Chapter 2 #2
“First junior practice is tonight,” he calls after me. “Don’t be late.”
#
Callie
“It’s a shame, honestly. This man will be on unemployment within the month.
” Priya has commandeered half my desk and all of my monitor, scrolling through the photos with the professional detachment of a jeweler appraising a stone.
“Look at him. Green eyes, sandy blond, a jawline you could put on razor ads. Wait, he is on one. The delivery service. Sharp. He does the ad where he’s inexplicably shirtless holding a razor he clearly hasn’t used.
How can I forget the pecks and six pack… ”
“Well, his next endorsement can be a rehab center,” I say drily, because I’ve been staring at these pictures since I walked out of Marty’s office this morning, and no matter how long I look, the story refuses to improve.
Star quarterback, drugs on the table, and seated three feet away, a former player everyone in this building knows was quietly cut over exactly this kind of thing, even if nobody ever printed it.
There’s no redeeming frame. I’ve rotated the thing like a Rubik’s cube and every side comes up scandal.
“Did you know he’s been voted the league’s most eligible bachelor five years running?
” Priya continues, because of course she has that stat filed and cross-referenced.
“Every relationship he’s ever had that went public lasted six months, maximum.
Callie, I’m telling you what the data says.
Your boy is a drug addict and a manwhore. ”
“He’s not my boy. And we don’t know the drugs are his.”
“The table knows,” Priya says, tapping the screen.
I wouldn’t put it the way she puts it, nobody puts things the way Priya puts things, it’s why her click numbers keep the lights on in this newsroom, but she has a point, and the point is my problem.
There is nothing in Nate Rivers’s public life that offers a reason for him to be in that room other than the obvious one.
I could work the witnesses. If I can identify the woman, the two other men.
Danny is out of the question, he’d sooner kill me than talk to me, and honestly, that’s the optimistic read. I don’t even blame him for that.
Which leaves background. And for background, we have a resource better than Google.
“Hey, Ellie.” I lean around my monitor toward the woman swallowed by a hoodie in the corner, our data analyst, who is at this moment building some model with the intensity of a bomb tech. “What do you know about Nate Rivers?”
“Like… stat-wise?” Ellie surfaces with the expression of a deer who has been personally addressed by headlights. That’s not the question’s fault; it’s her default setting. Smartest person on this floor, shy as they come, treats direct eye contact as an optional premium feature.
“No, I don’t care about his completion percentage. What’s his story?”
“Oh.” She thinks for exactly one second, and then it comes out of her like a wire feed.
“Odessa, Texas. Blew up in high school, took a nothing program to the division final. Full-ride offers from basically everyone; he turned down the blue bloods and stayed home. A it can’t just be dead men and the King.
“Crap.” The clock on my monitor catches me like a tripwire. “I have to go, I’ve got both pickups, Finn’s after-school project is across town, and Eli has practice at six, and I’m —”
“Late,” Priya and Ellie say, in accidental unison.
I’m already jogging for the elevator, laptop half-zipped into my bag, apology granola bars in the side pocket where they live. Behind me I hear Priya call out something that sounds like drive safe, designated driver, and I would be offended if I had the time.
I don’t have the time. I never have the time.
And time, though I don’t know it yet, has just started running in both directions. Somewhere across town, in a building with a fifty-yard lawn, a quarterback’s Tuesday is detonating too, and the fuses are cut to meet.