15. Isak
ISAK
My gear bag was slung over my shoulder and I was halfway through a text to Fox about whether we had cat food at home or whether I needed to make a fancy pet store run when Coach caught me in the hallway.
"Good work out there today, Kingman." He nodded and clapped me on the shoulder, then kept walking.
That was it. No speech. No extended note about the drill we'd finally nailed after three weeks of running it like we'd all forgotten what football was. No request for a meeting in his office. Just a pat, a good work, and then he was moving toward the weight room like he had other people to find.
Coach Guetta would've run me into the ground yelling at me twenty times to make sure I remembered getting it wrong.
I tucked my phone away and pushed through the door into the lot.
My bike was right where I'd left it. Next to Clover's cute little blue Toyota SUV.
That had stopped being an accident around tryouts. She parked in the same spot every morning, and I parked next to her because when I came out at the end of the day, there it was. I liked that my bike was the thing her car saw when she came out in the morning.
Then I saw the glass.
On the asphalt, mostly. A webbed hole where the passenger-side window used to be. Tires flat, slashed. One, two, three, fuck, four. All four.
Someone had gotten to her car.
Someone had gotten to her car in our private lot. That was supposed to be guarded.
I didn't have a car. I had a bike. I would not put a woman on a bike without a helmet, and the one she'd worn before was a loaner from the shop, long gone back. She didn't have one here. She didn't have one anywhere.
My hand came up with my phone in it and I was on the local bike shop's site before I knew I was doing it.
Pink. No. Not pink. She'd turn a pink helmet into a whole thing.
Plain black would be fine. I paid the extra forty for same-day delivery and then hit the number on the confirmation page. The guy picked up on the first ring.
"Hello, Moto Guys."
"Hey, you just got an order. Black helmet. One-hour delivery." I was hoping money would talk.
"Pulling it up now."
I recognized the voice as the owner's son. "I'll give you a hundred bucks to get it here in fifteen minutes."
"To the stadium?"
"Yep, but come to the parking lot at the back, near the practice fields. You'll see me, I'm the only bike in the lot."
"On my way."
I hung up and called security.
They picked up on the first ring and I told the guy I was in Lot B and that a bunch of cars had been broken into. He swore and said he was already walking.
Then I called Clover.
It rang twice.
"Kingman?"
"Your car." I was looking at it and still couldn't figure out the order of words. "Someone got into your car."
The second after I said it, she didn't make a single sound. Not a breath. Not a question. Zero signs of panic. I didn't know a lot of people who could do that. The way she just wasn't a freaker-outer up a tree, in an evil protestor situation and now with this kind of bad news, shorted my brain out.
"Okay," she said. "I'm in my office, so I'll be right there."
"Clover." My tone was serious and on the edge of anger.
"What?"
"Your window's smashed. Tires are slashed.” I sighed hating having to relay this news. “It's not drivable."
"Okay." She hung up because she was already moving.
I stood there with my phone, started a new group, and typed, fast, with my thumb.
Me: Clover's car hit. Lot B.
Then I looked around, and I saw what I should've seen right away. At least a dozen other cars had also been broken into.
Gabrielle's Mercedes. Window. Coach's truck. Window. Fox's beat up Jeep. Soft top, slashed. Monty's Audi. Window.
A handful of other players and staff, and then Monty's. But it was strange that it wasn't all of the assigned staff spots. The VP of Marketing, Alpharetta Smith's 7-series Beemer looked pristine. Most of the others, just fine and dandy.
It's as if the thieves either played wack-a-mole or...
My thumb went back to the thread.
Me: About a dozen cars in the lot. All of yours… and Monty's.
Clover came out of the side door at a walk. Not a run. Her keys were in her hand like she was about to use them, which she wasn't, because the car they went to wasn't going anywhere.
She walked around the car once. Slow. Didn't touch it. Looked at each tire. Looked at the back seat through the broken glass. It reminded me of a TV crime scene tech examining the scene.
"My jacket was back there." She said it like she was reading an inventory. I heard it the other way, which was that somebody had her jacket now. "The green one. With the thumb holes."
"It will be okay, Clover."
She kept looking at the back seat. She was doing the thing where she was handling it, which was not the same thing as being okay.
I knew the difference now. It was something I'd learned about her between the tree and this parking lot, and I didn't have a word for what it was yet, except that it made me want to stand closer to her than I was standing.
I stayed where I was.
Security came jogging up first. Then one of the security guys from the main desk, already on his radio, calling for a patrol officer and a supervisor, and pulling up the camera feeds on the tablet in his hand.
He looked at the glass, looked at Clover, looked at me, and said, "I'm getting everyone down here.
Players, staff, whoever's got a car in this row. Give me five minutes."
He was already walking when he said it, radio to his ear, reading off plates.
Gabrielle showed up in under two. She came out of the building in heels that should've slowed her down and didn't, clocked Clover, me, her Mercedes, and came straight over to us. "You two okay?"
I looked to Clover to answer. "Fine."
Gabrielle nodded, but clasped Clover's arm. "You don't have to be yet."
Gabrielle held the look for a second and didn't say anything else. Clover's mouth did something small that I pretended not to see.
Coach came out next, saw his truck, said "ahhh hell" under his breath, and then was moving toward Clover and Gabrielle before he'd fully processed the damage to his own vehicle.
Fox came out right behind him, saw the Jeep, stopped walking for one full second with both hands on top of his head, and then said, loudly, to nobody, "The soft top? THE SOFT TOP?" and kept coming.
The owners of the other cars started filtering out in ones and twos. Some of our guys. Some of the training staff. A woman from admin I didn't know by name. Everybody was looking at their cars, then looking at the other cars, and there was plenty of grumbling, swearing, and irritation.
The patrol officers pulled in about the same time Monty showed up.
Phone still to his ear. Saying loud things into it. "Can you believe this and in our own lot? I want this on every camera we have."
He was off the phone by the time he got to his own car, which was already inside the cluster of damage. He looked at the window. Made a frustrated sound. "How did this happen?"
Nobody answered him, because he hadn't asked anybody in particular.
"In our lot," he said, louder. "In broad daylight. Where is security?"
"Standing next to you, sir," the head security guy said, without looking up from the tablet.
Monty didn't miss a beat. He turned with his arms folded, the way a dad does a kid he's about to be disappointed in. "Not blaming you, son. You can't be everywhere at once. This is a resource failure. We're going to have to have a real conversation about coverage in this lot."
He did not look at me at all, which was actually the part I clocked the hardest, because Monty always looked at me. Quarterbacks were currency to Monty.
Not today.
The patrol officer was taking down names. He got to Clover and walked around her car in the same way she had, except he stopped at the back and crouched.
"Shit," he said. "They got your catalytic converter."
Clover nodded like she'd already known that.
"Pretty standard on a job like this," the officer said. "Sounds like they hit the whole row. Probably two, three guys with a saw, in and out in fifteen minutes. Opportunistic."
"Right," Clover said.
"Right. Opportunistic." Monty said from six feet away, loud enough that the officer looked up. He said it like he was agreeing with the officer. "That's what it looks like."
I was not agreeing with the officer. I wasn't saying that out loud yet.
The tow truck hooked up to Clover's Toyota. Coach and Gabrielle had gone back in. Fox was still at the Jeep, on the phone with his insurance guy, voice doing a full Shakespearean arc about the soft top.
Monty made sure he was the last to leave.
He passed me on the way out and put a hand on my shoulder that I didn't want there.
"You keep an eye on your girl, Kingman."
What in the WTF was he doing? I didn't move.
He patted twice and walked off.
Clover came up beside me. "Your girl?"
"That's what he said." Was it to make me uncomfortable or Clover or something else.
She narrowed her eyes at the space Monty had occupied. "He doesn't know me well enough to call me anybody's girl."
She didn't deny that she was mine. That was a hopeful romantic heart talking. It needed to shut up. I was barely back in her good graces, much less getting into her heart.
"C'mon, I'll take you home."
"I'll get an Uber." She was already looking at her phone.
The app was loading. I watched the little car icons start to circle her dot on the map and that was not happening. No. No way. Some guy in a Prius she'd never met before was not driving her out of this lot.
"I'll take you home."
"It's literally across the street."