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the ball.”
    â€œHe delivered the jersey. I’ve got that back. He didn’t bring no ball. He said he couldn’t find it.”
    â€œOh, he found it. Had it under his arm when he was walking out. I remember because . . . the stupidest thing went through my head while I was lying there, my nose busted, covered in spaghetti. I thought: He’s not protecting the rock. He can get stripped. Fumble waiting to happen.”
    Tommy laughed, but he was a nose-laugher and the snorting hurt his busted cartilage. “Stupid things that go through your head, you know, in the moment.”
    â€œHe didn’t deliver no rock.”
    â€œCheck the security tape. They’ll show you,” Tommy said.
    â€œThe guy is going down the hall with the jersey under one arm and the football in the other.”
    Banazak’s pupils dilated. He breathed in salt air, listened to chinkling boat chimes and gulls scavenging over near the Cheesecake Factory. “The jersey’s a jersey. I ripped a dozen of them, gave a dozen to little kids. But that rock, man. That was a tipped ball at the line of scrimmage in the red zone. My big, lumbering ass took that ball eighty-seven yards to pay dirt. On national TV. My father fucking cried. Only game ball I was ever awarded. My whole career is in that ball.”
    â€œYeah, well. Now some Chinaman probably has it on eBay.”
    Banazak kicked the cooler. The cover split a hinge, the tank slid off the boat into a slick of motor oil. “Here comes Jesus,” he said, and he went down into the galley. The hair bristled on Tommy’s nape. Those words. That’s what J-Zak used to say aloud when he broke through the line and went after a quarterback with intent to kill. “Here comes Jesus.”
    Opposing linemen were said to void their bowels when they heard those words. Because few quarterbacks ever played another game; some never walked again.

7
    FIRE IN THE HOLE
    Down between Garfield and Garvey, in the area known as Downtown Monterey Park, Louie Mo sat inside a crowded little house, speaking Cantonese to an old woman named Mother Celery. The English translations that some Chinese chose for their names forever baffled him. “Louie” was transnational, but “Celery”? Still, he wasn’t going to tell Mother Celery that. The house was full of Chinese laborers, the surrounding area boasting the largest concentration of Chinese in any municipality in the United States. That’s why he lived there. He could hide. Blend in. Relax, almost.
    On the days or nights he went to work for his “agent,” a Czech loan shark he called Boss Jim, he’d come back to the house tired and sleep in a room he shared with four other Chinese men. When they sat about and spoke Cantonese, Louie would tell them he washed dishes in South San Gabriel, didn’t say much more. When the Chinese people of Monterey Park would see the white girl in the Chevy come to pick him up, they never asked about it.
    For the past two days he’d been resting his hip at the communal house, eating the old woman’s soup, reading Troy’s script, and taking solace in the fact that he made two grand in a matter of days. Half came from selling the “superball” to a dealer in Thousand Oaks, half from the elbow he put on the kid Troy in Malibu. Of course, he split the fee on both with Dutch. After paying Mother Celery for room and board he had a little more than nine hundred dollars inside the backpack that contained everything he owned: a red sweat suit, a pair of ostrich-skin loafers, a shaving kit, his passport, and several changes of socks and underwear.
    Sometimes he felt like one of the Chinese emigrants who came to America to work on the railroad. Living day to day, paycheck to paycheck. A “coolie,” Dutch told him they were called. One day Mother Celery set down his rice and said, in Cantonese, “Man with secrets. Who do you hide