Metzger's Dog by Thomas Perry

Author:Thomas Perry [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781588362957
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-06-10T05:00:00+00:00

19 The strong winds of the morning had scoured the sky to an impossible blue and then moved on. The sunlight now beat into the bowl of Dodger Stadium, heating the seats and the concrete steps so that food and drinks spilled months ago cooked and released a perfumy essence into the air. When the third warmup pitch smacked into the catcher’s mitt, a tiny cloud of dust exploded and then drifted luminous in the sunlight for a second.

Jorge Grijalvas stared about him at the stadium. He wasn’t looking at any of the individual players throwing the ball back and forth. That view of things didn’t interest him very much. His box had been chosen because it gave him what he called the whole view. At a glance he could see the entire infield as a unit. If he lifted his gaze he could see not people, but the crowd. He liked the crack of the bat and then the whole infield moving at once in the smooth, precise, and practiced maneuvers too quick for thought. The Dodger infield was like a special kind of machine, perhaps a trap.

Grijalvas had the same box every year. He also had a box in the Hollywood Bowl for the concert season, but he always gave the tickets to friends and business acquaintances who seemed to enjoy it, or perhaps only to enjoy accepting the friendship of Jorge Grijalvas. He paid no attention to the Los Angeles Rams, because American football made no sense to him. He understood it completely, but it seemed interesting only theoretically.

Baseball was different. Here was ritual, the nobility of a single small man in a white uniform on a field of dust pitting his cunning and his reflexes against nine in a contest of concentration and will before an immense gathering of people, a colorful, variegated blur of humanity ranged from the dugout to the heavens, all breathing in unison, all gasping as he swung the blond bat.

Grijalvas smiled and pivoted his head about in satisfaction to look at his companions. He was a happy man. He was a man of substance, a padrón, a man who could spend the afternoon in Dodger Stadium surrounded by his friends. They were more than friends. They were fidelios, the faithful.

As he gazed about the stadium he could see that the food and ice-cream vendors were beginning their first sweep down the steps that separated the seating sections. Across the stadium they were stepping down the aisles at once, the aluminum cases slung on their shoulders glinting in the sunlight. He snapped a twenty-dollar bill in his fingers and held up his right arm, then glanced about for the man who would come to collect it.

He was pleased when he saw the vendor step down the aisle. It was a young woman with beautiful long brown hair that shone reddish in the sunlight, and a complexion that was white, like a ceramic figurine. She was perfect, as the day was perfect.

“Give these gentlemen whatever they wish,” he said.

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