Screwball
Chapter One
Boston: Four Years Later
Two pink neon nipples pulsated above the tall figure of a cat -- the brazen sign of the Topless Kitty strip club two miles south of Fenway Park. Augie Sharkey parked his big maroon Oldsmobile in the gravel lot out front and lumbered inside, squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke tinted red by moonlike ceiling globes. Up on twin stages above him were two young dancers, writhing to the beat of Pearl Jam; the taller one, a supple honey blonde, had just completed a
pirouette and slipped off her brassiere, twirling it overhead with a rouged expression of pouty arrogance.
Sharkey watched her for a moment and searched the room. His face was made more rugged by the lurid light. After nine years of managing the Sox, "Big Fish" remained an imposing presence, tall and rawboned, although age and frustration were beginning to give him a tattered look
at fifty-seven. His hair, still mostly black and ragged over the ears, was thinning on top; his jowls had broadened; his skin had grown leathery like an old mitt. He retained the air of a warrior, a leader who could endure the brutal vicissitudes of baseball, but there was often an aspect
of pain in the hard lines of his mouth -- a scowling, carplike mouth -- and in his ey ... read full excerpt from Screwball ebook
