LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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