Mean Streets by Jim Butcher Read Free Book Online

she said a minute later, between sniffles. “You were talking to Coach Carpenter yesterday. A-Alicia said you were a friend of the family.”
    “I’d like to think so,” I agreed. “I’m Harry.”
    “Kelly,” she said.
    I nodded. “Shouldn’t you be practicing with the team, Kelly?”
    She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “It doesn’t help.”
    “Help?”
    “I’m hopeless,” she said. “Whatever it is I’m doing, I just screw it up.”
    “Well, that’s not true,” I said with assurance. “Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”
    “I am,” she said. “We’ve only lost two games all year, and both of them were because I screwed up. We go to the finals next week and everyone’s counting on me, and I’m just going to let them down.”
    Hell’s bells, what a ridiculously tiny problem. But it was obvious that it was real to Kelly, and that it meant the world to her. She was just a kid. It probably looked like a much larger issue from where she was standing.
    “Pressure,” I said. “Yeah, I get that.”
    She peered at me. “Do you?”
    “Sure,” I said. “You feel like people’s lives depend on you, and that if you do the wrong thing they’re going to be horribly hurt—and it will be your fault.”
    “Yes,” she said, sniffling. “And I’ve been trying so hard, but I just can’t.”
    “Be perfect?” I asked. “No, of course not. But what choice do you have?”
    She looked at me uncertainly.
    “Anything you do, you risk screwing up. You could do a bad job of crossing the street one day and get hit by a car.”
    “I probably could,” she said darkly.
    I held up my hand. “My point,” I told her, “is that if you want to play it safe, you can stay at home and wrap yourself up in bubble wrap and never do anything.”
    “Maybe I should.”
    I snorted. “They still make you read Dickens in school? Great Expectations ?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You can stay at home and hide if you want—and wind up like Miss Havisham,” I said. “Watching life through a window and obsessed with how things might have been.”
    “Dear God,” she said. “You’ve just made Dickens relevant to my life.”
    “Weird, right?” I asked her, nodding.
    Kelly let out a choking little laugh.
    I pushed myself up and nodded to her. “I never saw you hiding over here, okay? I’m just gonna go do what I gotta do, and leave you to make the choice.”
    “Choice?”
    “Sure. Do you want to put your cap back on and play? Or do you want to wind up an old maid wandering around your house in the rotting remains of a wedding dress and thirty yards of bubble wrap, plotting heartlessly against some kid named Pip?” I regarded her soberly. “There’s really no middle ground.”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s not right,” she said.
    “See there? I’m not much good at offering wise counsel, but that didn’t stop me from trying.” I winked at her and walked on, around behind the backstop to where Michael sat on the bleachers on the far side of the field.
    Molly sat on a blanket underneath a tree maybe ten yards away, with earbuds trailing wires down into her shirt’s front pocket, as if she was listening to a digital music player. It was an effort to blend into the background, I supposed, since she couldn’t have been listening to one of those gizmos any more than I could have. She was wearing sunglasses, too, so I couldn’t tell where her focus was, but I was sure she was being alert. She gave me the barest trace of a nod as I approached her father.
    I sat down next to him and waited for it.
    “Harry,” Michael said. “You look awful.”
    “Yes, I do,” I said. I told him about the attempted assassination and about my discussion with Forthill.
    Michael frowned out at the children practicing, his expression quietly disturbed. “The Church wouldn’t do something like that, Harry. It isn’t how they operate.”
    “People are people, Michael,” I said. “People do