Hitmen Triumph (3 page)

After the charity golf tournament though, things had not been too good. When it came to Nate, my radar had vanished. Thinking about it put me in a bad mood.

Just like the postcard view. Behind me was the Calgary skyline against the blue sky. All the tall buildings. The Calgary Tower with the revolving restaurant. Yup, another postcard view. If you liked postcard views.

As I walked, I kept my eye on the Saddledome so that I wouldn't have to see a beautiful fall sky or the trees with orange and red leaves. Players arrived long before the game started, so there weren't many people there yet. The parking lot was almost empty.

Two guys in a new red Mustang drove into the parking lot. Both wore ball caps and sunglasses. I knew this because the driver sped toward me like he was going to run me over. I stared into the car's grill and windshield until he swerved the car sideways and stopped right beside me.

The driver grinned. He was a few years older than me. He had long blond hair. The passenger was about the same age, but he had dark hair that wasn't quite as long. They were big guys. Really big. Like they worked out and used steroids.

The driver leaned his arm out the window. He was wearing a black T-shirt. The sleeve had moved up his arm, and I saw the tattoo of an eagle.

“Nate,” the driver said.

It wasn't the first time that I had been mistaken for Nate. It happened less these days, because I worked out and I had more bulk than Nate did. The extra muscles helped, going into the corners to fight for the puck. I was wearing a loose sweater though, and the driver probably couldn't tell that I weighed twenty pounds more than Nate.

I should have told him I was Nolan. But the driver was holding a plain white envelope out to me. In the month since the charity tournament, I'd spent a lot of time wondering about the cash that Nate had
used for betting. I confess that was on my mind as I saw the envelope.

“Here you are, dude,” the driver said, holding out the envelope. “Play a good game tonight. Don't get hurt. We'll see you tomorrow night. Usual time. Usual place.”

I still didn't say anything. I took the envelope.

Yes, it was dishonest. I won't pretend anything else. I won't make excuses. It was wrong. I did it. I took the envelope that he thought was going to Nate.

I nodded. Speaking would have let the driver know I wasn't Nate. Nate wasn't deaf.

The driver grinned. Gave a thumbs-up. Then he burned rubber as he blasted out of the parking lot in the shiny red Mustang. Nice car. Expensive car.

I opened the envelope. Nate's envelope.

It held one-hundred dollar bills. Ten of them. Clean, crisp and new.

I found Nate in the dressing room with a few other players who had arrived early. When I stopped beside him, no one paid much attention to the two of us. A few other guys were already there. Some of them were sitting and rolling tape onto the blades of their sticks. Others were talking quietly, telling jokes.

“Here, Nate,” I said, handing him the envelope. “Some guys just gave this to me. They must have gotten you and me mixed up.”

This was about as much as I had said to him since the night of the charity golf tournament. After it ended, he'd found me at my car. Our argument had been short, and I remembered every word.

“If Mercedes hadn't found that other ball, would you have even told me what was happening? Or just taken the money? And what about all that extra cash in your pocket? What's happening, Nate? Why are you keeping secrets from me?”

“I can't tell you,” he had answered. “Trust me, okay?”

“Why don't you trust me and tell me what's happening?”

“When I can, I will,” he had said. “

“Then I guess we don't have anything to talk about until then.”

I was mad and I had walked away. I shouldn't have. Now there was a big wall between us; it was going to stay there until he trusted me enough to tell me what was happening.

If it hadn't been for the fact that we played on the same hockey team, I'm sure
we wouldn't have even seen each other again.

Now Nate took the envelope.

“Did you look in it?” Nate asked. His voice was cold.

“No.” It was a lie. I was hoping he would tell me about the money in the envelope without me asking. Or finally tell me how he got all the money he was able to gamble at the charity golf tournament. Maybe then I could start trusting him again. Large amounts of cash delivered in plain white envelopes are very suspicious.

“Next time,” Nate said, “open your mouth a little earlier and say something. That way there won't be any confusion.”

Had he just insulted the way I speak? Or did he mean I should have told them my name?

“Whatever,” I said.

He folded the envelope and put it in his front pocket. He stared at me. I stared back. The night of the charity golf tournament was a big wall between us that both of us pretended wasn't there.

Who knows how long we might have stared at each other. Fortunately, another player stepped into the dressing room and told us to stop blocking traffic.

Nate moved toward his equipment. I sat down by mine.

I dressed for the game in total silence. The silence of not speaking. The silence of being deaf. The silence of feeling like I no longer had a brother.

Three to three against the Rebels. Four minutes, ten seconds left in the game. I was in the players' box, watching, as a Rebels forward got dinged two minutes for tripping. That gave us a one-man advantage on the upcoming power play.

The crowd was roaring for the Hitmen. I knew that because I could see the hands clapping and the mouths moving. But I couldn't hear it. My world was total silence. When I play hockey, I don't wear the processor that
delivers audio signals to the implant in my skull. I don't wear the magnetic “spider” on my skull either. The spider is a flat circular device a bit bigger than a quarter. It is connected to the processor on my ear by a thin wire hidden by my hair. The equipment is too expensive and, on the ice, too easy to break.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Jonathan Koch, our coach. Everyone just called him Coach Jon. He was in his early thirties, wide and strong, with dark hair. He could bench press three hundred pounds. We never messed with him.

He held up a small whiteboard. He'd written out instructions for me. Coach Jon did that because he didn't trust that I would always be able to read his lips and understand every word.

Some people who have been deaf for a long time before getting cochlear implants learn sign language and lip-reading. I knew many of them called themselves “deafies” and were proud of how well they coped with their hearing loss.

Others, like me, received implants when we lost our hearing as children. We learned to understand sounds through the implants. We weren't forced to read lips or use sign language. Still, I was good at it. Good but not great.

But all of us with hearing loss become very good at understanding the world by watching it. Deaf drivers are usually much better than hearing drivers because they concentrate on what appears in front of the car, not what's on the stereo. I know it made me a better hockey player—everyone said it seemed like I saw everything that happened around me. Off the ice, I'd always concentrated on people's faces as they spoke, and I could read lips.

Coach Jon didn't speak to me. He just held up the whiteboard with instructions:
RADAR, MAKE SURE YOU DON'T GIVE AWAY THE PUCK
!

I nodded. I knew what he meant. For the whole game, my passes from the left side to Nate at center had been off target.

As the other guys on the line shift went onto the ice, Coach Jon wiped the words
off the board. He quickly wrote something else down.

GO GET THEM!

He smiled and patted my back. I stepped onto the ice to join my teammates.

We lined up in the Rebels' zone, with the linesman dropping the puck in the circle to the left of the Rebels' goalie. As left winger, instead of staying on the boards, I took a position above the circle, directly behind Nate, who stepped in to take the draw.

The linesman snapped his hand down as he dropped the puck. Nate fought for it but lost the draw. The Rebels' center kicked the puck toward the boards. From behind him, the Rebels' right defenseman raced to the puck.

So did I.

I got there first. I chipped the puck ahead along the boards, past the defenseman, and I chased the puck into the corner.

I knew where Nate would go. That's why they called me Radar. Because I saw the entire ice and knew how all the plays would unfold.

Yes, Nate was in a traffic jam in front of the net, but he knew what I knew: where the open ice was. Back at the top of the face-off circle, where I had just been. It would be open there. He'd have time to shoot.

I glanced up the boards and saw the defenseman racing for me. The safe pass was to bounce it off the boards knee high, back to our defenseman at the point. But time was ticking. A goal this late in the game would almost guarantee us a win.

I floated a pass to the top of the face-off circle.

Except Nate wasn't there!

Instead the Rebels' center stepped in and took my pass. He had some momentum and used it to peel away up the ice, toward our defenseman on the point.

The Rebels' center saw that our defenseman had come in a little too far, expecting my pass. With his speed, the center knew our defenseman was trapped. The center banged the puck off the boards past the defenseman and burst over the blue line.

The center poured on the speed, breaking loose. All alone on the goalie.

He moved right and then left; then he flicked the puck up and over our goalie's shoulder into our net.

Just like that, we were down 4–3. Worse, we'd given up a shorthanded goal.

Correction. I'd given up a shorthanded goal because of a bad pass.

I hung my head and skated back toward the players' box. I didn't want to be able to read any lips as I took myself off the ice.

About twenty-four hours after causing the Hitmen to lose the opening game of the season, I was standing on a street corner near a theater in the Kensington shopping district of Calgary. The weather had stayed nice, and on this evening a lot of people were walking the streets.

Kensington is an older area of Calgary, across the Bow River from the downtown skyscrapers, with a lot of cool shops and restaurants. It was the kind of area Nate liked.
Fancy people in fancy clothes driving fancy cars. Not my kind of place.

I was wearing jeans and a beat-up leather jacket. Nate, who had already gone into the theater, had on some designer jeans and an expensive leather jacket. I knew this because I'd been following him down the street from a safe distance so he couldn't see me. In the last few months, he'd spent a lot of money on clothes. Which made me wonder, of course, where the money had come from.

It surprised me that he was going to see a movie. I'd expected something else when I'd driven to the house where he was billeted during the season.

Nate had driven straight to Kensington in his late-model Ford pickup. I'd kept some cars between us, and it wasn't a problem following him in my old Camry.

My problem was wondering why two guys in a bright red Mustang had delivered a thousand dollars in cash for him. It seemed obvious that Nate was doing something illegal. Especially because he wasn't talking about it to me.

We'll see you tomorrow night. Usual time. Usual place.

That's what the guys had said just before handing me the envelope.
We'll see you tomorrow night. Usual time. Usual place.

Since I didn't know the time or place, the only way to find out was by watching Nate until he met them. Maybe then I'd learn what all this was about.

A touch on my elbow broke through my thoughts.

I turned to see who was holding my arm. I was surprised to see a girl—tall, like me. About my age too. With long, burnished copper hair. Freckles. And a very, very nice smile. Wearing jeans and a sweater and a leather jacket that wasn't as beat up as mine.

Yup. Mercedes.

Surprised as I was to see her, I was even more surprised when she leaned close and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Great to see you,” she said. Her voice was velvet, even filtered through my cochlear implant.

Wow, I thought, I must have really impressed her at the tournament when I gave away all the gambling money. I'd make sure to tell Nate that. Then he'd finally understand I had done the right thing.

“Great to see you too,” I said. I felt shy.

In the street's light, it was easy to see the frown on her face.

What had I said wrong?

“Nolan?” she said slowly.

I nodded. This suddenly seemed to be going in the wrong direction.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I thought you were Nate.”

Oh. It wasn't
what
I'd said that was wrong. It was
how
I'd said it. As in the way a guy with a hearing difficulty speaks. Instead of the way that a guy in designer jeans and an expensive leather jacket speaks.

“Don't worry about it,” I said. I wanted to crawl into a sewer grate. It would have been easy. I felt only a couple of inches tall. “It happens a lot.”

She shook her head. “No, I should have
noticed quicker. Nate's not as big in the chest as you are.”

She looked down. Then up. She had a big purse, which she held as if to protect herself from me. “I didn't mean it to sound that way. Like I've studied you or anything.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. I'm sure what she meant is that she'd spent a lot of time studying Nate. He must have called her after the golf tournament. Not that I would have known, since he and I weren't speaking to each other.

“It's just that I was expecting to meet Nate at the theater,” she said. “I didn't know you would be here. So I assumed it was Nate I saw on the street and that you hadn't made it to the movie yet.”