Night Twenty-Six
Zeke
Zeke was alreadyat the airport when Sybil’s text came in. His ASU hat was slung low, and he kept his eyes down so hopefully no one recognized him. He’d thought about just flying private, but the impulse to get back to New York, back to Sybil, struck him so suddenly that the fastest thing was just to get on the next flight out.
Los Angeles?He reread her text.
“Actually,” he said to the ticket agent. “Change of plans. I need your next flight to LA.”
“Absolutely, Mr.Rodriguez.” She smiled at him, and he knew she knew who he was.
He hated that Sybil had been the one to break their standoff, that he hadn’t been mature enough to apologize for being such a petulant dick in New York. He thought he could surprise her. Board a flight, show up at her house with roses or something maybe less predictable because Sybil would appreciate whimsy, and sweep her off her feet. And now he’d gone and blown it.
“Here you go,” the ticket agent said. Then whispered, “And go Mets!”
He forced a grin and said, “Thank you.” He hadn’t told anyone that he was ditching town, so he didn’t even know if he’d be on the team after tonight. Or after tomorrow, when his trainers and managers woke up and realized that he was gone.
Earlier, he’d had one of the best practices of his career. Every pitch was faster, more precise than the last one. Like abandoning his life in New York and singularly lasering in on his game really was the antidote to all that ailed him. He’d taken an anti-inflammatory before he got out there, and his pain was abating in the way that a long, slow tide would; his throws were nearly, though not quite, what he’d been hurling before the injury. The coaching staff was elated. Timothy wouldn’t stop pumping his fist. When the trainer called it for the night, these people who profited off his arm gave him a standing ovation. He should have been bouncing, high on serotonin, coasting on euphoria. The doctors hadn’t been able to say if the great Zeke Rodriguez would fight his way back, but he could, and hehad. And yet when he retreated to the locker room and stood under the scalding water for so long that it turned into more of a sauna than a shower, he felt none of that. There was no pride at his accomplishments anymore, just…emptiness. A windup toy who had been repaired and was entertaining the children again. He missed Sybil. He missed Betty. He missed Pluto and the way that he shed all over Zeke’s couch and left little stains from his drool on the cushions. He texted Lani after his shower, a towel around his waist, alone on a bench in the locker room and said:do you think I could just move home and become a UPS driver?And she texted him back and said:I hear FedEx pays better, but yeah, absolutely. Come home. We got you. Just come home.
He’d been poring over his conversation with Annabeth all day. As he did his stupid laps in the pool. As he lifted his stupid weights. As he threw at his target again and again. Part of why he’d crushed it might have been his rehab, but part of it might also have been that he was so focused on something else that he forgot to be worried about his arm, his accuracy, his future.
He churned the information about Matthew and Pastor Jones over and over with each throw. About how far someone would go to get out. About who would protect you when you couldn’t protect yourself.
Matthew was the one who benefited from Pastor Jones’s death.
Throw.
But Jones was the one who was up to his neck with the FBI.
Throw.
Levi was already gone, but he knew what Betty was up against.
Throw.
Come home, Lani had said.We got you. Just come home.
He hadn’t realized that he was close to an answer until startlingly and all at once, it came to him. Zeke had never been the first to solve a formula. Half the time, he didn’t even think he understood the problem well enough to figure out which formula to use. Everyone around him was solving forx,yandz, and he was still flipping through his cheat sheet for the equation.
Intrinsically, in his bones, reverberating in his gut, he knew he’d done it. Just like he could see where the batter was going to swing before the bat even began its rotation, he could see this now. All his life, Zeke Rodriguez had been told he was good at one thing and one thing alone. But it turned out that everyonehad gotten his narrative wrong. He wasn’tjusta pitcher. Being a pitcher meant detecting things right in front of you that no one else could see. This is why Timothy knew that Zeke could have avoided Schmidt’s line drive, and this is why Zeke now realized that he should have given himself more credit than he’d gotten for something other than his arm. You needed guts, you needed intuition to go head-to-head with a guy armed with a bat and a hell of a lot of power.
After he got back into the condo, he packed a bag and slid into the SUV the team had hired for him, then directed his driver to the airport. He passed his driver two hundred-dollar bills not to say anything to anyone until the morning. He’d be back in New York by then, and they could chase him down at his apartment and argue with him there.
Then Sybil’s text landed while he was at the check-in counter, and she was just a ninety-minute flight away.
He settled into his first-class seat. The doors closed, wheels were up.
Zeke needed to find Sybil and tell her.
He’d figured out who started the fire.
63
Night Twenty-Six
Sybil
They crossed theborder into Nevada two hours into the drive. Cell reception was spotty, coming in and out over the stretch of miles, and Sybil tried not to think about how Zeke had reacted when her text came in. When she’d asked Levi where they were headed, he’d said only:
