Blind Spot (Top Tier #3)

Prologue - Rook

The container of chowder was still warm against my palm when he opened the door.

“You didn’t have to come,” Varga said, leaning on the frame with his weight on the good leg. The bad one was wrapped from hip to knee in medical tape. His hair was flat on one side.

“I brought chowder,” I said.

“Clam soup?”

“Chowder. My mother’s recipe. From Maine.”

He looked at the container, then at me. “Come in, Rook.”

The apartment was a young player’s apartment. It held scuffed rental furniture and no art on the walls. The TV was too big for the room, and three different protein-powder containers sat lined up on the kitchen counter.

He’d suffered the injury on the ice three months after arriving in Chicago. I followed him to the living room and set the chowder on the coffee table next to two empty water bottles and a prescription pad from the team’s orthopedist.

He lowered himself onto the couch in stages. The leg went up on a cushion at the far end last. When it was settled, he exhaled like a man putting down something he had been carrying all day.

“Bowls?” I asked.

“Cabinet over the sink. Left side.”

I found two bowls. They didn’t match. The spoons were in a drawer that didn’t quite close. I poured chowder into both bowls and brought them back with two spoons.

“What are we watching?”

He picked up the remote. “I don’t know. Something. I was drifting when you buzzed.”

He pulled up a streaming menu, scrolled past three things, and landed on a cooking competition. Four contestants wore white coats, kneading dough, while a clock counted down.

“This okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

He turned his attention to the chowder.

The contestant in the lower-left corner of the screen was making a meat pie with a top crust. Varga watched him for about ninety seconds and then said, “He’s going to fuck it up.”

“How do you know?”

“He fucked up a soufflé last week.”

“I’d do awful on a show like this,” I said.

“You don’t cook?”

“I cook.”

“What can you make?”

“Chowder—and eggs.”

He smiled at the TV. It was a small smile on a face that was tired and in pain.

The bottom crust of the meat pie crumbled. Varga made a small sound of vindication. The British host said something in a dry tone. The contestant frowned at the camera.

We finished the chowder. I took the bowls to the sink and rinsed them before setting them in the drying rack. I came back to the living room and sat in a chair across from the couch.

The cooking show went to a commercial. Varga muted it.

“Rook.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s just chowder.”

“It’s damn good clam soup.”

I didn’t answer that. He glanced at the muted TV and back at me.

“My mother called this morning,” he said. “She wanted to fly in. I told her not to. I told her the team has people and said I was fine.”

“Are you fine?”

“I’m bored,” he said. “I’m so bored, Rook, you don’t understand.

Three days since they let me out of the hospital.

The pills knock me out for sixteen hours, and then I wake up, and it’s eleven in the morning and I’ve already watched everything.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary about a guy who builds canoes. I have opinions about canoes now.”

“That sounds educational.”

He sighed. “I called my agent yesterday just to hear a human voice, and he thought I was dying. He started talking about my contract like I wasn’t going to need it anymore.”

“You’re not dying.”

“I know I’m not dying. He thought I was.”

The commercial ended. Varga un-muted the TV. The cooking show came back. Another contestant cried over a pan of caramel that had seized. Varga watched her with what looked like genuine sympathy.

“I’m sorry about your knee,” I said.

“It’s not the knee. It’s the ligament.”

“I’m sorry about your ligament.”

“Six weeks minimum. Probably eight. Maybe the season.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Cross told me. I asked him.”

He turned his head to look at me. The painkillers were doing something to his eyes that made them move slower than usual. He held the look longer than he would have held it otherwise.

“You asked Cross about my ligament?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know.”

He didn’t say anything and turned back to the TV. The contestant with the caramel had recovered. She was straining something through a sieve. Varga watched her hands.

“You want more chowder?” I said.

“Yeah, I’d like more soup.”

When I came back from the kitchen, he had shifted on the couch and his hand was on top of the blanket on his good leg, palm up. I set the bowl on the coffee table and sat again.

We watched the rest of the episode. The contestant with the crumbled pie came in last. In second was the contestant with the seized caramel. The winner was a quiet woman who had made something with lamb that the British host called very confident.

The credits rolled. He didn’t reach for the remote.

“Rook.”

“Yeah.”

“What time is it?”

I looked at my phone. “Quarter after eleven—p.m.”

“You’ve got practice tomorrow.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“You should go then.”

“Soon.”

The credits ended. The autoplay timer started counting down on the next episode.

“Stay,” he said.

It was a small word spoken in a quiet voice on painkillers, from a man who had been alone for three days. He didn’t look at me when he said it.

I should have said I needed the sleep and that I would come back tomorrow after practice. Instead, I said, “Okay.”

He nodded once and pressed play on the next episode.

We watched for another forty minutes. Somewhere in the middle of it, his breathing changed. I looked over and his eyes were closed and his head was tipped against the back of the couch at an angle that would give him a sore neck by morning.

I muted the television and retrieved a pillow from the bedroom. I slipped it behind his head as carefully as I could. He didn’t wake up.

I pulled the blanket over both legs and made sure the injured one was still elevated.

I turned off the TV and sat on a chair opposite him in the dark.

The apartment was quiet. Somewhere above us, someone walked from one room to another and back. Varga breathed slowly through his nose. His hand was still resting open on the blanket.

I looked at it and then at his face.

He hadn’t shaved since before the injury. It was almost a week of growth, dark and uneven, heavier along the jaw than at the cheek. It changed him.

Awake and clean in the locker room, Varga was all motion and edges; here he was a tired athlete in his mid-twenties with a bad leg. The shadows under his eyes were dark.

I had brought my mother’s chowder recipe to a teammate. He was bored and alone, and I thought he shouldn’t have to spend all his time by himself.

Sitting in the dark, I watched him breathe. Somewhere after two, he listed. Not toward the back of the couch, where the pillow was. Toward the coffee table. Slowly, the way a boat drifts when nobody’s holding the wheel.

Tumbling onto the floor with a leg like that was a real risk. I got up and placed myself on the edge of the couch by his torso. He kept leaning until his shoulder touched the side of my arm and stopped there. His weight settled against me as if it had been looking for the spot.

He didn’t wake up, and his breathing didn’t change.

I was a hockey defenseman. Steering a man’s weight without him feeling it was a big part of my job. I could have shifted him back onto the pillow without waking him. It would have taken four seconds.

Instead, I sat there with his shoulder against my arm and didn’t move for another hour.

I stayed until 5:30. With him situated properly on the couch, I left a note on the counter that said I’d be back tonight. I let myself out and locked the door behind me with the spare key he had pressed into my palm on arrival, like it was nothing.

At practice, Cross asked me how Varga was. I said bored. He said figures.

I went back that night with rotisserie chicken and a bag of rice.

Then I went back the night after that.

And the night after that.