Breakaway (Hard Hearts #2)

Chapter 1

Matt

The wipers were on full and losing.

The road kept dissolving in front of me.

Taillights smearing into long red streaks, lane lines going soft, the whole windshield turning to static.

In weather like this you slow down, you read what you can, you wait for the next thing to develop.

See it early, react clean. Fifteen years of hockey and that was still the whole job, on the ice or off it.

I wasn't seeing anything early.

Murphy's Gas Station came up on the right, neon smeared but readable through the downpour, and I took it. Cut the wheel harder than the road allowed. The back end stepped out, caught, settled. I rolled in under the canopy, put it in park, and sat there a second with both hands on the wheel.

They were shaking.

I watched them do it. These were hands that had settled a bouncing puck and snapped it top corner more times than I could count.

Hands I trusted more than I trusted most people.

My body was the one thing I'd never had to wonder about.

You train it, it answers. That was the deal, the whole deal, the thing I'd built a life on top of.

Four days ago the deal had quietly stopped holding, and there was no game-plan for that.

I'd been calling it bad sleep. The hands weren't buying that any more than I was.

Rain came down on the metal canopy in a flat, layered roar, no rhythm anywhere in it, and my brain did what it had done for four days straight. Took the sound and ran it through the one filter it had left. Twenty thousand people, booing.

I knew that sound. I'd earned it, live, in high definition, with a sponsor's logo at center ice.

Game seven. Third period, tie game. The puck came across to me in the slot, bouncing up on its edge, and I had maybe a quarter second to settle it before the lane closed. I didn't settle it. Rushed the release, let the blade come open, and an open blade sends the puck exactly where mine went.

Wide. Past the post. Season over, third year running, all three of them ending against the same team.

I'd watched the replay enough times to run it frame by frame behind my eyes.

I knew the fix, too. That was the part that had me staring at the ceiling at three in the morning.

It wasn't a hard play. I'd been making it in warmups since I was thirteen, half-asleep, with a hangover I was technically too young to have.

Game seven, twenty thousand people, one quarter-second, and my hands forgot a thing they'd known for fifteen years.

I got out of the car.

Three seconds in that rain and I was soaked to the skin. My shoes squeaked across the linoleum as I pushed through the doors, and the fluorescent light came down too bright after the dark of the road. I pulled my cap low and pointed my face at the floor.

A dozen people in here, easy. A dozen people waiting out the same storm, and this was a hockey city. The odds weren't great. The last thing I needed was one of them deciding the soaked guy by the chip aisle was Matt Baker. The choker. However they wanted to phrase it.

I kept my head down and worked toward the back.

Coffee that had been on the burner since roughly the Clinton administration.

Cleaning solution. Gasoline somebody had tracked in on a shoe.

It smelled like a place nobody picked. You didn't drive to a Murphy's, you just ended up at one, waiting for something to pass.

"...can't believe they lost again."

I stopped.

Two guys by the coffee machine. Red Sox caps.

One heavy through the middle, the other one younger, and wearing my jersey.

Number seventeen. It took me a second to get my head around that.

The kid had pulled it on this morning, after everything, and walked out his front door still willing to be seen in it.

"Third year in a row," the younger one said. He poured sugar into his coffee like the coffee owed him money. "Third damn year they lose to the White Hearts in the finals."

"That Baker kid had the shot." The heavy one shook his head. "Wide open. My grandmother could've made that shot."

My back teeth came together. I knew that grind. I'd been doing it for four days.

The shot wasn't wide open. The pass came in hot and bouncing, I'd been on the ice forty-two minutes, their D-man got a piece of my stick on the backswing. I could've turned around and walked them through every frame of it.

It wouldn't have changed the one number that counted.

I missed.

"Don't even get me started on Baker." The kid took a loud sip. "Guy's supposed to be our captain next year? Please. Can't handle pressure. Never could."

Captain.

Coach had pulled me aside two weeks before game seven.

Told me I had the leadership and the hands and the heart — the whole motivational-poster set — and that all I had to do was show it when the lights came up.

He'd said it like he was handing me something.

Like it was already mine to keep or drop.

Four days ago, in front of everyone, I'd shown them which one.

I moved deeper into the store and put a couple of aisles between us.

Wet bootprints on the floor behind me, marking the route back out like I'd need it.

The beer cooler hummed in the corner, glass fogged from the temperature gap.

I stood in front of it not reading a single label, just letting the cold roll off it onto my face.

"You think they'll trade him?"

"They should. Start fresh. Get someone who actually wants to win."

I closed my hand around the cooler handle and held on.

Cold, solid, steady. Didn't shake under my grip, which was something.

Four days and the thing in my chest still sat there like I'd swallowed it wrong.

Not anger at them. Anger at me. For the miss.

For handing every guy in a cheap seat the proof he'd always wanted.

My phone went off in my pocket. I pulled it out far enough to read the screen. Mason. Fourth time today.

I couldn't pick up. Not for him, not for anyone wearing the same crest I did.

Mason had been my best friend since juniors.

He'd have either talked me down or talked me in circles until I forgot what I was upset about.

I didn't want either one. I wanted the silence.

What was I supposed to lead with, anyway?

Sorry I cost us the year, sorry I turned out to be exactly the guy you were warned about. I put the phone back.

Thunder hit close and the lights stuttered. Somebody up front sucked in a breath. A kid started crying. I watched the ceiling tiles and waited to see if the power would drop. It held. The kid kept going. The rain kept coming.

I drifted toward the windows at the front. The lot had turned into a sheet of moving water, little currents cutting toward the storm drains. My car sat out under the canopy taking the wind sideways. This was going to be a long wait.

I leaned against a display of motor oil and kept my face angled off the room.

A woman working on a crying kid. An older guy gone down inside his phone.

Two teenagers with a video turned up too loud.

Ordinary people doing ordinary things, and me in the middle of it, stuck somewhere behind my own eyes.

Behind me the two of them had moved on. The coaching staff now, the defensive scheme, everything wrong with the team. They had answers. People always had answers from the couch.

Then I saw her.

Out past the glass, in the worst of it. The rain turned everything beyond the window into smeared color, but the shape down by the bike rack was a person. Crouched. Fighting with something.

A dog.

She was trying to get a dog loose.

I stepped up to the window. Golden retriever, young, fur flattened down until it looked like half a dog.

Its chain had wrapped the front rim of one of the bikes, and every time it panicked and pulled, the wrap cinched tighter.

The woman had her hair down in dark ropes across her face and both hands on the chain and no angle on it at all.

I ran it like a play, and it wasn't one she could win. She needed to pin the bike and work the chain at the same time, and she had two hands and three problems, the dog being the problem with its own ideas. It was a board battle, and she was already losing it.

"Who the hell leaves a dog out in this?" somebody said behind me.

A woman in a store uniform had come up next to me, name tag reading Linda, watching the same thing I was.

"Is that anybody's bike?" I said it loud, for the whole room.

Heads came up. People looked. The talking stopped.

Nobody answered.

"Anyone?"

More head shakes. A guy by the magazine rack actually shrugged, like the woman drowning in the parking lot was a scheduling conflict.

Twelve, fifteen people in here, all of them dry, not one of them moving, and I knew that math too.

I'd stood on the ice inside that exact moment, everybody on the bench waiting for somebody else to step up and take the body.

Outside, the bike went over. She got a hand on it, lost the chain. Grabbed the chain, lost the bike. Then her feet went out from under her and she came down on one knee in the running water and stayed there a beat before she pushed herself back up and went at it again.

"Someone should help her," Linda said.

Nobody did.

Four days, I'd had one thing I wanted to fix and no way to reach it. The miss was done. The season was done. None of it would hold still long enough for me to put my hands on it and make it right.

This would hold still.

"Unbelievable," I said, to nobody, and pulled my cap down and headed for the door.

Behind me one of them said something about Baker not being able to save a goal, never mind a dog. The other one laughed.

Let them.

The doors slid open and the rain came through like a wall. Cold, total, soaking me before I'd cleared the curb. I didn't break stride. She was still down there, still fighting something she couldn't win alone, still not quitting.

That part I understood. The not quitting. Right now it was about the only part of myself I still trusted.