18. Nolan
Chapter eighteen
Nolan
The doctor looked me over in the wet grass long enough to decide I wouldn't die during an SUV ride, and he did the rest of his examination at a kitchen table in an unfamiliar house.
Elias walked me in with a hand under my left arm.
The house was a furnished two-bedroom four blocks from the Colchester.
It was the kind of place a traveling consultant rented by the month.
The sofa was gray. The art was gray with a few yellow highlights, and a fruit bowl on the kitchen counter held no fruit.
The doctor had unpacked his gear onto the table. He was in his mid-fifties, wearing reading glasses. His canvas kit opened in folds like the one carried by Dee, the locksmith. He didn't introduce himself, and I didn't ask. He pointed at a chair, and I lowered myself onto it.
"That's not something that happened this morning," he said.
"No."
He started at the top, cleaning the cut above my left temple and closing it with adhesive strips, no sutures. "It'll hide under the hair," he said. And under a helmet. I hated how fast the thought came to me.
My ribs took longer. It was the right side, where the car had clipped me. He pressed along each one, watching my face.
"Breathe in. All the way."
I did. It hurt.
"Again."
I did it again, and this time I tried to hold a neutral expression. He looked up over the reading glasses as if he'd seen that trick before.
"Deep contusion. Maybe a crack in the eighth, but nothing's moving. It'll hurt to breathe hard for at least two weeks."
"But it will hold?" I asked. "Contact's fine. It's stable."
He stopped and then wrote something down.
He'd told me what happened to the ribs, and I answered with what I could still do. I'd been doing that since I was twelve.
He checked the hip last, moving the joint through its miserable little range.
"It's old damage, and I don't think there's anything new. You were lucky. You landed on the good side."
Lucky. A car hit me, nearly broke ribs and tore open my head.
He packed up his kit. At the door, he gave Elias instructions—periodic applications of ice and watching my pupils overnight. Then he was gone, and Elias turned the deadbolt behind him.
Elias told me the plan for the day.
"No police," he said. "The league's counsel made that call at seven this morning, and Mac agreed with it.
A police report would mean a public record.
That record means at least one beat writer with a courthouse source, and by noon the story is Mercer Attacked before Game Seven, and every camera in North America will be pointed at you.
" He stood at the counter. "I don't like it, but I agreed to it anyway. "
"Doyle?"
"Doyle knows you had a security scare, and that I moved you.
He doesn't know where, and he didn't ask.
That's professional security behavior. The team brass knows you're resting off-site.
Your coach was told you'll be at the rink tomorrow at the normal time.
" A beat. "You will be. Barring anything unusual, that part isn't negotiable from their end or yours. "
"The car?"
"Gone. Michael's running traffic cameras on every road out of the park, and mud obscured the plate in the two frames we have. The driver isn't searchable yet." His tone was flat. "He was a face that looked like nobody, and that's a professional feature, not an accident."
Elias explained that we were in a safe house leased through a shell. The doctor worked off the books. I sat at the table and sorted it in my head. A man had tried to kill me before six a.m., and I was absorbing it like Boston's forecheck.
My phone buzzed on the table.
Brick: Maddie informed me that if we lose she's transferring her loyalty to a team that respects her time. She's fifteen going on forty-eight. God help us.
He didn't know what happened. He was sitting in Webster Groves with his wife, a crossword puzzle, and his daughter, thinking my morning was as ordinary as his.
I typed tell her I'd do the same and deleted it. It sounded like a man performing being fine, and Brick would smell it through the phone.
Nolan: She's a good kid.
***
A duffel arrived at one o'clock. Elias took it at the door from a man I didn't see and carried it into the bedroom I'd been assigned.
It was my game-day suit, folded carefully. The duffel also contained my tablet and toilet kit. Elias's anonymous courier also brought the most important items: the roller, lacrosse ball, percussion gun, heating pad, and pill bottles.
The schedule said down at two, so I slept. I iced the ribs before and after, plus every twenty minutes while I was awake. I lay on top of a rented comforter in a room with drawn blinds and told my body the same thing I'd told it before a thousand games: you know how to do the rest.
It didn't believe me at first. The pillow was wrong, and the light through the blinds came from the wrong side. Every time I drifted, some piece of the morning surfaced: gravel under tires or the grass coming up at me. I'd be wide awake again with my heart racing.
Then, when I drifted for the fourth time, I slept.
I woke at ten to four, not knowing where I was. Then I heard Elias speaking on the phone. He was ordering dinner from a restaurant, and the day came back to me.
Dinner came in a bag delivered to the door. He ordered pasta and a container of bitter greens that he knew I liked. It wasn't food from a frozen tray. It was real food the night before the biggest game of my life.
We ate at the kitchen table. Elias piled the pasta and greens onto plates and gave us real silverware instead of the plastic that came with the food.
When I had only two bites left, he began to talk.
"Forest Park," Elias said. "You asked me how he knew the path."
"I did."
"I'm going to tell you everything I know."
I nodded.
"There's a clinician at Tarn's facility here. His name is Colin Frey. He ran my tour of the clinic. Frey knew my published work. We talked shop for two hours, and it was the best professional conversation I'd had in four years."
He gathered our plates and took them to the sink while he kept talking.
"I also met him at a hotel bar on Euclid.
Then he invited me to a diner in Boston, two blocks from the team hotel, the morning of Game Three.
We've had four or five calls in between.
Every time, he gave me something useful for the investigation. It was all true and verifiable."
"And you sent what he wanted back the other way," I said.
Elias sat at the table again. "I did. At the bar, he asked how a thirty-four-year-old does load management in a run like this, and I told him you have your own regimen.
I called it the best self-built maintenance program I'd ever seen up close.
I used the word disciplined. On another call, I told him you were up before five every morning.
" He took a breath. "When Tierney's name surfaced, Frey offered to put a feeler out to the other old technicians. I spelled out the name for him."
He kept going.
"I can't confirm talking about the route. I don't remember saying Forest Park out loud, but I can't swear I didn't."
He stopped there. It was the end of his story.
Fourteen years of media training taught me what a man looked like when he was managing information. He rationed eye contact. Elias's report was honest, with no deflections.
He started to say something about Seattle, and I interrupted. "Elias, you're forgiven."
It came out of me almost without thought, and it cost me nothing.
He started to speak again. "I—"
I didn't let him say it. I had my own story to tell. "Thirteen years ago," I said, "in Pittsburgh, I stood in a hotel hallway with two buckets of ice and told a dying kid I'd see him at breakfast."
Elias didn't move. He closed his mouth and was still.
"Ty Hawkins. You've seen the file. I knew him.
" I looked at my hands. "He was nineteen and grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
He called his mother twice a week and texted his sister every day.
There was a St. Christopher medal in his shaving kit, saying it was from his grandmother.
He had a dry sense of humor, and it was everyone's favorite thing about him.
The coaches assigned him to me unofficially.
They told me to keep an eye on him. I was only twenty-one, but they thought that made a world of difference.
I took it seriously, making sure he ate right and didn't run with the wrong guys on the road. "
The refrigerator hummed behind Elias. I kept my eyes on my hands.
"That January, he started to talk about things in weird ways.
It wasn't a conversation. He just floated things.
After a Saturday practice, he asked me if it was normal to feel like you were standing a little outside yourself.
He laughed when he said it. I was peeling tape off a stick, and I told him the season's a grind and everybody gets weird when we get close to February. He said yeah, probably."
Elias got up and started coffee in an old-fashioned coffee maker.
I continued my story. "In the airport in Tampa, he asked if I ever forgot the drive home from the rink.
He meant not remembering it at all. I said sure, all the time.
We all zone out sometimes." I flexed my fingers.
"On a charter, he asked me if the stuff they were giving him in the training room was the same stuff they were giving me.
His cup had the number nine on it. Mine said seventeen.
I had a magazine on my chest and I was half asleep, and I said I assumed so.
I asked him if it was working. He said it was working great.
Then he looked out the window for the rest of the flight. "
"Sounds like he was a good kid," Elias said.