Bottom of the Ninth

The blood had stopped spreading across the concrete floor, settling into a dark irregular pool that reminded Elena of her father's eyes when he'd been drinking. She knelt, careful not to kneel in it, and pressed two fingers to the man's neck. No pulse. Not that she expected one after that shotgun blast.

"You were supposed to be fixing the sink, Danny," she whispered, but Danny was beyond plumbing repairs now. Danny was beyond everything.

On the television above the bar, a baseball game played silently—the ninth inning, two outs, bases loaded. The kind of pressure situation her father had lived for, back before his knees gave out and his dreams dissolved into whiskey and what-ifs. He'd taught her to keep score, taught her that baseball was a game of failures where even the best batters failed seven times out of ten. What he hadn't taught her was how to survive when you struck out for good.

The police would find the betting pool sheets soon enough. Danny had been running book for the local outfit, taking more action than he could cover, and somewhere along the way, he'd decided that robbing Peter to pay Paul meant literally robbing Peter at gunpoint. Peter, apparently, had been armed.

Elena stood up and walked behind the bar. She needed a drink—something to stop her hands from shaking, something to help her think. The bottle of James Bond stared back at her, and she thought about how her father would joke that drinking was like swimming: learn to do it young, and you'll never forget how. The joke had stopped being funny when she was sixteen and found him face-down in their apartment complex pool, three sheets to the wind and barely floating.

She poured two fingers anyway, didn't drink, just held the glass while the liquid caught the light from the silent television. The baseball game had ended. Players were shaking hands, the meaningless rituals of sport, all that grace under pressure applied to something that didn't matter in the end.

The sirens were getting closer now. Elena set down the glass, walked to the door, and locked it. She'd need to call her mother. She'd need to figure out what to say. But for another minute, she just stood there in the quiet, watching the blood-darkened floor, thinking about how all the things you can't swim away from eventually catch up with you, and how some games, you don't get to walk away from when the season ends.