Blood Ties by S. J. Rozan Page B

nothing, I think it’s incurable. About the kids, go out there. This isn’t just a social call, they’ll have to let you talk to them. Sullivan’ll be going there soon, but he’ll have to hook up with the locals. Maybe you can find out something from the kids before he gets there.”
    With a note of caution in her voice, she said, “This is a homicide investigation now, Bill.”
    â€œThat’s in case I forgot?”
    â€œIt’s in case you remembered and don’t give a damn.”
    A Mustang racing out of the parking lot screeched its brakes when the traffic didn’t stop to make way for it.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “You’re right. If you don’t want to go on with this—”
    â€œOf course I’ll go on,” she said impatiently. “But I want you to pay attention. The way you would if this were any other case.”
    When we hung up, I watched the Mustang muscle into the street, then stand at a red light, engine stupidly racing.

six
    I needed to see Helen once more, and I needed to get out of Warrenstown before Sullivan made me a short-term guest of the place. But there was one other thing I wanted to try, and if I was lucky I’d be able to get in and get out before Sullivan knew I’d been there.
    Warrenstown High stood on the outskirts of town. Broad stairs led up to the doors and sunlight glinted off wide windows in the classroom wings on either side. Behind the classrooms rose the higher blocks of the irregular spaces: auditorium, library, gym. Everything was yellow brick and it all glowed triumphantly in the afternoon sun.
    I climbed the steps past a group of kids sitting around killing time. Inside, a few more kids walked the deserted halls, opened lockers to exchange one set of books for another. These would be brainiacs, or geeks, or maybe the artsy crowd, doing what they did even over camp week. I asked directions, got pointed this way and that, and found my way to the gym, wondering how I’d feel if I were fifteen and new to this sprawling building on a crowded school morning, and everyone else was rushing around, and finding your way was confusing and difficult and really mattered.
    The gym’s polished floor gleamed in sunlight from high windows. The huge overhead lights, caged against damage, were off now, but they’d be on for evening practices, for Friday night games. The place was empty; I stopped inside and my footsteps and the thump of the swinging doors echoed, faded. A wave of memory crashed over me as I stood looking: high school basketball in Brooklyn, the two years I lived there before I joined the navy; shipboard games under a net to keep the ball from the Pacific; college intra-murals; pickup games in the park. Shouts, sweat, feet pounding, heart pumping, pulling out more than you thought you had from deep inside you again and again. I’d been a good shooter, but it wasn’t the game-saver shots I was seeing now, not the cheers of the crowd I heard. What I remembered, what I’d forgotten, was a different thrill, and it was real, and better: making the no-look pass, setting the solid screen, nailing the timing on the alley-oop. Getting the pointed finger and the thumbs-up from the guy you’d made the pass to, set the screen for. Being depended on by a team full of other guys, and coming through; depending on them and not being let down. Long exhausting practices you looked forward to, coaches and trainers whose insults you let pass and whose orders you followed, pain you iced and ignored, because all that was the price of being here, on the hardwood, under the lights, in a place where you belonged.
    I shook off the memory. There was no one here. I pushed out the swinging doors again, left them to echo by themselves.
    Back along the corridor I came across the Warrenstown Wall of Fame: photos of boys, grouped by the sport they played, with plaques identifying them as