Read The Setup Man for Free Online Page B

“I’ll be gentle.”
    Upside, downside, frontside, backside: you know the routine. After twenty minutes you start to wonder how much longer it will be before the Prince anoints her with his royal jelly. Then a telephone rings. Maria reaches over and fetches a massive, bricklike cellular from the side table. She pulls up the antenna and flips it open. “Hello?” she says. “Oh, hi, Pablo. No, I’m not doing much. Why don’t you come over?” The big guy stops thrusting for a minute, asks who it was. “Just my cousin,” she says. “He’s coming over.”
    “Cool,” says the Prince, “I’m sure we can find something for him to do.”
    A minute later, you hear a doorbell, then footsteps. A new man walks onto the set. His face, too, is kept out of the shot. Quickly he sheds his clothes, and Maria Herrera kneels between the two gentlemen, a cock in each hand. A few minutes later, she changes positions so the new guy is on her back door. The shot tightens around their midsections—hers is the smooth unblemished brown of a Coppertone ad, his thick with ropy muscle, a few pimples, and an amateurish tattoo. The camera pans out a bit and I see that the tattoo reads “Granma” in crude Old English script.
    I nearly drop my cappuccino.
    I rewind to the moment when Pablo enters the apartment, replay the banter between the “cousins.” No question, the male voice belongs to Frankie Herrera.
    My mind races to the consequences: Bay Dogs management would have been furious if this clip hit the Internet. Frankie’s endorsement deals, if he had any, would have been terminated as well. No energy drinks or breakfast cereals want to be associated with a porn star.
    The trouble, as Frankie surely understood, was that the video was already online. Its only saving grace was the anonymity of a DIY porn site. All it would have taken to ruin Frankie Herrera was for someone to identify the actors and post the link on a Bay Dogs message board. Anyone who had ever seen Frankie Herrera in his underwear—years of teammates and half the sportswriters in the Bay Area, for starters—would have recognized him instantly.
    I pick up the phone and call Bethany’s office. Her assistant, a deadpan Korean American kid fresh out of Harvard, answers on the first ring.
    “Good morning, Johnny,” he says. “May I offer congratulations on last night’s win? Fifteen runs is six standard deviations from the Bay Dogs’ median production.”
    His tone is astonishingly flat. The voice in a GPS has more affect.
    “Thanks, Jun. I guess we got lucky.”
    “I was going to mention luck, but I was worried it would offend you.”
    “No offense taken. We’ll take luck.”
    “Just a moment, please, while I transfer you.”
    When she comes on the line, Bethany sounds as busy as always. I hear men chuckling in the background.
    “Done with the Latin babe?” she says. “I thought for sure you’d beg fatigue.”
    “It was Maria Herrera,” I say. “Frankie Herrera’s widow.”
    I assume she cups her hand around the phone, because the background noise is suddenly gone. “Wow, John. Is she already auditioning replacements?”
    “Listen, I have to be at the park in half an hour. Do you still have that project with the morgue? The one where you take DNA from stiffs.”
    “You mean DataShape?”
    DNA collection was only one part of the company’s business. A minor part, if I recall Bethany’s explanation correctly. The project that got her to pull out her wallet was DataShape’s operations at the sewage-treatment plant. Someone at DataShape got the idea that if you were to sequence human DNA from a city’s raw sewage, you could assemble a statistically representative model of human genetic diversity. According to Bethany, this has plenty of valuable implications—for example, the ability to pinpoint genetic variations that cause diseases. If you find that 1.91 percent of the DNA in the sample has a particular genetic mutation, you might look for a