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“I’m not investigating any of you. I want to be direct about that, because rooms hear this wrong. What I’m doing is telling twenty-four people that money is being moved on your first periods, so that if anybody outside this building has approached any of you, or approaches you next month, you know what it is when it happens.”
She holds up a card between two fingers.
“Nobody is going to be asked to make a speech about this. If someone contacts you, call the number on this card. Say the words ‘somebody contacted me.’ Then stop talking. Let me do my job. It doesn’t go through your club. It doesn’t go through your agent. It comes to me.”
She walks the front row and starts handing them out. The pile goes back along the rows, hand to hand, the way a sign-up sheet does.
Mine comes to me from the young defenseman, who’s on his phone.
Plain white. Black type. Her name, a title, a cell number, and nothing at all on the back.
I put it in my jacket pocket.
Beau says, from the back of the room, “Can I ask something?”
“Please.”
“Say a guy gets approached.” He has his arms folded and he says it in his normal voice, which is a big voice. Every head in the room turns. “And he doesn’t call you that day. He sits on it a week because he doesn’t know what he’s looking at, or he’s scared, or he thinks he’s handling it, and then he calls. What happens to him?”
“That depends entirely on how long he waits,” Yeardley says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one there is.” She says it without any edge at all. “A man who calls me the same week has a story about a phone call. A man who calls me in July has a story about six months of decisions. Nothing between those two things changes what happened to him. It changes what I’m able to do about it. That’s not a threat; it’s arithmetic, and I’d rather you had the arithmetic than a reassurance.”
“Fair enough,” Beau says.
He’s asking as a captain. He’s asking because there are eleven kids in this room under twenty-five and two of them have gambling apps on the phones they’re holding right now. He’s standing four feet from me with his arms folded, oblivious, doing his job.
Priya thanks her. The room breaks up. Somebody puts the card straight in the trash by the door. Somebody else fishes it back out and gives it to him again as a joke.
I go and get taped.
Practice is normal. Nils runs a forty-minute skate with a long neutral-zone section and gets annoyed at the same winger twice. Emil and I take turns in the drill. He beats me twice on the same play and points at me both times with his blocker.
At the end of it, I stay out and take shots from the young defensemen because they ask. One of them says, “Hey, did you ever get approached? Like, ever, in your whole career?” He laughs. The other one shoves him.
I say, “Shoot the puck,” and they do. The whole exchange takes nine seconds and neither of them thinks about it again.
I think about it in the shower and the drive home. By the time I’m back in the building at five with a plate of pasta in front of me, I have it under control.
We beat Detroit two to one. I stop thirty-three. It’s the best I’ve played in a month. Nobody in the building can tell the difference between that and the night I let one in on purpose. Neither, if I’m honest with myself in a parking garage afterward, can I.
Roth is at my truck at twenty past ten that night.
The garage is nearly empty. He’s not leaning on it, because he doesn’t lean; he’s standing by the driver’s door in the gray coat with his hands in his pockets, and when I come across the concrete he takes them out.
I stop about six feet away.
He doesn’t say hello. He doesn’t say my name, because he’s never used it. He reaches into his coat, takes out a piece of paper folded in four, and holds it out at arm’s length.
I take it.
He puts his hands back in his pockets and walks off toward the ramp. He’s gone around the corner before I open it.
It’s a page torn off a desk pad. There’s a date written on it in blue ballpoint in a small hand that slopes backward.
That’s all. No time, no name, no amount.
