Overkill(14)

Following his inglorious exit from the NFL, he’d packed on an extra twenty pounds. After his day of reckoning with the sports network that had forced him into an early retirement, he’d awoken one morning with the mother of all hangovers. He’d puked and dry-heaved for five minutes, after which he gave himself a good, hard look in his bathroom’s full-length mirror. The damn thing was merciless. Who the hell was that bloated, spongy, sorry excuse for a man staring back at him through bloodshot eyes?

Zach was disgusted by him. He despised him. He decided he must go.

Then and there his naked self had resolved that he would not continue down the road he was on. For one thing, he didn’t want to give those who’d predicted he would self-destruct the satisfaction of smugly watching from the sidelines as he inexorably degenerated.

He’d retained just enough fortitude to make a vow to himself to get his shit together. He might be ridiculed and scorned for past failures and bad behavior. That censure he deserved. But he would never let them say Zach Bridger had fallen from grace and then gone to seed.

That morning of his epiphany, he’d poured out every bottle of booze he had in the house, made a shopping list of healthy foodstuffs to replace the crap his pantry and fridge were stocked with, and had outlined a rigid and rigorous exercise program for himself that even Bing would have approved. Bing might even had said it was excessive.

The first workout, which in previous years would have amounted to a warm-up, had nearly killed him.

But within eight weeks, he’d dropped the extra twenty pounds, then over the course of the next couple of months, he lost another ten. That had brought him down to his pre-NFL weight, and it was all muscle. He was leaner, and, if not meaner, then sure as hell harder, his soul as well as his body.

Now, quads on fire, he covered the last arduous yards to reach the rocky ledge that marked his stopping point. He slowed to a normal walking pace and moved in a circle as he used the app on his wristwatch to check the pedometer, his time, his vitals, all the things he kept track of. He flipped his ball cap around backward and lifted the hem of his t-shirt to wipe sweat off his face. After drinking from the water thermos clipped to his waistband, he leaned against the rough trunk of a pine tree, closed his eyes, and waited for his respiration to regulate.

He tried to empty his mind and let his thoughts simply drift. Instead, they channeled straight back to Kate Lennon. “You can call me Kate,” she’d said. But from there forward he hadn’t called her anything, because after she’d dropped that H-bomb piece of information about Eban Clarke on him, he’d considered their meeting concluded.

He’d stood up so fast, he nearly knocked over his mini-chair. As it was, his thigh had caught the edge of that teeny table and sent it to rocking. “I’m outta here,” he said. “I’ve got to go before the market closes.”

“It’s open till seven p.m.”

And he’d said, “The stock market.”

And she’d said, “Oh,” and checked her wristwatch. “Time has gotten away from me, too. I have a Zoom meeting in fifteen minutes.” She’d shouldered the bag that he could have packed for a weekend. “But you and I have more to talk about.”

“No, Ms. Lennon, we don’t.”

That’s when she’d invited him to call her Kate.

But he hadn’t. All he’d said was, “Goodbye. Thanks for the coffee.”

Not wanting to scare her or any of the other customers in Wholly Ground, he’d gotten the hell out of there. Because he was about to explode. Like he had that time against Green Bay’s right guard who’d taken an extra potshot at him that had been ferocious enough to knock his helmet off.

Before he even realized what he was going to do, he had laid into the guy. It had felt like attacking a mattress, but his teammates practically had to peel him off the asshole. The officials went nuts with their whistles; both coaches were apoplectic. The Packer had been ejected from the game. But still, Zach had never been that angry. Not until this morning when he learned that they’d let that son of a bitch Eban Clarke out of prison.

He wanted to attack the whole damn legal system for allowing that.

It must have been obvious to Kate—what the hell, why not call her Kate?—that the miscarriage of justice had lit a short fuse in him, because she had let him go without protest, saying in his wake something about contacting him soon.

He didn’t stop to tell her not to bother, that he saw no point in talking about it further. Rebecca was still locked in a vegetative state. Clarke was free. Thinking about it, talking about it, rehashing all of it was pointless.

Dwelling on it only served one purpose, and that was to make him miserable. It had taken him all this time to extricate himself from that darkness, and it was still dusky. He didn’t want to be drawn back into it, not by anybody, but especially not by Kate Lennon, who was bad news personified.

Although she did have that cute butt, and he’d enjoyed watching her lick the vanilla-flavored foam off her upper lip. So, while he never wanted to lay eyes on the woman again, lying down with her was an enticing fantasy.

He muttered a stream of swear words, pushed away from the tree, and continued along the forest trail that had been charted over time by his own footsteps. He knew the landmarks along it like the back of his hand, and, by now, avoided them almost by instinct.

As he approached his house, he heard something that made him slow down, and then stop altogether to listen. It hadn’t been a natural sound. Not leaves stirred by the wind, or a squirrel’s scolding chatter, not a bird’s flit from one branch to another, nor the incessant white noise created by the waterfall.