55. Holden
FIFTY-FIVE
HOLDEN
Iarrive for bowling twenty minutes early, because I’m a cop and I don’t walk into rooms blind.
Lawn.
I get out. There’s no alley. No neon. Just a flat green rectangle mowed within an inch of its life, ringed by a little trench and lit by Sunday afternoon light harsh enough to make the whole place look like a denture commercial.
There’s a clubhouse with hanging baskets, sensible sedans in the lot, and a bumper sticker that says I’D RATHER BE AT BOWLS beside a graphic of balls that are very much not bowling balls.
I’m going to kill Milo.
And there are people. Maybe thirty of them, mostly in whites and wide-brimmed hats, holding drinks and moving at the unhurried pace of a generation with nowhere to be and all day to not be there. The youngest person on that green has grandchildren. Adult grandchildren.
I do the math on the exits without thinking: two doors on the clubhouse, one gate at the green. I clock the camera over the bar pointed at the till, the woman selling raffle tickets, and the man asleep in a deck chair who may or may not be alive.
Then I stop, because there’s nothing here to clock. No threat under seventy, unless you count blood pressure.
Milo booked us lawn bowls.
My phone buzzes. Knox.
KNOX:
She’s at the café on Third with the roommate. Public. Two exits. I’ve got the undertaker on the door.
Dean. Posted up somewhere with a coffee and a newspaper he isn’t reading, watching Sage and Amy talk through whatever there is to talk through after yesterday’s Tyler tantrum.
Public was the right call. Public means that man-child can’t walk in and turn it into theater, the way Tyler turns everything into theater.
We are, as a unit, developing a very specific and growing dislike for Tyler.
ME:
Good. Hudson plan?
KNOX:
Sent to Odin this morning. Locked in.
So that’s done. Job is three days out, final logistics in Odin’s hands, and every major variable nailed flat. I should feel the way I always feel when a plan goes rigid and clean.
Instead I’m standing on a lawn bowls green in a town full of retirees, about to lose at a sport designed for people with hip replacements.
Fuck.
“HOLDEN!”
I watch as a woman pops out a set of dentures, placing them on the chair beside her.
Good God. Perhaps I can still escape.
“HOLDEN! Look at my shoes!”
Milo is on the edge of the green in a pair of flat white loaner shoes a size too big, holding them up one at a time like a toddler showing off new sandals.
He’s also holding a bowl—not a ball, a bowl, a fat black weighted thing the size of a grapefruit—and a brightly colored one in lurid teal that stands out among the sober black balls the old-timers are using like a clown at a wake.
“They make you wear flat soles so you don’t wreck the green,” he says, delighted, when I reach him. “These are communal. A thousand pensioners have stood exactly where I’m standing. Generations of feet have been embraced by these supportive arches.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s beautiful. Here. I got you a beer.”
I accept it begrudgingly. He grins at me like a man who’s just successfully bribed a judge.
“You’re early,” I say, taking a sip.
“I’m always early when there’s a trophy on the line.
” He hefts the teal bowl, rolling it palm to palm like he’s been doing it for years.
“And you’re going to want to watch my form.
The lady running the raffle walked me through it.
There’s a bias—the balls are called ‘woods’ and they’re weighted, so they curve.
You don’t roll at the jack, you roll the wood so it curves to where the jack is going to be.
It’s like baseball only for people who can’t run. ”
I look at him. I look at the green, the hats, the little white jack at the far end like a lost golf ball, the man asleep in the deck chair.
“Milo.”
“Mm?”
“You know you said bowling, right? This is lawn bowls.”
“Obviously.” He doesn’t blink. “Lawn bowls is the thinking man’s bowling. A noble and ancient sport. I chose it for us, as a unit, deliberately, because I felt we needed something with a little—” he gestures grandly at the thirty retirees in white “—serenity.”
“You told the group chat there was a trophy shaped like a pin.”
He frowns. “And?”
“There are no pins here, Milo. There has never been a pin on this lawn. Not to mention that the people competing for it have pacemakers.”
“The trophy is a pin,” he protests. “Look, Cliff over there is wearing last year’s.”
Sure enough, the old guy nearest to us is wearing a set of small decorative pins on his wide-brimmed hat.
I shake my head.
“What about the names you floated—I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gutter? Snakes on a Lane? Britney Spares?” I count each of his offered team names off on my fingers. “Just admit you fucked up.”
“In my defense,” he says, and I watch the bluster come down all at once, the way a condemned building comes down, with a little puff of dust, “you never asked for clarification. Look, the deposit is non-refundable, and there are balls.” He bounces the wood in one hand.
“There’s grass, fine, sure, but what’s not to like? ”
Micah’s voice arrives behind me. “You got it wrong, Milo. Own it.”
He takes the beer out of my hand without asking and drinks half of it in one pull. That about sums up this whole afternoon.
Milo sighs, shaking his head. “Assumptions have made an ass out of you lot. It’s not my fault.” He huffs and heads over to talk to Cliff, admiring his trophy pins.
We’re quiet for a long beat, sharing the beer between us.
“So . . . lawn bowls,” Micah says finally, tugging on the hem of the colorful bowling shirt Milo got us all to wear. He glances at all the retirees in white, who are eyeing us suspiciously.
“Lawn bowls,” I confirm.
He takes another pull of my beer as Milo heads back our way. “Fuck it. It’s a beautiful day, and we’re already here.”
“Yes!” Milo fist pumps, rejoining us.
“Eli here yet?” Micah asks.
“Not yet.”
He nods, glancing around the green before sighing.
“You okay?” I ask. Milo’s already wandered off again, interrogating a passing octogenarian about bias and curve.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’ll be okay.”
That’s not the same thing and we both know it. I let it go, because Micah’s the kind of man who hands you the truth in his own time, and after the breakdown Eli caused yesterday, there’s enough raw skin in this group already without me pressing a thumb into it.
Last night was bad. I got there fifteen minutes behind the others and walked into the kind of quiet that only comes after the worst of something.
Milo had Sage in his lap on the couch and didn’t have a joke in him, which is how I knew shit had gone down.
Knox stood at the window, still as a statue—and with Knox, still isn’t calm.
It’s a man deciding whether to go drag the problem back by the collar or make it disappear permanently.
Eli is a big problem. An arrogant, self-serving one. If he thinks having a relationship with Sage is an issue, he should stay the fuck away and let her be happy as she is.
But he isn’t doing that. He’s skulking around, feeding her breadcrumbs. And I’m fighting the urge to punch him in his self-righteous face.
I love you, dude, but you’ve got to pull it together.
Milo waves us over to a printed sheet taped to the clubhouse window. GLENVIEW SOCIAL PENNANT—GREEN 2, RINK 3—2:00PM. Underneath, in the spot for the visiting team, someone has handwritten our name off Milo’s booking form.
BALLS OF FURY
“Lead, second, third, fourth, skip,” he says, pointing down the list. “I lead. You’re second, Holden. Micah’s third. Knox is fourth if he ever rejoins the living. Eli’s skip.”
“Why’s Eli skip?”
He looks at me like I asked why grass is green.
“Because he’s Eli, Holden. The skip stands at the far end, tells everyone what to do, bowls last, and acts like the fate of the world rides on every shot. It is the single most Eli job in the entire sport.”
Across the rink, the opposition has assembled, and I assess the threat out of habit.
Four retirees. The skip’s a small, upright woman in pressed whites and a visor, eighty if she’s a day, with the flat eyes of a sniper.
Beside her is a face I know—Walt Brennan, thirty years on the precinct front desk.
He retired the year I made detective, capable of reducing a grown cop to tears with one look over his reading glasses.
He clocks me. Nods. The nod says I know exactly who you are, son, and I’ll still beat you in straight ends.
“I know that guy,” I tell Milo.
“Seriously?”
“Ex-cop. Real hard ass. Used to run interrogations for fun.”
Milo beams like a jackal. “This is fantastic. I was hoping for competition. Are there trash talk rules? Is cursing allowed?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know?” I ask, shooting him a look.
“I doubt it. I don’t think some of these people have ever heard the word fuck in public,” Micah says, nodding at an older lady wearing pearls.
“Gonna fix that,” Milo says.
The clubhouse door opens and Eli walks out. Beside me Micah stiffens.
Yeah. That about sums it up.
I watch him for the few seconds it takes to cross the grass, gauging his mood. His hair is shoved back like he’s been dragging a hand through it for an hour. Eyes too bright. He looks like he’s had a shit day on top of a restless night.
Good.
“Sorry I’m late,” he mutters, stopping beside me.
“You’re not late,” Milo says, bright as a struck match. “You’re fashionably on time. You’re skip. Go stand at the far end and look important.”
Eli glances at Micah who ignores him pointedly and finishes the rest of my beer.
Knox arrives. “This isn’t bowling,” he grumbles, glaring at the retirees.
“Correct, big guy,” Milo says, clapping him on the shoulder. “It’s lawn bowls and we’re about to dom-in-ate.”
I nudge Knox with my elbow. “Stop glaring. You’ll give someone a heart attack.”
He does, marginally.