20. Maddox
MADDOX
Two uniformed guys walk me to my truck.
They don't touch me after the first grab at the corridor.
They don't have to. One in front, one behind, the geometry of men who have done this before.
The one in front is maybe twenty-four, razor-burn down his neck, a wedding band that's new enough it still catches on his glove.
The one behind is older. Bored. Doing overtime.
I walk in full gear because they didn't let me change.
Skates traded for shower slides at the tunnel.
Pads still on. Jersey still on. Blood still on the shoulder of the quarter-zip.
The blood is cold now. It sticks the fabric to my collarbone and peels off a little with every step.
Nobody in the service corridor looks at me. Everybody looks at me.
Callahan is behind us somewhere. Paul is behind us somewhere. Theo is behind us somewhere in a hallway I'm not allowed to walk back into.
Wait for me, I said.
I said it with my hands up. I said it with blood in my eye. I said it with security already on my arms. I said it like a guy who didn't know yet how small his world was about to get.
The kid in front opens the door to the players' lot. Cold hits my face. My breath goes white. My truck is where I parked it seven hours ago, back when the biggest problem in my life was a coach's pre-game speech I was going to play around. The wedding-band kid steps aside.
“Mr. Creed. You're gonna drive yourself home.”
“Yeah.”
The older one shifts his weight behind me.
“We'll follow you to the building. Mr. Callahan wants eyes on.”
“Fine.”
I get in the truck in full gear. The chest plate hits the wheel. I have to lean back to clear it. I start the engine and my hands are shaking, not from cold, from the adrenaline dump that's arriving ten minutes late, right on its usual schedule.
I pull out of the lot. Headlights in my rearview. A black SUV, not a cruiser, which tells me Callahan keeps his own guys on retainer, which tells me more about Callahan than I wanted to know tonight.
The drive is six minutes. It takes longer. I catch every light. At the third one, I put my forehead on the wheel and breathe through my nose because if I open my mouth I'm going to say something to the windshield I can't take back.
The SUV waits behind me at every light. Polite. Patient. A man doing his shift.
I park in my building's lot. The SUV pulls up behind me and stops but nobody gets out. They're going to sit there until I go inside. Fine. I let them.
I take the stairs because the elevator is slow and I can't be in a box right now. Four flights in skates-off gear. My thighs burn. I get to my door and stand in front of it with my key in my hand, and I can't make my hand do the thing with the lock for a second because the key is shaking.
I make it stop shaking. I unlock the door.
The hallway of my own apartment smells like the detergent the cleaning service uses on Fridays. Pine and bleach. I stand in the entry and I drip. Blood, sweat, melted ice off the back of the jersey. A small puddle forms on the hardwood the team owns. I stare at it.
I pull the quarter-zip off. It hits the floor.
I yank the jersey over my head. Number sixteen. I drop it on the quarter-zip. The blood on the shoulder has gone brown.
I unbuckle the chest plate and it drops onto the jersey.
I stand in the entry in compression gear and shower slides and look at the pile on the floor that is everything I am to the Frosthaven Huskies organization, and I breathe.
Then I go shower.
The shower is scalding. I put my forehead on the tile and let it run down the back of my neck and into the cut over my eye, which opens up again and bleeds a thin pink ribbon into the drain. I watch the ribbon. I watch it thin and thin and go clear.
Paul hit me four times.
I let him.
I could have put him on the floor with one shot.
I have two inches and thirty pounds, and I've been in a lot more fights than he has.
His form was garbage. He was throwing out of his shoulder, not his hip, and his second punch tipped him forward so far I could have caught his wrist and ended it.
I didn't. I ate them because the kid who loves his father was standing two feet away from me and I was never going to be the man who beat his dad in front of him.
I would eat four more. I would eat forty. I would not have hit Paul Laurent tonight if he had broken my jaw.
My hand opens and closes in the spray. The knuckles are fine. I check them. No split. That's the part I'm going to be proud of later, when I have the capacity to be proud of anything. Tonight, I just note it.
I shut the water off. I wrap a towel around my hips. I stand in the bathroom mirror and look at my face. My face looks like the face of a man who lost everything he loves in forty minutes and made it look like a traffic incident.
The cut over my eye will need glue. I don't care.
The knock on the door happens while I'm pulling sweats on.
I freeze with one leg in. I don't own a gun. I own a hockey stick. That's what I pick up walking to the door. I look through the peep.
Building management. Two of them. One I know. Ramirez, the daytime guy, nice, once got my DoorDash up when I was napping. The other I don't know. Suit. Clipboard. The clipboard guys are multiplying tonight.
I open the door. I keep the stick low.
“Mr. Creed.” Ramirez won't meet my eye. “I'm sorry. We got a call.”
“From who?”
The clipboard answers. “Frosthaven Huskies front office holds the lease on this unit, Mr. Creed. As of twenty-two hundred tonight the organization has terminated its tenancy. Per the tenant-in-residence clause, you have seventy-two hours to vacate.”
I look at him.
“Seventy-two hours?”
“Yes, sir.”
My grip on the stick tightens, loosens.
“It's after ten on a Saturday.”
“The clock starts at ten tomorrow. You have until ten Tuesday.”
I look at Ramirez. Ramirez is looking at the floor.
“Jorge. Is this real?”
“It's real, Mad Dog.”
Nobody has called me Mad Dog in this hallway before. He says it soft, like condolences.
The clipboard holds out a piece of paper. I don't take it. He sets it on the entry console and backs up one step.
“Also, sir, the organization asked me to convey that your access to team facilities has been revoked. Effective immediately. Please don't attempt to enter the Frosthaven Arena practice or main building. Security has been notified.”
“I'll never play again. Is that what you came to tell me?”
The clipboard goes carefully blank.
“I'm not authorized to speak to your contract, sir.”
“Right.”
He steps back another half step.
“Seventy-two hours, Mr. Creed. I'm sorry.”
They leave. Ramirez looks at me one more time on the way down the hall and I see his mouth do the thing people's mouths do when they want to say something and can't afford to.
I shut the door.
I stand in my own entry with a hockey stick in one hand and an eviction notice on the console, and I laugh.
It isn't a good laugh. It's a single hard sound out of my chest that doesn't have anywhere to go.
I laugh because at twenty-eight, after eight years, after every time I have bled for Frosthaven on tape, my contract and my apartment and my access to my own practice rink got ended by a man I punched back with my face.
Four years left on the contract. I know what that paper on the console is going to say when I read it.
I know what Callahan's Tuesday press release is going to say.
Personal conduct. Character concerns. Mutual parting.
I know the whole song. I've watched it happen to other guys. I've never watched it happen to me.
I set the stick against the wall. I pick the notice up off the console. I read it. It says exactly what he said it says.
Seventy-two hours. Fine.
I sit on the edge of my bed in sweats and the towel around my neck and I stare at my phone.
My phone is lit up. Thirty-two texts, seventeen missed calls, four voicemails.
I scroll without opening anything. Mom. Dominic.
My agent, three times. Phoenix, four. A reporter I know from the Gazette who already has the story somehow. Two teammates. No Theo.
No Theo.
I knew there wouldn't be. Paul will have the phone by now. He isn't stupid. He's heartbroken but he isn't stupid, and a heartbroken man who isn't stupid is the worst kind of opponent you can pull.
I open Phoenix.
dude where are you?
answer your phone
i'm at shanley's
call me when you can
I text him: home. not home. you know.
He calls me inside three seconds.
“Mad Dog.”
“Phoenix.”
Bar noise under him. Someone laughing, far off. He steps outside. The noise drops.
“How bad?”
“Four to the face. No hit back. Gear on.
Condom wrapper on the floor. Callahan walked in.
Theo got carted home by Paul probably with private security on the lawn.
I got walked out by two guys in uniform and evicted from my apartment by building management ten minutes ago. Contract's done by Tuesday. That bad.”
Phoenix is quiet for a second.
“Okay. Talk me through what you need.”
This is why I called Phoenix.
“I need you to get a message to Theo.”
“Yeah.”
I stand up. I can't sit for this.
“Paul's got the phone. House probably has a guard. I can't email him. The aunt, Diane, she's the only one who'd carry a message and I don't have her number. I don't know anyone else in his life who isn't Paul's.”
“Park.”
I walk to the window.
“Park's on the team, Phoenix. Park touches this and Callahan has his contract Tuesday too.”
“Park's already offering.”
I close my eyes.
“Tell Park thanks. No. Not his problem.”
“Okay. Diane. You got a last name.”
I press my forehead against the cold glass.