by Beverly Bird
“In any society, there tends to be a hierarchy,” Danny said.
She turned back to him quickly, her eyes narrowing.
“Hierarchy? Good word. You know, I’d heard they were starting to educate you guys in prison.” The barb hit its mark. She could tell by his face, and she almost felt ashamed of herself.
He shot a basket then jogged and caught the ball back. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt today. A muscle shirt. And he had the muscles to go with it. Really incredible muscles, she thought. His upper arms were corded, solid, and the sight made her wonder what it would feel like to have them around her.
Molly pressed her fingers to her temples. He was an ex-con. She was losing her mind.
“Hierarchy implies a sort of a totem pole effect,” he continued, dribbling. “First comes the director. Then there are the paid employees. Oh, wait. Let me rephrase that. Paid employee. There’s only one of us here, isn’t there?”
Molly glared at him.
“Then we have the bottom dwellers. They would be the volunteers. Are you following me here, pretty Molly? I think so. Those dazzling green eyes of yours are shooting sparks.”
Real anger shot through her. “Fran and Plank give generously—” Then she broke off and made a funny little sound in her throat.
Startled, Danny stopped playing with the basketball to look at her. Was she blushing? Why? Because he’d said she had dazzling eyes? She was a cop. She couldn’t be so naive and innocent that she couldn’t take a little pure male appreciation in stride. The possibility had something tightening suddenly across his chest. The effect started to spread to other regions before he clamped down on it.
Danny turned and shot the ball through the hoop again. “I admire all of you who donate your time here. All this is just an abject lesson on the authority-chain around here. And, no, they didn’t teach me words like abject in prison. I was actually a pretty good student. Before.”
Molly waited for him to say something else about before, then she realized that he wasn’t going to. She might have asked, but then he’d probably think she was interested or something.
“Bite me,” she grated.
“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.”
He turned back in time to see her face actually flame this time. That tightening-effect started to hit his body again, then it was doused by pure surprise. Danny dropped the ball, and it hit his foot, rebounding and rolling away.
“You lost something there, jock.” She looked smug now.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“About so big, round?” She held her hands up as though to grasp the basketball.
“Not the same something I was just thinking of.” He let his gaze coast up and down her deliberately.
It happened again, he realized. She had the most transparent face of any woman he’d ever met. But at the moment, Molly French’s heart was stamped all over her face. His innuendoes were really getting to her.
He took a step closer to her. She actually surprised him by holding her ground this time. One of her heels seemed to shift, but she stayed put.
“Get out of my space,” she warned. “Back off.”
“Molly, this is my half of the gym. I can step wherever I please. Volunteer…” He poked her gently on the chest, right beneath her collarbone. This time she jumped back skittishly. Then he tapped his own chest. “Employee. And by the way, volunteer, you owe me eighty bucks.”
“For what?” she asked, startled.
“That’s what it cost me to get my car out of the tow lot.”
“Your car got towed?”
She blinked with feigned innocence. He wanted to close his mouth over hers and take that smirk right off her lips, swallow it deep, keep it for his own. That rattled him. The suddenness of the urge had him stepping back of his own accord. “Get off my court.”
“You’re going to teach basketball now?”
“You got it.”
“To whom? May I watch?”
“I—” He broke off and looked down at the other end of the gym.
Five of the kids from yesterday remained. They were all sitting beneath the basket, watching them, their new shoes gleaming white in the overhead lights. Bobby J.—and all the rest of them—had vanished.
“Damn it,” Danny swore. “Now see what you’ve done? You chased off my kids!”
Molly turned away with a quick little twitch of her hips. God help him, but he noticed. How could any woman look that good in khakis? He hated khakis. And loafers. She wore loafers that were clicking their hard little heels all over the floor he’d polished late into the night. She was a genuine handcuff-toting, law-abiding priss. With really great hips. He wondered what she’d look like in Cia’s leather.
He watched her sit down among the kids beneath the other basket. A few minutes later she and Anita peeled off from the rest of the group and went outside. Danny took a deep breath and walked toward the rest of them.
“Back to basketball.”
“It’s going to be a little bit of a walk,” Molly apologized as she and Anita turned the corner onto the next block.
“Where’s your car?”
“In Ethiopia.”
“How come?”
Suddenly her mother’s voice filled her head, something about cutting off her nose to spite her face. Molly’s mother had been full of axioms, bless her soul.
Linda Lee French’s heart hadn’t given out until she was fifty-two. Which was a miracle, Molly had always thought, given her mother’s life. She’d raised two children on her own—one of which hadn’t been able to stay on the right side of the law to save his life, literally. She cleaned houses day and night, taking in enough extra seamstress work that Molly couldn’t remember her ever not having some piece of fabric in her hands. Any men she’d attracted after Molly’s father had run out on them had always seemed more interested in having Linda Lee support them than the other way around. And she’d always done it, generously, hopefully, until each of them left her high and dry. Finally, at fifty-two, all her hope had run out.
“The fire department decided they needed direct access to the front door of the center,” Molly explained, her heart cringing a little at the lie.
Anita laughed. “You’re a cop, not a fireman.”
Molly looked at her sharply. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Danny said you did it.”
He’d told the kids that? “What else did he say?”
“He said you did it because you’re hot for him.”
Molly choked as she unlocked her car door. “That’s not true.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Happens to all of us, right?”
Molly grabbed the drugstore bag out of her passenger seat. It held a pregnancy test and a box of condoms. “But most of us take precautions.”
“I knew you were going to get around to a lecture.”
She pushed the bag into Anita’s hands. “Just listen to me for a minute. Please.”
The girl rolled her eyes but she took the bag.
“You are a special, intelligent human being. You don’t need to let some guy paw you just to prove that to him.”
“Cia—”
“Forget Cia. This is about you.” Molly took a deep breath and plunged in. They hated it when she talked to them this way. “When they’re pawing you, most guys aren’t thinking about how special you are. Most guys are just thinking about themselves. If you sacrifice yourself—your life—to that, you’re only betraying yourself.” And because she knew Anita would probably do it, anyway, she’d bought the condoms. “There’s more to this than just pregnancy, Anita. There’s HIV and all kinds of other nasties out there. So try to make sure of who you’re with. Make sure of where he’s been and try to find out if he’s that one guy who knows you’re special. I promise you, he’s out there. And even then, even when you find him, promise me you’ll use what I put in that bag.”
Anita opened the top, peeked into it and groaned.
M
olly cleared her throat. “I put a pregnancy test in there, too. Can you pull that off at home without anyone knowing, or do you want to spend the night at my place?”
The gratitude in the girl’s eyes wrenched Molly’s heart. “I can do it at home. My dad’s hardly ever there.” Molly knew Anita’s mother had died years ago of a drug overdose.
“Okay, then let me know. Whatever the result, we’ll take it from there. I’ll help you, Anita, all I can.”
“Thanks.” Anita started to turn away. Then she looked back over her shoulder. “I’m really scared, Molly.”
Molly couldn’t tell her not to be. She just nodded. Then, when Anita was several strides down the street, she stopped her again. “By the way, where’d the new gym shoes come from?”
Anita turned to walk backward, looking down at her feet. “Coach,” she said, glancing up again.
Coach? He’d been here twenty-four hours, Molly thought, as something tried to choke her, and already he was Coach? “The rec center doesn’t have that kind of money!”
“He paid for them his own self. He robbed a bank, you know.”
“He did not! It was a convenience store!” What had he told these impressionable kids, anyway? Molly felt herself moving, taking a step back toward the center, ready to take another strip off his hide. Then she realized that Anita was laughing.
“I knew that,” the girl said. “I just wanted to find out if you did.”
Molly let out her breath and slumped back against her car.
She really, really hated him.
Molly dragged herself home at 12:20 in the morning, bone tired. She tossed her uniform cap on her bed, dragged the scrunchie from her hair and dug her fingers into her curls. When her hair sprang free in her hands, she blew it out of her eyes.
The small of her back hurt from where a teenage behemoth—not one of her rec center kids, thank heaven—had gouged her with his knee as she had wrestled with him on a very hard sidewalk. He’d been higher than a kite. He was in a holding cell now. It broke her heart. But even worse was the fact that suddenly she was getting all the dangerous and waste-of-time calls thrown her way—and she didn’t even have a partner on this shift yet. She had to wonder if it was her comeuppance for having squeezed her way onto the task force.
She undressed and found a T-shirt in her drawer, this one sporting the logo of the Dallas Cowboys. She hadn’t worn her Texas A & M shirt since Danny had turned up in an almost identical one. Danny again. She shook her head. Why couldn’t she get him off her mind? Because he was an enigma, she decided, going into the bathroom to brush her teeth.
Because—damn it—he wasn’t what an ex-con was supposed to be.
She’d known her share. She’d put in her time and she’d met the best and the worst the world had to offer. Danny just didn’t have that same sly glide to his eyes.
Didn’t mean a thing, she told herself, staring at her reflection in the glass. There were exceptions to every rule.
Why was he coming on to her? she wondered with her next breath. Because he definitely was.
Molly took a step back from the glass, eyeing herself critically. Okay, she was cute. Curly brown hair, big green eyes—they were good, but not dazzling—and that dusting of freckles over her nose. But there was nothing especially worth coming on to there, at least not for an ex-mobster who had probably had more than his fair share of exotic, olive-skinned women with come-hither eyes over the years.
Okay, she admitted, so that bothered her. Danny Gates was a hero-type hunk and if his past was any indication, he’d probably been around with the best womankind had to offer. It went with the territory. She couldn’t compete with that. She shouldn’t even want to. And she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. But for some reason, it made her feel so sad.
Molly went back to her bed. Beside her uniform cap, which she picked up and placed on her dresser, was the file she had gotten out of records hours ago. She went to the kitchen for a can of soda pop, then came back and curled up in bed with the file. She told herself again that she owed it to her kids to know exactly what Danny had done—and to convince Ron Glover to let him go if need be. If he posed any danger whatsoever—outside of the bad influence that Ron Glover had obviously already overlooked—she’d drag him off that gym floor bodily.
She read, and twenty minutes later she had enough of a headache to get up again and go looking for some aspirin.
Not much of the police report made sense. The store Danny had robbed had been way the heck north on Mission Creek Road, halfway to Lone Star Highway, actually beyond the city’s jurisdiction. That was the first odd thing. The sheriff had tossed the case to the Mission Creek boys but there was no record of why. Still, she could have lived with that, it was the only oddity.
What bothered her most was the fact that Danny had been picked up on the opposite end of Mission Creek Road—within the city limits—seventeen minutes after the 911 call had come in from the convenience store. Was it even possible to drive from the Mission Ridge area—which was just west of Mission Creek Road where the store had been held up—to a point south of Gulf Road inside of seventeen minutes? It was, she thought, if you had the pedal to the floor. And according to the police report Danny had been driving a spiffy, presumably horsepower-endowed Lexus at the time. But was it possible to drive that distance in seventeen minutes and add a small side trip even farther to the south and a jog to the west where his condo had been located? Because that was what he would have had to do to deposit the stolen money there. The 911 call had come in at 2:12 in the afternoon. He’d been picked up at 2:29. The stolen money was located almost simultaneously in his bottom dresser drawer by other investigative officers because, lo and behold, the convenience store owner had known Danny’s name and had bleated it out like a frightened lamb the minute the first cops had arrived on the scene. They’d dispatched another unit directly to Danny’s address, and that unit had discovered the money.
How neat. How convenient. Except…
For that to be possible, Danny would have had to leave the Mission Ridge area, drive all the way to his condo to dump the stash he’d taken, and then for some reason he would have headed north and east again before the cops had picked him up. Oh, and one other interesting thing, she thought. He would have had to make an inexplicable U-turn on Mission Creek Road in the process because by that time, when the cruiser had nabbed him, he’d been heading back home.
At least he’d said he’d been heading home. Maybe he’d lied. Cons did lie.
Why hadn’t he called for a lawyer? Maybe that just bothered her because Ed Bancroft hadn’t done it, either. An awful lot of guys these days were going down without a fight, Molly thought.
Why hadn’t anyone noted the discrepancy in the direction Danny had been traveling? Where had he really been heading home from—especially since he had presumably just left his condo after dropping the cash?
The Mercado compound was right off Mission Creek Road, she thought, between the convenience store and the location where Danny had been picked up. If Danny had been driving home from there, he would have been traveling in the correct direction.
Molly got back into bed and set the file carefully on her bedside table. Well, well, well, she thought as she turned her light off. Another smelly fish in the desert.
“I’ve figured it out. You were framed.”
Danny barely heard her. He was too transfixed by what he found when he came downstairs from his apartment and set foot in the gym on Wednesday afternoon.
First of all, there was an open library book on the floor in the middle of the court. The regular kids were standing back a way and watching Molly skeptically. Some of the newcomers had returned, as well. Four or five of them were lined up on the side of the court next to Bobby.
“What the hell are you doing?” Danny demanded.
“Playing basketball.”
“You’re not playing basketball. You’re bouncing around on your toes and occasionally looking down at that book. What’s tha
t book?”
“You were framed. Either you’re too stupid to realize it or too stupid to care.”
“I cared.”
“You didn’t do anything about it.”
“I want to talk about basketball.”
“Well, I don’t.” She stopped bouncing and faced him, planting her hands on her hips.
Those hips, Danny thought. What he could see of them today left his mouth dry. She wore spandex leggings. There was a great deal of rolled-down sock at her ankles and…she wore new high tops. She also wore a black sports bra, and he liked it a whole lot better than Cia’s.
Every sweet curve of her was outlined in nice, tight black.
“You can’t learn basketball from a book,” he said stubbornly, trying to keep his mind off the way she looked. “That book is about basketball, isn’t it? Some sort of in-ten-easy-lessons kind of thing? Basketball for dummies?”
“It’s very informative.” Molly sniffed. “And I can learn anything from reading. For instance, I learned a great deal from reading your crime file.”
“You read my file? I told you to stop digging up dirt on me! Damn it, stop bouncing!” She was jiggling in place. Oh, yeah, she definitely jiggled.
“I just warmed up. I want to stay that way.” She thrust her chin toward him. “Warming up is important. The book says so. I want to stay loose.”
“You’re loose as a goose. And you don’t need to be. This is my basketball team.”
“Are you guys talking about his record or our game?” Cia called out from behind Molly.
“We’re talking about his record,” Molly said.
“We’re talking about her bouncing,” Danny said.
“Oh, man, I want to up my ante,” said Fisk.
Danny stalked over to the library book and snatched it up off the floor. “This is a joke.”
“Why didn’t you defend yourself when they brought you in for questioning?” she countered. “Why didn’t you call a lawyer?”
“It wouldn’t have done me a damned bit of good. Get off my court.”
