Power Play (The Ice Breakers #6)

Chapter 1

Theo Lindgren had blocked four shots in the third period, and he was going to feel every one of them by morning.

He felt them now. The puck that had caught him on the inside of the right ankle was the worst, a deep iron ache that throbbed in time with the clock, and the one off his shin pad had still found bone.

They always did when it mattered. He sat on the bench with his elbows on his knees and watched the last forty seconds bleed off the scoreboard above the Blaze’s home barn, and he did what he always did when a game had already been lost. He took inventory.

Ankle. Shin. The two fingers on his left hand he’d jammed in the second blocking a pass that should never have gotten through.

And the shoulder. Always the shoulder, the right one, the one that had been surgically bolted back into its socket when he was eighteen and had been quietly negotiating its escape ever since.

It wasn’t bad tonight. It was just there, a low hum under everything, a tenant he couldn’t evict.

He did not think about the ankle or the shin or the fingers or the shoulder out loud, because a defenseman whose entire value was that he could take a hit had no value at all the second he started talking about how much the hits hurt.

“That was on you,” Shane Novak said.

Theo didn’t look at him. The clock said thirty-one seconds. Down two. The puck was in the Toledo zone and going nowhere, and the only thing left to play for in this game was the right to be angry about it after.

“That was on you,” Shane said again, louder, because being ignored was the one thing on this earth Shane Novak could not tolerate. “The third goal. You stepped up. You never step up, and the one time you do, you step up, and Vukovic walks right around you, and it’s a two-on-oh.”

“You pinched,” Theo said.

“I pinched because we were down a goal.”

“You pinched in your own end.”

“It wasn’t my—” Shane made a sound that was mostly air. “You’re supposed to have my back. That’s the entire job. I go, you stay. I gamble, you’re the house. You stepped up.”

This was true, and Theo hated that it was true, and so he said nothing, which he had learned over twenty-six games as Shane Novak’s defense partner was the single most effective way to make the man come apart at the seams.

It worked. Shane turned on the bench so fast his elbow knocked Theo’s, and there it was, the spasm, a white wire pulled tight from the shoulder down to the jammed fingers, and Theo kept his face where it was.

Bored. Stone. The horn went. The Blaze lost four to two, and the small Tuesday crowd made the small Tuesday sound of people who’d hoped for better and would come back anyway, and Shane was still talking.

“—because if you’d just played your game, your actual game, the boring game, the only game you have—”

“Good talk,” Theo said, and stood up, and went down the tunnel.

* * *

The room was quiet the way rooms get after a loss you should have won, the worst kind, full of guys staring at their own skate laces.

Marek Dvo?ák broke it, because Marek always broke it.

The captain was thirty-four and had played eight hundred and some games at this level and exactly nine in the NHL, all of them a long time ago, and he wore that math on his face like weather.

He stood in the middle of the room with his jersey off and his shoulders pink from the cold and he said, “Okay. That was bad. We don’t do that Thursday.

Eat something that isn’t from a vending machine.

Lindgren, Novak, you two figure out whatever this is before Thursday, because Thursday is Grand Rapids and Grand Rapids is two points we need. ”

“We’re fine,” Shane said.

“You screamed at each other for fifty-five minutes.”

“That’s how we communicate.”

Marek looked at Theo, who was unlacing his right skate with more attention than it required. “Is that how you communicate?”

“He communicates,” Theo said. “I listen.”

A couple of guys laughed. Shane threw a roll of tape that Theo caught without looking, which annoyed Shane more than getting hit with it would have.

It was a room like every AHL room Theo had ever dressed in, a room full of men in the middle of the longest negotiation of their lives, the one with their own ceilings.

Half of them were going up, kids on their way to Chicago who treated Rockford as a layover, and half of them were going nowhere, career minor-leaguers who’d made their peace or hadn’t, and the social physics of the place ran on which half you were in and which half you were pretending to be in.

Marek was the king of the second half, the lifer, the conscience.

And on the far side of the room, peeling off his gear with the unhurried ease of a kid who’d never once doubted he was going up, was Tripp Vandenberg, twenty-one, first-round pedigree, the only man in the room the organization owned a future in.

And he knew it, and everyone knew he knew it, and it made him as beloved as you’d expect.

“Tough one, boys,” Tripp said, to the room in the tone of a man who would not be in Rockford long enough for any single loss to matter. “We’ll get ‘em next time.”

“You played eight minutes,” Wozniak pointed out.

“Quality eight minutes.” Tripp grinned, and tossed his gloves in the bin, and a couple of the younger guys laughed because you laughed at the prospect’s jokes, that was the food chain, and Theo watched it all with the flat detachment of a man who had been the prospect once, in another country, in another body, and had learned what the league did to prospects who didn’t translate.

He did not hate Tripp. Hate took energy.

Tripp was a younger, healthier, more expensive version of what Theo had failed to be.

A name that would, one day soon, be in the same call-up conversation as Theo’s own, except with a working shoulder and a future the org had paid for.

Not a useful mirror, on the night of a voicemail Theo hadn’t listened to yet. He laced down and said nothing, which was his gift.

Coach Mercer appeared in the doorway, and the room found its laces again.

Danny Mercer was in his fifties, built like a man who’d spent four hundred NHL games getting run through the boards and had enjoyed none of them, and he had a way of standing in a doorway that made it clear the doorway was his, and you were a guest in it.

“Lindgren. Novak. My office. Five minutes.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He never did.

Shane shot Theo a look across the room, the look that meant this is your fault, and Theo gave him back the specific nothing that meant everything is your fault, always, forever, and they finished undressing in a silence that the rest of the room gave them a wide berth around, the way you’d give a downed wire.

* * *

Mercer’s office smelled like coffee that had been hot during the Clinton administration. There were two chairs in front of his desk, and Theo and Shane sat in them like boys outside a principal’s door. Theo supposed that was exactly what this was.

“I’m not breaking you up,” Mercer said, before either of them had fully sat.

Shane opened his mouth.

“I’m not breaking you up,” Mercer said again, “so close your mouth, Novak. You want to know why I’m not breaking you up.

Here’s why. When you’re not screaming at each other, you’re the best pairing I’ve got.

Forty-six games left, and I need a top pair that can play forty minutes between them and not get caved in.

That’s you. When you’re right, that’s you.

So you’re going to get it right.” He folded his hands on the desk.

“Lindgren. You stepped up on the third goal.”

“Yes,” Theo said.

“Why?”

“Bad read.”

“You don’t make bad reads. That’s the whole—” Mercer exhaled. “Whatever. Don’t make it again. Novak. You pinched in your own zone on a one-goal game in the third.”

“I was trying to make something happen.”

“In your own zone. In the third. Down one,” Mercer said each phrase like he was setting bricks down.

“Make something happen in their zone. That’s why God made blue lines.

You’re a power-play quarterback who can’t be trusted to defend a lead, and the day you learn to defend a lead is the day I can put your name on a piece of paper and send it ninety miles down the road, and not one day before. You hearing me?”

Theo watched the words land on Shane. He’d seen Shane take a slapshot off the collarbone and barely blink. This was worse. Shane’s jaw worked, and his eyes went bright and hard as he said, “Yes, Coach,” in a voice scraped down to nothing.

It was the defend a lead that did it; Theo had filed that, too.

There was a whole man inside that sentence, a man Theo had spent twenty-six games next to and decided he understood and had, it was becoming clear, not understood at all.

Everyone in the league knew Shane Novak as a highlight reel: the hands, the vision, the absurd outlet passes, the power-play goals that made the building stand up.

Nobody talked about the other column, the goals-against, the gambles that didn’t come off, the nights the flash cost more than it scored.

Mercer had just named it out loud in a small office, and Theo had watched Shane take it like a cross-check to a part of him that didn’t have padding, and Theo had thought, against his own will, he’s heard this before from someone who mattered more than a coach.

Theo did not want to know things like that about Shane Novak.

They were not useful. He filed it anyway.

“Good. Get out. Drink water.” Mercer was already looking at his computer. As they reached the door he said, not looking up, “Lindgren. Your visa thing. You sort that out?”

The question landed in the center of Theo’s chest. “Working on it,” he said.

“Work faster. I can’t recommend a guy I can’t roster next year. You’re a good soldier, Lindgren, but the math has to math.” He waved a hand. The audience was over.

* * *