LITMIR.BIZ

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to owe me for this.”

      “I always pay my debts, Joe.”

      “A six-pack. Any import.”

      “Consider it done.”

      He nodded, then he called in the tow order for the ugly lemon Dodge in front of the rec center. “I’ll have a temporary No-Parking sign there by nightfall.”

      Chapter 3

      It didn’t seem possible to Danny that seventeen kids in any given city in modern America could not own gym shoes. Granted, the rec center families were mostly impoverished. But Anita’s tattoo, Cia’s leather and Lester’s boots had all cost money, so the kids were finding it somewhere.

      He was being played for a chump, Danny decided. And where had these other eleven kids’ names come from, anyway? There’d only been six teenagers here yesterday.

      “You,” he said to Jerome, “had sneaks on yesterday.” He sat at Ron Glover’s desk facing the boy who stood on the other side of it.

      “They got stole last night.”

      “Stolen.”

      “What, now you’re an English teacher?”

      “Whatever I have to be, pal, to get you into college.”

      That broke Jerome up. “Me? Yeah, right.”

      “You. Right.” Danny looked down at the handwritten list. At least the kids had sent Jerome back with it. That was something. Actually, it was more than he had hoped for. “Okay, here’s the deal.”

      “I don’t do deals, man.”

      He caught the boy’s gaze and held it. “My guess is that you do deals every day, just not with the likes of me. Now where was I? Right. I’m going to leave here and buy gym shoes for everybody who was here yesterday. These other eleven kids—whoever they hell they are—are going to have to make an appearance and personally request their own pair—after they’ve practiced with us at least five times.” In the meantime, Danny realized, he was going to have to try his hand at a little fund-raising. They’d need uniforms, too, and various other equipment, not all of which could come out of his limited bank account.

      “Man, that’s lame,” Jerome complained.

      Danny stood from the desk.

      “Hey, what did you do time for, anyway?” the boy asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell us.”

      Danny paused on his way to the door. He’d known it was coming and had already determined to be honest with these kids. He had a halfhearted hope that some of them might learn from his experience. “Money,” he told him. “They said I stole money.”

      Jerome didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, so you got plenty, right? You can buy us all shoes.”

      “If I had money to buy you all shoes, would I be driving that scrap of metal out there at the curb?”

      “Ain’t no scrap of metal there now, dude.”

      “Sure, there is. Right out front.”

      “Uh-uh. No more.”

      Then, somehow, Danny knew.

      He shot around the desk, opening Ron’s office door hard enough and fast enough to make it crack against the wall like a gunshot. He heard Jerome laughing behind him as he jogged outside.

      His car was gone.

      Danny drove his fist against a stop sign. The metal clanged. Then he realized that he was still holding the piece of paper with the shoe sizes. Swearing, he shoved it down into his jeans pocket and headed back to the center to call—again—for a cab.

      He was going to kill her.

      When Molly arrived at the center at two o’clock, the space in front of the center walkway was vacant. There was a no-parking sign there. She grinned to herself and started scouting around the block for another space. She found the Dodge around the first corner, deliberately taking up two spaces, half in each of them. Her grin vanished.

      Oh, baby, this was war.

      She had to park two blocks away this time. Molly locked her Camaro and headed back to the rec center on foot. She found Danny in the gym.

      There were fifteen to twenty kids with him today. She’d never seen so many kids here at once in the whole two years she’d volunteered. What was he doing? Paying them to play basketball with him? She stalked across the court and approached the knot of them.

      Danny looked up at her. “Good afternoon, Officer.”

      “Same to you.” Then she added under her breath, “Inmate.”

      He heard her. “Not anymore.” He nodded at the far basket. “Your end of the court is down that way.”

      “It’s wherever I want it to be.”

      “No, actually, that rule changed yesterday right around five o’clock. Now I’m assigning you one.”

      He’d caught her in Ron’s office at five o’clock, Molly thought. She felt her temper spike even as her stomach squirmed with guilt. “No one promoted you to director of this place.”

      “Nope. No one did.”

      “Then I’d say rule making is a little out of your job description.” Where were the kids going? she wondered. A quick glance around told her that they were all easing back to the other end of the gym. “Her” end. Were they choosing up sides, determining to stick with her against him? Molly started to smile at that prospect then she noticed that Jerome and Fisk, Cia, Lester and Anita were all wearing new gym shoes. Cia wore hers with rolled-up white socks beneath a stretchy, skin-tight red skirt.

      Molly picked out Bobby J. standing at the edge of the gym, watching the others the way he usually did. He wasn’t wearing new shoes. They sat on the floor beside him, still in the box.

      “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.

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