Page 26 of Blind Spot
In the second, I sent a clean pass out of the zone, tape to tape. It was the breakout Coach Markel draws on the board at six in the morning while the rest of us pretend to be awake. I tied sticks up in front of Pratt and made sure he could see everything coming.
He didn’t have to make a save worth talking about. That’s the best thing you can do for a goalie—make his game boring.
Markel sent me over the boards for the last two minutes with the lead, like he often does in tight games. I was tired, but I hadn’t lost my focus.
The ice was the one place in my life where the job was simple. Five other men joined me in the effort. I understood both the boundaries and the objectives.
Mikkelsen was tired, too. I saw it in his skating. It was his first three games in four nights since arriving in Chicago. His rookie legs were slowly giving out.
I watched him reach for a stride that wasn’t there anymore and come up short. He started strangling his stick the way players do when the tank reads empty.
He didn’t say a word. That wouldn’t be like him. He’d skate himself into the boards before he’d admit he was gassed. I sent a pass to Varga. I knew he’d corner the kid in the room and tell him that being twenty and dead-legged after three games in four nights wasn’t a character flaw.
It wasn’t pretty, but we won the game two to one.
I didn’t see Varga until he was next to me. He emerged from the tunnel crowd, in the stretch of the corridor past the cameras where the carpet starts.
He wasn’t talking. He’d dialed all the way down to the man only I get; the quiet one I bought a house for.
“Hey,” he said. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me. He knew something was off.
For most of the five years, I’d been the one who read him.In that hallway, he reversed the poles.
He read me.
He didn’t push. “Okay,” he said. “Bus,” he added, tipping his head toward the lobby. Then the quiet Varga was gone, swallowed up by comments about Mikkelsen’s dead legs.
I’d built the entire structure that kept us safe and kept everyone away from the truth so Varga could travel light. I’d been the one that protected him until now.
Chapter six
Varga
Iwas three rules into the unofficial rookie handbook when Trier told me, with feeling, to shut up. I declined.
“Rule one. You do not talk to Pratt on the bus to the rink. Notheyornice morning—nothing. On the way there he’s a closed door. If you knock, you lose the hand. Coming home, he’s a person again. The night before a home game, he sleeps on the floor, and you do not ask him about it, ever. That part’s one-A.”
“Okay,” Rafe said.
“Rule two. When the media puts you at the podium, you’ve got one job and it’s not honesty. It’s being boring. If they ask you a real question, you give them a quote about wanting to be better and taking it one game at a time. They write it down, and everyone goes home. If you say something interesting, you’ll be reading about it for a week, and so will I, and it will annoy me.”
“Okay.”
“Rule three. This one’s free. When Markel stops talking in the middle of a sentence, that’s the sentence. The quiet part is the part. Everybody waits for the end when the end already went by.” I pointed my tape roll at him. “Write that one down.”
He didn’t write it down. He looked at me for a second instead. “How many rules are there?” he asked in his prairie-flat voice.
“As many as it takes. That’s the system.” I turned, delighted, because the kid had asked a follow-up, and a follow-up meant he was holding on to what I said. “Rook, two months in, and he’s running his own investigation. The kid remembers everything.”
Two stalls down, Rook had a skate in his lap and a stone in his hand. He didn’t look up from the edge he was working on . “Leave him alone,” he said.
“I’m mentoring him.”
“You’re talking at him.”
