them and looked in. Satisfied, he reached under his leather jacket and came up with two six-inch-long needle-thin rods of metal.

“Spend maybe a hundred and fifty thousand juicing this place and the lock on the back door ain’t worth fire-ant shit.”

He inserted both pieces of metal in the lock, played with them for a few seconds, and heard something over the waves that Ames and I didn’t hear.

“Black jack, quinine, a bit of dose,” he said, putting the pieces of metal away and coming out from under his coat with a ribbon-thin strip of dark metal and a pliers, the thinnest pliers I had ever seen, with long pincers.

“Dead bolts,” he whispered, going to work. “Two of them. Got a real quiet little handsaw with diamond blades I can rent from a supplier in Tampa, but I didn’t have the cash and you didn’t have the time. This worked last time. If they didn’t change to something better, it’ll work again.”

Snickers went to work, slowly, quietly.

“You’re working cheap,” I said, seeing beads of sweat beginning to form on his nose.

“Love of the game,” he said. “Here comes our only sure noise. Cowboy?”

Ames reached under his slicker and came out with his shotgun.

There was a metallic double click, not loud but not quiet either. Snickers tucked his tools away, opened the door, and walked in, with Ames and me behind him.

We were in the kitchen. There was enough light coming from the next room to show us that. We stood waiting, Ames’s shotgun aimed at the passageway between the kitchen and what looked like a family room or den.

There were voices far away, deep in the house. We followed Snickers through the next door and found ourselves in a room filled with overstuffed dark chairs and shelves of books and videotapes. A large television set with a monster screen stood at the end of the room.

There was a single floor lamp on. Between the shelves of books and tapes were huge paintings of baseball players in full uniform, four of them altogether. In one, Willie Mays stood with his bat back, waiting for the pitch. In another, a pitcher, hands up, ball protected, looking over his shoulder at a man on second base, was frozen forever deciding whether to throw a fastball or curve. I thought it was Robin Roberts. I wasn’t sure.

The third painting looked as if it had been copied from an old baseball card, a very old baseball card judging from the player’s uniform, mustache, and the part down the center of his hair. I guessed Honus Wagner.

The fourth painting was someone I didn’t recognize at first. The Yankees uniform, the confident smile, the bat over his shoulder, the cap tilted back. It was Kevin Hoffmann, an idealized Kevin Hoffmann, a Kevin Hoffmann at least thirty years younger than the man I had met, but definitely Kevin Hoffmann who, I knew, had never played for the Yankees.

“Come on,” Snickers whispered to wake me from Hoffmann’s dream.

Snickers first, me second, and Ames last, we moved past a door to our right to a second door at the end of the room. Snickers opened it slowly and we heard a man’s voice, clear, distinct, several rooms away.

“He’s gonna have some trouble living that one down,” the man said.

“He’s been through it before. We all were. They’ll be cheering him with the next home run.”

The voices were coming from a radio or television. We moved slowly through a hardwood-floored dining room to an open door. The sound of the baseball announcers came from our right. There was a spiral staircase just to our left. Up we went. When we were almost at the top, I looked down into the room where the voice from the television set said, “A hit here could tie it up.”

I could see Kevin Hoffmann below, sitting with his back to me. He was wearing a pair of tan shorts and a baggy short-sleeved shirt with black-and-white vertical stripes. In his left hand was a glass of dark liquid. On his lap was a large pistol. I nudged Ames, who looked where I was pointing and he nodded.

Stanley was around somewhere but either out of sight in the room where Hoffmann sat, reading a book of poetry in the room next to the one where William Trasker lay, or roaming the house with a gun in his hands.

There was a small landing, not big enough for all three of us, at the top of the staircase. And there was a closed door. Snickers opened it slowly. The hinges made no sound. Light flooded in from the hallway beyond.

We moved through the door, Ames with shotgun held at hip level, aimed down the hallway. The door to Stanley’s room was open. The light was on. I moved forward and led the way to the room where I had seen Trasker. That door was closed. I opened it very slowly and stepped into darkness, with Snickers behind me and Ames turning his gun toward the now partially open door.

Snickers’s flashlight came on, circled the room, and hit the bed.

The covers were pulled down and rumpled. There was an indentation where someone’s head had been, but there was no William Trasker.

The overhead light suddenly came on and Stanley, in the doorway, a very large Magnum in his right hand, stood looking at us with an amused smile. He adjusted his glasses with his free hand and concentrated on Ames.

“We play gunfight in the streets of Laredo or do we go downstairs and pretend we’re civilized? I’m up for either,” Stanley said. “Old Wyatt Earp goes first and if he doesn’t put me down hard, you’re next. Fonesca?”

“Put the gun away, Ames,” I said.

“I can do him,” Ames said.

“We’d be murdering him in his own house,” I said.

“And you didn’t come to kill,” said Stanley. “You came for William Trasker. I’ll take you to him.”

Stanley stepped forward carefully, right hand out.

“Turn it around,” he said amiably.

Ames turned the shotgun holding it by the barrel. Stanley took it and motioned for us to walk ahead of him out the door. We did.

“Sorry,” I said to Snickers as Stanley marched us to the stairway and we started down.

“Not your fault,” Snickers said. “Not the money. The challenge got me. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“I know.”

Stanley marched us into the baseball collection room where Kevin Hoffmann sat drinking with a pistol in his lap. I could tell now he was wearing a New York Yankees shirt.

A color television sat on a shelf between two trophy cases. Someone was sliding into second base trying to steal. He was out by a yard.

Hoffmann pushed a button on the remote and the game disappeared.

Below the television set, in an armchair, sat a haggard man in a blue robe dotted with little white fleurs-de-lis. There was a blue terry cloth sash around William Trasker’s robe and he was wearing blue leather slippers. His skin was dead pale white. His eyes were dead blue. His mouth was partly open and his hair flopped over his forehead, probably getting in the way of his vision.

The good news was that he was alive and somewhat awake. The bad news was that he looked like he was going to fall over.

“You know what we’re going to do?” Hoffmann asked pleasantly, turning his head toward me and motioning to chairs in the room in front of him with the glass in his hand. “We’re going to sit here, maybe talk a little, maybe watch a little baseball, White Sox and Yankees, maybe have a drink until we’re sure the commission meeting is over. Then you are going to leave and Bill is going back to bed. Maybe Stanley has an appropriate poetic quotation for the occasion.”