Enforcer (25 page)

“Bullshit,” Connor said.

“Truth. I have heard the stories. Stories that are not lies. I have seen with my eyes too. He is too dangerous. He does not trust anyone. Not you, not Vadim, not me. He does not even trust Mr. Ojacarcu. Mr. Ojacarcu can order death for him at any moment. Dracul knows this, and does not trust anyone. He would know before I even pull gun out that I am traitor and kill me.”

“If he’s such a badass, then how would Ojacarcu have him killed?”

“Triadă. Three pros. They are team. Trained to kill operatives from Russia. Dracul might kill two of them, but triadă always finishes job. Always. Very expensive. They are known by American intelligence and cannot fly. They are smuggled in. Very bad business.”

“Would Ojacarcu ever have reason to bring in a triad to kill him?” Connor asked, hopeful that it could be as easy as doing what Larry did to him.

“Not for you. Too much television. Forget this.”

“I can’t forget it goddammit. I have to drive her around every single day.”

“She is not driving right now?” Petre asked.

“I think Vadim or someone else is on call in case she needs to go. I don’t know. I can’t get anything out of her except screams or insults. Or silence, if you count that.”

Petre laughed, not meaning to. “Just like old times, yes?”

“It’s not fucking funny,” Connor said.

“It is not. I am apologized.”

“Fuck you, that isn’t going to work on me today,” Connor said, too angry to be amused by Petre’s exaggerated butchering of English.

“I am sorry, Connor,” Petre said. “I am traitor.”

This time Connor did laugh. “Eat shit, man. Eat shit.”

*****

“So… when is this
job
going to end?” Dana asked him later that night. He’d walked down the road after Petre had dropped him off, calling Dana to have her pick him up. They’d progressed back to sleeping together, but things were getting edgy again with his new schedule. Not telling her exactly what job he was doing for Ojacarcu didn’t sit well with her either.

“I don’t know,” Connor answered, wishing she would talk about anything else.

“And what is it you are doing for him?” she persisted.

“Nothing interesting.”

“But you are doing something?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay then. Tell me what you are doing for for this job. I don’t care about it being boring or interesting, so just answer the question.”

“Driving.”

“Driving what? Or is it a who?”

“I drive shit around all day. Shit they don’t want anyone else knowing about, or getting their hands dirty with. It’s how they punish me for not being loyal.”

“So basically if you get busted, it’s all you, right? You won’t rat them out because they’d hurt you, not to mention the fact that everyone loves that slimy asshole and he would just deny it. Am I close?”

“Something like that,” he answered, glad that she believed the partial truth he’d told her, feeling like shit for lying to her. He had yet to have a positive scenario play out in his head that ended with the two of them continuing on as a couple after telling her who he was driving around, and why.

Dana shook her head, let out a sigh, then propped herself up on her elbow.

“What?” he asked as she stared at him.

“There’s something you aren’t telling me,” she said.

“It’s to protect you, that’s all. You don’t want to know. Trust me.”

“That’s the problem,” Dana frowned. “I do trust you. I probably shouldn’t. Not as long as you work for this guy. Just do me one favor if you truly care about me.”

“What?” he asked, turning on his side toward her.

“Tell me if I need to run. Please, just warn me. I’ll leave in the middle of a finals test if I have to. I can always take another semester. I can’t do that if I’m dead.”

“I don’t think they’d kill you,” Connor said, unsure if he was being truthful or not.

“I can’t take a final exam if I’m whoring out of a shack in Miami, or running drugs across a border as a mule, or whatever they might make me do.”

“You watch too much television,” he said, remembering what Petre told him earlier.

Dana wasn’t buying the smile on his face. “I don’t watch television. I don’t need to. My boyfriend works for a gangster. That’s better than television. Except the part where you or I could get killed, or worse.”

Connor wondered if being forced into prostitution or drug smuggling was worse than being dead. He didn’t want to find out.

“I promise if anything is going down, I’ll warn you. You just run. Run somewhere where you don’t know anyone.”

“Should we have like a codeword or something?” she asked him.

“You watch too much television,” he laughed, pulling her on top of him. “Stupid American television.”

CHAPTER 21

His teammates filed around their captain near the door of the locker room. Elvin Gannett looked at each player that passed him by, giving a slap on the shoulder pads, a fist bump, or a swat on the back of their pants as they made their way through the door and down the hallway to the ice surface. Connor was always the last one to leave the dressing room, and tonight was no different. Gansy held out a hand to his enforcer, a grin on his face.

“Let’s do this,” Connor said to his captain.

“It’s been a good year, Dunzer,” Gansy said. “If we win it, we’re in it.”

Elvin let go of his hand and put an arm around his shoulder as they left the locker room together. Connor had been here before, in another uniform at another time. His stomach gave only the slightest hint of nervousness. The Bombers had a 3-1 lead and only twenty minutes left to play. If they could hold off the Titans, they were headed to the UPHL Finals and a shot at winning the Thompson Cup. For the rest of the team, it meant a bonus of five thousand dollars, a considerable sum for most of them. Even if they lost in the finals, they’d each get twenty-five hundred.

Connor didn’t need the bonus. He often made twenty-five hundred in a week in addition to his hockey salary. It was the glory of playing on the big stage, even if the big stage was a three thousand seat arena in Idaho and just over four thousand seats in Lafayette, Indiana, home of the Lafayette Lions, that he craved. The last six games against the Titans, evenly split, had been refreshing for his mind.

He’d been given a respite from his driving job all through the playoffs, something he’d been thankful for. It gave him the ability to focus his mind on hockey, as well as Dana whenever the Bombers were home. She went to the games, even took a couple of her friends thanks to Connor’s four seats. They’d decided it would be better if she could give the other three tickets to friends, instead of her showing up alone. Dana had no trouble getting friends to go to the playoff games, even giving Alice a
date
twice, though Alice had given an extra ticket each time to her real date.

He was halfway down the corridor when the home crowd erupted, louder than he’d ever heard them in his four years playing for the Bombers. Even when the team had played in the finals two years before, he couldn’t remember them filling the arena with this much noise. He smiled, mostly to himself, as he crossed over the threshold from the hallway to the bench, then over the bench wall to the ice. He was sure the crowd got even louder when they saw his number thirty jersey skate out from bench.

The sound of the horn let the teams know it was time to finish the game. Connor skated back to the bench and sat at the far end. Coach Lamoureux would probably use Connor’s line, the fourth line, at least three or four times as long as the Bombers held the lead.

Connor and his linemates weren’t expected to score, but they were expected to play hard defense for the thirty seconds or so they were out and not give a up a goal, giving the other lines a chance to get a much-needed breather. Especially near the end of the period when both teams would be lagging from almost sixty minutes of exhausting up and down skating, checking, and shot blocking. The fourth lines of both teams would become an important factor as long as neither gave up a goal.

Sitting on the bench, knowing he could go five or even ten minutes before his skates touched the ice, gave him time to watch the game intently, keeping an eye on which Titans needed to be played closely, which might need an extra shove or a stealthy cross-check. He also had time to let his eye wander between whistles to see if he could spot Dana.

“Four-four-four,” Walters called, letting Connor know his line was up. Eight minutes had passed, neither team doing anything other than punishing each other with thundering checks and the constant chasing of players up and down the ice, wearing each other’s legs out.

The third line skated into the bench area and Connor was over the boards, pumping his legs to keep the Titans from having their way through the neutral zone. He watched their defenseman, Zanna, carry the puck out of the Titans’ end, and lined him up for a hit. Zanna barely made it to the center line before Connor collided with him, just as he shot the puck hard down the boards and into the Bombers’ zone. Both of them braced at the moment of impact, the glass absorbing the force of the blow before both players lost their footing and tumbled to the ice.

Zanna’s stick shot out, the blade catching Connor behind the knee as he tried to get up. It was an old trick that all players knew. If a player went down, you did everything you could to keep him down just a second or two, sometimes up to five seconds longer. Zanna was smart enough to try to rise at the same time so it looked like his stick was simply tangled up in Connor’s legs, but Connor could feel the force of the blade holding his knee to the ice.

He should have known something was wrong by the way the defenseman wasn’t even looking at him, instead looking down into the Bombers’ zone. Connor finally got back on his skates and looked back just in time to see the light behind his goal turn red and hear the cheering erupt from the Titans’ bench, a few “fuck” and “shit” curses thrown in from his own teammates. From the time Connor collided with the defenseman to the time he finally got his skates under him took less than six seconds, but that’s all the Titans had needed as the puck took a wonky bounce from one of the metal stanchions that held the glass panels in place, and instead of rolling hard around the glass from the dump-in, it shot off the glass straight into the middle of the ice.

The Titans’ forward, Kalinsky, had scooped it up, while everyone else from both teams turned on their skates once they realized the puck hadn’t screamed around the end boards like it was supposed to, and shot it into an almost empty net. Mondin, the Bombers goalie, had been fooled like everyone else, going behind his net to try to stop the puck.

“Don’t sweat it, boys,” Coach Lamoureux called out to his bench, looking Connor in the eye. “It’s a shit bounce. No one’s fault. We’re still in control. Shake it off and let’s finish them.”

A few of his teammates slapped him on the shoulder pads and gave him a conciliatory “nice check” or “not your fault” as they came off the ice at the end of their shift. Connor fumed, knowing that it was one of those unlucky instances that sometimes happen in sports. Sometimes the basketball bounces off the rim in just the wrong way. Once in a while, the football hits the turf just right on one of the pointed ends, and instead of going into the hands of the right player, it seems to magically teleport to the wrong one. In hockey, a frozen rubber puck being shot off solid boards and even more solid glass at speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour made for some unfortunate situations.

With the teams now only separated by a single goal, the Titans double-shifted their top lines, keeping Connor on the bench for the next eight minutes. “Four-four-four,” Walters called, and Connor snapped his chin strap in place and stood up. It turned into a terrible line change, the Bomber defensemen and forwards thinking they’d dumped the puck deep down the ice. Connor and his teammates screamed at them to turn around, but it was too late, the Titans entered the zone with a three-on-one advantage.

Mondin kicked out the first shot, but he kicked it right onto the stick of a Titan, and the crowd went from deathly silent to a deafening chorus of boos and angry shouts. Coach Lamoureux used his timeout, calling everyone on the bench and the ice to gather around. Connor looked up to the clock and saw just over three minutes left, the score 3-3.

“Goddammit, Jakes, Tooks, what the fuck was that? You got to fucking get that puck deep before you can change. This isn’t fucking pee-wee hockey.” Lamoureux realized he was shouting and lowered his voice, trying to calm himself as well as his team. “Listen. We got three minutes to end this. We can take them in overtime, but I goddamn well want to go home tonight and fuck my wife with a winner’s cock. Got it? We’ve owned these fucks all night. Gansy, James, Potsy, gimme a damn goal. I’ve never been to Lafayette. I’m sure it’s a giant shithole, but I’d like to see it before I die.”

The linesmen and ref blew their whistles in chorus, the horn sounding as well to let both teams know it was time to play. The arena loudspeakers blared something from Metallica while the PA announcer called on the crowd to make as much noise as possible. Connor sat at the end of the bench again, wishing he were on the ice.

He kept hoping for one more shift. He’d been out only once, his line getting scored on, and his skates had just touched the ice when the tying goal went in. He knew he could will himself to win the game, the dream every boy has growing up on the frozen rivers and lakes of Canada. Every shot was game seven, every foe was vanquished until there were none left, every boy the hero in his own version of the fantasy.