What were the odds he was waiting outside? Of course it was paranoia, but paranoia had settled into Kyle’s life so long ago that he now simply acknowledged it, coped with it, and moved on.

The Red Knights regrouped in the visitors’ locker room, a cramped little space under the sagging and permanent stands on the home side. There Coach Kyle said all the right things — nice effort, good hustle, our game is improving in certain areas, let’s finish on a high note this Saturday. The boys were changing clothes and hardly listening. They were tired of basketball because they were tired of losing, and of course all blame was heaped upon the coach. He was too young, too white, too much of an Ivy Leaguer.

The few parents who were there waited outside the locker room, and it was those tense moments when the team came out that Kyle hated most about his community service. There would be the usual complaints about playing time. Marquis had an uncle, a twenty-two-year-old former all-state player with a big mouth and a fondness for bitching about Coach Kyle’s unfair treatment of the “best player in the league.”

From the locker room, there was another door that led to a dark, narrow hallway that ran behind the home stands and finally gave way to an outside door that opened into an alley. Kyle was not the first coach to discover this escape route, and on this night he wanted to avoid not only the families and their complaints but also the agent/cop. He said a quick goodbye to his boys, and as they fled the locker room, he made his escape. In a matter of seconds he was outside, in the alley, then walking quickly along a frozen sidewalk. Heavy snow had been plowed, and the sidewalk was icy and barely passable. The temperature was somewhere far below freezing. It was 8:30 on a Wednesday, and he was headed for the law journal offices at the Yale Law School, where he would work until midnight at least.