The Setup Man Read Online Free Page A

old.”
    “Oh yeah?” I say.
    “Mr. Adcock, I could lose my job if I told you her name—”
    “I understand.”
    “—but because you were his friend, I will tell you this much: they weren’t family.”

5
    Before the evening’s game, the stadium honors Frankie with a moment of silence. For us, though, the silence has been going on since the early afternoon. The grief counselors, two overweight librarian-looking women in cable-knit sweaters, sit for hours in the trainer’s room without any takers. No surprise there. I could have summarized the players’ sentiments like this: Number one, it wasn’t fair, the kid was only twenty-five. Number two, holy shit, it could have been me. And number three—but this is only my concern—who the hell was the girl in the car? Is there a connection with the video? I used to believe in coincidences, but that was before I started doing investigations and realized that “coincidence” is just another way to say “I give up.”
    Ironically, our bats choose this somber occasion to explode with an orgy of runs. Fifteen, to be exact, on twenty-five hits, the highest totals of the season. Every man in the lineup scores. Modigliani has two homers and a double, for six RBIs. Skipper decides to air out the bullpen, giving all of us a little work in this rare glimpse of garbage time. I get the whole eighth inning, and our closer, Big Bob Schneider, pitches a perfect ninth. The closer normally does not pitch unless he has a chancefor a save, but we’ve been playing so badly that there haven’t been many games to save. Skipper figures Schneider needs work, so he brings him in anyway. I like a blowout win as much as the next guy, but it takes a long time to score fifteen runs. It is eleven-forty-five when Big Bob records the final out. Thanks to the continuing somber mood in the clubhouse, there is no chitchat tonight, and by twelve-thirty I am a free man. Donning a pair of Oakleys and a 49ers hat for cover, I take the light rail to Japantown. There is only one place I want to be, only one man who can help me sort out the events of the last twenty-four hours.
    Marcus Washington pitched sixteen years in the bigs, the last four in San José when I was new to the league. He comes from a bygone era when all pitchers trained to be starters. The guys in the bullpen—especially the long relievers and setup men—were either failed starters or starters whose prime had come and gone. The pen was a kind of back pasture where old horses were put out to graze. By the time I met Marcus, he had not started a game in eight years. “The game is changing,” he told me. “Soon there will be seventh-inning specialists, eighth-inning specialists, first-out-of-the-ninth specialists.” I told him that had already happened. “Look at me,” I said. “This is my first year, and already I’ve got my slot. I’m destined to pitch the eighth for my entire career.” Marcus leaned back on his folding chair and said if that was so then he was finished.
    Marcus’s retirement plan had always been to open a bar. (The writers of
Cheers
were right to make Sam Malone a relief pitcher—bartending is a pretty common dream in the bullpen.) But after the Bay Dogs cut him loose, he realized that he was not quite ready to retire and accepted an offer to play in Japan for the Kintetsu Buffaloes. Thus our man Makasu (Japanglish for “Marcus”) enjoyed a second career in Japan,where, in addition to several years’ worth of top-quality Asian trim, he gained an important grain of inspiration: it was not just a bar he was supposed to open, but a sushi bar.
    Sushi Makasu opened right after the dot-com bust in a storefront on Jackson Street once occupied by Kozmo.com. Marcus pulled out all the stops in infusing the vibe of his native West Oakland into the neat order of San José’s Japantown. The lighting is subdued, even dark, and the sushi bar is a long zinc-topped number with rotating stools. All the waitresses are