In The Line Of Fire

“What if we don’t want to learn?” Fisk asked, but Danny could tell he was curious.

“Just give me a couple of weeks, then you can decide.” He’d hook them. He was confident.

“What are you, some kind of do-gooder?” Lester demanded.

Yeah, these days he was, Danny thought. But that wasn’t the way to reach them. “Actually, I just came off six years of doing time.”

Eyes widened again in five identically stunned faces. For the first time, Danny looked around the whole gym and realized that they’d lost the skinny, quiet kid with the razor-short black hair. “Where’d that other boy go?”

“Bobby J.? Man, he’s like smoke. He’s here, he’s not here, you know?” Jerome said.

Danny did know. That kid was troubled, he thought again. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for him, not only here at the center, but on the streets, as well.

“Okay, here’s the deal.” He eyed Lester’s feet. “Tomorrow you all show up in gym shoes. No boots.”

“What if we don’t have none?” Jerome asked.

“Then give me your size, and you’ll have some by this time tomorrow.” Danny had a mental image of his remaining nine thousand dollars dwindling fast.

“What about us girls?” Cia asked.

“You’ll play, too.”

“Why would I want to play basketball?”

“Boys think it’s a contact sport.” He was delighted when she tossed back her purple-and-black hair and laughed.

Danny finally stood and picked up the basketball again. “Okay, one last question. What’s with the lady? Molly French? What’s her story?” As soon as the question left him, more high-fives were exchanged. Ah, so that was what the betting was about, he realized.

“You won’t like her, dude,” Lester said, heading for the door. “Leastwise not if you’re telling the truth ’bout doing time.”

“Why’s that?” But something in his gut shifted.

Cia giggled. “Molly’s a definite do-gooder. She’s a cop.”

Every good thing Danny had felt since leaving the parole office abruptly left him.

Molly made it in and out of her apartment, with her hair dried again and her uniform on, in less than half an hour. Record time, she thought. Which just went to show what a good head of steam could do for a woman.

She was really irritated about Danny Gates.

She landed back at the police station three and a half minutes before roll call. The task force cops gave her baleful looks. A couple of them were here, though neither Gannon, McCauley or Hasselman worked the four-to-midnight with her because they all had a healthy chunk of seniority. They got the plum shift, day work, eight-to-four.

Molly’s manna was another cop’s poison. While many of the others complained about working the swing shift, she was just glad to be home each night by 12:30. She had only just worked her way up to the four-to-midnight three months ago. Prior to that, she’d been on graveyard.

Beau Maguire shot a smirk in her direction as Molly slid into the vacant seat beside him. He was on the task force and putting in a lot of overtime these days. “The extra hours getting to you already, Officer?”

Molly made a pointed show of looking at her watch. Then she raised her hand when her sergeant called her name. “Bingo. Present and accounted for. And, I’m pleased to say, not a second behind schedule.”

“You need to work on that mouth of yours,” Beau said, scowling.

“So I’ve been told.” She smiled at him. “Maybe later.”

When roll call was finished, Molly shot to her feet. She already had her cell phone out of her trousers pocket when she got to the hallway. She tapped in Ron Glover’s office number with her thumb. When he wasn’t at the center, he worked as an accountant.

“What have you done?” she asked when Ron answered on the first ring.

“Molly?” He sounded, as he always did, vaguely befuddled. His voice was always hushed and hesitant, but he had a heart of gold. Ron had taken over the operation of the rec center nine years ago, and against all odds it was still open for the kids.

“There’s a man in my gym,” Molly said.

“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.