Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

He still didn’t reply. The entire stadium is up on its feet, everyone clapping in an audible frenzy, and he’s just sitting there looking at me, but really looking at nothing at all.

Undaunted, I said, “Great seats, no?” Read: Don’t be rushing anywhere, there, MVP. You may be the entire reason for this turn of fortune.

Trot Nixon comes to the plate. He takes the first pitch for a ball. The crowd calms itself down and everyone takes their seats. Elizabeth is still down in concessions hell — exactly where I want her right now, bless her heart, not to mention the rest of her gorgeous body.

I leaned back in my seat, casually turned to my silent friend, and said, “Truth is, I think Trot’s the best clutch hitter on the club.”

He replied, “You Jack Flynn?”

Ding, ding, ding. I knew this was some sort of Christ figure, or maybe Christ himself, descending from the heavens to push the Red Sox to their first World Series win in 85 years, and he’s about to let me in on his secret.

Nixon swung and missed. I turned to my seatmate and stared him up and down, allowing some of my reporter’s skepticism to take hold. I asked, “Why do you ask?”

He was just sitting there, his eyes so dull we might as well have been sitting in the last pew of the Holy Name Cathedral on a Sunday morning rather than the box seats of Fenway Park during a one-run game against the Yankees in the middle of the best pennant race we’ve had in this city in twenty years.

“Because if you are, I have some information for you.”

Well, there you have it, my biggest weakness — information, well, along with beautiful women, great food, and handsome dogs, specifically retrievers.

Crack.

I whirled toward the action to see an arching fly ball to center field, more shallow than I or anyone else in the park would have liked. The outfielder caught it. Ramirez tagged up and headed for home. It’s a shame they don’t have public transportation right on the playing field because it probably would have gotten him there faster.

As it was, the catcher caught the throw, completed half that day’s New York Times crossword puzzle, then tagged Ramirez out. Double play. To Ramirez’s credit, it took him so long to run home that it allowed Ortiz to tag up and get to third.

Back to the man beside me. I asked, “What is it you have?”

“You’re Mr. Flynn?”

“No, my father’s Mr. Flynn. He’s dead, though. I just go by Jack. Jack Flynn.”

I sounded like Bond, James Bond, when I said that, but not really.

My fellow fan said, “From the Record, right?”

I nodded.

“I have a group of associates who want to meet you after the game, in the Boston Cab Company garage. If you’re not there within thirty minutes of the last out, they’re gone, and they’ll take the information somewhere else. We have a story of crucial importance that we’d like to give you.”

His instructions were formal, rehearsed, as if he had gone over them many times in what I was starting to understand was his tiny mind. Deviation didn’t seem to suit him well, as when I replied, “Not likely. But who are your associates?”

He fumbled for a moment, collected himself, and returned to the script, “You will see them soon enough. Mr. Flynn, people’s lives depend on your getting this story. Life and death. It’s in your hands.”

Crack.

Again, I turned back to the infield and saw batter Jason Varitek racing toward first base. The right fielder was sprinting toward the foul line, heading directly at the Pesky Pole. I saw a blur of white disappear in the short right field stands. I heard a deafening roar. I began clapping along with the rest of civilization, stamping my feet, hollering my approval, until I couldn’t clap, stamp, or holler anymore.

Then, flush with bravado, I turned back to my mystery man and said, “Tell your friends to go fuck themselves.”

Elizabeth, standing beside me holding a Cool Dog in each hand, an impassive look on her utterly flawless face, held one out to me and casually replied, “Why don’t you go tell them yourself.”

I accepted the ice cream and said, “No, no, I wasn’t talking to you.”

She looked at me curiously. I cast a glance up the aisle, in search of my messenger, but he was nowhere to be found. Elizabeth said, “I had to go all the way over to the first base side to track these things down. You better like it.”

Oh, I do. I do. I spread some warm chocolate sauce across mine. The Red Sox put New York down one-two-three in the top of the ninth, advancing to within a game of first place. But it ends up, now that the game was over, the night’s excitement had just begun.

I don’t want to sound melodramatic and make this seem like I was meeting an unknown informant in an underground parking garage in the dark of an unfriendly night. That would be a lie. The garage was at street level.

The Boston Cab Company is located in one of those warehouse-style buildings on the outfield end of Fenway, tucked among the artists’ lofts and sprawling dance clubs that encircle much of the park. Elizabeth and I filed out of the stadium with the rest of a happy humanity, and outside, on Yawkey Way, she grabbed my arm with both her hands in that affectionate way she has and said, “You pick the place, I’ll buy the beer.”

It was one of those increasingly common situations that required an ever so slightly delicate touch, for the following reasons: My name is Jack Flynn. If that’s not enough of a description, and much to my professional chagrin, in most cases, it’s not, I’m a reporter for The Boston Record, as the lucky messenger pointed out during the game. Actually, I’m the best reporter I know, though with a caveat. My editors often tell me I don’t know a lot — jokingly, I think, or at least I hope.

Anyway, Elizabeth Riggs is also a reporter, though with The New York Times, her beat being New England and all the news that’s fit to print about it. That’s a little newspaper humor there. Admittedly, she didn’t laugh the first time I used it either.

The point here being that because we work for two papers that might be considered rivals, I can’t always share with Elizabeth every facet and nuance of my day, nor she with me. At least we both understood that, so I said to her, “Something work-related suddenly came up. Very suddenly. I have to go meet a guy. I don’t have a clue about how long I’ll be, but I suspect not very.”

We were standing on the street outside of Gate A, with what felt like the entire baseball-loving world jostling past us. My emotions were admittedly mixed. On the one hand, the Sox had won. I had tickets to the next night’s game. I wanted nothing more than to sashay into some bar with the most beautiful woman in town and celebrate what it means to be in the throes of an epic pennant race during the greatest month in the greatest city in the world.

On the other hand, this was Monday night, September 22. On Wednesday, the aforementioned Elizabeth would be boarding a flight that would take her to a new life in California, where she would become the San Francisco bureau chief for the Times. The prospect of her departure left me feeling somewhere between uneasy and morose, and standing there staring into the biggest, bluest eyes I might ever see in my life, I didn’t like the fact that I was being dragged off on what would likely prove to be a goose chase, and one that probably wouldn’t be all that wild. Good-byes are always tough, tougher still when you’re not there to give them.

Elizabeth didn’t ask any more questions. She had been as distracted as I had lately, wondering about her new job, wondering about her new life in a faraway city, wondering what the future held for us, as a couple, or not as a couple, whichever the case might be. All good questions, the last of which we had fastidiously avoided. She pushed her hair out of her face, kissed me softly on the lips, and said, “If I’m asleep when you get home, wake me up and fuck me.”