Stealing the Game (21 page)

“Hey, kid!” Fauxhawk barked as he approached the court. “Where the hell’s your retarded brother?”

I shrugged. What was it about that
A
on his chest that kept nagging at me?

He looked around the park, then back to the parking lot. His focus was on Jax showing up with the goods, not on the game. Especially since there was no bet. To him, the game was only a cover for
their exchange.

But
we
were playing to win. I figured the Undertakers felt the same way.

“How’s the nose, kid?” Masterson asked with a smirk. “Mommy kiss and make it better?”

“You going to forfeit again?” Danforth asked. “Why not do it now and save your friends the humiliation?”

I said nothing, so he shrugged and hurried off with his team to stretch.

They looked even bigger today.

Fauxhawk didn’t bother huddling with his team or giving them any coaching advice. He paced on the sidelines, looking around nervously.

The rest of my team was on the court warming up their shots. I just stood there studying the
A
on his hoodie, trying to dig through my brain to uncover the voice that was trying to tell
me something. Before I could find the voice, my cell phone buzzed. I went over to the grass and pulled it from my hoodie pocket.

“I got the info you wanted,” Theo said. “It was all public record, so it wasn’t much of a challenge.” He sounded disappointed.

“How old are the children in each of the victim families?”

I could hear the rusting of paper as he looked through the documents.

“Varies,” he said. “They’ve got kids of all ages.”

“Right; what I meant was, do they all have children under the age of ten?”

More rustling. “Yes! How’d you know?”

“I think I figured out how the garage robberies are done. And who’s been doing them.”

“Tell me!” he said excitedly.

“Later,” I said. “I need one more thing from you.”

“Dude, I’m not your sidekick. Need I remind you that I’m a detective, too?”

“I know, I know. You’re the guy who inspired me to figure it out. Besides, I’m not really a detective. I just stumbled on this whole mess while trying to figure out what was
going on with my brother.”

Theo sighed. “Okay, last favor.”

I told him what I needed.

“That’s a lot of phone calls, Chris.”

“Use your charm,” I said.

He laughed. “It’ll take me an hour. If I use my charm, it’ll take two hours.”

“Cancel that order of charm,” I said.

He said he’d text me the results.

“Thanks, man, I really appreciate it.” I hung up feeling a little guilty that I couldn’t tell Theo everything I’d figured out. About Jax’s real story. About the
garage burglaries. About everything. Not yet. Not until I was certain.

I tapped in Jax’s number and sent him a text:
I know everything.

I waited. No response.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe everything I thought I’d figured out was the equivalent of a three-point air ball.

I texted again:
Wait until after our game.

Again, I waited. Again, no response.

“Dude,” Roger called. “You gonna warm up, or what?”

“Be right there,” I said.

I stared at my phone. Come on, Jax.
I know you got my texts. I know you know what I meant.
Right?

I was about to text again when Jax finally answered:
You have 15 mins.

“Let’s get this over with,” Masterson said, leading his team onto the court. “I’ve got more important things to do with my life than step on ants all
day.”

A couple of his teammates chuckled.

We didn’t respond. We weren’t there to trade insults; we were there to beat them. Right now I had to forget about Jax and Fauxhawk and Stanford and Brooke and my parents and the
police and what everyone expected from me.

Right now, I just wanted to win.

FOR
some reason, as I walked onto the court, I thought, What color is an orange? If you asked an orange, it would probably say, “Who
cares?” It’s like asking me what is my passion? I have lots of passions: basketball, comics, Mr. L’s class. Why do I have to put a name to it, call it a color?

“Shoot for outs?” I challenged Masterson, tossing him the ball.

He dribbled it a couple times. “Kinda bouncy,” he said.

It was. We’d deliberately pumped it up before they got here so it was a little overinflated. An inflated ball would bounce farther away from the rim in a missed shot, neutralizing the
height advantage the Undertakers had under the basket. While they were crashing the boards for rebounds, missed shots would be bouncing back into our hands.

He dribbled the ball again, frowning at it.

“Look, it’s the same ball we played with yesterday,” Rain said. “But if you want your own ball, that’s fine with us. We want you to have every advantage you
can.”

Masterson glared at Rain, then snorted. He went to the top of the key and shot for outs. He drained the shot. He looked at Rain. “We don’t need any advantages.”

“You want ball or basket?” I said.

They could choose to have the ball first or they could choose which basket they wanted to shoot at. This was also part of my strategy. At this time of day, the sun shone at an angle so that on
the near court, the sun would be in your eyes while shooting. But if you chose the far court, the sun would be in your eyes while defending your basket. I knew he would choose not to shoot into the
sun, because that’s what almost everyone picked. Most players focused on their shooting, because making baskets is what made them feel good.

However, because they had the height advantage, we knew they would be shooting most of their shots close to the basket, so the sun wouldn’t be a major factor. But on defense, when we were
snapping passes around, they’d be staring into the sun, giving us a fraction of a second to shoot before they got into defensive position.

“We’ll take basket,” Masterson said.

I grinned. I really was devious.

“We’ll take that basket,” he said, pointing to the one we didn’t want him to take.

Uh-oh.

I looked at the rest of the team. Roger sighed heavily, as if we’d already lost. Gee shrugged as if he’d expected things to go wrong, as they always did when he had to go up against
a bunch of rich Newport Beach kids. Tom showed no emotion. He just wanted to play, win or lose.

Rain laughed.

Then she ran around high-fiving us. “Yes!” she said.

Maybe she’d misunderstood the plan. Maybe she was going a little crazy.

“Ball,” I said to Masterson. He passed it hard at my chest. I caught it without expression, as if a butterfly had just wandered into my hands, but the force had slightly jammed my
index finger. The knuckle ached.

I stepped out-of-bounds next to the hoop pole to pass the ball in. Gee waited for the pass.

“Wrong side, loser,” Masterson said, pointing to the other basket.

“Wait a minute,” Roger said, “you chose this side.”

“You can’t do that!” Rain snapped. “You already picked!”

“I changed my mind, midget. Game hasn’t started yet.” Masterson grinned at her.

Rain slunk off down to the other side of the court. The rest of us looked as angry as possible as we glared at them on our way to the other side. As I got close to Rain, I whispered, “Well
played,
midget
.”

“A variation on the Sicilian Defense in chess,” she said.

I just stared, not knowing what she was talking about.

“Reverse psychology,” she explained.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s what I thought,” I said.

We both laughed at that.

In pickup ball, the first few minutes of a game are the most important, because the teams don’t know each other very well, so they’re still feeling out the weaknesses and strengths.
We’d played the Undertakers before, so we knew that they had a lot of strengths. But they also had the one weakness that sometimes allows the smaller team to pull an upset. Like the
eighth-ranked Sixers defeating the Bulls in the 2012 play-offs. Or the 135th-ranked Steve Darcis defeating number one seed Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in the first round in 2013.

Overconfidence.

Overconfidence makes players sloppy. They don’t follow their shots as quickly, they’re slower to jump into defense, they don’t hustle down the court. I remembered what Brooke
had said about fast versus slow zombies. Slow zombies made people overconfident and they ended up getting chomped on.

We had the pumped ball, we had the better court; now we needed to make them overconfident.

So we let them score the first five points. We pretended that we were trying our best, but we let ourselves get stopped by picks that we ordinarily would have fought through. We let ourselves
get “surprised” by a pump-fake we ordinarily would have anticipated. It was a gamble, but we were desperate to even the odds. We sure weren’t going to grow three inches and gain
twenty pounds in the next few minutes, so we relied on our basic basketball skills—and my deviousness.

And it all worked as planned. Missed shots rebounded a little farther off the rim. We anticipated that and hung back from the hoop, giving us more second attempts and therefore more points. The
sun messed with them on defense, so we passed the ball around a lot and shot from the spots where the sun was at our backs but directly in their eyes. That made them slower to get their hands up to
block. Finally, giving them the first five points allowed them to relax a little, certain that they would crush us fast and be on their way home.

A fourth bonus was that Fauxhawk was so distracted checking his watch and searching the park for my brother that he didn’t pay attention to the game. Why should he? There was no money
riding on it. But that meant he didn’t yell at his team, motivating them through fear.

When the score was 12–12, Fauxhawk called a time-out.

“Where the hell is your brother?” he hollered at me.

I checked my phone. I knew he wouldn’t have texted or called, but I wanted to see how much of the fifteen minutes that he’d given me was left. Only eight minutes.

“Nothing new from him,” I said. “But he told me he’d be here by the end of the game.”

“I don’t care about the stupid game!” Fauxhawk shouted. Then he slid closer to me and said, so that only I could hear him, “He’d better be here soon or I’m
going to take it out on you, little brother. And I won’t be as kind to you as I was to him. Ever try to shoot a basketball with a couple broken arms?”

“There’s a lot of people around,” I said.

He grinned. “Doesn’t have to be here. Doesn’t have to be today. I’m a very patient man. One day you’re riding your bike home and a van ‘accidentally’
clips you from behind. Instant tragedy.”

I didn’t say anything, just returned to the court to get the game rolling.

I tried not to think about his threat. I was counting on Jax. I was counting on being right about everything I’d figured out. That was a lot of counting.

A couple minutes later we had pulled ahead 17–14, and that’s when the Undertakers got physical again. We knew they would, so we tried to avoid physical contact as much as possible.
But in basketball, it’s not always possible.

Masterson started it by charging through a pick that Tom had set for me. He rammed Tom so hard that Tom staggered into Rain, almost knocking her down.

“Offensive foul,” I said, taking the ball to the top of the key.

“He was moving!” Masterson said.

“Seventeen to fourteen,” I said, ignoring him. “Ball’s in.” I passed it in.

Danforth came down with a rebound, elbowing Roger on top of his head.

Clement straight-armed Gee in the chest in order to snag a loose ball.

Masterson pushed me toward the basket, using his butt. But I kept darting back and forth, swatting at the ball. I knocked it away once. He retrieved it, but he had to start pushing me all over
again. I knew he was frustrated, and I could tell by the tension in his body that he was about to do another shoulder fake, followed by a head smack in my face. Just as his head came backward, I
ducked around his right side and stole the ball.

Masterson chased me downcourt like a hunting dog after a rabbit. But I was faster and managed a soft layup before he made it to the free throw line. I stopped and turned in time to see Masterson
plow right into me, knocking me into the hoop pole. Fortunately, the pole had a thick green pad around it, but the impact knocked all the air out of me and I slumped to the ground, gasping.

My team ran over to help me up.

When Roger saw that I was okay and breathing normally, he spun with his fist up. “I’m gonna punch a hole in his face!”

I grabbed Roger’s shoulder. “Let’s just finish the game.” I knew we were running out of time.

When I looked over at Masterson, I saw his team gathered around him arguing. Clearly, Lambert and Bendleton felt Masterson had gone too far. “Not cool, Phil,” Lambert told Masterson.
Bendleton nodded agreement. Masterson didn’t seem to care, but I could see Danforth and Clement shift uncomfortably at the disagreement.

“Fine,” Masterson said. “Let’s just beat these little turds senseless and head down to Huntington Beach to check out the sand bunnies.”

Disagreement over. They all liked that idea.

“Our ball,” Masterson said, snapping his fingers at Rain, who’d snatched it up after my collision with the pole. She scowled fiercely at Masterson, gripping the ball as if she
were about to hurl it into his face.

“C’mon, team,” I said brightly to show I was okay, “let’s finish this.”

Both teams squared off to continue the game. Some of the Undertakers might have disagreed with cheap shots, but the determined looks on their faces showed that they still wanted to win.

My teammates also had the grim glares of warriors who want to win.

Nobody was giving an inch.

So, you probably want to know who won.

Did Good (us) defeat Evil (them)?

Did the Underdogs (us) beat the Top Dogs (them)?

Or was Coach right about the big guys almost always beating the smaller guys with the same skills?