Free Jump by Mike Lupica Page A

house.
    “You’re saying a girl can come out of this the bad guy?” Ellis said.
    Richie Collins smiled. “Now you’re paying attention,” he said.
    DiMaggio hated car phones usually, but you could rent them right along with your car now, and he had found that they saved him a lot of time. He called Frank Crittendon, the Knicks’ general manager, and told him they needed to talk. Crittendon said come ahead, the team didn’t practice until six on Thursdays.
    Now DiMaggio was standing there in the back parking lot with everybody else to see Adair and Collins make their entrance fortwenty-two television cameras—DiMaggio had counted—and three times that many other people, TV reporters, print reporters, and photographers. If something else happened in the tristate area—something minor like a nuclear attack—all the stations were going to be screwed because the cameras that weren’t in Fulton were still back at the Vertical.
    DiMaggio wondered how Adair and Collins would play it. He had followed them through the campus for a while until Adair pulled over and then Collins really gave it to Ellis Adair, doing most of the talking, pointing a finger at him sometimes. Looking very much in charge.
    When the Jeep pulled in, everybody swarmed it, both sides, barely leaving space for the two Knicks to open the doors. Adair got out first, smiling but acting shy, putting his hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot. DiMaggio couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he couldn’t have said very much because right away Adair was moving toward the door of the gym. Most of the crowd moved with him. All DiMaggio could see, over all of them, was Ellis Adair shaking his head no, then disappearing. Collins was still there, smiling, looking small compared to Adair but bigger than most of the media people, coming across the way he did the few times DiMaggio had watched him play, like this cute gym rat.
    Collins didn’t last much longer than Adair. They cleared a path for him, and he started for the gym door and would have made it as easily as Adair just had, except that here came this big, handsome blond guy out of the pack, jogging casually after Collins, catching up to him right before the door. DiMaggio was about twenty feet away from the door, leaning against the wall. He didn’t read what was happening right away. But there was something about the blond guy, speeding up now as Collins reached for the door. Now DiMaggio moved, started for the door himself, just as the blond guy’s right hand came out of the side pocket of his windbreaker and DiMaggio heard him say to Richie Collins, “This is for what you did to my sister, asshole.”

8
    Hannah was exhausted when she got back to Jimmy’s apartment. She tried to take a nap but couldn’t and put on the television instead, one of the eight thousand movie channels you got with Manhattan Cable if you were willing to pay. They were showing some movie with Mary Stuart Masterson, who had become Hannah’s spunky favorite after she saw her in
Fried Green Tomatoes
a few years ago. Hannah didn’t know the name of this one. Mary Stuart was a teenager and in love with some guy who thought he was in love with somebody else. Hannah stayed with it until she was sure the guy would come to his senses, which he did.
    How come life never worked out that way?
    Hannah was positive she was going to be a great actress. Jimmy used to joke that they were going to be the new Barrymores. He sat her down one night and made her watch this old newspaper movie,
Deadline U.S.A.
, with Humphrey Bogart and Ethel playing the woman who owned the paper Bogart was trying to save. Hannah thought Ethel Barrymore looked like she was ninety.
    “I’m not so sure I want to be Ethel,” Hannah said.
    She gave it five years, though. Five hard years. When it was all over, she had made a little over four thousand dollars, total. She had done walk-ons in soap operas, including Jimmy’s. After what Hannah used to joke was her