Page 81 of Blind Spot
I let it out instead. Erasing Dahl wouldn’t make us safer. It would only be me repeating his brand of cruelty.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rook said. “Leave it.”
Then he did a thing he never did forty feet from a camera. He knocked his shoulder into mine, once, the way the dads do after a beer-league game.
The room had the same stalls, same guys, and same smell of a hundred games soaked into the rubber on the floor, but the volume was back up around the ceiling where it belonged.
Someone’s playlist was too loud. Rafe stood in the middle of it with the player-of-the-game helmet jammed down over his ears.
I planted myself in front of his stall.
“Speech,” I said.
“I’m not giving a speech.”
“He’s giving a speech. Quiet, animals.” I got two guys to actually quiet down, a minor miracle. “Go ahead, Rafe. Thank your linemates and thank the academy. Thank the genius left-winger who put it on a platter—“
“I tipped it,” Rafe said. “You missed the net.”
The room lost it. Somebody threw a roll of tape at me. I took it in the chest like a man.
“I missed the net,” I told the ceiling. “Eight points in his last six and he’s chirping the guy who taught him where the net is.” I pointed at the kid. “Saskatchewan. No respect. They raise them in a barn, and it shows.”
“You’d know about barns,” Cross said, not looking up.
He was peeling tape off at his stall, unbothered, like he hadn’t reset the entire room three hours ago with one shin pad on his knee. He says about four things a night, and one of them’s usually at my expense. I’d never been happier to be his target. I put a hand on my heart.
“That’s two,” I said. “Two complete sentences out of Julian Cross. Write it down, somebody. Mark the date.”
I didn’t thank him. You don’t thank Cross.
Down the wall, Pratt was already half out of his gear, back to the rest of us. He didn’t turn around to look. He’d said his one thing, and he was done for the week, probably the month.
Rook caught my eye across the room for less than a second. He gave me the chin-lift he gives everybody, the one that reads as good game and went back to his skates.
Rafe finally wrestled the helmet off and set it in his stall like it might break.
“You did good, kid,” I told him, quieter, just us.
He blushed red to the ears and said nothing.
We’d come in two cars, like always, and we left in two cars.
Snow had started to fall. I had the heat up and nothing on the radio.
The West Loop Ironhawks billboard came up on the right. Cross was in his jersey, arms crossed, wearing that emotionless face. He was forty feet tall, looming over the first mile on the Edens.
I raised a fist to him through the windshield as I went by. Then I drove home to the guy whose picture isn’t on any billboard.
At home, Rook was at the kitchen table when I came in, and his phone was sitting on the island.
“I’m calling Kovac in the morning,” he said. “We’re going to do this right. I’ll tell him the story’s his.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m calling him anyway. It’s the right thing to do.”
