Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder Read Free Page A

they were trying to calm things down, but it was hard to tell.
    The Greyhound coaches were trying to drag players off the pile, or so it seemed.  Later, Rhodes wondered if they might not have been encouraging them.
    Jerry Tabor, his frayed letter jacket flapping, clambered over the fence that separated the field from the stands and started after the coaches.  Rhodes could see his mouth working, but he could not hear what he was yelling because of the crowd noise.
    “Uh-oh,” Ivy said, but Rhodes was already on his way out of the stands.
     
    C rossing the field, Rhodes was surprised at how little certain things had changed in all the years since he’d played football.  The browning grass crunched under his feet, the sound of the crowd was still a dull roar, and the noise that really stood out was the thudding of pads and helmets.  It was too bad that the thudding was taking place in a fight instead of in the course of a game.
    Ruth Grady, one of Rhodes’ deputies, was already in the middle of things when Rhodes arrived.  She was short and stocky and well able to take care of herself in most situations.  She had shouldered her way into the middle of the fighting that was breaking out along the sidelines and was trying to get to the pile that still writhed in front of the Greyhound bench.
    The situation bordered on bedlam.  Players were screaming things about each other’s lineage and mental capacities as they tried to punch each other out.  It wasn’t easy to punch out someone wearing a football helmet, but there was some damage being done to players who hadn’t had the presence of mind to put their headgear on.  Most of the damage was inflicted by players who also had their helmets off but who were swinging them at other unprotected heads.
    The officials were trying vainly to separate the brawling players, but they were having no success at all.  In fact, one of them was sitting on the grass with a dazed look on his face as if he might have been clobbered by a helmet.
    The Clearview coaches had managed to grab a few of their players and muscle them away from the main part of the fighting, but the players were still struggling, trying to get back to the fray.
    Jerry Tabor was engaged with a woman who had come out of the Garton crowd and run onto the field.  She would be easy to pick out of a line-up if it came to that:  the hair on one side of her head was dyed a garish red, while the other side was pure white, the Garton colors.  Her face was also painted in contrasting shades, white on the side under the red hair and red under the white. 
    Jerry was trying to get her off the field, but he wasn’t having much luck.  She kept kicking him in the shins.  Rhodes didn’t know who to rescue first, the downed Catamount player or Tabor.
    Suddenly he heard the opening notes of “The Star Spangled Banner.”  The Clearview Marching Catamounts to the rescue, he thought, as the cheerleaders bravely tried to get the crowd to sing along.  But the national anthem didn’t do a bit of good.  The fight continued as if the band were not playing at all.  Rhodes suspected that the only person in the stadium who was standing at attention was Hayes Ford.
    Rhodes started throwing players aside, trying to get to the center of things.  He could see Ruth Grady grabbing at shoulder pads as she tried without much success to unpile the irate Greyhounds still atop the hapless Catamount tackler.
    Then Rhodes heard another sound that cut through all the grunts and groans and screaming and even the blare of the national anthem.
    Rhodes looked around.  The ambulance that usually parked in the south end zone in case of emergency was headed across the field.  The piercing siren got everyone’s attention, and the fact that the ambulance was bearing down on them at about twenty miles an hour did more to stop the fighting than anything else could have.  Players, officials, and coaches scattered for the fence, jamming together in