LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Ah, him.”

      Ah, him? “Did one of the Wainwrights or the Carsons make some major contribution to our bank account that I don’t know about?”

      “Most of them won’t even accept my phone calls.” Ron sighed. “No, we’re still limping along on the same budget. I wish I could pay you…” He trailed off without finishing. Neither Molly, Fran nor Plank Hawkins—who ran a city-funded soup kitchen out of the center’s back room on Sundays—were compensated for their time.

      So how had he found it in the coffers to pay Mr. Basketball with his smooth male grace and that crooked bad-boy grin? It just didn’t make sense, Molly thought. Something was wrong here.

      She entered the city garage and held her hand out for her cruiser keys as she passed the attendant there. He dropped them into her palm, and she went to her assigned unit. “Danny Gates just came to the rec center for a job, and you flipped open our limited checkbook and said sure?” Molly said into her cell phone.

      “Well…yes. That was—that’s just about the way it happened.”

      In a pig’s eye, Molly thought.

      “He’s also going to fix the place up in exchange for the use of the apartment upstairs.”

      “That’s not an apartment. It’s a cardboard box.” She knew. She had spent two nights there shortly after moving to Mission Creek until she’d gotten her apartment.

      “Be that as it may…” Ron said, then he trailed off again. “The neighborhood’s not the best, Molly. It’s good to have someone like him there at night.”

      Someone like him? What did that mean? This was getting stranger and stranger, Molly thought.

      She drove out of the garage. When something smelled, she thought, it was usually a fish, even if you were standing in the middle of a desert at the time. But she had connections, didn’t she? She was a cop. Ron Glover was hardly her only source of information. “Okay,” she said equably. “I’m on shift, Ron. I’ve got to run.”

      “Oh, of course. I’ll see you later, Molly.”

      She disconnected and narrowed her eyes on the road ahead of her. Thinking. Simmering. Oh, yes, she thought, there was a fish in this desert somewhere, and she was going to follow her nose until she found it.

      She went around the block and turned in the direction of the rec center. Danny Gates’s ugly yellow car was still in her parking space. She pulled to the curb half a block away and got out, locking the cruiser and pocketing her keys.

      She was just going to meander inside and poke her nose into Ron’s office for a moment. She’d been volunteering here for two years; she was in and out of Ron’s office all the time. So why did she suddenly feel nervous and guilty about it?

      Because, she thought, she didn’t want Danny Gates with his devil’s grin and sexy, not-quite-definable air of danger to catch her at it this time. And Fran might be around somewhere. Sometimes she came in early to set up for bingo. For some reason Molly realized that she didn’t want Fran to know what she was up to, either.

      Molly slid into the vestibule and waited for a moment, listening. There were no basketballs thumping in the gym. He was probably upstairs. She stepped into Ron’s office and closed the door quietly behind her. The resulting clicking sound seemed furtive even to her own ears. She moved over to his desk and found what she was looking for right there, on top, in the center of his blotter: Danny Gates’s application.

      It was typed. That was very weird.

      She pulled her cell phone from her trouser pocket again, and this time she hit in the number of the Department of Motor Vehicles. She ran his Social Security number.

      “He just registered a car today,” the woman at DMV said after a moment. “All the paperwork hasn’t caught up yet, but his last known address was the state penitentiary.”

      Molly felt her legs fold suddenly. She turned around fast and sat in Ron’s chair. “The pen?”

      “Please tell me, Officer, that you’re not standing at the side of the road with this guy pointing a gun at you.”

      “Oh, no. It’s nothing like that.”

      “Well, good. Anything else I can do for you?”

      “Not a thing.” Molly disconnected.

      She would make one more phone call, she decided. She looked at her watch. It wasn’t quite five o’clock yet. Ralph would still be at his desk.

      She’d dated Ralph Bunderling once, eighteen months ago. He was a probation officer. He was the kind of man who normally went for lady cops. Not a Danny Gates kind of man. She’d known better, she chided herself. She’d known from the start, when her stomach had somersaulted and she hadn’t been able to get her air, she’d known that a man like Danny coming on to a woman like her was just…well, flat-out too good to be true.

      He was the bad-boy-hero type and she was no big-breasted bimbo. She was a woman who was a whole lot smarter than to get goofy-eyed over an ex-con.

      “Damn it.” Molly dropped her forehead briefly against the desk.

      Ralph was more her speed. Ralph and his kind adored her. Ralph was quiet, timid—basically spineless. He craved an authority figure in his life. Maybe it was her badge, or maybe it was her stubborn strength or her nonstop mouth, as Beau Maguire had said earlier. Maybe it was even the fact that her physical attributes were all—to her way of thinking—just a tad on the side of average. Either way, the Ralph Bunderlings of the world flocked to her while the Danny Gateses…well, the ones who didn’t have records just pretty much ignored her.

      She’d let Ralph down gently so he was glad to hear her voice when he picked up his line. “Molly! It’s been a long time.”

      “I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been very busy. Listen, I need a quick run on a Social. I’m on the city’s clock right now.” She winced a little at the inferred lie.

      “Certainly. Absolutely. Anything. Just read it to me.”

      Molly did. She could hear Ralph’s fingers clicking on the computer keys in the background.

      “Got him,” Ralph said. “Daniel Gates. He was released today, parole for good behavior after six years. He ran a basketball program at the prison. He’s not part of my caseload. The parole department has him.”

      “What did he do?”

      “Armed robbery.”

      Her stomach wanted to heave. She pressed a hand to it.

      “Oh, now, here’s something interesting,” Ralph continued. “His parole officer got him a job at that rec center you help out at. Hey, he’s living there, too.”

      “No kidding.”

      “You’ll keep him on the straight-and-narrow, Molly. I have faith in you.”

      “Thanks,” she said hollowly. “Anything else?”

      “Well, they finally got him on the convenience store holdup but prior to that he had a rap sheet going back to the time he was eleven. Those were just loitering and vagrancy charges when he was a kid, though. You know how it is, they don’t want to go home for the night, they hang out somewhere else. And good cops like you get them.”

      “Like me. Right.”

      “By his late teens, he was already wrapped up with the Mercados.”

      “The Mercados?” How much worse could this get? Her head spun. “Any charges there?”

      “No, none. It’s just in his backup bio. A rumored association is what we call it. He was clean from his last vagrancy charge at sixteen until six years ago when he held up the store.”

      “Thanks, Ralph. That’s what I needed to know.” She fumbled her thumb over her

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