Chapter One #2
He hit send, slid the phone back into his pocket, and watched Des set up over his ball.
He had an elaborate, pre-shot routine he’d carried over from his football days: a breath-and-settle ritual a guard ran before a snap.
Marcus stood ten feet behind his father with the reverent attention of a kid who had figured out that he was watching the back end of something.
Leo’s phone buzzed against his thigh.
He pulled it back out, expecting nothing in particular.
Chloe’s reply was at the top of the screen in the form of a selfie.
Her face filled most of the frame, eyes crossed, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, a mud-colored protein shake clutched in one hand.
Behind her, slightly out of focus, Kayne Serruto stood at the kitchen counter, holding a wooden spoon and wearing the long-suffering expression that Leo interpreted to mean he’d stopped trying to understand the woman he had married and decided to simply enjoy her instead.
The test underneath read: Honeymoon’s over, big brother. He made me eat crawfish.
Leo huffed out a laugh. His smile came from a place deeper than amusement. It was the relief that arrived whenever he saw her alive, safe, and being ridiculous.
Crawfish. Of course Kayne had made her consume the crustaceans. Kayne would die on the hill of his Cajun grandmother’s kitchen, and Chloe, who had once tried to argue Leo into believing that ketchup was a vegetable, was about to learn things about hot sauce she had no business learning.
He thumbed back: Tell him welcome to the family. You’re his problem now.
Three dots appeared, and then her answer landed: RUDE. Then, a second later: Love you. Go schmooze somebody.
Leo chuckled and hid the phone away again. The day wrapped around him in an easy, uncomplicated way. If someone had asked him right then whether anything in his life felt unstable, he would have said no without hesitation.
Then his phone buzzed again with a different rhythm. It was a short double-pulse his settings used for breaking alerts. Leo tugged the phone back out and angled the screen against his palm to read it in the slanting light.
KSDK Breaking News: St. Louis area sports agent Victor Shaw found dead in Kansas City hotel room. Authorities investigating as apparent suicide.
Leo read it once, then again, because the first pass hadn’t actually made it into his brain.
Out on the tee box, Des connected with his ball with a ringing crack, and the sound felt as though it were coming from a different country.
Vic Shaw.
Three days ago, Leo had watched Vic push a ribeye around a plate at Tony’s downtown and drink a bourbon he didn’t seem to taste.
Vic had laughed at the wrong beats and kept glancing at the door.
Leo had chalked it up to Vic being Vic. He always looked as if he were expecting a bill collector or a process server or possibly a jealous husband.
Maybe all three. Leo had paid for his own steak and left, and he honestly hadn’t thought about the man since.
Now the memory rearranged itself in Leo’s head, every detail shifting a fraction of an inch.
Suicide.
The word didn’t belong in the same sentence as the man Leo had seen at that table.
Vic had been a lot of unpleasant things in his life.
Leo had clashed with him over clients, tactics, and a specific rookie wide receiver whose mother Vic had charmed with a bouquet of roses and a set of lies.
Vic was slippery. Opportunistic. He was a professional poacher.
He was the reason Leo had a policy about not leaving prospects alone with rival agents at combine week.
Vic was not, as far as Leo had ever been able to tell, the type of man who ran out of road inside himself.
The no came from deep inside before he had finished processing the headline. It was an instinct that started in his head and moved outward. This was wrong. The whole shape of it felt wrong.
He became aware, distantly, that he was standing on a cart path at Bellerive with a phone in his hand and the afternoon light running off the edges of the fairway as the day faded.
Marcus was watching his father’s ball climb against the sky.
Des lowered his club with a smile, knowing he’d struck it pure.
Leo slid the phone back into his pocket without acknowledging the alert.
He didn’t know yet what he was going to do about it. He only knew that his body was two moves ahead of his head, and his body was saying no. The uneasy little urge that had pushed him to text Chloe minutes before the news hit suddenly didn’t feel quite so unprovoked.
He started walking toward the eighteenth tee because a man had just struck a beautiful drive and was waiting for his agent to tell him so. You didn’t flinch in front of a client, no matter what was on your phone.
But the cut fescue didn’t smell the same anymore.
#
Leo made it through the cocktail reception by smiling at the right people, drinking club soda with lime, and keeping his left hand in his pocket.
These events attracted two types of people: those trying to sign you up and those trying to sell you something you had no intention of buying. Sometimes they were the same person.
He stayed long enough to shake the tournament chairperson’s hand and congratulate Reed Steele on a round of sixty-nine.
Reed came off the eighteenth green sunburned and grinning, his hair standing up in the back as if he’d wrestled a leaf blower and lost. He pulled Leo into a one-armed, back-breaking hug that smelled like sweat, grass, and whatever cologne Reed’s wife had slipped into his shaving kit that morning, hoping he might remember to use it.
“You staying for dinner?” Reed asked.
“I have to go to the office.”
Reed checked his watch. “This late on a Friday afternoon?”
“Something came up.”
Reed had the disconcerting ability to read a face with the same precision he used to read a pitcher’s grip, and Leo watched him clock the expression that Leo had been trying to hide for the last twenty minutes.
“You good?”
“I’m fine. Tell Hillary I said hi.”
“I will. Call me this weekend if fine turns sideways.”
“I’ll call you regardless.”
Leo handed his half-empty club soda to a passing server and approached the valet stand with the news alert an irritating weight in his pocket he couldn’t ignore.
The valet brought the Range Rover around, and Leo breathed a sigh of relief.
After it had been stolen a few months ago by the man who had stalked Chloe, he was paranoid about leaving it with strangers.
Leo slid behind the wheel and pulled onto Ladue Road before the valet had finished closing the door.
The GPS offered him a route home to the Central West End.
Leo ignored it and pointed the SUV toward Clayton instead.
The Pinnacle Sports Management offices occupied the top four floors of a glass tower on Forsyth, twelve minutes from Bellerive on a good traffic day and fifteen on a Friday.
Leo drove with the radio off, which was unlike him.
He usually had sports talk going or an audiobook or the classic rock station his father had raised him on.
Today, he wanted the silence because his brain was trying to sort something, and it needed room.
Tony’s. Tuesday night. Vic Shaw in the corner booth closest to the kitchen door.
The memory returned in pieces. Leo had walked in for a late dinner after a client call ran long, and he’d spotted Vic from the host stand.
He’d nearly walked back out. They had a history.
Fifteen months ago, Vic had tried to steal a rookie wide receiver off Leo’s roster with a story about Leo overbilling for travel.
Leo had come close to filing a defamation complaint before the kid came to his senses and stayed. Leo hadn’t spoken to Vic since.
Before he could cut a rusty dusty, Vic glanced up from his plate and lifted a hand. If he’d been cocky or sarcastic, Leo would’ve flipped him off and spun around to leave. Instead, he’d looked tired, his expression close to pleading.
Leo had taken the stool at the bar so he wouldn’t have to commit to a table. Vic had come over with his bourbon and slid onto the stool next to him without being invited.
“Leo. You got a minute?”
“I’ve got a steak coming.”
“I won’t keep you.”
Leo had studied him then, and what kept coming back to him now was his face.
Vic had lost weight. Not gym weight. The other kind that fell off when someone stopped sleeping and eating, and started watching the door.
His collar was too loose. The hand around the bourbon glass had a tremor Leo had assumed was the alcohol itself, but now that he played it back, the glass hadn’t been near empty.
Vic hadn’t been drunk. He’d been scared.
Then there had been one comment Leo had written off at the time, but the words surfaced now with uncomfortable clarity.
“I know we’re not friends, De Luca. I know I’ve been a bastard. But I’m gonna ask you this, and I need you to remember I asked, okay? If something happens to me, and somebody tells you a story about why, I need you to not believe the first version you hear. Can you do that for me?”
Leo, halfway through a sip of club soda, had set the glass down and slid a sideways glance at him.
“Vic. Are you okay?”
“I’m just tired. Forget I said anything.”
Vic’s phone had buzzed on the bar. He’d glanced at it, and his face had done something Leo couldn’t quite define. He’d slid off the stool and walked out of the restaurant without finishing his bourbon or saying goodbye.
Leo had eaten his steak, paid his tab, gone home, and not thought about it again.
Until now.