The Strangler Read Online Free PDF

for a rebound, arms up. “Amy, you want to make this interesting?”
    “Sure.”
    “Six points okay?”
    “Sure, whatever.”
    “Margaret, how about you? Michael’s feeling feisty tonight. Care to put a little cash down on the middle son?”
    “You want me to bet against my own sons?”
    “Only one of them.”
    Margaret shook her head.
    “Go on, Mum,” Amy urged, “it’s just for fun.”
    “We’ll never tell,” Kat added. “Promise.”
    “No, thanks, dear.”
    “Take Joe,” Kat pleaded. “The poor thing.”
    Margaret considered it. “I’ll put a nickel on Ricky.”
    “Oh!” Kat yelped. “You’re a horrible mother.”
    Through the window they could hear the brothers ragging each other as the game got going. Joe and Michael were a team, as usual, and at the start they exploited their two-to-one advantage by spreading out, forcing Ricky to cover one or the other, then passing to the free man for easy shots. Michael was a careful player, a lurker. He liked to slide into open spaces for unmolested set shots. At times he moved out of the lighted area altogether, and the women had to squint to find him in the darkness. Joe’s game was all muscle. He moved like a bear chasing a butterfly, but his size ensured he would always have the best position under the basket. Together they made a decent inside-outside combination. As their lead climbed, 2–0, 3–0, 4–0, Joe’s taunting got louder and louder. Amy was right: Joe was pissed about the way Brendan Conroy had been treated, and, though Michael had been Conroy’s main tormenter, Joe directed his anger at Ricky. There was a tacit understanding that Michael was somehow disengaged from the grander struggle between Joe and Ricky. So if Joe was angry, it seemed perfectly natural for him to target Ricky, not Michael. The insults from Joe were all variations on a theme: “Come on, Mary…Does your husband play?…What, are you afraid of a little contact?…Pussy…”
    And then, in an instant, the game changed. Michael put up one of his little jumpers, the kind he knocked down over and over, but this time the shot was flat. It caught the back rim and rebounded high, out into the street, away from the hoop where Joe was hanging. Ricky snagged it in the air.
    “Shit!” Kat hissed.
    A little smiled wriggled across Amy’s lips.
    What happened next happened very quickly. Ricky bounced the ball once with his left hand, once with his right. Michael swiped at it, and Ricky avoided him by threading the ball between his own legs, from back to front, which left Michael behind him and out of the play. Joe took a step toward him, like a palace guard blocking a gate. Ricky paused for an instant to eye him up. He slow-dribbled the ball low and to his right, extending it a few inches toward Joe, who finally took the bait, leaning then stepping toward the ball, a reluctant irresistible stuttery step. But it was enough. Ricky crossed the ball over to his left hand, and he was behind Joe. He laid the ball in: 6–1.
    Kat groaned, “
Mmm.
It’s not fair. The way Ricky shows off!”
    “He’s not showing off.”
    “Oh, Amy!”
    “Alright,” Amy allowed, “maybe a little.”
    But Amy could not take her eyes off him. Because he was showing off
for her
. And because he was beautiful. His game was jazzy and gliding and fast, she thought, but more than anything it was beautiful. The way he moved. The way the ball moved with him, the way it yo-yoed back to his hand. The way he spun, his body in flight. Amy had not known Ricky when he was a high-school hero—when he was Tricky Ricky Daley, point guard and captain at Boston English, All-Scholastic, All-Everything; when he’d been offered a scholarship to Holy Cross, alma mater of the great Cousy himself—and she was glad for that. She did not want to think of Ricky as one of those arrested men who were such stars in high school or college that everything after was tinged with anticlimax and nostalgia. She did not want to