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  “Okay.”

  I helped her lug the water jugs from her car, a recent-model Jeep Cherokee, and I arranged the bats while she anchored the bases.

  “This team is in the Police Softball League,” Randie said. “It’s for girls going into tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade. We play other teams in the county, and if we do well, we go to the state tournament at the end of the summer. I’m a corporal on the police force. I work in the community affairs division.”

  “I didn’t know you were a cop.”

  “It’s all right, Kotter. I haven’t arrested anyone on the team all year.”

  I laughed. This coach was making me feel nervous and relaxed at the same time.

  “You can stay and watch the practice if you want to,” she said.

  I wanted to. I retreated to the bench when the players started to arrive, sauntering and styling as athletes do. They greeted Randie warmly and went about their practice in that relaxed but alert manner of every good ballplayer.

  I minded my own business until a batter smashed a foul ball off her shin. Randie was beside her almost before she hit the ground and hollered at me, “Kotter! Go to my car and get an ice pack out of the ice chest in the back!”

  I scrambled off, elbows and knees pumping, not to mention my heart. Years later Randie teased me about it. “You looked like one of those skinny, little pale sandpipers with a hound dog after it. I never saw a child scurry so.” All I knew at the time was that I was wanted.

  I brought her the ice and made myself scarce again. At the end of the practice, she asked me to wait until the players had departed. We walked to her car and she gave me one of the team’s dark blue baseball caps.

  “Here,” she said. “I can use you again tomorrow.”

  I wore that cap everywhere, jammed down low over my eyes. My mother hated it but didn’t ask me to get rid of it. Freedom of expression, you know.

  I spent all of that summer hanging around with Randie’s team and all of the next one, too.

  At some point I wondered idly how a cop could have so much time for a softball team, but I never asked her. Little did I know it was a major part of her job. The police force knew what it was doing. It made the biggest drug bust in the history of Hillsboro after one of Randie’s players whispered that some dealers from out of town were casing her neighborhood. Randie got a citation for that one.

  ***

  The citation still hung on Randie’s wall. I glanced at it, then looked back at her and shrugged. “I guess I can put up with Alie de Ville,” I said.

  Randie gave me that all-knowing chuckle. “Why don’t you come to dinner tonight,” she said. “Julie’s barbecuing chicken and boiling up some corn on the cob.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Four

  Randie and Julie lived in a little house near the park on a street that served as a transition from one side of town to the other. They could have afforded better, but Randie didn’t want to be too far from the meaner neighborhoods. Law enforcement was a full-time commitment for her.

  Randie answered my knock. “Come on in. Dinner will be ready in a minute. Is that the beer?”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I said, lifting a paper bag in one hand and saluting mockingly with the other.

  She kicked me in the seat of my pants as I walked by. I could get away with sassing her in their house, but I always paid for it.

  I went into the kitchen to put the beer in the refrigerator and see Julie.

  “Kotter! How’s it going?” Julie turned from the stove and melted against me in a sensuous hug. Randie watched amusedly from the doorway.

  “Julie, let me take you away from all this,” I said. “I’ll show you sunsets in Paris, romance on the Riviera, candlelight cruises on—”

  Julie shoved me away. “What’s the matter, Kotter? Can’t you get that clerk at the Rising Moon to pay any attention to you?” she teased.

  “It’s not the clerk that’s the problem,” Randie said. “It’s that tennis pro.”

  Julie smiled mischievously. “What a pity. You should have seen her, Kotter. A body like that doesn’t come along every day. Lean, muscular, skin like silk, lying there naked on my massage table. As soon as I touched her, she started moaning real softly, like she was fantasizing about—”

  “Would you guys lay off?” I yelped.

  “You started it,” Julie said.

  “She always does,” Randie said drily.

  I sighed. I wasn’t going to win this one. “I think I could use a beer,” I said.

  “Not to mention a cold shower,” Randie said. She got herself a beer, handed one to me and found Julie an Evian. Julie didn’t drink. She said her body was a temple—which was perfectly obvious to anybody who looked. We sat down to eat.

  “Julie,” I said, “do you know what Alie de Ville did to me before you started the massage?”

  “No, what?”

  I explained how Alie had appeared in the anteroom. “That towel,” I said. “A couple of millimeters lower, and I’d have been up close and personal with a pair of celebrity breasts.”

  “You know, Kotter,” Julie said, “I haven’t seen you this hot and bothered about a woman since Randie brought you here the first time.”

  “That was over the student teacher,” Randie said, laughing.

  “It was the worst,” Julie said.

  “No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as when Kotter got involved with the pitcher at the state softball tournament,” Randie said. She was laughing so hard she was dabbing her eyes with her napkin, and that got Julie laughing, too. I was blushing furiously.

  “God, Kotter,” Julie said, “didn’t you ever learn to keep your hands to yourself?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my fault! Both of those times they came on to me!”

  “Kotter, I swear, I’ve caught crooks red-handed with better alibis than that,” Randie needled.

  “Do we really have to get into all this stuff?” I asked, still blushing.

  “Yes, we do,” Randie said. “It’s good for you.”

  ***

  The summer after I finished ninth grade I was eligible to play on Randie’s softball team, but I knew my parents would never let me. Wendell and Lynn still were holding out for the Hillsboro Library Reading Club.

  I confessed my troubles to Randie about a week before the softball season began. I didn’t cry, but it was a close call.

  Randie listened quite seriously, as though something important was in the balance, and maybe it was. “I think I can help,” she said. “I’d like to pay a visit to your parents and do a little negotiating.”

  “They’ll never change their minds.”

  “We’ll see about that. But you have to promise me you’ll do whatever we decide.”

  “I’m not going to that Reading Club.”

  Randie put her hands on my shoulders. “This isn’t going to work if you don’t trust me, and it isn’t going to work if I can’t count on you. Now what’ll it be?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Okay.”

  The next evening Randie came to our house. She arrived in a police cruiser and wore her uniform, all spit and polish with her hat pulled low—very intimidating. There were sergeant’s stripes on her sleeves now. As she walked up the path over the expanse of lawn, I wondered what the neighbors were thinking. When people on our street encountered the law, they usually met with lawyers, not cops.

  My parents were waiting, as gracious as they could be to someone not of their set. “You’re very kind to take an interest in our daughter,” my mother said.

  “Not at all. It’s been a pleasure knowing Wendy Lynn,” Randie replied. I winced to hear her call me that, but she knew what she was doing. When in Rome, act patrician.

  Wendell and Lynn ushered her into their study. I lounged on the living room couch, doing nothing. They talked for nearly an hour, and then Randie came out alone. I searched her face for clues, but she had been on too many witness stands to give anythi
ng away.

  She sat on the couch beside me and set her hat do the coffee table. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “You can play softball, and you don’t have to go to the Reading Club, but you do have to read. I’ll be the one who chooses the books.”

  “What kind of books?” I asked warily.

  Randie chuckled. “You’ll know soon enough. Now come on, I’m taking you out for ice cream.”

  Randie never did tell me how she brought my parents around. Still, I wasn’t the least bit surprised in the years to come when police departments around the state asked for her help in suicide and hostage situations. If she could persuade Wendell and Lynn, she could handle anything.

  Randie kept her part of the bargain, making sure I did my reading. She gave me a variety of books—a biography of Arthur Ashe, Huckleberry Finn, a book of mythology, The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. To my astonishment, I liked them. I even read Ryan’s story of D-Day twice. I still wasn’t any scholar, but by the end of that summer, the printed word and I were getting along.

  Mostly there was softball. A rookie in the major leagues couldn’t have been any happier than I was. I wanted to play first base, but there was no way I was going to displace Amanda Jackson. She was in her second year on the squad, and she was awesome. Five foot ten and wreathed in muscle, Amanda went from first to third faster than anyone else on the team and led the league in home runs. With it all, She had the sunniest smile in the league, too.

  I liked Amanda too much to resent her. I was content to play right field, instead. I batted second and developed a reputation as a pesky hitter.

  We had a good team that year but not a great one, and we just missed the cut for the state tournament. The next year we were better and got to go.

  That’s what led to trouble.

  I was fifteen and fast coming to the realization that prom nights did not make my heart go pitter-patter but pajama parties did. I accepted it without anguish, simply acknowledging it as something else that made me a perpetual outsider. I was used to not fitting in at home. I was comfortable being the only white kid on a team of African-American and Latin players. A long time ago I had figured out the only thing normal about me was if somebody took my temperature and it was ninety-eight point six.

  The state tournament was held at Devon Academy, a boarding school about two hours away from Hillsboro. The teams stayed in the dormitories and ate together in the dining hall.

  The buzz that year was all about a team from Maycomb County and its pitcher. Her name was Mary Margaret O’Day, but everyone called her Shamrock—for the obvious reason. She was going into her senior year, which put her a grade ahead of me.

  Shamrock had set state records that summer for strikeouts and shutouts, and her team had gone undefeated. UCLA, one of the best softball schools in the country, had scouted her and was expected to offer her a scholarship.

  Shamrock threw five pitches—fastball, change, rise, drop and curve—and every one of them was wicked. She was said to have joked she was sorry that batters got only three strikes, because it meant she couldn’t use her whole repertoire.

  The tournament schedule did not go our way. We were slated to start off against Maycomb County. Shamrock and her magic arm would be gunning for us.

  “We could do worse,” said Estelle Martinez, our shortstop. “We could be opening against the New York Yankees.”

  “When they had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the lineup,” said Bonita Street, the left fielder.

  When we filed into the dining hall for dinner on the eve of the tournament, we weren’t any happier to discover we had been assigned the table next to Maycomb. They looked us over. We looked them over. They were big and they were burly, and they looked like the class act from a rugby tournament.

  I spotted Shamrock, sitting in the middle of their table surrounded by her teammates, like the prize jewel she was. Unlike the rest of them, Shamrock was no bruiser. She was lean and rangy, her spare frame tucked into a green shirt and white jeans. She had no chest to speak of, and her hips were slim as a boy’s. Her hair was short and dark, and there was an easy jauntiness to her.

  If you had wanted to paint a picture of the luck of the Irish, you would have painted Shamrock. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  “Look at the size of them,” Amanda, our first base player, whispered to me.

  “I know.”

  “That one in the middle has got to be Shamrock.”

  “I noticed.”

  The Maycomb players saw us staring and took exception. “Hey,” a player said. “What are you looking at?”

  “Losers,” I blurted.

  The Maycomb team stiffened as one, as though they expected lightning to flash through the ceiling and strike me dead. Clearly no one had ever spoken to them that way.

  Then Shamrock fixed me with a pitcher’s eye. “You,” she said. “Where do you bat in your lineup?”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you think you’ll be able to pick me out from the rest of my team?” I shot back. It cracked up my teammates, pale as I was against them, and even got a quick snicker or two out of Maycomb.

  Shamrock never wavered. “Where do you bat?” she repeated.

  “Second.”

  “Well, I’ve got news for you. You’re going down on strikes. You can put the ‘K’ on the scorecard now.”

  “The only one going down is you. I’ll be hitting right back through the middle.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Shamrock said.

  The two teams turned their backs on one another and huddled at their tables.

  “Do you think you should have said all that?” asked Vanessa Chamberlain, our center fielder. “They’re going to want to kill us now.”

  I shrugged.

  “I can see it unfolding,” moaned Estelle. “The first double-play ball I take covering second base, I get knocked to kingdom come.”

  “Sorry, guys. It just sort of happened,” I said.

  Amanda put an arm around my shoulders. “We know you can’t help it, Kotter. We’re with you.”

  The next morning we were pretty nervous as we congregated at the ball field. We watched Shamrock warming up. She looked like Nolan Ryan out there.

  We batted first, with Estelle leading off. She struck out on three pitches, never taking the bat off her shoulder. I’m not even sure she opened her eyes.

  Then it was my turn. I took a deep breath of the morning air and listened to the chirps and trills of the birds. I was damned if I was going to look nervous.

  I settled in at the plate. Shamrock glared at me, then shifted into her windup. The pitch was the fastest I had ever seen in my life, and like Estelle before me, I never moved.

  “Strike one!” the umpire bellowed. I was sure she was guessing. She couldn’t have told any more about that pitch than I could.

  Shamrock gave me a little smirk and set herself for the next delivery. It was another fastball, and I swung and missed. I managed to foul off the third pitch, but the one after that dropped down on me and I swung through it. I struck out—just as Shamrock had predicted.

  She didn’t even bother to look at me as I trudged back to the bench. I was furious. I hadn’t even been a challenge for her. I had made the fatal mistake of worrying about her pitching instead of my hitting. I wasn’t going to let it happen again.

  Maycomb was leading 2-0 when I came up for my second at-bat in the fourth inning, but the score didn’t reflect how bad it really was. Not one of us had reached base. Shamrock had a perfect game going.

  She blew the first pitch by me, and I didn’t even try for it. The second one was what I was praying for—a changeup I could handle. It came in a little bit low, but I went for it and did what I had vowed to do. I smoked it right back at the pitcher’s mound.

  It was a screamer of a line drive that could have done serious damage to a lesser athlete, but Shamrock miraculously got her glove in front of her face. The ball deflected straight up in the air, its venom draining, and she caught it easily
on the way down. I was out.

  I gave her a look as I trotted back to our bench, but she had her back turned—the coward. Still, I had settled the score. We were even.

  Amanda gave me a pat on the back as I sat down. “That’ll give her something to think about!” she said.

  “Hell of a shot,” Estelle said.

  I nodded my thanks, feeling pretty good.

  By the seventh and last inning, Shamrock was still rolling along on her perfect game, and we were trailing 4-0.

  Estelle fanned for the third straight time, and then it was up to me.

  We were desperate to make something happen. We didn’t want to start the tournament with the humiliation of being on the wrong end of a perfect game. Losing was going to be bad enough.

  “Get on base,” Amanda whispered to me. “Just figure out some way to get on.”

  I took my place in the batter’s box and eyeballed Shamrock on the mound. I couldn’t read the look in her eyes. She seemed far away, more contemplative than combustible, and I wondered if she wasn’t in some sort of Zen state where pitchers go when they are two outs away from perfection.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Shamrock had something entirely different on her mind.

  She reared back and threw, and the pitch came boring right at me, shoulder high, like a Scud missile. I had enough time to flinch away before it hit me, to take the knockdown that was intended to make me flop around and look foolish, but there was something in me that wouldn’t let it happen.

  Instead, I turned my back only a little bit and took the ball just under my right shoulder blade. I felt the welt rising immediately and the pain explode, but my only outward reaction was a short, sharp gasp that just the catcher could have heard.

  I slammed down my bat and took a step toward Shamrock. She took one toward me. Before anything else could happen, though, Randie was beside me. She must have sprinted from the bench as soon as she saw the ball heading inside.

  “Take your base, Kotter. Take your base,” she said.