Bending the Rules. Susan Andersen

bringing home a truly in-the-toilet-type report card.

      But the weekends were a different matter. They just seemed to stretch without end, what with Mom working two jobs and the fact that they’d only moved here from Philly a couple of months ago. Midyear changes at school sucked—she’d like to see anyone, except maybe one of those so-perky-you-wanted-to-smack-’em cheerleader types, make instant friends. And a girl had to have some fun.

      There’d sure been precious little of that since Daddy was killed.

      Grief, hard and sharp, sliced through her defenses, and she doubled over, her arms wrapped around her middle. But this wasn’t the place to give in to it and she pulled herself upright. Still, she had to get out of here.

      She was slipping out from between the two buildings when she heard glass breaking, so close it made her jump. There was a shout from within the store next door. Then the report of a gunshot. It was a sound that defined her nightmares and she froze in the deep shadow of the dentist’s office doorway, cold sweat trickling down her sides.

      A strident alarm started whooping and she made herself move, shimmying up the rough brick that formed a facade at the front of the building. It seemed like an eon but was probably only a few moments before she hooked her elbows over the edge of the one-story office’s cantilevered roof and swung herself over its lip. She lay there on her back for a moment, panting and struggling to slow her heartbeat. Then she slowly rolled onto her stomach and pulled herself by her elbows to the back edge nearest the north-side jewelry store, knowing she should have simply beat feet while the beating was good, but sucked into a bad decision once again by her damn impulsiveness and never-ending curiosity.

      From her vantage point she watched kids pour out of the shop’s back door and realized the stories she’d thought a couple of taggers had been making up must be true: there was a youth gang robbing city jewelry stores. Given that most of the kids looked young even to her, she couldn’t imagine they’d come up with the idea on their own.

      The thought had no sooner flitted across her mind than a man stepped out behind them, shoving both a gun and what looked like a black hood in the waistband of his slacks. He paused beneath the dim light that shone over the door, but with the brim of his porkpie hat throwing his face in shadow she couldn’t make out his features. And that was just fine with Cory, since the most painful lesson she’d learned in her life was that the wrong kind of knowledge could kill you.

      That’s how it had worked with her dad.

      “Move your asses,” the man growled, and the kids scattered in six different directions. “Fucking amateurs,” he muttered and lit a cigarette as he pushed away from the door.

      And, oh, crap. The flame of his Zippo briefly illuminated his face.

      She knew him. Well, she didn’t know-him know him, but she recognized who he was. She’d overheard someone saying he was, like, the muscle for some local crime boss whose name she couldn’t recall. But she knew he had a bad reputation. And she really, really didn’t want to bring herself to the attention of the top dawg or his henchman. Not when it was obvious the Hench had just shot someone.

      But she must have made some sort of noise or moved without realizing it, because even as Muscle Boy was stalking purposefully down the passageway between the two buildings toward the street, he looked up.

      Straight at her.

      Cory’s heart stopped and for a moment she merely gawped. Seeing his hand go for the gun in his waistband, however, unfroze her but quick and, scuttling backward, she scrambled to her feet and raced across the rooftop, leaping up onto the roof of the south-side building with strides long and sure even as her mind screamed in panic. Her daddy had been a track star way back in his high-school years, and he’d taught her to run practically from the time she could walk. He used to say she was the son he’d never had and the daughter he’d always wanted.

      But she couldn’t think about that now because it made her knees weak. Shoving all thoughts of her family aside, she sprinted across the second building and up onto a third. This one had a working roof with heat or air shafts or whatever they were sticking out, and a little shedlike structure with a door that led to the building. She came to an abrupt halt. She couldn’t simply keep going—at least not without trying to think it through. The Hench hadn’t come up onto the dentist’s roof after her, so he was no doubt headed straight for the last building to await her descent. At least she hoped that was what he would do. Because her plan was to bail midblock. She sped over to the door and reached for the knob.

      It was locked. But there was a fire escape going down the back of the building. Cautiously, she approached it and peered over.

      And damn near wet her pants. In the millisecond before she jerked back again she glimpsed Muscle Boy—a big, ugly boogeyman of a guy—pointing his gun at her in a two-handed grip.

      A gun that he’d already proved he wasn’t shy about using. The crack of it discharging at her in the next second sounded louder than thunder.

      Almost simultaneous with the report, the bullet hit high on the air vent thingie behind her and ricocheted off. She managed to bite back the girlish scream bulging the back of her throat, but it was a close thing. She’d learned a long time ago to dress like a boy when she went out tagging. It was just safer and even with the cops and the store owners who’d busted her two weeks ago, she’d stayed in character. She hadn’t claimed to be a boy, but she was tall and she knew how to walk and talk like one when she needed to. Plus Cory was one of those names that could belong to a boy or a girl and hers even had the more boylike spelling.

      If she got out of this tonight, hopefully that would stand her in good stead, since it would be way harder to track down a boy tagger than a girl.

      She was already hauling ass when she heard the fire escape rattle beneath the bad guy’s weight, but the adrenaline that spiked through her bloodstream at the sound acted like a turbo boost as she raced back the way she had come. She jumped down the three-foot drop to the next building, raced across that roof, then dropped another couple feet to the dentist’s office roof. Reaching the edge, she plopped onto her butt, rolled, grasped the rim of the roof and dropped, bending her knees to soften the impact when she hit ground.

      She still had to put a hand down to catch herself on the tiny patch of grass fronting the office and her feet scrambled in the dormant flower border before she gained some purchase and sprinted like a bat out of hell toward Forty-fifth. Reaching the main east-west arterial, she cut across a gas station lot, then slowed down and eased into a shadow as the wail of a cop siren split the night. A second later a blue-and-white flashed past, red lights swirling.

      Passing only two students weaving unsteadily down the sidewalk, she left the shopping district behind, casting glances over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She slid through the neighborhood, jumping fences and cutting through yards. It wasn’t until she was blocks away that she slowed down and tried to collect herself so she could make a plan to get back home. She had to arrive before her mother, or Mom would go ballistic. And not just about her being out on her own this time of night, but over her disguise.

      Which brought back the way she’d misrepresented herself to the shop-owner people, which in turn made her stomach drop. She didn’t even know why she’d stayed in guy character, except that it was a form of protection. Girls were more vulnerable on the street. So if Danny G. and Henry found out, her cover was blown.

      And, okay, she admitted that maybe she’d hoped the whole thing would just go away and nobody would ever have to know the difference.

      But of course it hadn’t, so now she had to show up tomorrow as herself. Because it was one thing to pull off acting like a guy for short periods of time in dim lighting. It was something else again to try it in broad daylight for God knew how long. The woman who had contacted her about making reparation said to plan on being at her beck and call for as long as she deemed fit.

      So it presented a problem—the guys were going to find out she was a girl. She had a hunch that Danny G. maybe already knew, but he was a quiet, self-contained guy who mostly