14. Nolan #2
The goal took the crowd out of the game for the first time. The hush was worse than the nonstop noise.
Wes gave them their voices back with ninety seconds left in the period. It was a broken play, a puck rolling on edge at the blue line that he batted flat through four sets of legs. Their goalie guessed wrong. It cleared his glove by six inches.
The riverboat whistle blew, and I worried the noise would collapse the ceiling. On the bench, Jamie leaned into my shoulder and yelled over it.
"That's my goal. I've been building that since Game Two."
"File a grievance," I said.
For half of the third period, we were the better team, but we couldn't put a puck in the net. We hemmed them in for whole shifts. Jamie missed two masterful shots: one bounced off a post, and the goalie stopped the other with a barely there tip off the end of his glove.
Then the ice tilted.
The winner started with me on the wall, eight minutes remaining.
I chased a puck behind the net, and for the first time in the series, they came at me a different way.
All year they'd used the same forecheck; now, with the game on the line, they changed it.
Their first guy cut off my path along the boards, and the second came in behind him.
I tried to chip the puck out. That kind of clearing pass loads everything through the left hip. It came off my stick at half-speed and died at the top of the circles, right where they wanted it.
After that, we did our best to hang on. They moved the puck around, and we chased it. By the time the shot came, we were too tired to cut it off. Misha stopped the first one. Their center buried the rebound.
Two-one. Six minutes left.
We pushed. Coach shortened the bench, and I doubled up shifts. With 1:50 on the clock, he sent me out for the six-on-five with Misha sprinting for the bench behind me.
Wes had the puck up top. Jamie rotated low. Twenty seconds. A shot came through and I got a piece with my blade, a redirect that beat the goalie clean, but it rang off the outside of the post.
The puck slid the length of the ice into our corner and died. The horn blew.
Two-one. Down three games to two.
Eighteen thousand people went silent at once. What's left when a crowd like that goes quiet is small and terrible: you can hear the other team. Down at the far end, eleven Boston players piled onto each other, laughing. It was a thin, bright sound a road team makes in a building it just killed.
Wes took most of the questions, but they came for me, too. A national reporter found me first.
"Nolan, one loss from the end of the season now. Fourteen years, maybe your best shot at a Cup. You've absorbed more contact than anybody in this series." He held his recorder a little closer. "What do you tell your body to get it to answer the bell for a game like Game Six?"
I reached for something worth saying, and I couldn't find it. I stood there with my mouth open, saying nothing.
"It's June," I said. "Everybody in both rooms has earned their bruises. We'll be ready for the game."
It was fine, a nothing answer, and it'd probably be on TV by the end of the night. Wes glanced up. He knew I was reaching, and it wasn't my usual response.
I found Elias at his pillar past the last camera, where he always was. He caught my eye and tipped his head toward the exit. I joined him. He didn't say anything about the game. He just fell in beside me and walked me to the car.
Brick caught us in the players' lot.
He was parked two rows over, bag already in the truck bed, and he crossed the concrete with his tie stuffed in his jacket pocket. Around us, the lot was emptying in silence, engines starting one at a time, nobody gunning anything.
"Maddie texted me between periods," he said. "During the game, Nolan."
"What'd she say?"
"She wanted to know if the cake carries over." He leaned against the fender of Elias's SUV as if it were his. "If we lose, does the cake still count, or does she have to bake a new one for Game Six? Jen ruled that it carries over."
"Tell her I agree," I said. "Tell her the candle count keeps going either way. That's how it works."
He looked at me for a second, and then out at the lot. "You know what this reminds me of? Winnipeg, the year we lost eleven straight. You'd come off the ice after another one, and you had this face, like you personally had lost all eleven by yourself."
"I was a plus player that year."
"You were. That's my point." He pushed off the fender. "One draw and one rim. I counted. The rest of it was the ice tilting. Go home and sleep."
He rapped a knuckle twice on the SUV's hood, nodded once at Elias, and walked back to his truck. I watched his taillights leave the lot.
The blue was all still up—the ribbons on the planters, strings of Christmas lights on the awnings, and the sheet with the Wheel on it—but the rooms behind the windows had gone dark.
Neither of us had said anything on the drive back to the Colchester.
The hip stiffened on the drive, with the game's adrenaline fading. When we got back to the condo, I unfolded the mat by the recliner because floor work waits for no man's mood. I worked through the sequence while Elias stood at the window with coffee, looking down at the street.
He turned around to face me. "Nolan."
"Yeah?"
"Use both locks from here on out, even when we're inside."
He'd started to say something else, but the locks came out.
"Two locks," I echoed.
He set the coffee on the island. "I need to make a Seattle call. I'll take a walk around the block while I do it. Sleep, Nolan. Game Six is coming."
He picked up his phone off the sofa arm, left his work bag where it always sat, and let himself out. I heard the two locks turn from the outside.
I put myself to bed and did not sleep. I lay in the dark, re-running the night in my head.
At one-forty I gave up on sleep and reached for my phone to see how miserable the comments were on the team's group chat. The screen remained black.
Dead. It was fully charged when we left for the arena, and then it must have drowned in messages: my mother, my agent, the group chat. A loss like tonight's burns a battery like nothing else.
Any other night I'd have left it dead till morning, but the alarm was on my phone. I needed it during a Cup Final.
My cable was in the bedroom wall where it always was, on my side. I plugged in, and the phone didn't charge. The cable had been fraying at the neck for a month, and I'd been meaning to replace it.
Elias had a charger in his work bag. I'd watched him pull it out of the side pocket at a red light that morning. It already felt like weeks ago.
The bag sat at the end of the sofa. He was down on the street somewhere, walking the block. We shared a bed. I'd had his heartbeat against my back at dawn. Borrowing a cable from a man who slept in your bed was nothing. It happened daily between people who shared living space.
I dug into the bag looking for a phone charger and nothing else. I found the cable in the side pocket by feel, neatly coiled. When I drew it out, something came with it: a slim folder halfway out before the cable pulled free.
I started to push the folder back down. It had come out crooked, with one page riding up out of it, and the lamplight fell across the top third of that page.
It had a seal, embossed, official. I'd seen that seal many times in my working life. It was standard on contracts and letters like the one that named me an All-Star.
The letterhead under the seal was some law firm, three names long. It didn't read The Guardians. Next was a line in bold caps: CONFIDENTIAL — INVESTIGATION.
I froze for two beats.
I didn't push the folder back down. I drew the page the rest of the way out and read it under the lamp. My eyes caught on names, and I couldn't process the rest of the text. First was Halloran, and then Hawkins.
For a moment, I couldn't breathe. Hawkins. That was Ty, the rookie we lost thirteen years ago.
At the bottom, where it should have listed the parties to a bodyguard contract, it didn't say principal. Instead:
Subject: Mercer, Nolan (STL).
I stood in the lamplight, holding the page in both hands, afraid of dropping it. I wasn't a client. I was a case. Days of boring phone calls arranged themselves in my head like a shelf of pill bottles arranged by a stranger's hand.
Down in the building's guts, the service elevator woke up and began to climb.