19. Elias #2
"On its own, it's just a horrified old man talking, but we have the backup. Finally, we have athletes with unexplained premature joint deterioration. Medical experts will testify. The one thing we never found was legal permission to run blind experiments on young athletes."
"So what happens next?" Nolan asked.
"It goes to counsel today. The league's people run Reis's placement of her in the Tarn machinery.
They will request records, including the names of the alumni.
They'll file a subpoena for the carrier logs that tie the Tierney call to a timeline.
It's not ours anymore, Nolan. It's no longer just three people trying to formulate a theory. "
I understood what he told us, but it didn't sit quite right. Nolan had walked into a room and pried open a crack in the entire apparatus. Now, he was supposed to put it all out of his head and play for a Stanley Cup.
"One more thing," Michael said. "There's been action already this morning."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Tarn's gone dark. The website is down, and their appointments system is offline. It looks like a standdown. Somebody seems to have decided the smart move is to stop, cut losses, and lawyer up. "
"So the threat's off," Nolan said.
"The acute threat is receding, yes," Mac said. "That is good news, and this is the point where I tell both of you not to change anything. Elias, you cover Nolan tonight like nobody stood down. Doyle will run the building the same way he has since Game One."
"Understood."
We ended the call. "How do you feel?" I asked.
Nolan offered a half-smile. "Like I finally said it out loud. Ask me again after the game."
He ate at one, off a plate instead of a tray, and he napped at two, following the game-day schedule.
Michael sent an update at two-thirty. The stand-down was holding. One more piece made me tense slightly. "The driver remains unidentified," he said.
He woke at ten to four. He padded to the living room in bare feet.
"You didn't lie down," he said.
"I don't sleep on game days, it turns out."
"I've said we should do the botanical gardens when the circus leaves town. You need to ride up inside the Arch, too, if you've never done it."
"Nolan—"
"Don't. I mean it, and I don't want to hear any objections until after we win the Cup." He reached out for my hand, and I let him take it. "There's also a standing thing I do at Eileen Danaher's on off-days. You should come. She makes a cookie that'll ruin you for what other people bake."
The message was clear. Nolan was building an after.
"I'd like that," I said. It was the only honest answer I could give.
He went to the front closet and reached for his game suit hanging there.
"Come on," he said. "I've got a building full of people who've waited forty years, and I told Wes he'd get every last ounce of me."
***
I drove us out of the Central West End and down toward the river. Every window was blue. The buses were wrapped in blue. The fountains sprayed blue water.
Nolan watched it all go by and said nothing. When we arrived at the arena early for warmup, a massive crowd already surrounded it. I took us into the players' lot underground.
In the morning, I feared that I would have to leave Nolan alone in the lair of a company with a body count. Now, I was turning him over to the safest building in Missouri. For the next five or six hours, a crowd nearing twenty-thousand would surround him with their love.
Warmup was still running when I made my way up to a section entrance on the north side. On the ice, the two teams circled their own halves of the rink, never crossing the center line.
Pucks bounced off the boards. Misha stood in his crease, taking shots one at a time. Nolan circled wide, leaning on his good side, giving nothing away. I watched him for the thing only I could see, and I couldn't find it. He'd successfully buried it.
A woman appeared beside me. "That one learned my name three years ago and hasn't forgotten it."
It was a sixty-ish woman wearing a yellow staff coat. She didn't look at me when she spoke. She looked at the ice.
"The second time he saw me here, he asked how long I'd worked in the building.
I told him since before he was born." She smiled without turning.
"Every game he's at since, it's 'Evening, Carol.
' Nobody tells them to do that. You can tell the ones who mean it.
" She finally glanced at me, took in the lanyard, and filed me as harmless.
"We waited forty years for a night like this one.
I was standing about here in 'eighty-six.
I kept telling everyone I'd live to see it again. " She shrugged. "Here we are."
The horn ended the warm-up. The players peeled off toward their tunnels, and the Zambonis came out to lay down clean ice.
When the anthem ended, the applause shook the building's foundation. It would be possible to read the game by listening to the crowd.
Doyle's people murmured in my ear at intervals. They identified and solved mundane problems in the crowd.
I walked the lower concourse during the intermission between the first two periods. It was normal. I had time for the players' tunnel and the route to the buses before the players returned to the ice. Nothing unusual there.
While the second period unfolded, I walked down a service corridor toward the northeast quadrant, past a door propped for the caterers. It was near the ice plant that gave the building its identity. The machinery's hum was louder, a deep continuous grind that swallowed the sound of the crowd.
A man came out of a cross-corridor twenty feet ahead. He wore a yellow staff coat. He didn't turn to look at me, and that felt wrong. Everyone in a sealed building looks at the people wearing lanyards at least once.
Above me the crowd erupted, cutting through the grind of the ice plant. The man turned down my corridor. I opened my mouth to say something friendly as he approached. I didn't make it to the words.
He came at me with a knife.
I saw it late. It was a short blade, held low and back. I got my forearm up before it reached my throat. The knife sliced open my sleeve and left a gash in my arm underneath. I didn't feel pain. I felt the warm trail of blood down my arm.
He plowed his shoulder into my chest, knocking me back against the wall. He was fast, trained for hand-to-hand combat. There was no wasted motion.
I got both hands on his knife wrist and pushed it wide. We hit the wall together, hard, with a loud thud.
He brought a knee up into my groin, and my legs buckled. I crumpled down to the floor.
The last clear thought in my head wasn't fear. It was the realization that there was one man in the building who would know I was gone before anyone else raised the alarm. He was standing on the ice in front of twenty thousand people, distracted by the biggest game of his life.
The crowd roared again over my head, and the floor shook.