In The Line Of Fire

Molly shot to her feet again, angry now, at herself and at him. She left Ron’s office without even glancing over her shoulder at the gym, but the steady thump of Danny’s basketball followed her.

Within twenty-four hours, Molly had decided two things. Dressing for success with the task force was a total waste of time because no one wanted her there, anyway. And Danny never seemed to leave the rec center. At least, that damn yellow car of his never moved.

She woke early on Tuesday morning, thinking to get a good start on the day. The telephone rang just as she was leaving her apartment. It was Ralph Bunderling asking for another date. She’d probably given him renewed hope with her phone call last night. Molly declined politely.

At least the rain had stopped, she thought, stepping outside. Because she wore flats today, her ankle didn’t turn when she stepped on the newspaper. She took a breath, grabbed it from the walkway and looked up. The sky was that cool winter blue that came in February even to southern Texas, and the sun was big and…

Lemony.

“He just moved right in on my turf,” she complained aloud. “And Ron not only let him, he enabled him.”

She realized that she was talking to herself again.

“Well, spinsters talk to themselves. I read that somewhere. They do it a lot. They talk to themselves, and they talk to their cats.” How old did one have to be to officially become a spinster? The term brought to mind doddering virgins in their eighties, she thought as she headed for her car. But times had changed. In current lingo it would probably define a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who had scarcely had more than three consecutive dates with the same man in her entire life.

She decided to drive past the rec center first. If Danny was gone, she’d stop and chat for a while with whatever kids were there. It didn’t matter that it was a weekday and the high school was in session at ten o’clock in the morning. Lester had already dropped out, and the attendance of the others was spotty in spite of the volunteers’ best efforts. Molly wondered how Danny expected them to play for a high school team when half of them already had one foot out that door.

“That’s his problem, not mine.” She slowed down as she approached the center. His car was still there. “Jerk. Store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk.” Why’d he have to go and rob that store, anyway? Why couldn’t he just have been a nice guy?

Because spinsters had notoriously bad luck where men were concerned, she answered herself. He’d seemed to be flirting with her and he looked good enough to eat, so something had to be wrong with him.

All she’d ever asked for was a man who could match her, stride for stride, she thought, driving on. Someone who wouldn’t back down from her and let her wear the pants all the time. Someone who could make her skin heat with a glance. Someone whose kiss didn’t leave her wondering what was on television later that night.

Someone with all that who didn’t have a record.

The full task force was in the war room when she arrived. They were having a meeting.

She hadn’t been informed. Molly felt a dull flush creep up her neck, but she forced herself to stride confidently to the first vacant chair she could find. They had all been lined up in rows for the occasion.

“Hi, Chief.” She sat and wiggled her fingers at Ben Stone. “I said I’d do this on my own time. I didn’t say you ought to start without me.”

Stone’s head moved as though his gaze had turned her way, but that was the only acknowledgment she got. He stood in one corner of the room, near the coffee table, taking up space between that and the American flag. She couldn’t see his eyes because of the cowboy hat he wore.

Spence Harrison, the district attorney, stood beside him at the end of the table. Molly’s glance flicked that way and she caught a quick smile touch the man’s mouth. His brown eyes were clear and direct on her for a moment before they cut to Chief Stone. “I wasn’t aware that Officer French had joined our ranks.”

Stone shrugged without actually responding. One of the task-force cops made a disparaging sound in his throat. Harrison lifted a brow at him, then he focused back on Molly. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.”

“To sum up, I’m still liking the Mercados for this, predominantly because nothing points away from them,” he said, obviously picking up from where he’d been when she’d entered the room.

Translation, Molly thought, he likes them because we don’t have anything else.

“But I’m very concerned with our lack of progress,” Harrison continued. “If we don’t catch a break soon, I’m thinking we’re going to have to go outside our area for expert help. The lack of evidence so far indicates a professional job. It tells me that we’re dealing with someone who is used to committing crimes and covering his or her tracks afterward.”

“Like the mob,” one of the detectives suggested.

“That’s one scenario,” Harrison agreed enigmatically.

Now what did that mean? It was an interesting comment, Molly thought. It seemed to indicate that he had another scenario in mind. But whatever it was, he obviously wasn’t going to share it with the task force.

Everyone was standing to leave. Molly stood, as well, but she stayed behind as the others dispersed. She noticed that more paperwork had been added to the crime book table and that no one had done a thing about organizing it since she’d left yesterday. No wonder they weren’t getting anywhere. How could Chief Stone even monitor this investigation if nothing was in place?

She started to move a chair back to that table, then she realized that Spence Harrison hadn’t left. She gave him a crooked smile. “Joe Gannon seems to think it’s my Laredo connection, but maybe it’s because I’m a woman. What you think?”

“You mean why they cut you out?” He was replacing papers to his briefcase and didn’t look up at her.

“Actually, I sort of cut myself in.”

Again, he gave that fleeting grin. “It’s an old-boy network. I’ll make sure you’re notified of the next meeting.”

“Thanks.” Molly wondered how much she could trust him. Her gut instincts told her that neither Harrison nor Joe Gannon minded her being involved here. She decided to find out. She was a pretty good judge of people and their reactions to things she said. “You know, something’s been bothering me.”

The district attorney finally glanced up. “What’s that?”

“It’s Ed Bancroft. Why didn’t they take away his belt and shoelaces when they put him into that holding cell? Who booked him?”

“Joe Gannon.”

She noticed that Harrison didn’t have to consult anything in his briefcase for the answer. Molly nodded. She’d already known it, too, but she was going somewhere with this.

“And he relieved him of all his potentially deadly possessions at the time,” Harrison continued.

Molly took a deep breath. “Okay. So Bancroft had a friend who brought him the belt. And by association, Malloy probably had some friends, too.”

“It’s a safe guess.”

“I wonder if these friends have any more associates…within the department.”

“You’re a good cop, Molly. You’ve got to know there are also bad ones.”

There, it was out on the table, she thought. It was what she had been fishing for—support for her only theory. Malloy and Bancroft had friends in bad places—and if they did, then it was entirely possible that other cops did as well.

There had just been too many at that bombing scene, she thought again.

“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I like the Mercado angle for this, too. Who else could they have been hooked up with?” She refused to think of Danny when she said it.

“The Mercados are our resident bad guys,” Harrison agreed. He snapped the locks on his briefcase.

He left and Molly sat down at the crime book desk, rubbing her forehead. It was nice to know that someone as powerful as Spence Harrison didn’t think she was nuts for her theory. But she still had questions. Who had supplied Bancroft with the belt he’d looped around his neck? Had Bancroft requested it? Or had someone convinced him that he wanted it?

Molly rose from the table suddenly. She left the war room and went to the records department.

Ten minutes later she had a copy of the official visitors log from the cell area for the day Bancroft had been brought in. She ran down the list of the man’s visitors as she stood in the corridor. Some list. She was the only one on it.

No attorney? Why hadn’t Bancroft called for legal counsel? Those sharks could be counted on to show up before the key turned in the lock.

She hadn’t supplied Bancroft with the belt. Therefore, Molly thought, someone else had visited Bancroft without being signed in. Which meant that whoever had been on desk duty that day hadn’t made an issue of the belt-carrying visitor. Whoever had been on the desk had just waved the visitor in. Because it was another cop?

Her stomach shifted. She’d have to check with personnel to find out who had worked the holding cell area during that shift.

She already knew from the autopsy report that Bancroft hadn’t been dead long when she’d found him. She’d gotten him down and had started CPR herself, to no avail. Bancroft had still been warm. His mysterious visitor could have been there within half an hour of her own sign-in.

Molly started to head back to the war room, then she hesitated. Don’t do it, don’t do it, an inner voice warned her. She stepped back into the records room. “I also need the file on a six-year-old convenience store hold-up.”

“Got a number? An exact date?” the clerk asked. She was a pretty, lithe, young blonde named Gale Howard. Most of the guys loved her.

“No, just a name. Daniel Gates.”

“I should be able to find it. Hold on,” Gale said. “Sign another request for me and I’ll go look.”

And stop running my name through the system. Danny’s voice shot back into Molly’s mind like acid, seeming to singe the edges of everything it touched. “Go away,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head. You’re messing with my kids at that center. I have a right to know.”

“Were you talking to yourself?” Gale asked, returning with the file.

“Uh, no. Well, not really.” Molly took the file and stepped away from the desk.

At some point or other, the store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk would have to leave the center, she decided, returning outside to her car. He couldn’t stay there twenty-four hours a day, could he? She decided to swing by the place again.

His car was still in her space. That was when Molly got her brainstorm. She went back to the police station and found Joe Gannon in the detective’s bureau. She told him what she needed. She could do it herself, but she would probably be questioned by the brass over it.

“What’s this about?” he asked, scowling.

“I volunteer there.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. But that’s not a no-parking zone, is it?”

“Not unless we decide to make it one.”

“On what grounds?”

Molly thought about it. “That building is a firetrap.”

“Close to it, but it must have passed code or the fire department would have shut them down a long time ago.”

Ron was going to kill her for this. Still, principle was principle. And she wouldn’t be able to park there anymore, either, would she? Plus, it really would make the building safer. “We should probably have a clear path to the front door for…you know, firefighters. Just in case.”

“What the hell are you up to?” Gannon was staring at her as though trying to find the answer in her eyes, then he scratched his temple. “Okay. Who cares? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“So do I. I just want to start with the minnows.”

“You’re going to owe me for this.”

“I always pay my debts, Joe.”

“A six-pack. Any import.”

“Consider it done.”

He nodded, then he called in the tow order for the ugly lemon Dodge in front of the rec center. “I’ll have a temporary No-Parking sign there by nightfall.”

Chapter 3

It didn’t seem possible to Danny that seventeen kids in any given city in modern America could not own gym shoes. Granted, the rec center families were mostly impoverished. But Anita’s tattoo, Cia’s leather and Lester’s boots had all cost money, so the kids were finding it somewhere.

He was being played for a chump, Danny decided. And where had these other eleven kids’ names come from, anyway? There’d only been six teenagers here yesterday.

“You,” he said to Jerome, “had sneaks on yesterday.” He sat at Ron Glover’s desk facing the boy who stood on the other side of it.

“They got stole last night.”

“Stolen.”

“What, now you’re an English teacher?”

“Whatever I have to be, pal, to get you into college.”

That broke Jerome up. “Me? Yeah, right.”

“You. Right.” Danny looked down at the handwritten list. At least the kids had sent Jerome back with it. That was something. Actually, it was more than he had hoped for. “Okay, here’s the deal.”

“I don’t do deals, man.”

He caught the boy’s gaze and held it. “My guess is that you do deals every day, just not with the likes of me. Now where was I? Right. I’m going to leave here and buy gym shoes for everybody who was here yesterday. These other eleven kids—whoever they hell they are—are going to have to make an appearance and personally request their own pair—after they’ve practiced with us at least five times.” In the meantime, Danny realized, he was going to have to try his hand at a little fund-raising. They’d need uniforms, too, and various other equipment, not all of which could come out of his limited bank account.

“Man, that’s lame,” Jerome complained.

Danny stood from the desk.

“Hey, what did you do time for, anyway?” the boy asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell us.”

Danny paused on his way to the door. He’d known it was coming and had already determined to be honest with these kids. He had a halfhearted hope that some of them might learn from his experience. “Money,” he told him. “They said I stole money.”

Jerome didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, so you got plenty, right? You can buy us all shoes.”

“If I had money to buy you all shoes, would I be driving that scrap of metal out there at the curb?”

“Ain’t no scrap of metal there now, dude.”

“Sure, there is. Right out front.”

“Uh-uh. No more.”

Then, somehow, Danny knew.

He shot around the desk, opening Ron’s office door hard enough and fast enough to make it crack against the wall like a gunshot. He heard Jerome laughing behind him as he jogged outside.

His car was gone.

Danny drove his fist against a stop sign. The metal clanged. Then he realized that he was still holding the piece of paper with the shoe sizes. Swearing, he shoved it down into his jeans pocket and headed back to the center to call—again—for a cab.

He was going to kill her.

When Molly arrived at the center at two o’clock, the space in front of the center walkway was vacant. There was a no-parking sign there. She grinned to herself and started scouting around the block for another space. She found the Dodge around the first corner, deliberately taking up two spaces, half in each of them. Her grin vanished.

Oh, baby, this was war.

She had to park two blocks away this time. Molly locked her Camaro and headed back to the rec center on foot. She found Danny in the gym.

There were fifteen to twenty kids with him today. She’d never seen so many kids here at once in the whole two years she’d volunteered. What was he doing? Paying them to play basketball with him? She stalked across the court and approached the knot of them.

Danny looked up at her. “Good afternoon, Officer.”

“Same to you.” Then she added under her breath, “Inmate.”

He heard her. “Not anymore.” He nodded at the far basket. “Your end of the court is down that way.”

“It’s wherever I want it to be.”

“No, actually, that rule changed yesterday right around five o’clock. Now I’m assigning you one.”

He’d caught her in Ron’s office at five o’clock, Molly thought. She felt her temper spike even as her stomach squirmed with guilt. “No one promoted you to director of this place.”

“Nope. No one did.”

“Then I’d say rule making is a little out of your job description.” Where were the kids going? she wondered. A quick glance around told her that they were all easing back to the other end of the gym. “Her” end. Were they choosing up sides, determining to stick with her against him? Molly started to smile at that prospect then she noticed that Jerome and Fisk, Cia, Lester and Anita were all wearing new gym shoes. Cia wore hers with rolled-up white socks beneath a stretchy, skin-tight red skirt.

Molly picked out Bobby J. standing at the edge of the gym, watching the others the way he usually did. He wasn’t wearing new shoes. They sat on the floor beside him, still in the box.

“In any society, there tends to be a hierarchy,” Danny said.

She turned back to him quickly, her eyes narrowing.

“Hierarchy? Good word. You know, I’d heard they were starting to educate you guys in prison.” The barb hit its mark. She could tell by his face, and she almost felt ashamed of herself.

He shot a basket then jogged and caught the ball back. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt today. A muscle shirt. And he had the muscles to go with it. Really incredible muscles, she thought. His upper arms were corded, solid, and the sight made her wonder what it would feel like to have them around her.

Molly pressed her fingers to her temples. He was an ex-con. She was losing her mind.

“Hierarchy implies a sort of a totem pole effect,” he continued, dribbling. “First comes the director. Then there are the paid employees. Oh, wait. Let me rephrase that. Paid employee. There’s only one of us here, isn’t there?”

Molly glared at him.

“Then we have the bottom dwellers. They would be the volunteers. Are you following me here, pretty Molly? I think so. Those dazzling green eyes of yours are shooting sparks.”

Real anger shot through her. “Fran and Plank give generously—” Then she broke off and made a funny little sound in her throat.

Startled, Danny stopped playing with the basketball to look at her. Was she blushing? Why? Because he’d said she had dazzling eyes? She was a cop. She couldn’t be so naive and innocent that she couldn’t take a little pure male appreciation in stride. The possibility had something tightening suddenly across his chest. The effect started to spread to other regions before he clamped down on it.

Danny turned and shot the ball through the hoop again. “I admire all of you who donate your time here. All this is just an abject lesson on the authority-chain around here. And, no, they didn’t teach me words like abject in prison. I was actually a pretty good student. Before.”

Molly waited for him to say something else about before, then she realized that he wasn’t going to. She might have asked, but then he’d probably think she was interested or something.

“Bite me,” she grated.

“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.”

He turned back in time to see her face actually flame this time. That tightening-effect started to hit his body again, then it was doused by pure surprise. Danny dropped the ball, and it hit his foot, rebounding and rolling away.

“You lost something there, jock.” She looked smug now.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“About so big, round?” She held her hands up as though to grasp the basketball.

“Not the same something I was just thinking of.” He let his gaze coast up and down her deliberately.

It happened again, he realized. She had the most transparent face of any woman he’d ever met. But at the moment, Molly French’s heart was stamped all over her face. His innuendoes were really getting to her.

He took a step closer to her. She actually surprised him by holding her ground this time. One of her heels seemed to shift, but she stayed put.

“Get out of my space,” she warned. “Back off.”

“Molly, this is my half of the gym. I can step wherever I please. Volunteer…” He poked her gently on the chest, right beneath her collarbone. This time she jumped back skittishly. Then he tapped his own chest. “Employee. And by the way, volunteer, you owe me eighty bucks.”

“For what?” she asked, startled.

“That’s what it cost me to get my car out of the tow lot.”

“Your car got towed?”

She blinked with feigned innocence. He wanted to close his mouth over hers and take that smirk right off her lips, swallow it deep, keep it for his own. That rattled him. The suddenness of the urge had him stepping back of his own accord. “Get off my court.”

“You’re going to teach basketball now?”

“You got it.”

“To whom? May I watch?”

“I—” He broke off and looked down at the other end of the gym.

Five of the kids from yesterday remained. They were all sitting beneath the basket, watching them, their new shoes gleaming white in the overhead lights. Bobby J.—and all the rest of them—had vanished.

“Damn it,” Danny swore. “Now see what you’ve done? You chased off my kids!”

Molly turned away with a quick little twitch of her hips. God help him, but he noticed. How could any woman look that good in khakis? He hated khakis. And loafers. She wore loafers that were clicking their hard little heels all over the floor he’d polished late into the night. She was a genuine handcuff-toting, law-abiding priss. With really great hips. He wondered what she’d look like in Cia’s leather.

He watched her sit down among the kids beneath the other basket. A few minutes later she and Anita peeled off from the rest of the group and went outside. Danny took a deep breath and walked toward the rest of them.

“Back to basketball.”

“It’s going to be a little bit of a walk,” Molly apologized as she and Anita turned the corner onto the next block.

“Where’s your car?”

“In Ethiopia.”

“How come?”

Suddenly her mother’s voice filled her head, something about cutting off her nose to spite her face. Molly’s mother had been full of axioms, bless her soul.

Linda Lee French’s heart hadn’t given out until she was fifty-two. Which was a miracle, Molly had always thought, given her mother’s life. She’d raised two children on her own—one of which hadn’t been able to stay on the right side of the law to save his life, literally. She cleaned houses day and night, taking in enough extra seamstress work that Molly couldn’t remember her ever not having some piece of fabric in her hands. Any men she’d attracted after Molly’s father had run out on them had always seemed more interested in having Linda Lee support them than the other way around. And she’d always done it, generously, hopefully, until each of them left her high and dry. Finally, at fifty-two, all her hope had run out.

“The fire department decided they needed direct access to the front door of the center,” Molly explained, her heart cringing a little at the lie.

Anita laughed. “You’re a cop, not a fireman.”

Molly looked at her sharply. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Danny said you did it.”

He’d told the kids that? “What else did he say?”

“He said you did it because you’re hot for him.”

Molly choked as she unlocked her car door. “That’s not true.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Happens to all of us, right?”

Molly grabbed the drugstore bag out of her passenger seat. It held a pregnancy test and a box of condoms. “But most of us take precautions.”

“I knew you were going to get around to a lecture.”

She pushed the bag into Anita’s hands. “Just listen to me for a minute. Please.”

The girl rolled her eyes but she took the bag.

“You are a special, intelligent human being. You don’t need to let some guy paw you just to prove that to him.”