The Reckless Rookie (The Stampede #4)

1. Finn

Chapter one

Finn

Second period and we’re down a goal we didn’t earn.

That’s the part that’s eating me. Not the deficit. The way we got it: a bad bounce off Evan’s skate, a scramble our goalie never had a chance on, two Dallas guys crashing the crease like the whistle’s a suggestion. One-nothing, and the scoreboard’s lying about the game we’re playing.

The left wall is mine. Since the first shift, I have owned it. I’m the first one to the puck.

Number six is the reason.

Their big body on the back end, six-two of a Dallas defenseman, and for a period and a half he hasn’t been able to touch me. So he’s stopped trying to play me and started trying to end me. Every whistle he’s got a word. Every board battle he’s got an elbow riding a half-inch too high.

“Keep your head up, forty-four.”

“Working on it,” I tell him, and let him see the grin.

I could not do that. The grin.

I do it anyway.

Roman slides in for the draw and doesn’t look at me. “You’re feeding him.”

“He’s already hungry.”

“Then quit setting the table.”

Fair. I set it anyway.

The bench is watching me do it. I can feel it without looking, the way you feel weather change.

That’s the deal when you’re the rookie; they handed you an actual job before you’d earned the trust that’s supposed to come with it.

Everybody keeps one eye on the kid, waiting to see whether the temper that put my name in every scouting report is going to cost us a game tonight.

I came up out of the minors this fall with the reputation already built, an enforcer’s name stapled to a body that’s supposed to score, and it walked into this building a shift before I did.

Sully’s watching me from behind the bench. Ryan’s watching from the top of the zone. Even through the cage, even from ninety feet, I can read the look he gives me, and it’s the same one it always is.

Let it go.

I tap my stick on the ice. I’ve got it.

He doesn’t buy it. Ryan buys nothing. He’s seen this one before; he knows exactly how it ends, and there’s not a thing he can do about it from up ice except watch it come.

The puck drops. Ryan wins it back to Evan and we move, and for thirty seconds it’s the good kind, five guys on one string. Zach on the wall. Chip to Colt. Colt drives wide, drags his man, drops it, and I’ve got a step on six.

One step. All I’ve ever needed.

Six quits chasing the play and takes the man instead.

His elbow comes up under my chin and his hip drives through my knee, late, a full beat after the puck’s gone. The knee folds sideways, and the ice comes up and takes my air with it.

No whistle.

Cold through the jersey, first. Then the burn behind the kneecap, deep, a wrongness that isn’t a tear but wants me to think it might be. My mouthguard’s half out. I breathe through it, one count, two, and the rink noise comes back all at once, like someone turned a dial.

I get up. You get good at getting up when you’re my size. You get up so fast nobody clocks what it costs, because the second they see the cost is the second it’s their game and not yours.

Knee holds. Pissed off, not torn.

Six is already skating away. He doesn’t even look back. The hit isn’t what gets me. It’s the boredom of it, a man doing paperwork.

I tuck it into my chest where it keeps; tell myself that’s discipline.

First lie of the night.

The whistle’s still dead while they clear a stick that snapped on the play, and I’m skating a slow loop to keep the knee from stiffening, and my eyes go up the way they do when there’s nothing to hit. Eighteen thousand people on their feet, wanting something from the ice.

And one who isn’t.

A luxury suite off the north end, glass front.

A woman standing right against it, close enough that her breath’s fogged a small patch of it near her mouth, arms crossed, weight on one hip.

Not screaming. Not holding a drink. Just watching the whole loud mess of us with a stillness that doesn’t belong in this building.

Everybody else in here wants something. She looks like she’s reading it.

The game is like a page, and she is already three lines ahead of it.

Half a second. Then the linesman drops a new puck, and the game grabs me back by the collar, and I don’t think about her again.

Not tonight, anyway.

Between periods the room smells like wet gear and the orange slices nobody eats, but Sully keeps ordering anyway.

Down one. Nobody’s loud. That’s the tell with a good room. You can hear how a game’s going by the volume between periods, and right now we’re a library.

I’ve got ice strapped over the knee and my mouth shut, which for me is a kind of shouting.

“O’Sullivan.” Sully doesn’t look up from the board. “Knee.”

“Fine.”

“Try it again with the truth in it.”

“Fine, Coach.”

He looks up then. He’s got a face he saves for rookies who lie to him, and he wears it a lot because we do. “Six is hunting you and you’re helping.”

“I’m beating him.”

“You’re kicking his butt and letting him know. That’s two separate jobs, and you’ve only got one to do tonight.” He puts the cap back on the marker. “If you want to hurt that guy, put one behind his goalie. This is his only option against someone like you.”

“I hear you, Coach.”

“You hear me. Whether you use it is the rest of your career.” He turns back to the board. “Third period. We’re down one to a team playing dirty because they can’t play clean. Answer it on the scoreboard.”

Ryan stops by while I’m relacing. Doesn’t sit. Just stands there with that stillness he’s got, the one that straightens your spine without asking.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got the face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You’ve got the one I’ve seen cost us before.” He taps my shin pad with his stick and goes, and I sit there feeling like the whole room drew straws on who watches Finn tonight, hating it, and not once, not one time, asking myself why they bothered.

Third period. Down one, then down two.

Their fourth line buries a garbage goal off a faceoff we lost clean, and now it’s 2–0 and the building’s gone quiet in the way a home building goes quiet when the night’s turning, and I can feel the whole thing getting away from us. From me.

I’ve been good. Head down, feet moving, doing the job Sully gave me. I even think, for a shift, that I’ve got a hand on it.

Then I strip six clean on a retrieval, take it right off his stick in front of eighteen thousand people, and I hear him grunt, the small furious sound of a big man beaten by a small one. I know before the next whistle he’s going to make me pay for it.

He does. Cross-check to the back, square over the same knee. Clean off the whistle again. A signature. I go down.

And getting up this time, something’s changed, and I feel it move through me like a front coming in, a pressure drop I’ve got no name for and no brake on. The place in my chest where I fold things is full. There’s no room left. Whatever comes next doesn’t get filed.

It comes out.

I go at him. Gloves on, but I go straight at the back of that jersey, and the entire building feels it a half-beat before I reach him.

And there’s an arm across my chest. Hard.

Ryan.

“No. Not him. Not now.” His cage against mine. “Look at me. We’re down two. You go, we’re down two and a man. Look at me.”

There’s a thing I can’t make anybody understand who hasn’t stood where I’m standing with the front coming in. I want to go through him. For one bad second my captain is just the last thing between me and the only thing I want, and I measure him for it.

Then his voice, and every voice like it that’s been in my ear since I was a kid, pulls me back, and I let him walk me off, and I go to the bench with my hands shaking inside my gloves.

I sit. The boards are cold against the back of my neck. Down the bench somebody’s telling me good, that’s smart, and it lands on me like praise for a dog that didn’t bite. My hands won’t quit. I press them flat on my thighs and hold them there until they do.

Twice. Hit me twice, bored both times, and I’m the one who gets walked off his own ice.

Six says something to his bench. They laugh.

I don’t catch the words. I caught the laugh.

We lost 2–0.

The horn’s final, flat note, the most terrible sound in the building, jolts me, and I sit on the bench a beat too long, gazing at the ice we couldn’t figure out. Ryan stops on his way past and taps his glove against the back of my helmet, says something I don’t hear, and he knows.

Whatever I’m carrying out of here, Ryan knows I’m carrying it. Because reading the room is his whole gift, the way it’s Sully’s, and the two of them have been reading me all night and coming up with the same answer.

Let it go, kid.

I nod as if I had.

Second lie of the night, and the bigger one.

Up in that same suite off the north end, most of the glass has emptied out. Left behind is a family gathering their coats, performing the slow shuffle of patrons ready for home. The still woman’s among them, not looking at the ice anymore, already somewhere else in her head.

She never looked at me. Whatever held her that still all night, it wasn’t the kid on the small side of every scrum.

Then they’re moving, and they’re gone, and I think nothing of it.

I’ve got no idea that before long I’ll be shoveling out that woman’s barn.