Murder at the Foul Line (12 page)

“Thanks.” Manny stowed the box under his arm and edged his way backward. “I’m running late, or I would.”

“Are you sure?”

Manny stepped onto the sidewalk. “I’ll call if I find Tony. I promise I will.”

Disappointed, she pursed her lips together. “Don’t forget. Maria Morelli. I’m in the book.”

He sprinted down the sidewalk, sneakers splashing in the rain.

Manny felt someone watching him before he turned and saw the man. Manny looked back. The guy was definitely tailing him. He
was overweight with a silver front tooth, and Manny knew he could outrun him if he had to.

He cut through a public passage and came out on the next street. He looked behind him. Not only was the guy still there, but
now Manny thought another guy was following. He wished he had his bike.

He tripped over a crack in the sidewalk.

The box clattered open. Its contents scattered on the ground.

Manny crawled on hands and knees in the pouring rain. He saw the wedding band and grabbed it. Then he scooped up five bundles
of hundreds before he finally found the diamond bracelet.

The guy with the silver tooth stood over him, rain dripping down his face. “Those things are mine.”

“Who the hell are you?” Manny clutched the cash to his chest.

“The name is Sal, and this game is now over.” Sal flipped out a pocketknife and held it in front of him. “Tony could never
pay his debts, see? I bet he didn’t tell you how I broke two of his fingers the last time he tried to be cute.” Sal knelt
down and sat on his haunches. “Now, give me my money.”

“Hey.” Manny noticed the basketball decal on the handle. “That’s Tony’s knife. What the hell did you do to Tony?”

Sal’s shoulders rose in a kind of shrug. “Don’t worry about it.”

Manny took a deep breath and grabbed Sal’s wrist as he lunged at him with all the force he could muster. He wrenched Tony’s
knife from Sal’s hand and kicked him in the groin.

“Shit!” Sal fell to the ground and grabbed his crotch.

“Tony would want me to have this.” He flashed the blade so it gleamed in the light. “Game over.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Sal sneered as he pushed
himself up from the sidewalk, but Manny kicked his elbow out from under him and stashed the loot in his pockets.

“Don’t worry about it.” Holding the knife out in front of his hip, Manny jogged backward until he got some distance between
them.

Sal waved a fist in the air. “You can’t hide from me, punk. I’ll find you, and you’ll end up like your friend.”

“Well…” Manny winked and shot him a nod. “We all gotta live by the odds.”

Brendan DuBois

I
t was a Monday morning, a week after Labor Day, and most of the tourists had left the wooded shores of Walker’s Lake, leaving
the wide blue waters quiet for a change. Glen Jackson stood on the rear steps of his summer cottage, looking down the long
dirt driveway that eventually led out to Mill Street, the road in from town, a small village of about four hundred or so.
He folded his lanky arms and waited, staring down at the empty dirt lane. To the right was a basketball court that he had
installed here, over a decade ago, when they had bought the place. It had been a nice summer but now this warm season was
down to mere hours. Marcia had gone home to Boston with their two granddaughters three days ago. She had wanted to stay but
he was insistent: “No, I’ll be fine closing it up. You take the kids and have fun back home. I’ll be right along.”

And he wasn’t sure how women did it—was it genetic? trained into them by their mothers?—but she knew right from the start
that he had been lying about something. But that special sense of hers also quickly determined that his fib wasn’t part of
a plan to sneak in some beach bunny for the night. No,
she knew him well enough to know that those wild days of his were gone, long gone, since he had exchanged vows with her more
than twenty-five years ago. He grinned. Of course, not that there weren’t some good wild times to think over at three a.m.,
trying to get back to sleep…

He turned and looked out to the cove, where some of the cottage owners had already dragged in their docks and had put wooden
shutters up over the windows, to protect them from the harsh winds and snows due in a couple of months. His own shutters were
on the porch, ready to go, numbered for each spot on the windows. He really should have started putting up the shutters a
few hours ago, but there was a finality to it that he hated. With each shutter going up, less light came into the cottage,
until finally, at noon, he had to have every light inside blazing to see what was going on. And that marked the official end
of summer, no matter what day was on the calendar. Out on the water a couple of fishermen hung on in their expensive bass
boats, and he could hardly wait for them to leave so he could get everything done. Everything that had to be done to mark
another year gone by.

Ugh. He went down the steps, picked up a basketball from the ground, the pebbled leather against his large palms bringing
back muscle memories of the hundreds of thousands of times he had picked up a similar ball, from his neighborhood in Philly
to the local high school to Temple U to the Olympic team and then six glorious years in the NBA, two championship rings to
wear… He dribbled a few times, getting the feel of the court, and then just started working from one side to the next, ball
going up,
swish
—nothing but net, thank you kindly—and just getting into the groove of hearing the
slap
of the ball in his hands, the
whisper-clang
as it went through the
hoop, the solid
thunk
as it hit asphalt. He kept looking at the net as he went back and forth, back and forth, thinking of the different courts
he had played on, from the cracked and stained asphalt, starting out as a kid, through all the polished wood in all the different
arenas, right up to the famous parquet floor at the old Boston Garden. Downstairs in the basement at home in Boston he had
lots of souvenirs, and one of his faves was a piece of the old parquet, doled out just before the idiots destroyed that creaky
old shrine to the Celtics.

Another three-point shot. How sweet, even though the three-point rule hadn’t been in effect during his career. And, of course,
this little half-court was probably the most pleasant one he had ever played on. It was framed by old pine trees, and through
the underbrush one could make out the cool waters of Walker’s Lake. Boston was nice enough most times of the year, but when
the sun grew higher in the sky and the air got thick and hot, there was nothing he loved more than just coming up here to
the cool breezes and warm summer nights, Marcia and he growing older and older and—truth be told—happier and happier. He had
been at this cottage once, years ago, during one of those “Fresh Air” experiences for city kids, back when he was twelve.
He had made a vow then, during those special two weeks, that if he could, he would buy this place when he got older. Which
he did. It was now a good life, one he never thought would end.

Boom
. Another three-pointer. He grabbed the ball and as he was moving around for another shot, there was the sound of a car engine
coming up his driveway. He waited, conscious of how heavily he was breathing, how his knees and wrists were complaining, and
how damn old he was getting.

There. Visible past the saplings and brush. A dark blue car,
coming up. He put the ball in the crook of his arm, hardly even thinking about it, as the car came into view.

A police cruiser.

He took a breath. Waited.

The cruiser came to a polite halt near his own vehicle, a silver Lexus SUV. It was the local police and he tried not to smile
as the young officer stepped out, looking so polished and serious in his uniform. A guy like that, back in his old Philly
neighborhood, would have lasted maybe ten minutes with his corner gang before being dumped back at the local station house,
stripped naked except for his socks. The officer came up to him and nodded and said, “Mr. Jackson?”

“The same,” he said, wondering if this young pup even shaved more than three times a week.

“I’m Tom Colter, the police chief,” he said, actually holding out his hand, which Glen shook, all the while thinking, M’man,
if you were in Philly like this, they’d even take your socks before dumping you back at your station house.

“Sure, I’ve seen you around town,” Glen said. “What can I do for you?”

The young chief looked embarrassed, like he was apologizing for interrupting his practice or some damn thing. “I’m investigating
a missing person case.”

Glen moved the ball back into his hands, dribbled it a few times on the asphalt. “Really? Anybody I know?”

“Oh, I sure do think so,” he said. “Marcus Harrison. A teammate of yours, am I right?”

Glen said, “Yeah, a former teammate. He was up here a couple of days ago, stopping by. Shit. You say he’s missing?”

Colter said, “Yes. And you’re saying he was here?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, bouncing the ball back up and down. “Stayed for a day and a night. Last time I saw him, yesterday morning,
I drove him back into town, at the Greyhound stop, by Frye’s General Store. You mean he never got back down to Queens?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Colter said. “You see, his wife was expecting him back yesterday evening, and he
never showed up. And Greyhound is claiming that he never got on the bus when it stopped in town. So it looks like you might
be the last one to see him.”

“Wow,” he said, bouncing the ball up and down some more and then suddenly stopping. “C’mon inside, I’ll get you something
to drink. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

“Gee, thanks,” the chief said, and Glen moved quick, turning his head so the kid couldn’t see him smile.

Glen didn’t bother offering anything alcoholic to the chief, so he poured them both glasses of lemonade and went into the
dining room, which had great views from the windows that overlooked the lake. Nearby was the dock and moored to the dock was
his light blue powerboat, with a gray canvas tarpaulin covering it. The fishermen were gone and there was now just a solitary
sailboat, out on the south end of the lake, catching one last sail before wintering in some boathouse somewhere, and Colter
said, “View must be nice once the leaves start changing.”

Glen sat down at the round oak dining room table, letting his long legs stretch out. “Sure, but we don’t come up that much
during the fall. Summer’s our playtime, and when we get back to Boston, there’s plenty of work to be done.”

“And what exactly do you do now, Mr. Jackson?” And with
that, the polite young chief sat down, took out a little notebook and opened it up on the dining room table. “You haven’t
played for the Celtics for a very long time, right?”

“Promise not to laugh?” he asked.

“Sure. Promise not to laugh.”

“Good. I give motivational speeches, that’s what I do.” He couldn’t help himself, he smiled at the chief, who was gracious
enough to smile back. “You see, the thing is, once you’re out of basketball, what’s left? I didn’t have the voice for doing
announcing work. I was okay in doing some advertising spots, but that kind of work didn’t last long. You see, things have
changed since back when I was tossing the ball around. Back then, there weren’t the endorsements, the contracts, the TV work.
Today’s guys can earn a couple of million by just showing up in the right sneakers. Wasn’t like that when I was their age.”

“So you give speeches?”

“Yep. About a dozen a year, on how to be better managers, better team players, work together for the same goal. That sort
of thing. Not lots of money, but enough to make a living. Hey. Wanna hear a secret?”

The chief smiled but there was something in those eyes that said he liked hearing secrets very much. “Sure. Go right ahead.”

Glen said, “Truth is, most of the time, I’m just stealin’ their money. Companies get in trouble, they have morale problems,
they tend to look outside for a solution. They don’t think about looking inside. So I come by and give ’em a nice pep talk,
everything’s jazzed up for a week or so after I’m gone, and then the same lousy managers and overworked employees fall back
into their ruts, while I’m waiting for their checks to clear.”