Dropping Gloves (25 page)

She gave me a tired, sad smile. And to think, this was just the beginning of it. We had a long way to go from here.

A few minutes later, Webs came down the hall to join us. He stripped off a pair of latex gloves and tossed them in one of two garbage cans. I looked closer and saw that this one was labeled as radioactive. He washed his hands twice and used a paper towel to dry them, once again pressing the foot lever to open the same can.

Laura got up and looked at a schedule that was attached to the fridge with a couple of magnets. “Julianne d’Aragon’s coming over before you’ll need to leave,” she said when she turned around again.

“Remember not to get too close,” Webs added. “Not unless you have to. And wear gloves if you do touch her or something she’s touched, or if you have to clean anything up. Use the other bathroom. And get her to drink. She needs a lot of fluids to flush all this shit out of her system.”

“Ginger ale might be best today because of the nausea,” Laura added.

I let them know that I understood, and eventually Webs got Laura out the door. Then I went down the hall and knocked on Katie’s partially open door.

“You shouldn’t come any closer,” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow she had her head buried in.

I ignored that and moved to sit in the armchair by the window. She turned her head to look at me. Her skin was already a pasty-white color and clammy, and her hair was sticking to her scalp in places.

“I look like shit,” she said, tearing up.

“You look like you feel like shit,” I corrected her.

“I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“Tough. You’re going to have to deal with the fact that I love you, and that means I love every part of you. Even the cranky, feeling-like-shit, trying-to-send-me-away part.”

Katie rolled over to her back, tucking her arms over her chest. “Dad said you’d thought about trying to stay behind.”

“Yeah. I have. I’m still not convinced I should go.”

“You can’t sort out the mess with Koz if you’re here trying to keep my puke bucket clean.” She indicated a paint bucket on the floor by the bed with her eyes. I supposed that was why Webs had been wearing gloves when he’d come out.

I laughed, which caused her to send a glare in my direction. I pointed at her bucket. “I don’t know,” I said. “Sending him in here to deal with that might improve his attitude by a mile.”

I could tell she was fighting it, but a small smile finally forced its way through to the surface. “You’re ridiculous. Do you know that?”

Yeah, I knew it. I would be as silly and outrageous as I had to be if it meant keeping her spirits up, and the truth of how next-to-impossible a task it might prove to be was sinking in.

“Drink some ginger ale,” I said, pointing to the disposable bottle on her nightstand.

She drank, all the while giving me a pathetic pout that could rival a toddler’s.

Instead of playing
cards with some of the guys like I often did, I spent my time on the flight to Philly having a meeting with my leadership team. I brought Burnzie, Danger, Wheels, Jonny, Nicky, and Q together at the back of the plane so we could hash out a plan for moving forward with the Koz issue, as well as for bringing everyone together. There was no better time for some serious team bonding than on a road trip because we were going to be forced to spend time together whether we wanted to or not. I just didn’t have a sound idea for how to do it.

Katie had proven to me that two heads were better than one when she’d pointed out the similarities between me and Razor, and Levi and Koz, so I figured bringing in more guys than just my assistant captains could only improve our odds of finding a solution. Jonny and Nicky had spent their entire careers in Portland, and Wheels and Q had both been around the league a long time. The more experience I could pull together, the better. I wasn’t too proud to admit I needed help.

“So here’s the deal,” I said once I had everyone together. “We’re more than a full month into the season, and we can’t keep our heads out of our asses long enough to blink, let alone play like we have a shot at the playoffs. Bergy’s ready to start benching guys, but I got him to give me a shot at pulling everyone together first. As much as we might enjoy having someone like Koz getting splinters in his ass, that won’t help us as much in the long run as having him on the ice and scoring goals. At least it won’t as long as we can convince him to play within the system. We need to figure out how to do that, though, and nothing so far has worked. Punishing him for fucking up is having the opposite effect from what we wanted.”

The guys nodded and grunted their agreement.

“I think we all know what the fucking problem is, Babs,” Burnzie said. “Too many guys out there thinking they’re fucking perfect. Not enough guys pulling their weight. How the hell do we fix it?”

I grinned, since he’d given me exactly the opening I needed. The thing was, Burnzie and Razor had a lot in common. Burnzie would fall on the other end of the spectrum from Koz, with Razor landing somewhere in between the two of them. “You’re a good example, Burnzie. You’re a cocky son of a bitch, right? How do you respond when someone tells you you’re doing something wrong?”

He chuckled. “I punch him in the fucking nose and keep doing what I’m doing.”

“Exactly. But then look at guys like Q and Jonny,” I said. “What happens if someone comes along and tells one of them they’re screwing something up?”

Danger crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat. “They put their fucking heads down, work ten times harder, and sort their shit out on their own.”

“And think about punching the guy in the fucking nose,” Q added with a grin.

“But we’re role players,” Jonny said. “That’s what we do. We don’t get shit handed to us on a silver platter. We work for every fucking thing we get.”

“You’re never going to convince a guy like Koz to just bury his head and work harder,” Wheels said. “He’s not built that way. He’s been told his whole life that he’s the best there is, so he doesn’t think he needs to change a fucking thing.”

“That’s my point,” I said. “Koz is built like Burnzie. He knows he’s one of the best in the game. He’s got all the skills in the world and he knows how to use them, and he’s never had anyone tell him he couldn’t have anything he wanted. He works hard when it’s something he wants, but otherwise, you can go fuck yourself, as far as he’s concerned. But Burnzie, what would happen if instead of telling you you’re doing something wrong and need to fix it, they told you what you’re doing right and then asked you to step into a bigger role, but to do that you’d have to improve a few things? What would you do then?”

“You mean if you stroke my big, fat ego before breaking the news that I’m shit?” He laughed. “Telling me I’m awesome always helps.”

“Massaging the confidence does wonders for everyone, as long as you don’t go overboard,” Wheels said.

“Right,” Q said. “So what the hell do you want us to do? Go fawn all over his ass? He’s already had enough of that for this lifetime.”

I shook my head. “We massage his ego in a different way. We’ve got Wednesday off. No practice. We’ll be in Raleigh, and I know there’s this team-building place. It’s a puzzle-solving escape game. You have to work together to figure out how to get free before you run out of time. I say we do some team bonding.”

In the game
against the Flyers, you could say that we had been the better team for fifty-five minutes of play. We’d been winning face-offs, getting plenty of offensive zone time, making crisp passes, scoring a couple of goals, staying out of the box, and receiving solid goaltending with Nicky in the net.

But then, with just under five minutes to go, Koz tried to make a fancy pass up the middle of the ice to Ghost instead of skating it out of our defensive zone. Flyers captain Claude Giroux cut off the pass, and then he was off to the races. Levi tried to defend him, but he lost an edge when he tried to dig in. Levi fell and couldn’t get back up in time to be of any use. His partner, Ilya Demidov, was out of position. Demi couldn’t get back in time. Koz got caught flat-footed in neutral ice and wasn’t even thinking about backchecking, and Giroux pulled Nicky out of position before roofing the puck with a sick backhander.

We were still up by a goal. No cause for panic.

Once he got off the ice, Levi went down the tunnel with Drywall Tierney, our head equipment manager, to get the edge on his skate fixed. Bergy sent me, RJ, and Luddy out for the next face-off, along with Burnzie and Cole Paxton on defense.

“Let’s lock this shit down,” Burnzie said as we got into position.

The puck dropped, and RJ lost the face-off to Sean Couturier like he had been all fucking night long.

I busted my ass getting back into defensive positioning, with Burnzie directing traffic. The Flyers dumped the puck into the zone, and I headed in to help Colesy dig it out of the corner. I finally got it free, but Couturier snagged it away from me, and when I tried to steal it back again, my stick got loose. I ended up high-sticking him right in the nose.

Blood started gushing right away. Double minor. I was going to be in the fucking box for nearly all the time left on the clock. Well, I would be if I was lucky. I’d get released early if they scored on either of the ensuing power plays, so at this point, the best scenario I could hope for was being released at the end of my penalty.

I didn’t even attempt to argue with the ref over the call. No fucking point. I skated to the box and took a seat, and hoped the boys could bail me out of this one.

Thirty seconds into the penalty kill, Cody “Harry” Williams took a shot to the head and hit the ice like a fucking bag of bricks. He was able to skate off with the trainers on his own power, but they had to take him back to the quiet room for evaluation because of concussion protocol. That meant we were down to five defensemen.

Play resumed. Levi was one of our
D
out there. A shot headed his way, and he got his foot over to block it. Instead of hitting the plastic protective piece, it knocked the blade clear off his skate. He couldn’t do anything but hop around on one foot. They cleared the puck, and Demi put an arm under his shoulder to help skate him off to the bench, but he had to go get his skate fixed. That would probably take longer than the rest of the game.

A new set of penalty killers went over the boards, but the Flyers brought off a tic-tac-toe play that ended with the puck in the back of our net and Nicky flat on his face with a hand on the back of his thigh, like he’d pulled his groin.

It was a tie game, and I was still stuck in the box for another two minutes of penalty time. I could only sit there and hope the boys held out long enough to get us to overtime.

They helped Nicky off the ice so he could be seen to by the trainers. Bobby went in along with fresh penalty killers. The puck dropped, the Flyers controlled it, and my team was scrambling.

Colesy went after the puck carrier, who turned at the last second, which led to Colesy slamming him hard into the boards. The ref put up his arm and blew his whistle, and then Colesy was joining me in the box for boarding even though it wouldn’t have been boarding if the Flyers player hadn’t turned his fucking back.

Needless to say, Colesy and Bergy and everyone on our fucking bench were livid. Bergy climbed up onto the players’ bench and was screaming obscenities at the refs. Both Webs and Wheels were physically restraining him, keeping him from jumping out onto the ice. I’d never seen him lose his shit like that. Not in person, at least. Back when he’d been a player, he went wild more than a few times, but he’d retired before I ever got into the league.

Colesy was still trying to argue his case when the linesman skated him over to join me, but it was no use. They’d made the call, and they were sticking with it. Now we had to deal with nearly a full two minutes of five-on-three penalty killing, and we were down to only three defensemen and our backup goalie, who hadn’t been granted a chance to warm up before being thrown to the wolves.

“It’ll be all right,” I said when Colesy flopped down next to me. “They’re going to fucking get us out of this mess, and then we’ll get to overtime, and it’ll be all right.” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince him of that or me, but it didn’t matter. Neither of us believed a fucking word out of my mouth right now.

RJ didn’t usually kill penalties, but he was our best guy on the dot, so he usually went out for a five-on-three kill. Sure enough, that was who Bergy sent out. We watched helplessly as Giroux beat RJ on the face-off, and the Flyers set up their power play. A few sharp passes pulled Jens and Burnzie both out of position, and a slapper from the point went in the net. The fans in the building were going wild as I made the eighty-foot skate of shame across to the bench.

It felt like we were finding new ways to lose every game instead of finally figuring out how to win.

Webs thumped me on the back of the head. “Game’s not over, Babs. Keep your head in it.”

It might not officially be over, but it might as well be.

True to their
word, the WAGs had hardly left me alone at all other than overnight when the only thing I was doing was sleeping, anyway. Monday had been miserable, made worse because both Jamie and Dad had to leave with the team. By the time I’d awakened today, though, the worst of the nausea was gone, and Mom was at my door with breakfast.