The HGH Kid: Confessions of a Major League Killer

By Felix Zeffirelli

Zeff is a 15-year-old orphan destined to become the first baseball player to reach the major leagues with the help of performance enhancing drugs. Using human growth hormone is not Zeff’s only secret; he is a prolific killer, but one who only takes a life when it is justified.
As the story opens, Zeff is lying in wait for his father in the middle of the night with a baseball bat, prepared to confront him for his chronic physical abuse of Zeff’s mother. During the confrontation, Zeff learns that his mafia-connected father has put out a contract hit on his mother, brother, and himself to avoid a costly divorce. In a heated rage, Zeff knocks his father into the next life with his baseball bat and flees the scene.
Racing home, Zeff discovers that his mother and brother have indeed been killed. When police chief Jerzy Kovak and a team of officers come to the scene to investigate, Zeff is shuttled off by Social Services to an orphanage. However enroute, Zeff escapes and returns to Palm Beach to live the life of an orphan.
Initially taking up residence in a tent on Peanut Island a few hundred yards off the north end of Palm Beach, Zeff lives off the land by taking fish from the sea with his rod and reel and spear gun, by picking fruit at some of Palm Beach’s poshest estates, and by selling some of the fresh fish and fruit to local markets and restaurants for extra cash.
Over the next six months, Zeff will try and seek revenge on the hit man who killed his family, continually dodge the Palm Beach police in his bid to stay free, fall into unrequited love with rising tennis star Rachel, and desperately seek to save the Police Chief’s daughter Callie from perishing in the worst hurricane ever to hit Palm Beach. It’s Huck Finn meets Dexter in an action-packed adventure against the backdrop of the paradise of Florida in the 1950s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Felix Zeffirelli
• Release date: Apr 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301479986

Book preview

The HGH Kid

Confessions of a Major League Killer

Book One In The HGH Kid Trilogy

By Felix Zefferelli

Copyright 2013 By Felix Zefferelli

Smashwords Edition

www.thehghkid.com

Prologue

This book is a confession to more than ten separate killings. It’s also a puzzle that involves figuring out who I am.

Regarding my confession, each time I killed someone, I firmly believed the killing was justified. However, with the passage of time, and as old age has brought me much closer to meeting my Maker than to facing justice in any court of law, I have become less sure of my innocence.

One problem troubling me is that at some of the killings involved both premeditation and what the lawyer types call lying in wait These are special circumstances, and if I were ever convicted of even one of those killings, I would surely be given the death penalty.

Despite these special circumstances, I still believe each was morally justified – although the last one, which involved the only woman in the group, still gives me the most pause (and nightmares).

So I am offering you this book at least partly as a confession hoping that you, dear reader, might be able to provide me with some perspective. That’s why when I tell you about the killings, I will spare you no detail. And I want to be clear here – I'm not asking for absolution. I just want your perspective; and if you think I should be hanged or gassed or given a lethal injection, then so be it. I'll make my final deal with the Deity soon enough anyway.

Now what about the puzzle part of the book? Well, it involves identifying who I am in real life based on the clues provided in the story.

This may not be as hard as you might think, particularly if you are a baseball fan. That’s because if you have ever followed the greatest game ever played, you will likely have already heard my name more than once. While I might not be going into the Hall of Fame, I did play for enough years to get a decent pension; and my career numbers are pretty respectable, too.

As to why this puzzle may be of particular interest to baseball fans, it is because I believe I can legitimately lay claim to being the first guy to reach the majors with the help of performance-enhancing drugs – and this was decades before the likes of Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, the Bash Brothers Mark Maguire and José Canseco, and the raging bull Roger Clemens ever got juiced.

On this delicate subject, I want to be clear here. When I'm talking about performance-enhancing drugs, I'm definitely not talking about steroids. That crazy stuff just twists your head, shrinks your privates, and can turn you into a sideshow at a Tijuana bullring faster than you can say stick that needle in my ass.

In fact, I only had a steroid injection once in my life, and it wasn’t any of that fancy stuff they’ve got today but simply pure testosterone. It was clear as gin and in an oil base, and it was so viscous coming out of the needle that it left what looked like a boil on my butt for the better part of a week as the hormone was slowly absorbed into my system.

I was 16 at the time that I got that testosterone injection, and I spent most of the next two weeks not knowing whether to screw something or punch something. It was the most confusing two weeks of my life. But my doctor made me try the testosterone as part of what he called a synergistic approach to my real drug therapy. That was using human growth hormone – what they call HGH – to turn me from a borderline dwarf into what I would become, a tall and strapping major leaguer. In fact, after I started juicing the HGH, I added a full 10 inches that got me topping out well over 6 feet – at least in my baseball prime.

You older folks will know what I'm talking about here. I'm probably down to about 5'10" now as old age has taken its toll. That damn gravity does suck – just like that 1960s bumper sticker once said.

Now before we get started with the story, there are a just a couple of ground rules for solving the puzzle that I’ve got to warn you about.

First, most of what I will tell you in the book is the God's honest truth – including most of the details about the killings. But to make this book a true puzzle, I'm also going to have to fictionalize some of the main storylines.

For example, that part of the book during my childhood is set in Palm Beach, Florida; but that's not really where I grew up. I just use the place because it is a locale where baseball, tennis, oppressive heat, and water are all in abundance – just like where I really did grow up.

As for the baseball teams I say I played with and the guys I played against, this has to be a total fiction. Otherwise, the puzzle would just be too easy to solve – and I can't have that happening at the same time I'm confessing to a bunch of killings.

Still, all of the things that happen in the games that I describe actually happened at some time or another in baseball games that I've actually played in. That means you can be rest assured that this is genuine baseball I'm talking about – often at its best, but sometimes at its most absurd.

So I do appreciate your willingness to hear my confession. And I also hope that this puzzle will be a fun one for you to try and solve. With that settled then, let's play ball!

Chapter 1: My First Big Hit

Even as a kid, I could swing the bat pretty good.

My first really big hit was square in the middle of my old man's forehead. Knocked him right into the next world – just where he belonged. Hour of the Wolf. 4 a.m. Palm Beach, Florida. Circa, the 1950s.

I hadn't meant to kill Pops that night when I went to the employees’ parking lot of the Palm Beach Towers Hotel. I only meant to scare his sad, sorry, abusive ass just enough so that he would stop beating up on my mama.

Earlier that day, I had reached the end of my rope. Pops had rolled out of bed at noon – that's sunrise for a professional musician like him as he gigged well into the wee hours of the night. Then Pops comes in and sits down at the kitchen table in his underwear; and my mama feeds him a big sweet breakfast of eggs, Italian sausage, and corn fritters with about a gallon of maple syrup. Once that’s over, Pops lets out a big belch – and then Sir Gasalot tells Mama he wants a divorce.

Instead of saying thanks, where do I sign? Mama gives Pops just enough lip about his constant womanizing that Pops first sends his egg plate flying over her head against the wall and then, after a pause to reload, Pops slings the fritter plate – Mama all the while bobbing and weaving like Sugar Ray Robinson.

Of course, once Pops got out of his chair, Mama tried to run because she knew what would be coming next. But he pretty much had her cornered; and once he got his mitts on her, he worked her over pretty good. Son of a bitch did it just the way one of his Mafia buddies had showed him – so as to hurt her good but to leave no bruises or facial marks.

My older brother and I watched it all from the living room. When the kidney punches started, and Mama began to whimper and beg, my chicken-shit brother – a head taller than me and 70 pounds heavier – walked to our room and shut the door. Me, I just started screaming at the bastard to leave her alone or I'd call the cops.

All that got me was an open hand across the face and then a free flight across the room on about the same trajectory as the egg plate and the fritter platter. As I bounced off the wall and my adrenaline spiked and all of the world seemed to go into slow motion – this kind of adrenaline spike would later help me in clutch situations to hit a 99-mile per hour fastball like it was standing still – I knew in that time-warped and elongated instant just exactly what I had to do.

So that night, just before midnight, and long after my brother was fast asleep and Mama was passed out on painkillers, I grabbed my 30 Louisville slugger, slipped out of our garage apartment, jumped on my trusty Huffy three-speed bike, and headed south down the Lake Trail towards the Palm Beach Towers Hotel. That’s where Pops and his so-called Society Orchestra" were the main attraction for whatever socialites that might be left in town this late in the season.

That’s the one and only good thing I can really say about my dad: He was a hell of a musician.

Yep. Pops played the saxophone and clarinet like he was born to it; and every night except Mondays at the Towers Hotel ballroom, he covered the tunes of Big Band artists like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman like they were his own – and the place was always packed.

As for Pop’s Society Orchestra, well, that was more than a little bit of a stretch. That’s because his Big Band sound came from a pretty small ensemble – just a drummer and a bass player and sometimes a trumpet.

Of course, what really made Pop’s band the toast of the town besides Pop’s own sweet horn playing was the band’s singer. Pops always had a young, gorgeous, and stacked late teen that could sing like an angel. It was one blond after another, like a frigging Barbie assembly