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"All that talk about dead trees and chemicals. But it's not a problem," he said. "I mean, the water and soil tests turned up nothing. Everything's okay." |
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Her anger swelled into the silence. "How could you have taken the chance?" |
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"It was stupid, okay? I admit itit was stupid. But on a lousy twenty thousand dollars, it was an option we'd never have again. You could understand that." |
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"No, I can't." Her voice was scathing. "Why didn't you check what the liability was, who did the dumping, what they buried and how much? For all you know, they could have buried a truckload of radioactive plutonium." |
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"I felt that if I didn't put down a deposit, we would have lost it." |
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Terry looked away in disbelief. |
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"In any case, like I said, it's clean. We have no problem." |
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Matty emerged from the woods. Terry watched him cross to the bench and put on a red helmet. He moved to the plate and took a couple of practice swings. A man dressed all in black stood on the sidelines nearby, watching him. |
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"What if they missed something?" |
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But Calvin didn't hear her. |
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In his red cap and blue shirt, Jack Perry looked like just another Little League dad standing along the fence behind the visitor's bench giving batting tips to his kid. Nobody would have suspected that he was studying every move of the kid in number 11, as he had for the last week. |
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Jack wasn't certain what the signs would be. Many kids had funny little tics that surfaced under stress. Some blinked too much, some spit every five seconds, some chewed the inside of their cheeks, some did queer things with their mouths. But this kid was a wad of raw nerve-endings. He looked possessed. Every few seconds he would give his head a shake, as if trying to displace a migraine. But the giveaway was his hands. He couldn't seem to control them. They were in constant motion, like a couple of birds trying to take flight. He sat on them, but they kept pulling free, rubbing his face or secretly knuckling his forehead. At one point the coach asked if he |
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