Chapter 26
Kevin was the fourth one who'd pulled a knife.
I'd stopped being surprised by this somewhere around the second, a guy named Travis who'd waved a switchblade like he'd learned knife fighting from movies.
They always went for knives, my mother's boyfriends.
Guns required permits and background checks, and men like Kevin couldn't pass either.
But knives were easy. Knives made them feel dangerous.
Kevin was not dangerous.
He was six-one, maybe two-twenty, with the soft middle of someone who'd been strong once and let it go.
He had a temper and a gambling problem and a tendency to use my mother as a credit line, and when I'd shown up at her apartment to find a bruise blooming across her cheekbone, he'd grabbed the kitchen knife like it meant something.
It didn't.
"You should leave," he said. The knife shook in his hand. "This is between me and Diane."
I closed the door behind me. "No, it isn't."
My mother was on the couch, crying in that theatrical way she had, the one designed to make everyone feel sorry for her.
She'd called me forty minutes ago, sobbing about how Kevin had changed, how she was scared, how she didn't know what to do.
The same call she'd made about Danny. About Travis.
About the one before Travis, whose name I'd already forgotten.
Red was in Vegas right now. Warming up, probably, getting ready to do impossible things on the ice while I stood in a motel apartment that smelled like stale smoke and cheap whiskey, facing another man who thought a knife made him powerful.
"I'm gonna give you one chance," Kevin said. His voice had gone hard, the way weak men's voices did when they were trying to sound strong. "Walk out that door and forget you were here."
I didn't move.
"You don't want to do this, pretty boy." He adjusted his grip on the knife. "I've been inside. I know how to use this."
"No, you don't."
I'd already mapped the room. Entry points, obstacles, distance. Kevin was eight feet away, the kitchen island between us, his weight on his back foot. He'd telegraph the lunge before he made it.
"Kevin." I kept my voice pleasant. "Put the knife down, get your things, and leave. Don't come back. Don't call her. Don't think about her."
"Or what?"
I smiled.
He lunged.
Predictable. The knife came in high and wide, a slashing motion that looked impressive and left his entire right side open.
I stepped inside his reach, caught his wrist, and twisted.
The knife clattered to the linoleum. Before it landed, I'd already driven my elbow into his solar plexus, folding him in half.
He went down gasping.
I let Kevin catch his breath and gave him a moment to understand what was happening.
Then I got to work. Two hits to the ribs, measured, the kind that would bruise deep but not break anything.
One to the kidney that would have him pissing blood for a week.
He tried to swing at me, and I caught his arm, hyperextended the elbow just enough to make him scream, then let him drop.
My mother was still crying on the couch. She hadn't moved.
"Joel." Kevin's voice was wet now, broken. "Joel, please, I didn't mean—"
"You hit her."
"It was an accident, I swear, I just—"
I crouched so I could look him in the eye. He flinched back, and something in me liked that.
"Here's what's going to happen," I said.
"You're going to get up. You're going to pack whatever's yours in this apartment.
You're going to leave, and you're never going to contact Diane again.
If I find out you've called her, texted her, or driven past her building, I'll come back. And next time I won't stop at bruises."
Kevin nodded frantically. Blood dripped from his nose onto the carpet, and I noted it the way I noted everything: another stain my mother would have to explain to her landlord, another mess I couldn't clean up for her.
I stood and stepped back. Kevin crawled toward the bedroom, one arm wrapped around his ribs, and I watched him go with the same detachment I'd watch a bad landing on replay.
Behind me, my mother sniffled.
"Joey, honey, I'm so sorry. I didn't know he was like this. I thought—"
"You thought he was different." I didn't turn around. "They're never different, Mom."
"This time I really am going to get help. I've been looking at programs; there's this place in Arizona—"
"Okay."
"I mean it. I'm going to change."
"Okay."
She kept talking. She always kept talking, filling the silence with promises she'd break within a month, and I let the words wash over me without listening. Kevin emerged from the bedroom with a duffel bag, his face already swelling, and I stepped aside to let him pass.
He didn't look at me. Smart.
The door closed behind him. My mother dissolved into fresh sobs.
I found the bathroom and closed the door behind me.
The mirror was smudged, water-spotted, the kind of cheap glass that distorted everything slightly. I looked at myself in it and waited to see my mother's chaos staring back. The wildness and the lack of control, the thing I'd always been afraid lived inside me, waiting to get out.
Instead, I saw my father.
Calm. Composed. Not a hair out of place despite what I'd just done, my breathing even, my hands steady. The only sign that anything had happened was a faint redness across my knuckles that would fade by morning.
I ran the water and washed my hands. The cut on my forearm needed attention.
Kevin's knife had caught me before I'd gotten it away from him, a shallow slice that had bled through my sleeve.
I found a first aid kit under the sink, cleaned the wound, bandaged it neatly, and pulled my sleeve down to cover the evidence.
In the other room, my mother had stopped crying. She was moving around now, probably pouring herself a drink, probably already rewriting the story in her head so that none of this was her fault.
I checked my phone. Three missed calls from Natalia, probably wondering why I wasn't on the plane. A text from my father that I deleted without reading. And the time: 9:47 PM.
The game had started almost three hours ago. It was probably over by now, or close to it. Red had played without me in the stands, had done whatever impossible thing he'd done tonight, and I'd missed all of it because my mother had called and I'd answered.
I always answered.
My phone buzzed in my hand. Natalia again.
I picked up. "Hey. Sorry, I got—"
"Joel." Her voice was wrong, tight in a way I'd never heard before. "Something bad happened. There was a scramble in front of the net. Red went down." She paused, and the pause was worse than the words. "Joel, there was blood. A lot of blood. They stopped the game."
"Where is he?"
"Sunrise Hospital. I think."
I was already moving out of the bathroom, past my mother on the couch, out the door without saying goodbye.
"His hand," Natalia said. "I think it was his hand. Joel, slow down. You can't help him if you wrap your car around a pole."
She was right. My chest was too tight, and my hands were shaking on the wheel, and the cut on my forearm had started bleeding again. I forced myself to ease off the gas, to take a breath, to think.
Natalia gave me the address. I followed the blue line through streets I didn't recognize, past casinos and strip clubs, and twenty-four-hour wedding chapels. Vegas at night was a fever dream, all that desperate glitter, and somewhere in the middle of it Red was bleeding.
I'd been fifteen minutes away.
The hospital parking lot was chaos. News vans had already gathered near the emergency entrance, cameras and reporters hoping for footage of hockey players arriving to check on their teammate. I parked in the back of the lot and sat there for a moment, trying to figure out my next move.
I couldn't walk through the front. Someone might recognize me, might wonder why Joel Coffey was at a Vegas hospital the same night an Aces player got injured. The connection would be thin, but thin connections were how secrets unraveled.
I pulled my hood up and found a side entrance.
The hallways were bright and antiseptic, full of that particular hospital smell of cleaning solution and something underneath it that no amount of cleaning could touch.
I followed signs toward the emergency department and tried to look like I belonged there.
The waiting room was half full. Families clustered in plastic chairs, some crying, some staring at phones, all of them waiting for news about people they loved.
I walked up to the desk.
"I'm here for Robert Piper," I said. "He was brought in from the arena."
The woman behind the counter didn't look up from her screen. "Are you family?"
The word caught in my throat. What was I? What could I claim?
"I'm a friend."
"Only family can go back right now. You're welcome to wait."
She gestured toward the plastic chairs without meeting my eyes.
I stood there for a moment, my hands curling into fists at my sides.
I wanted to reach across that counter and make her understand.
I wanted to say something that would change the rules, that would make her see that I had more right to be back there than anyone.
Instead, I found a seat in the corner and sat down to wait.
The clock on the wall read 10:47.
I watched it like it might tell me something useful. The second hand moved in small jerks, each tick a tiny violence, and I counted them because counting gave me something to do besides imagine Red on an operating table with his hand opened up.
At 11:32, a group of men came through the main entrance. Big men, athletes, moving with that particular awareness of their own bodies that hockey players carried. I recognized a few faces from games I'd watched. Teammates.