I started out of the small room, and Cal grabbed me by the arm. He pushed me back towards a chair.

“Yeah, I think I got a pretty good team,” Cal said into the phone receiver. “But I want to put a few dollars the other way. I know everybody thinks we can take them. But what they don’t know is that Lonnie has a bad ankle. I’m sitting him out.… Yeah, yeah.… I got two thousand dollars going.… Okay, right.”

He hung up.

A thousand thoughts came through my head all at once. If I couldn’t play and the team lost, he was going to make two thousand dollars on us.

“Hey, Cal, the money means that damn much to you?” I asked. “All that talk about throwing away your game, was that just a lot of bull? If this is what you’re all about, why don’t you go get your wine and find a hole to crawl into?”

“Thought you trusted me, man.” Cal looked at me. “Thought we were playing it to the bust this time.”

I just sat looking at him, wishing at that minute I had never even seen the dude. Somebody was knocking on the door. I didn’t move, and neither did Cal until the knock changed to pounding.

Cal got up, still looking at me, and opened the door. It was Paul. He had Mary-Ann around her waist. At first I thought she was asleep, and then I saw something was the matter with her. Paul put her on the chair, and she almost fell off.

“Mary-Ann! Mary-Ann!” I yelled into her face. She didn’t respond. “Mary-Ann!”

“Tyrone,” she said, weakly. “Tyrone figured out the money.”

“What?” I tried to get closer to her to hear what she was saying.

Cal pushed me to one side and looked into her eyes. Then he took her jacket off and looked at her arms. There was dried blood in the crook of her left arm.

“Get her to the hospital!” Cal said. “It’s an OD.”

“I’ll call for an ambulance,” Ox said.

“No time.” Cal picked Mary-Ann up in his arms and started for the street. “Flag down a cab!”

We got Mary-Ann into a cab, and Paul and a couple of other women from the club went with her to the hospital.

“I didn’t even know she used anything!” I said.

“She probably don’t,” Cal said. “Somebody gave her a veinful of skag to make it look like she did it herself.”

All I could think of was finding Tyrone and killing him. Cal grabbed me and held me and dragged me back to the center. When we got in the clubroom, he threw me against the side of a locker and put his forearm up against my neck and pushed until I thought I was going to pass out.

“Listen to me, fool,” he said. “I’m going down the tubes. You can’t stop it, and nobody else can. But I’m picking who I’m taking with me and who I’m leaving behind. Now you get your stuff together and get on over to the gym like I told you. Come on, son, please.”