The Setup Man Read Online Free

composure. “I’m really sorry about Mr. Herrera,” he says.
    “Yeah, he was my wife’s favorite.” I smile like I’m embarrassed. “She liked ’em young.”
    “My old lady likes Modigliani. But they all do, right?”
    I pull a baseball from the pocket of my leather jacket. “Give her this.”
    The cop turns the ball, finds Modigliani’s signature, smiles. “So, Mr. Adcock,” he says, “you want to see where it happened?”
    “I do.”
    He goes over to the two patrolmen, and they chat for a minute. Then he waves to me. “Sorry for your loss,” says the CHP captain, a middle-aged white man with a handlebar mustache and thighs that push the capacity of his golden uniform tights. I’ve always marveled at how much cops look like out-of-shape second basemen—or maybe how much second basemen (JeffKent, for example) look like in-shape cops. “Tough luck yesterday,” he says. “One pitch.”
    “Scouting report called for a fastball high and tight,” I explain. I shake my head to indicate (hopefully) that I would like to leave it at that.
    “That Kelton is a killer,” says the captain.
    “You’re telling me.”
    “Guess they thought you might get him this time, huh?”
    I bite my tongue. “Guess so, yeah.”
    I give the captain and his partner autographed balls, and they walk me over to the guardrail. On the way, we cross a set of fresh-looking tire tracks cutting across the road from the east-bound lane to a point just a few feet from the rail. Looks like Frankie was on his way home when he died.
    “These from Frankie’s car?” I ask the cops.
    “Most likely,” the captain says. “Though, to be honest, those look a bit wide. What was the deceased driving, Cam?”
    “BMW 328,” the partner replies.
    “I guess you can get those with wide tires, right? Anyway”—he puts his gloved hand on the mangled steel rail—“here is where he went over.” This stretch of Highway 92 is set into a hillside that has been encased in concrete to halt erosion. Imagine a miniature Hoover Dam; add fog. The cop nods to a spot downhill a hundred yards, on the next curve, where two more police cruisers are parked, with their lights flashing soundlessly. “And that is where he ended up.”
    “Can you take me down there?”
    The captain rolls the baseball in his hand. “I don’t know, Mr. Adcock. That would be against our procedures.”
    “Where are you from?” I say. “You want to see the Giants? I can comp you a pair of tickets.”
    He smiles at his partner. “The real question is, will you win?”
    “Is this about last night? With all due respect, officer, if youwant to try to throw a baseball past a hulk with a club, go right ahead. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
    The cop retreats from his pose. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know how hard it is. I played ball in high school.”
    “And?”
    “And I joined the Highway Patrol the week after graduation.”
    To save the guy’s pride, I look away.
    As we pick our way down the hill, I hear the captain cursing me under his breath: “Fucking left-handed assholes.… One pitch! Fucking jerkoff thinks he’s such hot shit.…”
    At the lower site, Frankie’s BMW is a mess of twisted, smoking steel. The air smells like gasoline, burning hair, and plastic. I try to breathe through my mouth.
    The captain points to a gash in the roof where the metal has been pried open. “See that aperture? That’s where the crew removed the bodies. They sent the Jaws of Life, but this was no salvation job, I’m afraid. Sorry if that sounds insensitive, Mr. Adcock, but that’s just the truth.”
    “Did you say ‘bodies’?”
    “Two. Your friend Mr. Herrera and an unidentified female.”
    I try to act cool, as though this is what I expected to hear.
    “Actually, Captain,” the partner pipes in, “she had ID.”
    The captain fixes him with a withering stare. “We can’t say her name,” he says slowly, “because she was a minor. Seventeen years