Elias
Chapter three
The Steamers were up by one with eleven minutes left, and instead of watching a crowd packed to the rafters, I focused on one man on the ice.
From the tunnel mouth, I had a clear sightline to the bench and most of the building. I heard Doyle's security detail through my earbuds, calling out sections at regular intervals.
"Two-ten, top of the aisle, guy who hasn't sat down."
I spotted him. "Drunk," I said. "Beer in each hand. He's fine." I'd pulled my attention away from Nolan and scanned the glass behind the visiting net and the camera wells. Ten seconds later, I focused again on the left wing on the second line.
Few could see what I saw. To the crowd, Nolan Mercer was playing a careful veteran's game, picking his spots and saving his legs for the shifts that mattered.
To me, he was playing hurt. His crossovers didn't dig on the left the way they bit on the right.
On stops, he was a tick late planting the bad side, and he hid it by gliding a stick-length early, so it read as anticipation.
A high stick was called, and the Steamers' penalty-killing unit climbed over the boards, Nolan among them. A defenseman shot through traffic from the point, and Nolan dropped to block it.
He went down on the good knee, turned his body into the lane, and took the puck off the shin pad and the thigh. The crowd roared. Then he got up slower than a healthy man. He finished the shift, and the players on the bench tapped his shins with their sticks as he stepped off.
"Ward." It was Doyle in my ear. "Section one-fourteen called it a night?"
"Still here. Aisle seat, gray jacket. He's filming, not watching."
"Copy."
Down on the ice, the clock ticked down. The Steamers iced it twice, won a draw, and killed the last thirty-five seconds with Nolan pinning the puck against the wall, his back to the man trying to dig it free.
The horn blared, and underneath it rose the Steamers' trademark victory sound—a long, low riverboat whistle. It was a grinding three-two win that put them up three-two in the series. A win on the road in Vegas would send them to the Cup Final.
The bench emptied over the boards. Nolan was the last one up, hanging back to let the kids spill out first.
Before he reached the scrum, he looked over at the tunnel and spotted me. I looked back just long enough for him to know that I'd seen. Then he turned away.
***
The game ended a little before eleven. It was past one before we left the arena. Media for a major post-season win ran long. Nolan Mercer was the last veteran out of every room. He never stiffed a reporter.
We took the quiet way back into his building—the loading dock and the service elevator. The second his condo door shut, he crossed the room to his leather recliner and set his body down like a bag he'd carried a long way.
"There's beer in the door of the fridge that I keep for Brick," he said. "Help yourself. I'm not having one."
"I'm working."
"You're standing in my kitchen after one a.m. You can have a beer." He grabbed a remote and aimed it at the large flatscreen on the wall. "Tomorrow's tape. I like to know their building before I'm in it."
"You watch the arena?"
"I watch everything." He thumbed the tape to a stop on a faceoff. "You're going to tell me that's your line."
"It's a good line. Maybe I'll steal it."
That earned a half-smile. I grabbed a beer. It meant I was playing along. Every time I let Nolan hand me something, he loosened a degree.
"Watch this D-man, second pair." He ran the clip back and leaned forward. "He cheats up on the strong-side wall every single time the puck's below the goal line. Every time. You can leave a guy backdoor, and he won't see it till it's in."
"So you leave a guy backdoor?"
Nolan turned to look at me.
"You know what it looks like," he said. "You've seen the goal a hundred times: guy alone at the far post, taps it in.
What you don't see is the two seconds before.
Watch the D." He ran it back. "Puck goes below the goal line, he jumps the strong-side wall—here—and for those two seconds the far post doesn't exist to him.
That's not a mistake he makes. That's a mistake he is. "
He talked about their forecheck for a while after that, not to teach me. It was thinking out loud at a body in the room. I knew enough to follow and not enough to argue.
Somewhere in there, I stopped collecting information. For two days I'd been building a file on Nolan. Now, I was just there in his condo, enjoying it, which is a different thing, something The Guardians have a policy about.
An operator who recognizes a developing attachment to a client is expected to disclose it at the earliest point his judgment could be plausibly affected.
I knew the policy word for word. I could call Mac in Seattle right away, but nothing had happened.
I'd call when there was something to call about.
My phone buzzed.
"I need to take this."
"Take it." Nolan turned his attention back to the screen.
I walked five steps down the hall and answered. "Go."
"You sitting down?" Michael McCabe ran research for The Guardians out of Seattle, and he didn't ask that unless he had something. "I started pulling the Carolina medicals. The window when Mercer was there. There's a file in here somebody spent real time on."
In the living room, the sound of hockey started up again—the scrape of the skates and thunk of a puck off the boards. I leaned back against the wall. "Spent time on how?"
"On making it look boring." A beat. "It's too clean for a healthy nineteen-year-old kid. The name's Hawkins."
***
I'd expected more noise. The Steamers were a win away from the Stanley Cup Final, primed for a celebration.
Instead, the plane was more like a church, and we were ten minutes off the ground before I understood why.
Everyone found their seats as if it were all choreographed, and they didn't speak.
It was superstition; I realized. A team that's winning won't change a single thing on the theory that any one element might be the reason for victory.
Nolan had a window seat two rows up on the right. He had headphones in with a tablet running a tape. A cold Dunkin' cup rode in his seatback pocket, untouched since leaving the ground.
McCabe called the second we leveled off.
"The records aren't missing. That's the part I need you to hear, because missing would be easier. Missing, you go find who took them. These are tidied—altered."
"The difference being?"
"Hawkins's medicals from that rookie year exist. More of them than you'd expect for a healthy nineteen-year-old.
They are scattered across three systems with redundancy that makes no sense, as if there were constant monitoring that never found anything.
Sitting on top of it is a consulting layer that's its own little world.
Tarn Performance Institute. Carolina brought them in that season for an integrated player-recovery protocol.
The kid's got a whole second file that isn't really medical.
Medical is what's wrong with you and what they did about it.
This is something they were running on him.
It was a program with the same steps every week, whether or not anything hurt, like he was a procedure they were carrying out, not a patient they were treating. "
A pause; he drank something. "And it's wrong, Elias.
Not falsified-wrong. Too good. Have you ever seen a real training-room file?
I compared Hawkins to the other players.
For them, there are notes scrawled at eleven at night, and the guy's name is spelled two different ways on the same page.
Hawkins's file is pristine. Somebody combed it. "
"Keep pulling," I said. "I need to make a call once we land."
Nolan got up, and I assumed he was heading for the lavatory. Instead, he dropped into the seat beside me.
"Everything okay?"
"Yeah, just had a call. Work thing. Boring."
He studied me. "You looked a little green back there during the safety demo."
"I've flown before."
"Not like this." He tipped his head at the cabin and the churchy hush of it. "First playoff charter. You've got the look. Like you walked into the wrong church and everybody's already kneeling."
"That obvious?"
"You tried to take Misha's seat."
"Nobody told me it was Misha's seat."
"Nobody's going to tell you." He smiled. "You just have to know. He's been in 14C since March. He's an eleven-for-eleven goalie sitting there. The plane could be on fire. You're not getting that seat." He leaned toward me and whispered. "It's stupid. Don't tell anybody I said it's stupid."
"Your secret's safe."
"That's the job, right? Keeping my secrets." He stood and returned to his seat.
I called Kate Halloran in the dead pocket before the bus loaded, off to the side on the tarmac, far enough from the team that no one could hear my half of it.
"Mr. Ward." Her voice was tired and guarded. "You're from the security firm."
"Yes, the firm that the league retained. I'm sorry about your father."
"Everyone's sorry about my father. The home was sorry, and the man who signed the certificate was very sorry and very fast." Bitterness leaked through the phone.
"He was dying, Mr. Ward. I'd made my peace with the cancer.
I have not made my peace with being told his heart simply stopped two days after he figured out he had something he wanted to live long enough to do. "
"What did he want to live long enough to do?"
"Talk to someone." A pause. "He fixated on something from back when he worked. There was a young player years ago. Dad never brought work home for thirty years, and then he's up in the middle of the night with this kid's name in his head, like it happened yesterday."
The buses idled. The team filed past me. Nolan glanced over and then boarded.
"Does the kid have a name?"