Chapter 14

Shannon was but part of his name, not the first nor the last, but the middle, after his mother's people, and he chose it as his only identification when they released him from prison rather than to use an alias. Should he resort to the full Andrew Shannon Connelly there were those, he felt, who might remember him, although it was doubtful there in Canada. Generally, the sportsminded were hockey people, some football, but baseball had yet to come into its own, even with the new Montreal Expos; still, he wanted no ties nor to be reminded of that segment of his life if only by chance, and especially now with what he had in mind.

He'd been sixteen-years in the majors, a husky corn-fed farm boy of eighteen from upstate New York in the beginning, foregoing college in '47 to sign with St. Louis, and later with Boston, then Milwaukee. He'd been good, having two no-hitters to his credit with the Sox, and great things still expected of him even at thirty-four, but Maggi had ended all of that.

Maggi Delaney Connelly, his wife of thirteen years, mother of Paulie, their six-year old son, had been an ardent baseball lover, an excellent hostess, and a godamned promiscuous woman. One afternoon in July, six-years past, Paulie, left alone had struck his head on the side of their swimming pool, tumbled into the water and drowned. He, Shannon, had been in Chicago and they'd wired him there. It was two days following the funeral that a friend advised him of seeing Maggi in a bar with a man at the time the accident occurred.

He'd said nothing to her, only pretended to return to the team. That night he'd found them together in his bed and attempted to kill them both with his bare hands. He might have succeeded, he remembered, had not Maggi managed to floor him from behind with a chair, knocking him unconscious and breaking his arm... his left arm... his pitching arm.

But the ironical part had come later when her lover, who had turned out to be a prominent, local political hack, had engineered an attempted murder charge against him and made it stick, netting him a year and a day in prison. When it was done, a bitter ex- baseball player named Andy Connelly was advised by a benevolent warden that he might do better in another part of the country... or even another country. Had he thought about that?

In fact, he'd thought about a lot of things, and that was but one of them. Divorced, broke and overflowing with hate, he had migrated north of the border, found employment in a small factory in Ontario, then, fumbled a stupid attempt to hijack its payroll.

So, once again here he was, five-years later, no less bitter, but seasoned, and happy to be breathing free air once more as he walked along a side street off St. Catherine in the warm September sunshine, enjoying the pleasurable sounds of Montreal's bustling activity. Twenty years had passed since his last visit to the fabulous city... since that exhibition game with Montreal's then International League team, and he was satisfied that its stellar attraction had not changed... the women were still beautiful... and God, how he needed one.

A half-dozen times he paused to ogle after a pair of pretty legs or a voluptuous figure wearing a piled-up, exotic coiffure... radical, ridiculous, but beautiful... slender ankles, rounded calves and curvaceous hips and buttocks... tripping off on high, needle-like heels in every damned direction. Christ, it was enough to set him wild; his love-starved cock jerked uncontrollably in his pants. He didn't intend that another day would go by without him knowing the satisfaction of a woman's warm, soft, receptive body. How he'd gone these last forty-eight hours since his release was almost more than he could fathom right at the moment, but then, with a little thought that wasn't too difficult to reason either.

There were other things besides the need for normal sexual satisfaction one became obsessed with when he was buried "inside"... and in this case it had been a plan to extort a half-million dollars. A thousand and one nights he had lain awake plotting, planning, learning all he could from his vindictive cellmate, Antoine Poirier, regarding the latter's infamous crime czar "uncle", Gaston Larreau; until he was certain he had devised a workable scheme. Nothing else seemed to matter all those long months and years except this fantastic coup that was going to even every score for him, even the medieval torture of being denied the biological need for a woman.

At first, when he'd walked onto the street and heard the big gate clang shut behind him the sensation of being a free man once more had nearly over-powered him. By god, he was going to kick things off with a few drinks, then, a woman, and he was going to fuck that doll, whoever she would be, until she couldn't walk, until he'd drained the last drop of stored-up semen from his aching, ravenous loins... but he hadn't done either. Instead, he'd gone directly to the CNR station, bought a ticket for Montreal and spent the day enroute, his brain cogitating in a never-ending pattern of hashing and rehashing, for it was the enormity of such a scheme and the aftermath should it fail that caused him to break out in periodic cold sweats.

The big gamble existed in the fact that he was playing at a game he knew nothing about, where the stakes, win or lose, were the ultimate... financially fixed for life, or very, very dead. The payroll escapade had been a foolhardy thing; the proof of that had been his tackling it single-handed and without a carefully prepared program. They'd caught him flat-footed. This time, he intended to minimize the gamble with methodical planning. There was no room for error, or else he would damn sure wind up in a basket; not that he feared death so much, but it was the uncontrollable ways one could achieve the state that bothered him.