Intent to Kill Read Free Page B

just two weeks out of Double-A ball, jumped up, grabbed his cap and mitt, and ran out of the dugout. He went straight to Ryan.
    “Coach needs to see you,” he said, not looking Ryan in the eye.
    Ryan knew this was no routine substitution, not with the owner of the Red Sox in the stadium to watch Ryan and the other players on his short list. Ivan stepped off the mound, confused. Ryan’s teammates on the field looked at one another and shrugged, and the wave of speculation carried over with equal force to the opposing team’s dugout. The fans, too, seemed baffled, and a few started booing the decision to pull Ryan from the game. The umpire behind home plate removed his mask and planted his hands on his hips, as if to say that someone owed him an explanation.
    Ryan jogged to the dugout, slowly at first, then faster, reeled in by his manager’s seeming refusal—no, inability—to look at him. Finally, his gaze met Ryan’s, and the expression on his face was unlike any Ryan had ever seen before. His lips moved, but it was as if no words would come, and when this big bear of a man could hardly find the strength to put his arm around Ryan, it was painfully obvious that something terrible had happened.
    “It’s bad, son,” was all the old man could bring himself to say.

3
    RYAN RODE SHOTGUN AS THE TEAM CAR SPED TOWARD MEMORIAL Hospital, the major trauma center in the area. There hadn’t even been time for him to retrieve his own phone and car keys from his locker. One of the PawSox trainers drove while Ryan tried to gather information on the cell phone he’d borrowed from him.
    “Faster, you gotta go faster,” said Ryan.
    They were already doing seventy in a forty-mile-per-hour zone. The trainer edged it up past seventy-five.
    “Let me call you back,” Ryan told his father-in-law on the line. “I want to check with the hospital again.”
    The only thing he knew for certain was that there had been an automobile accident, a serious one. Both Chelsea and Ainsley had been in the car, and both were alive when the ambulance had arrived at the hospital. The ER nurse had shared all this information in the previous phone conversation with Ryan just minutes earlier, and she had nothing new for him when he got her on the line again. She could only confirm what he already knew. He closed the flip phone.
    “How much farther?” Ryan asked.
    “Two minutes.”
    “Make it one.”
    Ninety seconds later the car screeched to a halt at Memorial’s emergency entrance. Ryan jumped out, the pneumatic doors parted, and he ran straight into ER pandemonium. A drug addict paced across the waiting area, arguing with the television set. An old man with an icepack on his head was mumbling about some kid who’d gotten away with his dog and his wallet. A homeless woman with mouth agape, and no teeth, slept in the chair beside him. Pawtucket wasn’t Newport, and while violent crime no longer riddled neighborhoods like Pleasant View and Woodlawn the way it had in the 1980s and ’90s, 30 percent of families with young kids here lived below the poverty line. The crowded ER waiting room was graphic testimony of the city’s continuing problems with crime, drugs, and general hard living.
    Ryan threw a quick glance at the mob scene around the registration desk and kept running. He’d visited this same ER last year for his shoulder, so he didn’t need directions to the examination bays down the hall and just beyond the double set of doors.
    “Sir!”
    He tried to keep going, but the intake nurse practically tackled him.
    “I need to see my wife and daughter! Where are they?”
    The PawSox uniform left no doubt as to his identity. The nurse checked her clipboard. “Your wife is in surgery right now.”
    “How’s Ainsley?”
    “Your daughter is going to be fine,” she said in a voice that tried to calm him.
    “I didn’t ask how she’s going to be. I said how is she.”
    “Fortunately, your daughter was in the rear seat in a child safety