13. Elias #3
"Got 'em." The controller clicked under his thumbs. "You know you've never once missed a call? You can't shoot worth a damn, but you've never missed a call."
"Everybody's got to be good at something."
"Yeah," he said, eyes on the screen.
We played three rounds. Somewhere in the second he rested his knee against mine between the chairs and let it stay there. On the screen, we cleared a building room by room. I made the calls, and he shot. We were better together than either of us alone.
At some point, Nolan switched to watching tape of Boston. My phone rang while he ran a penalty kill forward and back.
I knew the area code on sight. I stepped into the hall and left the door open a finger's width. Nolan didn't look up.
"Mr. Tierney."
"You said nobody outside your firm knows you're calling." This time I heard road noise behind him, cars moving past at highway speed. "I spent today finding out who you are."
"Okay."
"Elias Ward. There's a swimmer with that name, kick-mechanics paper, 2017, Journal of Applied Biomechanics. There's a university faculty page on the Internet Archive with your picture on it. You almost made an Olympic team." A truck rumbled past. "Did I get it right?"
"Yes. That's me."
"Huh," he paused. "I read your paper this afternoon at the public library.
You know what it's about? Of course you do; you wrote it.
I learned that you wrote about a body telling the truth whether the athlete wants to hear it or not.
That left me with a question." If it were a melodrama, this would be the place for a drum roll.
"My question is, what the hell is a man who wrote that doing carrying a gun for a hockey team. "
"I've asked myself the same thing."
"That's not an answer."
"The honest answer is an equipment manager died, and in his last days he was trying to reach this hockey player. Now I know that he was around when a rookie died far too young. Somebody needs to figure out the whys. That's what I'm doing here."
A few moments passed, but neither of us hung up.
"You're going to want names, dates, and the whole protocol stack," Tierney said. "You need to know what we ran and what the company served us from upstairs. You'll want to know what was in the—" He stopped. "No, not tonight. Not while I'm pulled over along the highway."
"Then when?"
"You've got a game tomorrow. The whole world's watching your guy.
" Two more cars passed. "After the games are over.
We'll talk when they've put the cameras away, and the league isn't calling you every hour.
I'll call this number. We'll have one conversation, and I'll talk until I'm done or until I hear something I don't like. "
"Any other conditions?"
"You already know them. As far as anyone else knows, this phone doesn't exist. Nobody comes to my door. If anybody knocks before I call you, and I mean anybody: census worker, missionary, or a lost pizza kid, I'm gone, and you will never find me again. They got Ray, but I won't let them get me."
"Nobody's established anyone got Ray."
"Sure," he said. His voice was flat.
I waited him out, listening for the click of him hanging up.
"The obituary said he went in his sleep," Tierney said. "It said peaceful. Is that true, far as you know? Did Ray suffer?"
"They told his daughter no," I said. "She believes that part."
"Okay." Tierney exhaled. "Ray was good to me down there. He was good to everyone. Those kids—" He stopped himself again. "After the games, Ward. Win or lose. Hang out in quiet places until I call."
The line went dead. I walked the rest of the way down the hall to the living room and sat on the couch, making an entry in my notebook: 21:40 — inbound, Tierney, second call, his initiative. Contact agreed: post–Cup Final. Conditions logged. Duration 6:12.
I opened my phone's log. The Guardians issued it, and the number attached was a shell that resolved to a Seattle answering service. Michael's people rotated services every ninety days. On my end, the calls didn't exist.
On Tierney's end, he answered the first call on a landline.
It was a landline in a rural house owned free and clear by a man who'd stripped himself out of every other database he could reach.
The landline was the one wire he couldn't strip.
The calls would live in the carrier's records, part of the billing system of a company that sells its logs to anyone with a subpoena.
He'd bought a second phone to call me from a gas station, which meant he understood it all better than I did. The burner was an attempt to quarantine the damage from the first call, but it was a call I placed.
At 5:15 that morning I had rung a number that connected to a house I'd never seen, and the ring existed now, permanently, at his end of the wire.
Who else might know that number had been dialed?
Would it be someone who sat under a sweetgum tree in a car, doing nothing in the middle of the night?
Would it be someone who read the labels on every bottle in Nolan's medicine cabinet?
I turned the question over the way Misha turned his locks, and it didn't open.