Murder at the Foul Line by Otto Penzler

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 thehoop, 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