Chapter 14
WALL
I'M TWENTY MINUTES into my sole night off of the week, when the Wolves group chat declares war on me with zero regard to my sacred recovery and the west coast game I’m half-watching.
I sigh and pick up that damn phone. Begrudgingly.
Becker: GENTLEMEN. Investigation. All hands on deck.
Becker: [image]
The photo loads and I sit up so fast the remote hits the floor.
It's a corkboard. A real, physical corkboard, screwed into Becker's dining room wall under a printed banner that reads WHAT’S THE AGENDA OF WALL'S DINER FAMILY.
The diner photo hangs in the middle. Red yarn runs from it to a map of Milwaukee, and from the map to a printout of my hair from the tomato era, circled twice.
Somewhere in this city a print shop employee took that banner order, printed it with no questions asked, charged him, and went on with their day like civilization wasn't collapsing.
Kane: You own yarn?
Becker: Lena at the craft store believes in the mission.
Groover: The mission has personnel??
Lovely. The mission has a Lena now. I put the phone down, walk a lap of my living room, and pick it back up. The lap helps nothing. Laps have never helped.
Becker: POOL'S NOW OPEN. Lines: Campaign shit, 1:1, for cowards (you’ll be judged). Lost another bet, 4:1. Hostage situation, 9:1. Witness protection, 15:1. Wall hired a body double, 25:1
The cowards' money is, well, right on the money. Which nobody who owns fucking yarn will ever accept.
Ace: What if he just likes them?
My stomach drops through the couch.
Becker: LIKES
Becker: Ace, buddy.
Becker: We're being serious here.
Kane: Wall doesn’t LIKE people. He tolerates them at best.
And there it goes. The truth walks into the chat, gets laughed out of the building, and leaves. I’d feel insulted on its behalf, if I wasn’t relieved.
Petrov: Maybe Wall has two companions.
The phone slips and hits me in the face.
Becker: WOULD YOU STOP MOCKING MY INVESTIGATION????
Groover: Petrov, you can't just say words.
Petrov: I am observant. Put me down on $50.
Observant of what? What is there to observe? There's nothing to observe. There's a thread, a diner, a hotel room in Milwaukee—
There's plenty to observe. I need a lawyer.
Jesus, has he seen me on my phone? I've been on my phone a lot. Have I smiled at the thread at my stall? I've smiled at the thread at my stall, haven’t I?
Shit.
Becker: You are BANKRUPT. Easiest $50 of my life. Logged and pinned.
Pinned. Great. There's a pin now. A permanent pin with the correct answer under it, in a chat containing our entire team, significant others, and, for reasons nobody remembers, three bartenders.
Okay, damage control. I need to act normal.
Me: :skull_emoji:
Perfect. Inconspicuous.
Becker: HE'S HERE
Becker: The subject is IN THE ROOM
Groover: Nobody move.
So much for inconspicuous.
Me: It was a campaign meeting. Sorry to disappoint.
The chat goes quiet for a moment. This can’t be good.
Becker: OMG He's EXPLAINING
Becker: Wall has never explained anything in his LIFE
Becker: [image]
The new image is my own face, cropped out of the diner photo and zoomed until the pixels beg for mercy. I'm mid-argument, pen raised, visibly enjoying myself.
In public.
No wonder there's a task force.
Kane: Is he... animated???
Ace: Never seen that face before.
Becker: Campaign meetings do NOT produce this face. THIS IS SCHEMING.
Well, that’s enough assholes for the day. The phone goes under a couch cushion.
Yes, I’m a grown man, hiding from his own phone. This is my life now.
I dig it back out an hour later, obviously. For my own sanity, I don’t read the 50+ new messages in a chat that’s now labeled WALL WATCH.
The real hit comes at the bathroom sink, toothbrush in my mouth, when the screen lights up with a direct text.
Leila Washington: :eyes_emoji:
I stop brushing.
Fuck.
Foam drips into the sink and I stand extremely still, on the theory that motion attracts predators.
No words, No question. Nothing I could deny, deflect, or answer with a skull.
Interrogations can be survived. Leila doesn't interrogate.
Leila tells you what she already knows, and this is her telling me.
Any reply is a confession, no reply is a confession, and the two little eyes just sit there, glowing.
In bed, lights off, I run the threat assessment.
Betting lines have updated. Witness protection is now thirty to one. It’s starting to look undervalued. Maybe I should bet on it. I might need to get myself into one, eventually.
***
"NICE CHAIR YOU'VE got at home, I hear."
Patrick says it at the warmup changeover, gliding past my crease, eyes forward, and he's back at his own end before the sentence finishes landing on me.
I don't own a chair.
I'm going to buy a chair.
And do what with it? Unclear. I'll figure that out at the store.
The phantom chair takes a toll on the rest of my warmup, despite not existing. I miss a glove on a shot I could stop asleep. The next one clips my mask. Becker circles in close. "You good?"
"Yup."
The one after that beats me clean, short side, while I'm still saying it.
Down at the red line, Theo sets up his stretching routine at the absolute legal limit of center ice, facing my net.
Hip openers.
Facing my net.
An entire rink to point himself at, and he picks the one alignment with a sightline into my crease, and the single time my eyes slip, he holds the stretch longer. I spend what's left of warmup in deep study of the rafters. Oh, look, what a lovely banner.
Our crowd is loud early, chanting before the anthem's even done, and I stand on my line through the whole song thinking about chairs. Leather? Recliner? What are the dimensions of—
I catch myself at the last appropriate moment and pray for the puck to drop.
When it does, my body, mercifully, remembers its job. Live play is the last place on earth where my life is simple. The Vipers need the points more than we do and come out sharp, and for whole minutes at a time I'm just a goalie again, on vacation from my own brain.
Between those minutes, there's Theo.
Late in the first. a scrum boils near my crease and he's in the middle of it instantly, chirping both my defensemen at once, getting shoved, shoving back. Under all of it, a stick blade taps my pad, light as a knock. "Hi."
"Get out of my crease."
"Make me."
The whistle sorts everyone out, and the refs, done with the shoving, give him two for roughing. He heads for the box grinning like he won something.
Here's what happens during your team’s power play, from the goalie's perspective: nothing. The play sets up camp in the far zone, the crowd rises, and I stand alone at my end with no job.
Alone, except the penalty box is far too close for my own safety.
I feel it before I look. Then, I make the grave mistake of looking.
Theo's leaned against the glass, helmet off, curls everywhere, watching me. The game is at the other end of the rink and he's watching me stand still.
Then, holding my eyes across the ice, he starts stretching.
In the box. Nobody stretches in the fucking box.
Nobody, who doesn’t try to play dirty, that is.
But Theo is Theo, and rolls his neck, slow, Adam’s apple becoming more prominent. This is targeted. I'm being worked over by a man in a glass cage, in my own damn building, in front of a full crowd that thinks he's just sore.
A dump-in picks that exact moment to wobble into my zone, the easiest puck of my night.
I play it like it's my first day on skates.
Off my stick, behind the net, a scramble, and the crowd makes a nervous sound I have never once caused before.
When I finally look up, Theo has a fist pressed to his mouth.
Sure, laugh it up. Two can play at this—
Who am I kidding? Two cannot play at this. One of us can, it's him, and I'm losing.
His penalty ends. First shift back, the play sweeps him past my net, and a pad tap arrives with one word. "Encore."
Washington bails my evening out in the second, tipping a point shot through traffic. An ugly, greasy, veteran-worthy goal. The building goes up, and I bang my paddle off the post like a rookie. One-nil. Something to defend besides my sanity.
The third period is Patrick's. First, he robs Ace. Then, he takes a sure goal off Groover's stick with a save so filthy my own bench swears in admiration.
Traitors.
I need us to bury this man, and meanwhile I'm rating his saves against my will. If the Vipers steal a point tonight after Patrick opened the evening with furniture talk, I will never emotionally recover.
Four minutes left, Vipers pressing, and it happens. A turnover, a step on Kane, and Theo comes down on me alone with the game on his stick.
The building stands. My mind goes quiet.
Fastest man on their roster, in full flight. I know where he's going before he does it. Glove side, high.
I get all of it.
Leather snaps shut around the puck, the crowd cheers, and Theo coasts through my crease on the follow-through, close enough that only I hear him under the noise. "Rude."
One more tap on my pad, invisible to every referee ever born, and he's gone, back to his bench, shaking his head, delighted. Delighted. About being robbed. That tap is going to live in my head all night and he knows it. I check the clock like the clock can save me.
The horn goes at one-nothing. Shutout. In the private ledger I've kept against Patrick since juniors, the shutout column ticks over to me, by one, and I intend to have that read at his funeral.
The handshake line, set up specifically for the campaign’s sake, waits at center ice, cameras stacked along the glass. I move down the row of Vipers on autopilot, glove taps, mumbled good-games. Then the line feeds me Patrick.
His hand closes around mine and the building goes somewhere else.
His eyes hold. Mine hold back. The handshake runs a second long, then another, and then his thumb crosses the back of my hand.
In front of the cameras. In front of both benches. In front of God.
I manage to keep my face in rivalry mode. I break the grip and keep moving down the line while the back of my hand goes on reporting the thumb like it's still happening.
Skating off, I make the mistake of checking the glass by the family section. Leila Washington, wine in hand, watches me over the rim. She raises the glass an inch. To me, specifically.
At my stall, the phone holds one notification.
Theo: disgusting display. unfollowed. blocked. anyway come over saturday
Around me the room is shutout-loud, Becker lobbying for a steakhouse over somebody's speaker. I read the message twice and sit there in half my gear, smiling at my phone like an idiot.
The shutout gets to be my cover.
***
MEDIA TAKES FOREVER. Somebody asks about the save on Theo and I produce thirty seconds of coach-speak while a French accent in my head says encore.
Washington intercepts me in the hallway after and tips his head toward the equipment room. And that, of course, is the exact moment my phone lights up in my hand.
P.G.. Incoming call.
The phone is face-down against my thigh faster than any save I made tonight. Washington's eyes drop to it.
"Spam," I say.
Not one to probe, he leans on the workbench between the sharpeners. "Leadership conversations for next season are happening. Your name is in them. Deep in them."
Against my leg, the phone buzzes again. I press the button blindly, sending the call to voicemail.
"The league won’t put a letter on a goalie," Washington continues. "That doesn’t mean we can’t decide who us."
The panic cuts out. All of it, gone, and the room suddenly very quiet in my ears.
Washington watches me take it, patiently, and something climbs my throat. I swallow it and give him what's left. "Okay," I say.
There’s no point in getting my hopes up. Guess I’ve been burnt one too many times in the past.
Washington nods. "That's what I told them you'd say."
His hand lands on my shoulder on the way out. At the door, he throws over his shoulder, "Answer your spam."
I don’t answer my spam until I’m in the safety of the underground garage. In the car, engine off, I check the voicemail first. A few seconds of quiet, then: "Call me back."
I call him back. My heart is already going, and nothing has even happened yet.
"You screened me," is Patrick’s hello.
"I was talking to the Cap." The silence that comes back has an eyebrow raised in it somewhere. "There's news, actually. I think. I’m not sure."
"Tell me Saturday."
I suppress a smile. "Who says I'm free Saturday?"
"Theo does. Loudly. He's been unbearable since the horn." There’s a pause, and when he goes on, the trash talk is draining out of his voice line by line. "Good game tonight, Wallace."
I swallow. "Good paddle save."
"I know."
Then the line goes quiet in a new way. I know his silences by now. This one has weight coming.
"Come over. Just you. No chair. We want hands this time." The garage is dead silent. My pulse isn't. He doesn't fill the next pause. He leaves it standing wide open, and I understand that the next thing that happens in my life is mine to decide. "If you do."
My hand is resting on the wheel. It's been steady all night, in front of everyone. It's not steady now. I look at it like it belongs to somebody else.
Maybe by Saturday it will.
"I do."