Three Strikes—You're Dead!

Table of Contents

THREE STRIKES—YOU’RE DEAD!

FROM THE SAME EDITORS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by SJ Rozan

MURDER AT HOME, by Alan Orloff

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, by Smita Harish Jain

THE ULTIMATE BOUNTY HUNTER, by Sherry Harris

PUNCH-DRUNK, by William Ade

RUNNING INTERFERENCE, by Kathryn Prater Bomey

DOUBLE FAULT, by Adam Meyer

OF MICE AND (MURDERED) MEN, by Rosalie Spielman

EIGHT SECONDS TO LIVE, by Robin Templeton

OFF THE BEATEN TRAIL, by Maddi Davidson

RACE TO THE BOTTOM, by Shannon Taft

CUI BONO, by F. J. Talley

THE LAST LAP GOODBYE, by Lynne Ewing

A MATTER OF TRUST, by Barb Goffman

AND NOW, AN INSPIRING STORY OF TRAGEDY OVERCOME, by Joseph S. Walker

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND THE SUBMISSION JUDGES

THREE STRIKES—YOU’RE DEAD!

Edited by

Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman,

and Marcia Talley

Submission Judges

Lucy Burdette, Dan Hale, and Naomi Hirahara

FROM THE SAME EDITORS

Chesapeake Crimes

Chesapeake Crimes 2

Chesapeake Crimes 3

Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’

Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder

Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays

Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning

Chesapeake Crimes: Fur, Feathers, and Felonies

Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder

Chesapeake Crimes: Magic Is Murder

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Collection copyright © 2024 by

Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley.

Copyright © of each individual story is held by the author.

Cover design by John Betancourt.

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

This edition was published in 2024 by Wildside Press, LLC.

wildsidepress.com

INTRODUCTION,

by SJ Rozan

Sport and crime: two of my favorite subjects.

The first, of course, being an allegory of the second.

Crime is behavior not sanctioned in its time and place by a society that deems that behavior destructive. Wearing your pajamas to walk your dog isn’t sanctioned in most places, and will get you funny looks, but it’s not considered destructive. Walking your dog nude—you; dogs are pretty generally nude—would in most places be regarded as offensive to, and thus potentially undermining of, public morals and would get you a ticket and maybe a newspaper to cover your privates as the ticket-writing cop escorted you home, or to the hoosegow to sober up. Throwing a baby out a window would be a shocking attempt at infanticide, except if you’d run into a burning house to save the baby and were lofting it into its mother’s arms. Then it’s heroism.

So it is with sports.

Punching a stranger in the face is assault, apart from in the boxing ring, where it’s the sweet science.

Throwing someone to the ground and piling onto him with a half-dozen other people could be construed as a mugging, except on the rugby field, where it’s a scrum.

Stealing a valuable item from someone who clearly had possession of it is theft; but on the basketball court it’s great defense.

Athletics were invented to channel aggression. In ancient Greece, where modern sports began, there was no concept of training. Athletes competed against each other not to prove who was fastest or strongest, but to prove whom the gods favored. If you won, QED. In ancient Mongolia, warring tribes would call a truce every couple of years and set up camp on a huge field, where they’d compete in the arts of war. Archers would shoot at targets, not each other. Wrestlers would throw one another to the ground but permit the loser to rise again. The Mayans had a ball game, and occasionally enemy cities would play it instead of going to war. The losing side would send tribute to the winners, who would become their default rulers. (No, the losing side wasn’t sacrificed; that’s a misreading of pictorial narrative. Makes a good story, though…)

As actual war-fighting became more dependent on technology, and as peace, however troubled, began to stretch for extended periods of time, sport burgeoned. As a species we’re made for physical exertion, and aggression’s part of our nature. Sport allows us to battle, if we’re on the field; to scream and yell for our heroes, if we’re in the stands. It allows —it calls for—behavior not sanctioned in our time and place, outside the arena. In that sense, sport is transgressive.

In every sense, crime is transgressive. Behavior allowed in one time or place may be criminal in another—polygamy, say, or criticizing the government. Some behavior, like housebreaking or premeditated murder, is criminal almost everywhere, unless carried out by the state. In the real world, crime is frightening—unpredictable, often dangerous. But in fiction it’s different. Our interest in fictional crime parallels our interest in sports. We can indulge our desire to break free of restraint, to disobey, to sin, without the need to deal with the consequences.

Small wonder, then, that sport and crime go together so well.

In this collection, from baseball to boxing—but not, alas, my own aggression-sublimation of choice, basketball—and from ultimate Frisbee to marching band—doubters beware!—sport and crime interweave, satisfying, as they so often do, the same itch.

Having collected my thoughts during my workout, I write this at the gym. I urge you all to read the stories here, and then go work out yourselves. The exercise might give you enough of a release to keep you from committing a crime.

If not, the increased blood flow to your brain might help you get away with it.

SJ Rozan

Sept 26, 2023

McBurney YMCA

MURDER AT HOME,

by Alan Orloff

Two outs, bottom of the fourteenth inning, score knotted at five, game seven of the National League Championship Series. Winner of this game gets their ticket punched to the World Series.

P.J. Bulldog Johnson took a short lead off first base and watched as the Cardinals’ sixth hurler of the game wound up and delivered his pitch to the Mets’ clean-up batter, Alfonso Cabrera.

Cabrera swung, and at the crack of the bat, Bulldog took off, begging his old legs to move. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the right fielder take a bad angle, letting the ball squirt past him into the gap, on its way to the wall.

Ahead, the third base coach yelled at him to "run, run, run."

So Bulldog ran, building up a head of steam, though he was indeed more bulldog than greyhound. He’d been in the league seventeen years now, played catcher for every single one of them, to which his aching knees could loudly testify.

He rounded second as his third base coach was screaming at him to "dig, dig, dig."

So Bulldog dug. Down deep. Shifted into a gear he hadn’t used for a decade. If he scored, he’d be the hero. After an awful year, after he’d been demoted to third string, suffered neck and shoulder injuries, got into an altercation with a teammate, and found himself in the manager’s doghouse—so to speak—it would be the perfect time to score the winning run and send his team to the Series.

Redemption, so near.

Maybe the guys in the clubhouse would even talk to him again.

He chugged toward third, where the base coach was windmilling his arms, shouting, "go, go, go."

So Bulldog went. He rounded the base, momentum carrying him wide of the basepath, closer to the fans in the stands, where he could almost feel their collective energy propelling him forward, their roars and prayers fueling his charge toward the plate.

Bulldog barreled on.

Seventy feet to go.

Sixty feet.

Fifty.

Then a cleat caught the ground wrong, just a slight misstep, but he lost his balance, stumbling, stumbling, stumbling, every muscle straining to regain equilibrium, arms flailing, knees buckling, threatening to do a face-plant thirty feet before his goal. Before victory. Before becoming a hero.

The hero. If he scored, all would be forgotten. He’d be anointed. If he tumbled now, he’d be the goat, forever known as the guy who fell on his ass and cost the Mets a chance at the title. His entire career boiled down to this singular moment. Hero or goat, nothing in-between.

That thought gathered him, brought a laser focus back to his attempt to right the ship. Somehow he willed his forty-year-old body to obey, to corral those misbehaving limbs and regain his balance, so he could continue his sprint home.

Victory was fifteen feet away.

Miraculously, his coach’s voice pierced the crowd’s thunderous roar: "slide, slide, slide."

So Bulldog slid.

He feinted a headfirst dive, then arched his back, flung his legs around the catcher in a wild, old-school-style hook slide, toe searching for the plate. The catcher caught the ball, spun around, slapped the tag on Bulldog’s calf. A bang-bang play. Every single fan in the crowd held their breath, awaiting the call.

Safe?

Or out?

The ump screamed, "Safe."

And the stadium erupted. The home team had won. It was on to the Series, courtesy of Old Man Johnson scoring from first on forty-year-old legs.

Bulldog lay there, right on home plate, soaking it all in. He figured he had about seven seconds before his entire team emptied onto the field and onto him, in the most glorious celebratory dogpile in the history of dogpiles.

Bulldog basked in glory as the entire mass of teammates piled on top of him. He was truly the hero, for the first time in his long, rocky, underwhelming career.

And for the last.

* * * *

Mets General Manager George Wellingham stopped the video playback on his iPad. A still picture of Bulldog Johnson’s lifeless body lying across home plate appeared frozen on the screen. Forty-two thousand witnesses, in person. Another six million witnesses on TV. The game’s star, dead at home! And nobody saw what really happened!

What happened? I thought it was a heart attack, Rick Baines said. He’d been shocked when the GM called him late last night, summoning him to an eight a.m. meeting. He could count on zero fingers the number of times Wellingham had asked him to come to his office for a chat. After all, he was only one of the team’s assistant hitting coaches. And now, the morning after one of the most tragic—and bizarre—occurrences in professional sports? Something was up, and Baines was pretty sure he wanted no part of it.

Wellingham set the iPad down on his desk. I wish it was a heart attack. Officially, the cause of death has not yet been determined. But Mr. Petrone, our esteemed owner and String-Puller-in-Chief, yanked on a few well-placed strings—at the ME’s office—and learned that the preliminary findings indicate Johnson had been poisoned, injected with something lethal. And they’re pretty sure it happened at the bottom of that dogpile.

Poisoned? Baines had been right there when it had happened, watching the action from the dugout steps. After Johnson had scored, though, Baines hadn’t stormed the field with the rest of the team. He’d stayed in the dugout to keep an eye on the equipment in case some exuberant—and drunken—fans wanted souvenirs. He knew how much the players’ lucky bats meant to them, and he also knew it was the responsibility of someone low on the totem pole to keep watch.

From his vantage point, Baines had seen pretty much what the video showed. Bulldog Johnson scoring the winning run, getting mobbed by his teammates, and not getting up after everyone else had. Death was terrible, but if you had to die, that was a pretty dramatic way to exit. As a Mets hero.

Who would want to kill Bulldog?

Only about every person he’d ever met, Wellingham said. In case you hadn’t noticed, he rubbed people the wrong way. Hard and often.

Wellingham wasn’t wrong; Bulldog was an asshole.

"Right now, I wish he hadn’t even been in the game. It would have been better for all involved if he’d been poisoned elsewhere. Wellingham’s face turned red. Well, I guess it wouldn’t have been better for Johnson."

Despite his callousness, Wellingham was correct. Ordinarily Bulldog wouldn’t have been in the game. It had been months since he’d played, spending much of that time in the minors rehabbing his shoulder. He’d been placed on the expanded playoff roster only because the team’s regular backup catcher broke his thumb in the last regular season game. And he was only on the field because Tommy Evans had sprained his ankle beating out a grounder, and every single other capable runner—including two of the rotation’s starting pitchers—had already been pressed into duty. The manager had no choice but to send Bulldog into the game to pinch run for Evans.

Do the police have any leads? Baines asked.

"First of all, there is no official investigation. Not yet. Something else Mr. Petrone arranged with his buddy, the district attorney. Neither of them wants to do anything that might tarnish this city’s time in the spotlight while we’re in the Series. So somehow, Mr. Petrone persuaded the powers that be to keep things on the down-low until the Series is over. Hopefully, we’ll sweep, and they can get to it quickly."

Yes, sir. Baines sat there quietly, admiring all the shiny hardware in a display case behind Wellingham’s enormous desk, still wondering why he was called in.

Wellingham seemed to read his mind. I bet you’d like to know why you’re here, wouldn’t you, Barnes?

As a matter of fact, I would. And it’s, uh, Baines, sir. Rick Baines.

Baines. Right. Sorry. He waved his hand in the air, gaffe dismissed. I need you to do me a favor.

Baines had heard those words before, from various friends and acquaintances, and about half of the time, things went south. He had the strong feeling this would be one of those times. But he sure did like working for the Mets, and helping the head cheese was a good way to get noticed.

Absolutely, he said, adding quickly, if I can, of course.

Of course. Wellingham leaned back in his chair, picked up a baseball from his desk, and gripped it as if he were about to throw a slider. I understand you’re pretty tight with the players. Well liked in the clubhouse. And you’re barely older than most of them. Speak their language.

I guess that’s a fair statement. I’ve gotten to know most of them pretty well.

Good, good. Then I have an assignment for you.

Okay. A few goose bumps prickled Baines’s forearm.

Wellingham set the ball down and made a grand gesture in the air, both arms held wide. "This is our home, son. Our home. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand back and wait for someone else to clean it up. Wellingham flashed a toothy grin, and in that moment, Baines knew exactly how Little Red Riding Hood felt. I need you to get involved with this."

Involved?

"Here’s what I want you to do. First, be polite and cooperate with the police, but keep in mind that there’s cooperation and there’s cooperation, capisce? Just answer their questions as succinctly as possible. Don’t offer anything extra."

Okay.

"But what I really want is for you to use your rapport with the players to ferret out what happened."

The bottom dropped out of Baines’s stomach. Sir?

"I need you to find Johnson’s killer, and quick. We’re not going to be able to keep the police—and the press—out of here for more than a few days. And who knows what other stuff they might find if they really muck around? Wellingham slapped the desk with his palms. We’ve got a World Series to win! We can’t waste time on all this foolishness, now can we?"

No, sir. Baines felt the pressure mount, as if he’d been the one on the bottom of the dogpile. But here’s the thing. I’m not sure the players will open up to me, especially about something like this. I mean, I’m just a staff assistant, and they’re major-league stars.

"Let me clue you in on something, son. If you have confidence in your abilities, if you believe in yourself, really believe in yourself, then others will believe in you too. Get my drift?"

Baines didn’t, not entirely. I still think they may be hesitant to talk to me.

Wellingham exhaled. Fine. I’ll send a memo around to the players telling them they’ll be starting off next year in Triple A unless they answer your questions. Think that’ll help?

Thank you, sir.

Wellingham picked up his phone, looked pointedly at the door. That’ll be all, Barnes.

* * * *

In light of what had happened, management had given the players the day off. But this being big-money professional sports, most of the players drifted into the park anyway, no doubt wanting to process their grief as a team. And once they got there, they gravitated toward those activities that provided a sense of normalcy.

Some tossed the ball around or took a few swings in the batting cage. Others lifted weights, stretched, or got treatments for their wide assortment of aches and pains. At the end of the long season, there was always a wide assortment of aches and pains.

Baines caught up with Alfonso Cabrera in the weight room. Great clutch hit, man. You saved the season.

Cabrera beamed. Thanks. Feels good going to the Series.

For sure. Baines glanced around. You got a minute, Al? There’s something I need to talk to you about.

Sure.

Let’s go someplace a little more private, okay?

Baines and Cabrera found a quiet spot in the corner of the main equipment room.

Helluva thing, ain’t it? Cabrera said. Bulldog, I mean.

Yeah. A shame. Baines paused for what he thought was an appropriate amount of time to show respect for a fallen teammate. Then he dove in. Just between you and me, do you know anyone who would want to kill him?

Cabrera’s eyes went wide. Kill him? I thought it was a heart thing.

Nothing’s been determined yet. I’m just asking. Baines offered a tentative smile. So, do you?

Cabrera pressed his lips together and knitted his brow in an exaggerated show of thinking. Nope.

It’s only the two of us here, Al. We both know that everything wasn’t always rosy in the locker room. And we both know how Bulldog could be. Baines quit talking, letting Cabrera mull things over.

Well, between you and me… Now it was Cabrera’s turn to glance around. He lowered his voice. Nobody liked that prick. Loud. Obnoxious. Not much of a team player. I imagine a lot of guys would want him gone. But murder? I don’t know. Maybe… He lowered his voice even more, just barely a whisper. I were you, I’d talk with Ray-Ray.

Ray-Ray Foster was the team’s big-hitting first baseman who’d clobbered fifty-nine homers this year, a Mets record. Yeah? Why do you say that?

Heard he found some creative way to beat the drug tests. You see Ray-Ray’s guns this year? No ordinary human can do that, you know? Not without a little chemical assistance. Something’s fishy, and I heard through the grapevine that Bulldog was maybe thinking about blowing the whistle. I don’t know any details, though. Maybe Ray-Ray got scared and blew Johnson’s whistle for good, know what I mean?

* * * *

So Ray-Ray, do you have any idea who wanted to kill Bulldog? Baines and Ray-Ray Foster were alone on the center field grass, where Foster was going through his off-day stretching routine. Cabrera was right; Foster’s gigantic biceps stretched the arm of his T-shirt almost to the ripping point.

Foster lay on his back, working his hamstrings. Well, I never had a beef with him, but I know plenty of people who did. How much time you got?

Hit me with the highlights.

Oh, where to start? He put his right leg down, then grasped the left one behind his knee, drawing it toward his nose. Grunted. "A lot of the guys thought he was phoning it in most of the year. I thought he was doing okay—given that he had limited skills and was an old guy anyway. He didn’t always fall in line, did he? What do you think, he ever listen to any of the batting advice you gave him?"

Not a lot of it. Baines had dealt with stubborn players before, those who always thought they knew what was best for their own swings, but Bulldog had been the worst, and it wasn’t even close.

Terrible, what happened. I just hope his death doesn’t mess up our chances. If it does, I might have to dig up his body and kill him again.

Baines tried not to picture that. I, uh, heard something about you.

Oh? Foster stopped stretching.

Something about beating the drug tests?

Foster’s eyes flashed. Who told you that?

Baines remained silent.

Foster glared at him a moment, then shook his head. Ah, screw it. Always goin’ to be haters. I built these muscles the old-fashioned way, hard work, lots of reps, lots of weight. I take the tests—legally—and I pass. Every. Single. Time. If somebody has some concrete evidence, tell them to step forward. If not, tell them to shut their goddamn piehole. His jaw tensed. If you don’t believe me, talk to Jaime. I’ve been following his regimen to the letter. He’ll vouch for me.

Jaime Hernandez was the team’s trainer, and he was good at his job, taking numerous players to physical levels they’d never be able to achieve on their own. Baines exhaled. I believe you, but still, I heard Bulldog was going to turn you in.

You think I killed him? Foster growled. Why would I? I told you, I don’t use performance-enhancing drugs.

Okay then. Let’s move on. Have you noticed any friction between Bulldog and anyone in particular lately?

Foster rolled onto his stomach and grabbed both of his ankles in a quad stretch. "About a month ago, he got into a heated argument with Clay in the training room. Wound up with them choking each other, until I broke it up. I thought for sure it would go viral on social media, but luckily no one had the balls to whip out their cell phones and