Ball Don't Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

at Sticky all confused after the cop said what he said.
    It’s your birthday today?
Dave said.
    Sticky shrugged.
    For real?
Sin said.
    But that’s as far as it went. Nobody felt like singing happy birthday to you, cuffed in the back of some cop car on the way to the station.

Sticky Swipes Gear
    like he shoots hoops. Shuts off his mind and rolls instinct. Every move in a department store is a SportsCenter highlight:
    You go in with an empty Double Gulp cup and walk out drinking your favorite new shirt through a straw.
    You try on those new Nikes with a hat pulled low, walk around Fragrances three, four times to check the feel, and cruise right out of the store. Get your sprint on if the high-pitched alarm starts screaming.
    You walk past the register and out the front doors with three new shirts draped over the shoulder. In front of everyone. Bar codes dangling like fish in a cotton waterfall. If the blue-hair behind the counter says,
Excuse me, sir, have you
paid for that?
(which they never do, because they don’t really give a damn either) you say,
No, I’m OK, ma’am. I’m OK, sir.
Maybe add a quick
It’s all taken care of,
like you know exactly what you’re doing. And you do. Then you cruise out calm like some suit guy with a heavy wallet.
    It’s the same high that’s floating around a hoop court. Lift a product and don’t give up a dime.
    Makes you feel alive.
    Take, for example, the day Sticky met Anh-thu in Millers Outpost last summer. He dropped in thinking layer scam (go in wearing your baggiest jeans, pull six or seven pants off the rack and hop into an empty dressing room. Leave the two best pair on under jeans, dump the rest in the saleschick’s arms and roll out cool). But when Sticky was busy sifting through the overstocked rack, beats jumping through Walkman headphones, pulling a pair of khakis off the rack and putting them back, pulling off and putting back, pulling and putting, Anh-thu came up on his blind side.
    Can I help you find something?
she said, tapping him on the shoulder.
    Sticky jumped two feet.
    Even when you shoplift with a slow heart, somebody’s voice behind you can sound like a pair of heavy handcuffs rattling. Sticky turned around thinking undercover security, but what he found was Anh-thu.
    Something clicked.
    He knew the face, dark-type skin in the center of long black hair. Straight. Yeah, he’d seen her before, coming in or out of the caf, standing with her girls outside econ class, but never up close like this. Where he could see the green in her eyes. To be straight up, his stomach dropped. All he could do was stare. It was like the time his cart strained up to the highest peak on Space Mountain during some big foster outing to Disneyland. He could feel it in his stomach: Something crazy was about to go down.
    Um, hel-lo,
Anh-thu said, waving a hand in front of his daydream face.
Can I help you?
    Sticky hadn’t been with too many ladies up to that point. You have to understand that. Some of the sluttier chicks at school, like Angelica and Chloe. A rich white girl everybody called Grand Slam (cause one, her dad owned a local Denny’s, and two, if you paid her a little attention, three, four days in a row, you were bound to take a trip around the bases) who used to buy Sticky lunch at school every Friday when the caf came through with pizza. There were a couple episodes with girls he lived with in previous foster homes. Sneak in each other’s room after lights-out. But he never felt anything special with any of them. It was just something you were supposed to do, like cheating on tests and drinking forties with the boys.
    Yeah,
Sticky said, shaking out of it.
I need some new pants.
    You have to realize, Sticky was a baller first and foremost. There wasn’t any time for chicks. He was too busy working on the Iverson crossover, or trying to sneak the rock over the rim with two hands-behind-the-back and call it a reverse.
    Fire one off before a big game and legs go to rubber