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 his own midriff against a reflexive sympathy pain.
One of the boys came forward, his chin jutting, ready to protect his territory. Danny pushed his hands into his jeans pockets, a deliberately nonthreatening gesture. He hadn’t been off the streets so long that he didn’t remember how it was.
“Who’re you?” the kid asked.
“The answer to your prayers. And you would be?”
He didn’t answer but one of the other boys stepped forward. “How come you want to know?”
“So I can call you something besides ‘Hey, you.”’
Glances were exchanged. The girl sidled up to join the other two. “Well, I’m Cia.”
“Hi, Cia. Are you going to play basketball in those boots?”
She looked down at her feet. They were encased in more leather with chunky, killer heels. “Who said anything about basketball?”
He had his work cut out for him, Danny thought.
He kept his eye on the one boy who hadn’t yet come forward. He was bone thin with dark hair that had been cut ruthlessly short. One to watch, Danny thought. There was something about him, something that said he was more desperate than the others. There was a certain hollowness to his eyes.
The other kids scattered as Danny passed by them beneath the awning, but the loner held his ground. Only his eyes moved as Danny walked past him. Danny pulled open the rickety screen door to the center, then he paused to read the graffiti on the bricks to one side of it. It was significantly more creative than it had been in his own youth.
“Is that even physically possible?” He nodded in the direction of the words scrawled in red paint.
The first boy snorted. “Not for you, maybe. I can pull it off.”
Cia laughed. “In your dreams, Lester.”
So he had Cia and Lester, Danny thought. So far so good. “Meet me inside on the court in fifteen minutes.”
“What for?” Lester demanded.
“I’m going to teach you guys basketball.” If not today, then tomorrow, Danny thought, but sooner or later they’d come into his gym.
He stepped through the door into a vestibule floored with cracked blue linoleum. The walls had once been white, but they were filthy now with graffiti of their own. There was a single door to his left and double, swinging doors straight ahead. The door to the side wore a small metal sign that read office. Danny went forward. He pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym.
A glance around told him that, surprisingly, it wasn’t in total disrepair. He could work with it, and what he couldn’t work with, he could fix. He’d never set foot in this place when he was a kid—he’d had the school gym at his disposal until Ricky had taken him under his wing and had shown him more lucrative ways to spend his time.
Thoughts of Ricky had his heart seizing a little. Best to take care of that little problem straight off the bat, he thought. Otherwise he wouldn’t live long enough to coach anybody.
Beyond a door at the back of the gym were stairs. The light bulb overhead was burned out so Danny made his way up cautiously, finally stepping into a single room, half of it given over to a sofa bed of deep, depressing green. The other half of the room was taken up by a kitchen straight out of the sixties. Danny didn’t have to open the bathroom door to know that the facilities in there would be prehistoric. He spotted an old rotary-type telephone on a coffee table in front of the sofa and he went straight for it.
He dialed in the number from memory, glancing at his watch. It was two o’clock. Ricky would be home. He was the type who did his prowling at night.
The line picked up midway through the second ring. “H’lo.”
“Some problems never go away,” Danny said calmly. “They just lie dormant for a while.”
He was gratified by a pause before Ricky Mercado spoke. “So you’re out. I heard they were going to spring you sometime this week.”
He’d loved the guy like a brother. But Danny didn’t feel like playing games. “You heard about it the instant I stepped through that jailhouse door this morning and you were waiting for this call.” He knew the way it worked. He knew too much. Therein lay the problem.
He was still as much of a threat to Carmine as he had been six years ago, Danny thought, when the mob had framed him and had him put away because he’d
