Читать книгу In The Line Of Fire - Beverly Bird - Страница 8

It was raining hard in Mission Creek, South Texas.

It wasn’t the general, impotent misting that he’d come to accept as a squall during his formative years here, Danny Gates thought, as he stood on the concrete sidewalk of Main Street for the first time in six years. That sort of rain would have been a kind of “welcome home, boy.” This rain was hard and punishing. It slid down the back of his neck, a cold finger trailing memories, most of them of the freedom he’d enjoyed years ago.

He started to pull up the collar of his jacket, then he remembered, too, that he no longer owned one. He’d been dragged off to jail without warning on a blistering hot July afternoon. He’d been denied the bail that would have allowed him a window of time to get his affairs in order. As a result, almost everything he’d owned back then was gone now.

Danny took a step off the curb. A glaring yellow taxi pushed toward him through heavy traffic, and he started to wave it down. He aborted the gesture just in time to shove his hand into his jeans pocket and pull out a few crinkled bills. He had six dollars and some change left of the money that the state of Texas had given him as a parting gift. Not enough for cab fare to his mother’s home out on the poor end of Gulf Road—it wouldn’t have been enough six years ago.

Danny swore aloud. His brown eyes darkened dangerously in the direction of the driver as the car approached. His expression obviously warned the cabbie not to pick that man up after all, because the yellow car sped on.

He’d have to work on that, Danny thought, rubbing a hand over his jaw as though to erase the expression.

He started to walk, turning off Main Street, leaving Lone Star County’s probation offices behind. He didn’t even dare stick his thumb out as he would have done as a kid. Hitchhiking was considered a minor crime in most places, and Danny suspected that Mission Creek was probably one of them. Any ridiculous infraction now could get his parole revoked.

He was an ex-mobster and an ex-con. He accepted responsibility for the first if not the second. He trudged on, toward whatever fate had in store for him in this second chance at life.

On Monday morning Molly French overslept.

Part of that could be blamed on the really good pinot noir she’d uncorked last night after her shift had ended—a sort of quiet celebration here on her bed with an old movie and a bag of tortilla chips. Unfortunately, her shift had ended at midnight, and that celebration had taken her into the wee hours of the morning. The rain that had started at dawn hadn’t wakened her; it had just lulled her into a deeper, dreamless sleep. Thanks to her little party-for-one, she’d forgotten to set her alarm before she’d dozed off.

“Damn it.” She pushed the comforter back and sat up in bed, scraping chocolate-brown corkscrews of hair out of her eyes. The curls tumbled back again as soon as she let them go. Because there was no help for it, she levered her legs over the side of the bed and went in search of a headband.

She found one on the floor where she’d tossed it last night when the stupid heroine in the movie had stood there screaming at the sight of a Martian. Molly distinctly remembered shouting, “Shoot him, shoot him!” and ripping the headband off to throw it at the television in disgust when the bimbo had only stood there with her laser weapon pointed at the floor. “She did not deserve what she got,” Molly muttered, shoving the headband on again. The bimbo had gotten the hero—long, tall and sexy with a fierce glare that could have slain the Martian on its own. It had probably been her large breasts that had won him over, she thought. When a woman had large breasts, it was Molly’s experience that she really didn’t have to actually do much of anything.

She turned on her heel and ended up facing the cheval mirror in one corner of her bedroom. Her curls were fastened back now, but beyond the braided leather headband, they shot straight up from her head as though protesting the confinement. Her favorite oversize sweatshirt—emblazoned with the words TEXAS A & M—stopped high on her thighs. Her legs were good, trim and strong, but her breasts were definitely not large.

“My cross to bear,” she murmured. She picked up the chip bag and the wineglass from her bedside table and carried them into the kitchen, glancing at the clock on the wall.

It was just past eleven. She liked to get to the rec center no later than two o’clock, but she was going to be late today. She’d found out last night that she’d been appointed to the task force that had been organized to investigate the bombing at the Lone Star Country Club last month. That was what she’d been celebrating.

Appointed might be a somewhat inaccurate description of what had actually gone down, Molly admitted, heading into the bathroom. She had badgered the chief of police shamelessly. She’d written him four or five memos and sneaked them into his In box. Okay, maybe the first three had actually resembled memos. Maybe the last couple had been outright pleas. Either way, Chief Stone had finally relented.

She’d had to promise him that she would work the task force on her own time, that it wouldn’t interfere with her regular patrol duties. It was the only way she’d been able to overcome his reluctance to appoint her. But Molly had never had a problem with working hard, and this time she had a plan. She’d been with the Mission Creek Police Department for nearly two years now and it was time to start moving up the ranks. She had the experience. She’d had almost ten years in with the Laredo Police Department before she’d made the jump to Mission Creek. She’d known she would lose her seniority and would have to start back at the bottom of the totem pole here, but two years of wallowing in the trenches was enough.

She wanted her detective’s shield, and she wanted it now. So she figured she’d just crack the case that the rest of the task force had been chasing their tails on for the past month. Then she’d accept the accolades with a small, polite smile. Then Chief Stone would realize what an incredible asset she was to his department, and he would rush at her with hands outstretched, that sweet little shield nestled in his palms.

“Nowhere to go now but up, baby.” Molly took her headband off again and yanked her sweatshirt over her head. She turned on the shower. She considered that she really ought to do something about this habit of talking to herself, but it just wasn’t high on her list of priorities. She stepped over the lip of the tub…and yelped.

Molly lunged for the steaming shower nozzle and turned it aside so she could readjust the water temperature. The task force was the opportunity she’d waited for, but what good would it do her if she scalded the skin off her bones before she even started?

Fifteen minutes later she was aiming the blow dryer at her curls and ruthlessly attacking them with an industrial-size hairbrush. The result was a rich, full sweep of gloriously straight hair that just skimmed her collar bone. This, she knew, would last until she left the rec center. She’d get four hours out of the do, tops…if she didn’t sweat. The bright side was that a scrunchie and her uniform cap would take the edge off the worst of the corkscrews from four o’clock until midnight, her regular patrol shift.

She hesitated at her closet. What did an off-duty cop wear to pop up in a task-force war room and share her brilliance? Jeans, she decided. Nice jeans. And a classic, V-neck white sweater. She’d look casual but ready for anything.

With that decision made, she was out the door in ten minutes. She lived in a ground-floor apartment on the north edge of town. She kept three separate locks on her door. Not that she owned a great deal worth stealing—she’d sold most of what she’d owned when she’d made the move from Laredo. But she’d been harassing Mission Creek’s more unsavory element for the better part of two years now in the line of duty. She’d slapped a few handcuffs on people who would not forget it in a hurry, and it wouldn’t take much effort to discover where she lived alone.

Molly turned her key in the last lock and stepped away from her door. Her booted feet got tangled up in the newspaper there and she nearly twisted an ankle. “Whatever the art is to walking in heels, I’ve yet to discover it.” She bent to swipe up the paper and held it over her head in an effort to divert some of the rain coming down.

“Good afternoon, Molly.”

“What?” Her gaze shot to the street where the custodian for the apartment complex was busily clearing the gutter. “Hi, Warren. It’s not afternoon yet. It’s only eleven…” She pushed up the sleeve of the navy-blue blazer she’d tossed on. Her watch read 12:05.

“Well, isn’t that just fine?” What would the task force think when she strolled in at a quarter past twelve? Not a thing, she decided, not once she wowed them all with her brilliance.

Still carrying the newspaper, she jogged along the walkway to the parking lot tucked off to one side of the complex. She was behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Camaro when she succumbed to an urge to pull the paper out of its protective plastic. She opened the reasonably dry pages against her steering wheel, then she saw the date at the top.

Year after year, memory after memory, it always happened to her the same way.

Her heart stopped for half a beat, then it raced. Something airy and light filled her limbs, then her head. And hot tears came unbidden to her eyes, though she refused to let them fall. It was February fifteenth. “Well, happy birthday.” Molly swallowed hard.

It was the day she had been born thirty years ago, the same day Mickey had died seventeen years later. Molly’s hands fumbled as she crushed the newspaper into a large, wadded ball. She tossed it into the passenger seat and shot the key into the ignition, revving the Camaro’s engine. She drove out of the lot, turning south onto Mission Creek Road.

This was not a day to dwell on the past, not this year. This February 15th she was going to find out what her future might hold.

It held three fellow officers who did not seem exceptionally overjoyed by her presence, Molly discovered ten minutes later.

By the time she stepped into the task-force war room, the rain had her hair zinging all over the place again. She blew a couple of damp locks out of her eyes and looked around. Chief Stone had converted the old lunch room for the task force’s efforts. The three Formica-topped tables had been jammed back against the far wall in a line. Some chairs were situated in front of them; others were littered about the empty room as though a band of rowdy children had suddenly abandoned a game of musical chairs.

The table farthest to the left supported a computer that was whining with a high-pitched hum that told Molly it might be about to exit this world. Beside it were photos from the bombing scene. Joe Gannon and Paulie McCauley stood there, flipping through them. The table in the middle held the crime book and a lot of pages and reports yet to be filed. She thought she could make herself useful there. It would be an excellent way to bring herself up to speed on what the task force had achieved this past month without her.

But first she went to the table on the right. It held the coffee machine, an empty box of donuts and a solitary slice of pizza abandoned in its super-size box. Molly lifted the lid to inspect the pizza. The cheese had hardened into yellowish-white nodules and the edges were curling.

Detective Frank Hasselman was standing there talking into a cell phone. His pale eyes lifted to her face at Molly’s expression. “Not to your liking, Officer?”

Molly gave a weak grin. “Not particularly.”

“Then find another restaurant.”

Her spine stiffened. Deliberately she lifted the slice from the box. “This’ll do.”

His brows climbed his forehead. “You’re not seriously going to eat that.”

“Watch me.” She bit in. Once, when she had been ten, Mickey had talked her into swallowing an earthworm. She reasoned that nothing could be worse than that.

She was wrong. Molly fought valiantly to swallow. At least the pizza didn’t curl in on itself on her tongue the way the worm had. “Yummy.”

“You’re crazy.” Hasselman put the telephone back to his mouth and turned away from her to continue talking.

“I’m tougher than I look,” she muttered. And she knew that she was going to have to be to get ahead here. After two years she was still the new kid on the block—which, in all honesty, perplexed her somewhat. It hadn’t taken her this long to break in back in Laredo when she’d been fresh out of the academy.

She poured herself a cup of coffee to wash down the truly bad pizza and went to the table in the middle. She pulled out the chair there and dragged a pile of filing toward her as she sat.

“What are you doing?” Hasselman said, disconnecting his call.

“The grunt work. Somebody has to.”

“She knows her place, got to give her that,” said McCauley.

“Ease off her,” Joe Gannon warned from the other table. At forty-three, he was pretty much the elder statesman of the task force. She’d looked into all fourteen officers and detectives who comprised the team. Gannon was two years from retirement.

Molly fought the urge to sigh in relief. He might be an ally…sort of.

Gannon placed a photo into a pile and came to the middle table to join her as McCauley and Hasselman left the room. “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked, frowning.

“Oh ye of little faith.” She glanced up at him as she began sorting pages. “I worked a task force in Laredo. Double homicide.”

“Don’t tell that to the others.”

Molly frowned. “They’ve got a thing about me coming in from Laredo? Is that what it is?”

“It’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” She slid the last of the pizza surreptitiously into the trash can beneath the table and thought she saw him grin fleetingly.

“Beats me.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Best I can do.” Gannon shrugged. “Plus they don’t trust anybody who wanted to be on this detail so bad she’d do it without pay.”

“Word spreads fast.”

“Start filing. Earn Brownie points. That’s my best advice.” He moved away from the table again.

Forty minutes later, Molly knew scarcely more than she had when she’d started. It was appalling how little information this team had gathered in the month since the bombing, and how disorganized it was. Fourteen cops, four weeks and the crime book was only about two inches thick. She rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

The bomb had gone off behind the Men’s Grill, in its kitchen, at the Lone Star Country Club. The task force had gathered statements from everyone dining there at the time with the exception of Daniel and Meg Anderson who’d had the misfortune of being seated closest to the point of detonation. They were dead. Their little boy, Jake, was not. He’d been on his way to the bathroom that afternoon when he’d made a wrong turn near the kitchen. He’d seen a couple of men moving large green canvas bags outside into a car. Molly noticed from some handwritten notes—not even typed—that there were those on the task force who thought the bags had contained the explosive device.

No matter how she tried, she couldn’t envision a bomb being transported in numerous green canvas bags. And besides, according to little Jake, the bags had been heading out of the country club, not in. It took no thought at all to rule out the theory, so why were the notes included without a disclaimer and why had it been awarded five useless interviews with the kitchen personnel?

Molly wanted to talk to Jake Anderson. He was currently living with Adam Collins, one of the firefighters on the scene that day. He and his fiancée, Tracy Walker, a burn specialist at the hospital where Jake had been treated, had already set the wheels into motion to adopt the little boy. What shape were these bags that he’d seen? That was important, but apparently no one had bothered to ask him. Had they been smooth, compact…or bumpy and bulging with knobby angles? Jake had said that something about them made him think of Santa Claus.

Molly made a note to herself to contact Adam Collins and see how the boy was doing. It might be too stressful for him to talk to her just yet. Whoever was behind the bombing had obviously thought Jake knew too much because he’d been kidnapped along with Tracy Walker no more than a week ago. They were both safely home now, but on top of losing his parents…Molly shook her head and decided she’d wait a few weeks on Jake.

But the boy brought to mind the matter of Ed Bancroft. Molly sat back in her chair and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. He and another guy, Kyle Malloy, were the ones who had kidnapped Tracy and Jake, but neither of those men were going to be talking about it. Malloy had been killed when he was apprehended, while Bancroft had been slapped into a holding cell here at the police station. As soon as she had heard about it, Molly had rushed over to see if Bancroft would talk to her, even thought she wasn’t part of the task force. But she’d found him swinging in his cell from an overhead fixture, courtesy of his belt.

Bancroft and Malloy were—had been—cops.

Then there was a nagging little something that had been bothering her ever since she’d gone to the scene that day of the bombing. Nine-tenths of the Mission Creek Police Department had responded to that call, most—like herself—whether they had been on duty during that shift or not. Granted, Mission Creek was a smaller, more intimate community than Laredo and they didn’t see this kind of trouble very often. But still…that was a lot of cops.

Molly didn’t like what she was thinking. She felt nauseous, but maybe that was just the pizza. She pawed through the papers and reports on the table that she had yet to file and found notes pertinent to Bancroft. The general consensus was that he and Malloy had been sucked in by Carmine Mercado and his boys into moonlighting for the Texas mob. It felt right to Molly. Green canvas bags, she thought again. Weapons, drugs, something being moved through the country club’s kitchen. And whose domain were those things in South Texas? The mob’s, of course. If Malloy and Bancroft had kidnapped Jake Anderson in order to keep him from talking about what he’d seen, they’d done it on orders from whoever was responsible for the blast. That indicated that the organized crime network had owned them.

It always upset her when a cop turned. She thought about all the officers at the scene again. Were Bancroft and Malloy the only ones? Or had some of the others had a staked interest in that explosion?

There were other theories. Heaven knew the Wainwrights and Carsons had been going at each other’s throats for the better part of a century now, but Molly couldn’t see two of Mission Creek’s elite families blowing up the spectacular and lavish club they had jointly established generations ago. There were rumors around town about the involvement of a South American terrorist group, but as far as Molly was concerned, that just smacked of pulp fiction. What would terrorists want with Mission Creek, Texas? Mission Creek already had its own bad boys in the form of Carmine Mercado and his mobsters.

Molly finally pushed her chair back and stood. She’d only gotten halfway through organizing the book, but a glance at her watch told her that it was time to move on to the rec center. She turned away from the table to find Paulie McCauley standing in the door watching her, his arms crossed over his fairly significant chest.

“Solve the case yet?” he sneered.

“No.” Molly shook her head and walked toward him, squeezing past him when he wouldn’t move aside to give her space. “But you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to.”

“Danny, Danny, Danny.”

He looked up from his seat on the chintz-covered sofa in his mother’s living room, the one that had smelled faintly of over-cooked cabbage twenty-five years ago and still did. If he inhaled hard, he could detect it beneath the strident lemon tang of the cleaning solution his mother tended to use with a heavy hand. It made his heart move in a way it hadn’t done for a very long time. This was home.

Some things never changed, Danny thought. Including the money in the shoe box on his lap.

“There’s nearly thirteen thousand dollars in here,” he said.

“You told me to keep it for you. Here. Have another cookie.”

“Mom…” He felt twelve again, but Danny took the cookie.

She went to the threadbare chair across the room from him and sat. Her hair was still as iron-gray and as ruthlessly scraped back from her face as it had been six years ago. Her face was just as seamed. He recognized her blue polyester slacks and the dimpled, dotted Swiss blouse she wore from the years before he had gone away. As near as he could tell, the stubborn woman hadn’t bought herself a damned thing in six years.

He loved her so sweetly and savagely it stole his breath for a moment, so he did the only thing he could do. Danny grinned at her as he shook his head in defeat.

“I told you to use what you needed and to keep the rest of the money for me,” he clarified.

“Which I did.” Mona Gates took a cookie for herself and watched the change come over her boy’s face. Thirty-two years old last month, she thought. She’d visited him in jail with a birthday cake, but they’d hacked it all to pieces before they’d let her give it to him. If she had been going to slide a file in there, she would have done it six years ago when he had first gone away, not weeks before his chance for parole. Fools.

On that day, on his thirty-second birthday, her Danny’s beautiful brown eyes—as soulful and hopeful as a puppy’s, she’d often thought—had stayed fixed on her face, never wavering. She knew he had gone through the motions of celebrating for her sake, not his own. Mona had watched him right back, knowing his gaze missed nothing in that visiting room, not a single movement of the guard standing near the door or a gesture made by the couple sitting at the table beside them. To Mona’s knowledge, Danny hadn’t smiled in six years.

His mouth had a way of crooking up at one corner—almost like he was abashed, but then there was that devil’s own gleam in his eyes. He’d had a way of winking that made anyone who saw the gesture feel as though they’d just been let in on some wonderful, exciting secret. Danny didn’t wink anymore, either.

After a moment his smile faded. “You used less than four hundred dollars, Mom. I gave you thirteen thousand three, and you’re giving back most of it.”

“That was what I needed. I get my Social Security now.”

And he could just imagine how much that added up to each month.

“I have everything I want,” she insisted.

“Liar.”

For a second her eyes twinkled, the way they had long before his father had left them with nothing, before she’d worked too many jobs trying to see them through and before Danny had accepted Ricky Mercado’s offer of a job to pull them out of a particularly bad financial hole. That had started him down a long road that had ended with him knowing every one of Carmine Mercado’s secrets…and needing so desperately to get away from them that he had spent six years in jail to do it.

“You can get a cab back now, can’t you?” Mona asked.

Danny nodded. “I’d say so.” His feet still hurt from the walk.

“Buy yourself a car,” she advised.

“I’m planning on it.” But it wouldn’t be the black Lexus he’d owned six years ago. All the same, it was time to move on, Danny thought. He stood and scraped two thousand dollars off the top of the money in the box. She probably wouldn’t spend that, either, but he was damned if he was walking out of here with it.

Although he’d been picked up by the police without warning, he’d been able to tell his mother where to find this stash. He’d kept it in a safe deposit box at the bank because anything could happen in the profession he’d chosen, and often did. His mother had been authorized for access to that box. She’d picked up the money for him and had held it all this time.

He laid the two thousand dollars on her scarred coffee table. “Buy yourself a new sofa.”

“I don’t want a new sofa.”

“Then that crocheting machine you used to want so much.”

She thought about it. “That’s only about a hundred.”

“Mom…”

She laughed and stood suddenly to hug him. “Danny, Danny, Danny. It’s so good to have you home. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

He finally extracted himself from her arms and folded the remaining eleven thousand back into the shoe box. He looked around for her telephone. She read the direction of his gaze and pulled a cordless from the cushions of the chair she had been sitting in.

“One of those newfangled ones. I bought it with forty dollars of your money when the arthritis started hurting me too bad to get to the phone fast.”

Danny laughed. That was something, at least. “Good for you.”

He used it to call for the cab he hadn’t been able to afford two hours ago. It arrived within fifteen minutes. He was half hoping it would be the same driver who had snubbed him in the rain, but it was a young Hispanic guy with what might well have been the whitest smile Danny had ever seen. He flashed it a lot, too, as though he had only just discovered what a jolly place the world was. Danny didn’t particularly agree with that assessment so he stared at the guy in the rearview mirror until he stopped grinning and looked away.

Eleven thousand dollars left.

The cab let him out at a used-car lot on Scissom Street. He negotiated a fourteen-year-old Dodge down to two thousand dollars and didn’t like the look the salesman gave him when he paid in cash. He’d paid cash for a lot in his life, but back then he hadn’t given a damn what anybody thought. Danny wanted to warn the salesman that if the car didn’t run for at least eight blocks, he was going to come back and bury him in it. But that kind of remark would probably get him in trouble so he kept his mouth shut.

He finally took possession of the car and drove…home.

The rec center was a beleaguered tan brick building on the eastern edge of Mission Creek. He pulled up at the curb and stared at it. Rain funneled down from the corners of a flat roof that covered most of the building. The water formed a solid, wet sheet cascading from the green metal awning hanging over the front door. The place took up most of the block, and the door was dead center with two barred windows on either side of it. Stuck to the top of the left side of the building was a square addition, sided in well-aged cedar. That had a window on each of its four walls.

His apartment. And the kids loitering beneath the green awning, getting wet but not seeming to care, were his new job.

Danny had agreed with his parole officer to teach basketball to these underprivileged kids, most of whom had already had a few skirmishes of their own with the law. For this he would receive the impressive compensation of eight bucks an hour. He could also have the apartment in exchange for acting as a handyman/caretaker/night watchman. Danny got out of the Dodge and reminded himself that this was what he had decided he wanted during his long, lonely nights in that cell.

The kids eyed him. He eyed them right back.

There were three boys and a girl. The boys were all wearing identical baggy jeans that clung to their narrow hips in a way that defied gravity. Two of them wore T-shirts and the third wore a green wool sweater that had seen enough launderings that the knit had gone loose and given way to nubs.

The girl scared him a little. Her hair stuck up from her head in spikes. Her roots were jet black and the ends purple. She was a beauty, with smooth dusky skin and intense dark eyes. It couldn’t be more than fifty-five degrees today, and the sky was pouring cold rain to boot, but she stood with one hip cocked in a stretchy black sports bra and a very small green leather skirt. A silver ring had been inserted into her belly button. Danny rubbed his own midriff against a reflexive sympathy pain.

One of the boys came forward, his chin jutting, ready to protect his territory. Danny pushed his hands into his jeans pockets, a deliberately nonthreatening gesture. He hadn’t been off the streets so long that he didn’t remember how it was.

“Who’re you?” the kid asked.

“The answer to your prayers. And you would be?”

He didn’t answer but one of the other boys stepped forward. “How come you want to know?”

“So I can call you something besides ‘Hey, you.”’

Glances were exchanged. The girl sidled up to join the other two. “Well, I’m Cia.”

“Hi, Cia. Are you going to play basketball in those boots?”

She looked down at her feet. They were encased in more leather with chunky, killer heels. “Who said anything about basketball?”

He had his work cut out for him, Danny thought.

He kept his eye on the one boy who hadn’t yet come forward. He was bone thin with dark hair that had been cut ruthlessly short. One to watch, Danny thought. There was something about him, something that said he was more desperate than the others. There was a certain hollowness to his eyes.

The other kids scattered as Danny passed by them beneath the awning, but the loner held his ground. Only his eyes moved as Danny walked past him. Danny pulled open the rickety screen door to the center, then he paused to read the graffiti on the bricks to one side of it. It was significantly more creative than it had been in his own youth.

“Is that even physically possible?” He nodded in the direction of the words scrawled in red paint.

The first boy snorted. “Not for you, maybe. I can pull it off.”

Cia laughed. “In your dreams, Lester.”

So he had Cia and Lester, Danny thought. So far so good. “Meet me inside on the court in fifteen minutes.”

“What for?” Lester demanded.

“I’m going to teach you guys basketball.” If not today, then tomorrow, Danny thought, but sooner or later they’d come into his gym.

He stepped through the door into a vestibule floored with cracked blue linoleum. The walls had once been white, but they were filthy now with graffiti of their own. There was a single door to his left and double, swinging doors straight ahead. The door to the side wore a small metal sign that read office. Danny went forward. He pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym.

A glance around told him that, surprisingly, it wasn’t in total disrepair. He could work with it, and what he couldn’t work with, he could fix. He’d never set foot in this place when he was a kid—he’d had the school gym at his disposal until Ricky had taken him under his wing and had shown him more lucrative ways to spend his time.

Thoughts of Ricky had his heart seizing a little. Best to take care of that little problem straight off the bat, he thought. Otherwise he wouldn’t live long enough to coach anybody.

Beyond a door at the back of the gym were stairs. The light bulb overhead was burned out so Danny made his way up cautiously, finally stepping into a single room, half of it given over to a sofa bed of deep, depressing green. The other half of the room was taken up by a kitchen straight out of the sixties. Danny didn’t have to open the bathroom door to know that the facilities in there would be prehistoric. He spotted an old rotary-type telephone on a coffee table in front of the sofa and he went straight for it.

He dialed in the number from memory, glancing at his watch. It was two o’clock. Ricky would be home. He was the type who did his prowling at night.

The line picked up midway through the second ring. “H’lo.”

“Some problems never go away,” Danny said calmly. “They just lie dormant for a while.”

He was gratified by a pause before Ricky Mercado spoke. “So you’re out. I heard they were going to spring you sometime this week.”

He’d loved the guy like a brother. But Danny didn’t feel like playing games. “You heard about it the instant I stepped through that jailhouse door this morning and you were waiting for this call.” He knew the way it worked. He knew too much. Therein lay the problem.

He was still as much of a threat to Carmine as he had been six years ago, Danny thought, when the mob had framed him and had him put away because he’d left their ranks. The fact that he had remained silent for six years, not singing like a bird to gain his own release, would hold minimum sway with the old man even now. Danny knew he was alive only because Ricky had probably interceded for him back then, convincing his uncle to go for the prison term instead of eliminating the problem of Danny Gates entirely.

Ricky finally laughed. The sound was rich and familiar. “Okay, we kept tabs on you. So I guess you’re not calling me for a lift somewhere.”

“No. I’m already where I need to be.”

He heard Ricky accepting this in the ensuing silence. “You’re definitely still out then.”

“I’m out.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“We need to meet and work out a stalemate.”

This time Ricky didn’t hesitate. “How about tomorrow?”

“No. Friday. I’m going to need a little time.” This, Danny thought, would be the true test of how much of their friendship remained. They both knew what he was going to do with that time. “Can you hold Carmine and the others off until then?”

“I guess I have to.”

Danny let himself breath again. Cautiously.

“I’ll meet you at the country club at one o’clock,” Ricky said.

Danny thought about that. As long as Ricky had kept his nose reasonably clean these past six years, meeting with him wouldn’t be a violation of his parole. It wasn’t against the law for an ex-con to meet with a suspected mobster—yet. “You haven’t been charged with anything while I was gone?”

“Bro, I’m way too clever.”

Same old Ricky, Danny thought. “I thought I was, too.”

Ricky ignored that. “Friday. One o’clock. In the Yellow Rose Café.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed hard and fast, like blinds slapping down to cover a window. It worried him that Ricky hadn’t chosen the Men’s Grill for old time’s sake. “Why the change?” he asked.

“Because the grill isn’t there anymore. Somebody blew it clear to China last month.”

“No kidding?”

“Sky-high, buddy. It’s a pile of rubble.” Ricky laughed again.

Danny didn’t ask if the Mercados had been behind the explosion. It was just one more thing he didn’t need to know. “All right. The Café, then. In the meantime you’ve got my back, right?”

“You’re covered.”

For now, Danny thought. After Friday, who knew?

He disconnected and shifted his shoulders back and forth, trying to rock some of the tension out of them. Then he cocked his head to the side. From downstairs came the thump-thump-thumping sound of a basketball hitting the gym floor. He grinned to himself. The kids had already come inside.

He returned to the stairs and trotted down, then he went still, holding the door to the gym open with one hand. Whatever was going on out there more closely resembled a game of keep-away than basketball. And it didn’t resemble keep-away much at all. He suspected this all had something to do with the woman who had pulled the kids inside onto the court while he’d been upstairs.

As he watched, she more or less tackled Cia on the hard flooring and began tickling her. The two of them came up gasping for breath. Somehow Cia managed to keep her modesty in that tiny skirt. Then the woman sprang to her feet again. Laughing, she scraped her hands through her hair, pulling it back from her face. It was a wild mass of curls that had hidden her features, but when it was swept clear, Danny saw delicate cheekbones and a spattering of freckles across her nose.

She was small, compact and she had the voice of a drill sergeant. She spun to one of the boys who’d stuck his tongue out at her behind her back—a new one who hadn’t been outside. “Keep it in your mouth, Fisk, until you figure out how to use it.”

“Hey, babe, I know how. Want me to show you?”

“Grow up first. Maybe we’ll talk in ten years.” She caught the ball that Lester shot to her. And fast, without looking, she threw it in the direction of Fisk. The boy was startled, but caught it. “Good job,” she said. “See? Your hands actually work for something besides picking pockets.”

Then she threw herself into the game, or whatever it was.

Her face changed, Danny thought. Her eyes went hot. Passion, he thought. It was there on her face, a hunger both for the release of the exercise and the need to win, assuming her game even had rules. Her hair bounced, all long, dark ringlets that made a man’s hand itch for palms full of it.

A new girl had joined the kids from outside, as well, he realized. She caught the sleeve of the woman’s white sweater. In an instant the woman stopped playing and turned, looking concerned. Then she slung an arm over the girl’s shoulder and together they moved off the court in his direction, their heads close as they whispered.

“Ah, man,” Lester said. “Damn Anita’s got more problems than an ex-con.”

Somehow Danny doubted that.

The woman made a semirude gesture in the boy’s direction and it shut him right up. Passion and kindness, he thought, and no-nonsense guts. He felt one corner of his mouth try to pull into a smile. Danny rubbed his palm over it to get rid of the reflex.

When she looked up and saw him, she stopped midstride. “Who are you?”

Danny lowered his hand and stepped out of the stairwell. “Danny Gates.” Her eyes were emerald green, he noticed, and she definitely had freckles.

“Is that your rattletrap out there?” she demanded.

“My what?” She’d lost him.

“Your car. There’s a car out there in my parking space.”

“There’s no assigned parking out there.”

“I always leave my car at the door. There’s an old yellow Dodge there now, in my spot.”

“It’s lemon.”

It was her turn to frown in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“Lemon. That’s what the salesman called it.”

“He might have been referring to its condition, you know, not its color.”

That snagged his pride. He walked past her. “Yeah, if the car in question is lemon, then that would be mine.”

“A rose by any other name…” She shrugged and pivoted to follow him with her gaze. “Are you leaving now? Because if you are, I’ll move my car back to where it belongs since the rain’s tapered off a little. I don’t want to have to run a block in a downpour to get to it when I’m done here.”

He stopped and looked back at her. It had been a while since he’d had occasion to handle a woman, Danny thought, but he was pretty sure he could remember how the routine went. Something told him that this one was used to having her own way, to giving orders. He’d have to fix that if she intended to spend any time around here playing with his kids.

“Finders keepers,” he drawled. “I was there first. Live with it.”

“I’m staying here for a while, and you’re not!”

“Who says?”

“I…well, I volunteer here. I’m Molly French.”

“Yeah? I work here. I live here. Guess you’ll have to find someplace else for your vehicle from here on in, won’t you? That spot is mine now.”

He had the pleasure of seeing her jaw drop as he picked up the ball that had fallen at center court. “Okay, here’s how we’re going to do this,” he said to the kids. “Let me show you how you’re supposed to play basketball, not that sissy thing you were doing a minute ago.”

He heard the woman make a choked sound of outrage behind him. Danny grinned to himself, and this time he didn’t wipe the reflex away.

His new life was starting to look interesting.