Page 7 of Thin Ice

"You watch the arena?"

"I watch everything." He thumbed the tape to a stop on a faceoff. "You're going to tell me that's your line."

"It's a good line. Maybe I'll steal it."

That earned a half-smile. I grabbed a beer. It meant I was playing along. Every time I let Nolan hand me something, he loosened a degree.

"Watch this D-man, second pair." He ran the clip back and leaned forward. "He cheats up on the strong-side wall every single time the puck's below the goal line. Every time. You can leave a guy backdoor, and he won't see it till it's in."

"So you leave a guy backdoor?"

Nolan turned to look at me.

"You know what it looks like," he said. "You've seen the goal a hundred times: guy alone at the far post, taps it in. What you don't see is the two seconds before. Watch the D." He ran it back. "Puck goes below the goal line, he jumps the strong-side wall—here—and for those two seconds the far post doesn't exist to him. That's not a mistake he makes. That's a mistake he is."

He talked about their forecheck for a while after that, not to teach me. It was thinking out loud at a body in the room. I knew enough to follow and not enough to argue.

Somewhere in there, I stopped collecting information. For two days I'd been building a file on Nolan. Now, I was just there in his condo, enjoying it, which is a different thing, something The Guardians have a policy about.

An operator who recognizes a developing attachment to a client is expected to disclose it at the earliest point his judgment could be plausibly affected. I knew the policy word for word. I could call Mac in Seattle right away, but nothing had happened. I'd call when there was something to call about.

My phone buzzed.

"I need to take this."

"Take it." Nolan turned his attention back to the screen.

I walked five steps down the hall and answered. "Go."

"You sitting down?" Michael McCabe ran research for The Guardians out of Seattle, and he didn't ask that unless he had something. "I started pulling the Carolina medicals. The window when Mercer was there. There's a file in here somebody spent real time on."

In the living room, the sound of hockey started up again—the scrape of the skates and thunk of a puck off the boards. I leaned back against the wall. "Spent time on how?"

"On making it look boring." A beat. "It's too clean for a healthy nineteen-year-old kid. The name's Hawkins."

***

I'd expected more noise. The Steamers were a win away from the Stanley Cup Final, primed for a celebration. Instead, the plane was more like a church, and we were ten minutes off the ground before I understood why. Everyone found their seats as if it were all choreographed, and they didn't speak. It was superstition; I realized. A team that's winning won't change a single thing on the theory that any one element might be the reason for victory.

Nolan had a window seat two rows up on the right. He had headphones in with a tablet running a tape. A cold Dunkin' cup rode in his seatback pocket, untouched since leaving the ground.

McCabe called the second we leveled off.

"The records aren't missing. That's the part I need you to hear, because missing would be easier. Missing, you go find who took them. These are tidied—altered."

"The difference being?"

"Hawkins's medicals from that rookie year exist. More of them than you'd expect for a healthy nineteen-year-old. They are scattered across three systems with redundancy that makes no sense, as if there were constant monitoring that never found anything. Sitting on top of it is a consulting layer that's its own little world. Tarn Performance Institute. Carolina brought them in that season for an integrated player-recovery protocol. The kid's got a whole second file that isn't really medical. Medical is what's wrong with you and what they did about it. This is something they were running on him. It was a program with the same steps every week, whether or not anything hurt, like he was a procedure they were carrying out, not a patient they were treating."

A pause; he drank something. "And it's wrong, Elias. Not falsified-wrong. Too good. Have you ever seen a real training-room file? I compared Hawkins to the other players. For them, there are notes scrawled at eleven at night, and the guy's name is spelled two different ways on the same page. Hawkins's file is pristine. Somebody combed it."

"Keep pulling," I said. "I need to make a call once we land."

Nolan got up, and I assumed he was heading for the lavatory. Instead, he dropped into the seat beside me.

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, just had a call. Work thing. Boring."