She really, really hated him.
Molly dragged herself home at 12:20 in the morning, bone tired. She tossed her uniform cap on her bed, dragged the scrunchie from her hair and dug her fingers into her curls. When her hair sprang free in her hands, she blew it out of her eyes.
The small of her back hurt from where a teenage behemoth—not one of her rec center kids, thank heaven—had gouged her with his knee as she had wrestled with him on a very hard sidewalk. He’d been higher than a kite. He was in a holding cell now. It broke her heart. But even worse was the fact that suddenly she was getting all the dangerous and waste-of-time calls thrown her way—and she didn’t even have a partner on this shift yet. She had to wonder if it was her comeuppance for having squeezed her way onto the task force.
She undressed and found a T-shirt in her drawer, this one sporting the logo of the Dallas Cowboys. She hadn’t worn her Texas A & M shirt since Danny had turned up in an almost identical one. Danny again. She shook her head. Why couldn’t she get him off her mind? Because he was an enigma, she decided, going into the bathroom to brush her teeth.
Because—damn it—he wasn’t what an ex-con was supposed to be.
She’d known her share. She’d put in her time and she’d met the best and the worst the world had to offer. Danny just didn’t have that same sly glide to his eyes.
Didn’t mean a thing, she told herself, staring at her reflection in the glass. There were exceptions to every rule.
Why was he coming on to her? she wondered with her next breath. Because he definitely was.
Molly took a step back from the glass, eyeing herself critically. Okay, she was cute. Curly brown hair, big green eyes—they were good, but not dazzling—and that dusting of freckles over her nose. But there was nothing especially worth coming on to there, at least not for an ex-mobster who had probably had more than his fair share of exotic, olive-skinned women with come-hither eyes over the years.
Okay, she admitted, so that bothered her. Danny Gates was a hero-type hunk and if his past was any indication, he’d probably been around with the best womankind had to offer. It went with the territory. She couldn’t compete with that. She shouldn’t even want to. And she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. But for some reason, it made her feel so sad.
Molly went back to her bed. Beside her uniform cap, which she picked up and placed on her dresser, was the file she had gotten out of records hours ago. She went to the kitchen for a can of soda pop, then came back and curled up in bed with the file. She told herself again that she owed it to her kids to know exactly what Danny had done—and to convince Ron Glover to let him go if need be. If he posed any danger whatsoever—outside of the bad influence that Ron Glover had obviously already overlooked—she’d drag him off that gym floor bodily.
She read, and twenty minutes later she had enough of a headache to get up again and go looking for some aspirin.
Not much of the police report made sense. The store Danny had robbed had been way the heck north on Mission Creek Road, halfway to Lone Star Highway, actually beyond the city’s jurisdiction. That was the first odd thing. The sheriff had tossed the case to the Mission Creek boys but there was no record of why. Still, she could have lived with that, it was the only oddity.
What bothered her most was the fact that Danny had been picked up on the opposite end of Mission Creek Road—within the city limits—seventeen minutes after the 911 call had come in from the convenience store. Was it even possible to drive from the Mission Ridge area—which was just west of Mission Creek Road where the store had been held up—to a point south of Gulf Road inside of seventeen minutes? It was, she thought, if you had the pedal to the floor. And according to the police report Danny had been driving a spiffy, presumably horsepower-endowed Lexus at the time. But was it possible to drive that distance in seventeen minutes and add a small side trip even farther to the south and a jog to the west where his condo had been located? Because that was what he would have had to do to deposit the stolen money there. The 911 call had come in at 2:12 in the afternoon. He’d been picked up at 2:29. The stolen money was located almost simultaneously in his bottom dresser drawer by other investigative officers because, lo and behold, the convenience store owner had known Danny’s name and had bleated it out like a frightened lamb the minute the first cops had arrived on the scene. They’d dispatched another unit directly to Danny’s address, and that unit had discovered the money.
How neat. How convenient. Except…
For that to be possible, Danny would have had to leave the Mission Ridge area, drive all the way to his condo to dump the stash he’d taken, and then for some reason he would have headed north and east again before the cops had picked him up. Oh, and one other interesting thing, she thought. He would have had to make an inexplicable U-turn on Mission Creek Road in the process because by that time, when the cruiser had nabbed him, he’d been heading back home.
At least he’d said he’d been heading home. Maybe he’d lied. Cons did lie.
Why hadn’t he called for a lawyer? Maybe that just bothered her because Ed Bancroft hadn’t done it, either. An awful lot of guys these days were going down without a fight, Molly thought.
Why hadn’t anyone noted the discrepancy in the direction Danny had been traveling? Where had he really been heading home from—especially since he had presumably just left his condo after dropping the cash?
The Mercado compound was right off Mission Creek Road, she thought, between the convenience store and the location where Danny had been picked up. If Danny had been driving home from there, he would have been traveling in the correct direction.
Molly got back into bed and set the file carefully on her bedside table. Well, well, well, she thought as she turned her light off. Another smelly fish in the desert.
“I’ve figured it out. You were framed.”
Danny barely heard her. He was too transfixed by what he found when he came downstairs from his apartment and set foot in the gym on Wednesday afternoon.
First of all, there was an open library book on the floor in the middle of the court. The regular kids were standing back a way and watching Molly skeptically. Some of the newcomers had returned, as well. Four or five of them were lined up on the side of the court next to Bobby.
“What the hell are you doing?” Danny demanded.
“Playing basketball.”
“You’re not playing basketball. You’re bouncing around on your toes and occasionally looking down at that book. What’s that book?”
“You were framed. Either you’re too stupid to realize it or too stupid to care.”
“I cared.”
“You didn’t do anything about it.”
“I want to talk about basketball.”
“Well, I don’t.” She stopped bouncing and faced him, planting her hands on her hips.
Those hips, Danny thought. What he could see of them today left his mouth dry. She wore spandex leggings. There was a great deal of rolled-down sock at her ankles and…she wore new high tops. She also wore a black sports bra, and he liked it a whole lot better than Cia’s.
Every sweet curve of her was outlined in nice, tight black.
“You can’t learn basketball from a book,” he said stubbornly, trying to keep his mind off the way she looked. “That book is about basketball, isn’t it? Some sort of in-ten-easy-lessons kind of thing? Basketball for dummies?”
“It’s very informative.” Molly sniffed. “And I can learn anything from reading. For instance, I learned a great deal from reading your crime file.”
“You read my file? I told you to stop digging up dirt on me! Damn it, stop bouncing!” She was jiggling in place. Oh, yeah, she definitely jiggled.
“I just warmed up.