Bad Karma by Dave Zeltserman Page A

if he had rouge on and almost matching the color of his red hair. He was about Shannon’s height but wider, carrying an extra forty pounds beyond Shannon’s hundred and eighty. “When I heard you outside I thought you were a reporter. The tabloid ones are the worst. Nothing but a bunch of fucking piranhas.”
    “No, I’m not a reporter,” Shannon said. “If you’ve got some time, I’d like to talk to both you and your wife. Is your wife home?”
    “She’s home.” He hesitated. “She’s not feeling well, though. She’s come down with some sort of bug and would give me holy hell if I brought you or anyone else upstairs. You also caught me as I was about to head out.” Maguire snapped his fingers again, his eyes brightening. “Look, I’ve got two tickets for the Sox game. Since my wife can’t come, and shit, you’re another Boston guy—as long as you’re a Sox fan, you want the ticket?”
    Shannon found himself nodding. “I was planning to go to the game,” he admitted.
    “Then come on, man, take my extra ticket. Otherwise I’ll just be scalping it, and with my luck, selling it to some undercover cop. This way I’ll know it’s in the hands of a true Sox fan. Wadda ya say?”
    Shannon hesitated as he thought it over. Maguire’s grin turned more into a smirk as he shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “What’s there to think about? It will be fun. Us guys from back east, we take baseball seriously, not like these rednecks and cowboys out here. And you can ask me all the questions you want while we’re driving back and forth to the game. But once the game starts, that’s it. No questions. I go into my gonzo fan mode. So last time, wadda ya say?”
    “You talked me into it.”
    “Great.” Maguire offered his hand and showed only a slight tic in his grin on realizing that Shannon was missing a couple of fingers. “I’ve got a few things I’ve got to do before we head out. I’d invite you up but my wife would kill me.”
    “That’s fine.” Shannon nodded towards the staircase behind Maguire. “Your condo’s on the second floor?”
    “Yep. We’ve got the upstairs, they’ve got the downstairs.” Maguire waved a thumb at the other condo. “What do you think, one of these days they’ll take that notice down?”
    “Three months is already too long.”
    “You’d think so, huh? It cheers my wife up everyday to have to walk past that. Also does wonders for my resale value.”
    “You’re thinking of selling?”
    “Maybe, not right now.” He sniffed a few times, then froze for a moment as if he were about to sneeze. The moment passed. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of things I really need to do, then you can fire away all the questions you want. I just don’t want to miss batting practice. With the altitude out here, Manny and Ortiz should be launching some moon shots.”
    Maguire gave Shannon a short wave, then turned and headed up the stairs, his feet heavy on the hardwood steps. Ten minutes later he came down wearing a 2004 Red Sox World Championship T-shirt, Red Sox cap and official-looking baseball uniform pants. His face was flushed a deeper red than before as he showed Shannon the baseball glove he was carrying. “Kind of a kid’s thing to do, but maybe I’ll get lucky and catch a foul ball.” They started towards the parking lot, and when he caught Shannon reaching for his car keys he put out a hand to stop him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll drive,” he said.
    He led Shannon to a dark blue BMW Z3 convertible. “Before you get any ideas I’m loaded, this beauty’s eight years old and has almost two hundred thousand miles on it. I bought it during the boom times of the late nineties. Before nine-eleven changed everything.”
    Maguire put the top down. As they drove from Arapahoe Avenue to Twenty-Eighth Street, he explained how he’d been a software engineer in the networking equipment sector during the nineties. “It was a magical time back then,” he