Elias
Chapter five
Michael was in my ear before I had the second cuff button done.
"Who runs it?"
"That's the interesting part. The business side's a blank.
No COO named anywhere public, no general counsel, and the corporate filings are signed by outside counsel in three states.
Everything with a face on it is Reis." A keyboard clattered over the phone.
"One more thing. You asked whether they've got anything near you. "
"What'd you find?"
"Their site lists the four clinic cities, and St. Louis isn't one of them, but they're registered to do business in Missouri, and the lease is in the commercial databases if you know the entity name.
It's a medical office on the west edge of your neighborhood, bordering the medical complex, tucked between a dermatology group and an imaging center.
A wellness company that sells supplements at Costco is running a facility it keeps off its own website. "
I stopped with my jacket half on. I'd walked past that building twice.
It had registered exactly the way it was designed to register, which is to say not at all.
The facade was brick and glass, with a coffee cart in the lobby, and people in scrubs going in and out.
It was four blocks from the Colchester's front door.
"Send me the venue floorplan," I said. "And the guest list if you can get it."
"Already did. You're on the list, by the way."
We lucked into a local event sponsored by the company connected with Ty Hawkins, the dead rookie from Carolina.
It was a sports-medicine symposium at the university hospital complex that anchored the southwest corner of the neighborhood—hospitals and research towers stacked along Kingshighway across from the park.
They were the reason half the Central West End ate lunch in scrubs.
I was a no-brainer for the guest list, a former Movement Studies faculty member who'd published in the right journals asking whether there was room at the evening event. There was always space for someone with PhD after the name. The best element of my cover was that none of it was cover.
Down the hall, Nolan's door opened.
He wore dark jeans and a gray button-down, with sleeves rolled and the fabric fitting snug across his chest. He had a bottle of wine in one hand.
The event was the Brickner dinner in Webster Groves. It was once a month and was purely social, nothing to do with hockey. Sean Brickner was a third-pair defenseman for the Steamers. He'd logged seven hundred games, married an ER nurse, and had one daughter, Maddie.
Nolan and Brick were teammates for a year a decade ago, and they spent years after that trying to drive each other through the boards when their teams met. They landed in St. Louis six months apart, and Brick was standing in the lobby of the Colchester before the ink was dry on Nolan's purchase.
Nolan gave me the once-over. It took him about a second and a half.
"Clean up well," he said. "Who's the lucky donor class?"
"Medical school thing." I adjusted my cuff. "I'll know some people from my previous life, but overall, boring."
"You said that about the call on the plane."
"Yep, boring like that."
He watched me for a moment longer and then decided to let it go. He didn't push. I was starting to understand it was policy more than politeness.
"Doyle's guy is downstairs," I said. "He'll run you out and back. Text me when you're leaving their place."
"You're worse than my mother."
"Your mother isn't licensed to carry."
"Have you ever met my mother?"
We rode down in the main elevator together. It was original to the building, brass, walnut, and slow. It wasn't much larger than a phone booth. Nolan smelled like cedar and clean cotton. I took a deeper breath than necessary as the doors opened.
"Whatever the work thing is," he said, "go be interesting."
Doyle's guy was waiting at the car by the curb. Nolan climbed in, and I watched it pull off onto Euclid.
***
I walked the eight blocks to the event and entered the atrium of a research building on the medical campus. As soon as I arrived, I scanned for exits out of habit.
Tarn ran across the sponsor wall by the door in a font so serene it could have sold spa memberships. Below it, in smaller type: The science of recovery.
The atrium smelled faintly of lilies. A string trio played a hushed version of Pachelbel's Canon in D near the stairs, and servers moved through the crowd Michael had promised: surgeons, department chairs, and a few development officers hunting the room in pairs.
I hadn't been in a room like it in four years. Somebody two conversations away said proprioceptive deficit, and I turned my head.
I worked the edges of the room first. I had three questions: who ran Tarn's business side, what the facility four blocks from the Colchester was for, and what Doc Reis was like away from the cameras and microphones.
A hand surgeon told me a story about saving a pitcher's career with a skin graft. Tarn referred imaging to her group. "Good people over there," she said. "Fast, and they don't oversell."
The mysterious St. Louis Tarn facility never came up. Nobody in the room had a reason to mention it. That was a data point.
I heard raucous laughter. Through a gap in the small crowd I got my first glimpse of Dr. Reis in the flesh.
Silver-haired, blocky through the shoulders, with his jacket open.
One hand illustrated the story, and the other held a beer, not wine.
When his line landed and the laughter rose again, he grinned like the joke had been on him.
I'd read Doc Reis for a decade before I'd ever heard of Nolan Mercer. Cited him twice myself.
I didn't approach, preferring to let the room come to me as the evening unfolded. Along the atrium's south side, I saw a woman who drew my attention.
She stood apart from Reis's orbit. Tall, gray-blond, wearing glasses and a dark, expertly tailored suit, she wasn't working the room. She was watching it, patiently.
For a moment, we looked at each other from at least fifty feet away. Then a man walked up to her shoulder with something on a phone, and she turned to focus on it. I moved on.
I listened to a cardiologist complain about the event with one eye still on Reis's crowd.
A young man cut through the crowd and leaned in at Reis's shoulder.
He said something brief, and Reis's head turned.
He looked across the atrium, broke from his group mid-story, and walked up to me with his hand extended.
"Elias Ward," he said. "You're the kick-mechanics guy. This has made my entire night."
His handshake was dry and hard, unexpected for the man who sold serenity in airports.
"Your piece. Two thousand—what was it, seventeen? Asymmetric force decay in the underwater dolphin. I made my fellows read it. One of them cried."
"That was a strong reaction."
"She was a rower. Everything made her cry.
" He let go of my hand and pointed the beer at me.
"You know what I liked about that paper?
You didn't do what everybody does, which is measure the kick and write down the measurement like that's science.
You asked why the decay ran asymmetric when the anatomy was symmetric.
You asked the body a question it didn't want to answer.
" He grinned. "Then you quit, and I never got the sequel. What the hell happened?"
"The academy happened. Committees. I did my best to squeeze it in around arguments about parking."
Reis laughed from the chest, a big unguarded sound, and just like that we were off.
It wasn't flattery. Flattery has a smell, and events like this were drenched in it. What Reis did was engagement. He asked me questions. They were real, and each one built on my previous answer.
What did I think proprioception actually was?
Had I ever seen an elite athlete whose sense of his own body was simply wrong?
When a swimmer shaves four hundredths off a turn, where does it come from, flesh or psychology?
I'd forgotten about the intellectual rush, what happens when two minds chase a common thread. For a decade, this was my native territory. I dropped back into it effortlessly.
"Here's my heresy," Reis said. We'd drifted to the atrium's edge by then.
"Pain is a coward. It's a biological smoke alarm.
It's loud, and it goes off early. Half the time it's simply wrong.
The body's an actuary. It prices every risk as ruin.
The difference—and you know this because you lived it—the entire difference between the great ones and the merely gifted is what they do when the alarm sounds.
" He shrugged. "Everything I've built is the science of answering the alarm honestly. Is it fire, or were you making toast?"
"And when it is fire?"
"Then you get them out of the building. Fast. But Elias—" He leaned in a degree, and his voice sounded sad. "—it's toast so much more often than this industry admits. I've watched careers end over toast. Kids are benched by team doctors covering their own malpractice exposure. That's real harm."
After my injury, I lost my whole life to a margin of four hundredths. I knew how thin the space was between contender and also-swam. While I spoke with Reis, the heresy didn't sound like heresy. It sounded like saying the quiet part of every elite sport out loud. I nodded.
"How's yours holding up? Off the record. Doctor to doctor."
I hadn't told a soul in this room what I did or who I did it for. Then again, I'd spent a week standing at Mercer's shoulder in a city that talked about nothing else. Half the atrium probably had tickets to Game One.
"My guy's not my patient," I said. "I just keep people from spilling drinks on him."
"Ha. Sure." He looked at me a beat longer, eyes bright. "Good answer, by the way. Your talents are wasted in security."
"So my mother says."
He laughed again, and put his hand on my elbow, turning me toward the room. "Come on. Meet my people before the dean gets to you. He'll have you back on the faculty by nine. There's a couple of folks who should know your name."
Being walked through a party by Doc Reis was like being towed by a friendly tugboat. The crowd parted ahead of him and closed behind us. He kept up a running commentary, low, just for me the entire way.
He introduced me four times, and it was the same sentence every time. Elias Ward. Movement Studies. The kick-mechanics paper. I made you people read it, don't pretend. One of the clinical directors, a compact woman with a runner's build, said, "Wait, that Ward?"
"He's minding a hockey player," Reis told her, delighted with himself. "The academy loses another one. Whose fault is that? Ours. Entirely ours."
"Somebody's got to keep the game safe for the concussed," I said. It got the laugh, and my shoulders relaxed another inch.
Reis pulled me half a step out of the group, and he lowered his voice. He spoke clearly and precisely, but only for me.
"Listen. While you're in town." He nodded vaguely, and I knew instantly. "We keep a facility here. It's small and quiet. It's the best recovery suite between the coasts. I designed it. Come by, meet the team, and see the toys. I'll tell them to expect you."
He placed a hand on my shoulder. "Elias, if your player needs anything during the run: imaging, recovery, or a second opinion he doesn't want on the team's books. Deep runs chew men up. Nobody in this city does it better than my people, and nobody is more discreet."
There it was. Michael had spent two days trying to see inside Tarn from the outside, and the founder had just handed me a key with a beer in his other hand.
"That's generous," I said.
"It's selfish. I want the sequel to that paper, and I'm softening you up." He turned, and his gaze landed on someone. "Di. C'mere a second."
The still woman from the edge of the room joined us. Her handshake was cool and brief. Up close I saw the glasses for what they were, a prop. The lenses were flat, plano, no correction in them at all. She wanted to look the part.
"Diane keeps the lights on," Reis said. "I break things, and she pays for them."
"Someone has to," she said. Her voice was low and even.
"She's the reason there's still a company," Reis said fondly, as she moved off into the crowd. "A decade of me, can you imagine?"
Reis walked me one more circuit around the room, and when the dean finally closed in with a development officer flanking him, he shook my hand goodbye. After he let go, I stood there for a second, thirty-eight years old, feeling like the best student in somebody's seminar.
The valet stand had a line of surgeons in it, so I walked.
On the walk back, the air was thicker than it would be during late May in Minnesota. Heat radiated off the brick buildings. In the distance, the cathedral bells tolled ten o'clock.
I considered what I'd learned. Tarn did have a hidden St. Louis facility, and I earned an open invitation to tour it. I didn't share any information I shouldn't, and I liked him. By any measure, it was a successful evening.
That's what I told myself for the rest of the walk back to Nolan's.
The light in the living room was low when I let myself into the condo. Nolan was in his recliner with the tablet going — not hockey, for once. It was a fishing show, with men talking about the last bass they caught. He muted the tablet and looked up.
"How was the donor class?"
"Wealthy. How were the Brickners?"
"Loud. Maddie's decided she's going to be a goalie now, so that was the conversation at dinner.
Jen made me take a plate home." He nodded at the kitchen, where a foil-wrapped square sat on the counter.
"There's half of it left if you didn't eat.
The donor class doesn't usually feed you.
They give you the appetizers that make you hungrier.
It's all —" he waved a hand—"things on spoons. "
"It was things on spoons and shrimp with tails."
"Every time."
I made myself a plate and ate it standing at the island. It was brisket, still warm at the center. Nolan turned back to the fishing show and let it run silently.
"It was a medical school thing," I said. "Sports medicine people. My old field." He looked over. "I forgot how much I liked it. Not the job. I don't miss that. It's the talk. Smart stuff about bodies, mechanics, and why a thing works."
"Like me with the room," Nolan said. "I told you. Fourteen years in, the game's almost beside the point."
"Yeah. Something like that."