Page 65 of Never Flinch

Kate wrinkles her nose. “Needs must when the devil drives, I suppose. Shakespeare.”

“All’s Well That Ends Well.”

Kate laughs. “Not just a bodyguard, an English major.”

“No, I just read a lot of Shakespeare as a teenager.”Romeo and Juliet, for instance. Over and over.

“Let’s get some dinner,” Kate says. “That’s also on the house, so order something expensive. I’ll have fish. Anything else, I’m apt to burp and fart onstage.”

“Do you get nervous before your… before you go on?”

“It’s ashow, Holly. You don’t have to be afraid to say it. No. Excited. Call me a partisan, I don’t mind. I try to hide zeal with humor. It’s stand-up, funny as I can make it, but deadly serious underneath. This isn’t the country I grew up in, it’s Funhouse America now. Don’t get me started on that shit. What about you? Areyounervous?”

“A little,” Holly admits. “Bodyguard work is new to me.”

“Well, you were fine when that alarm went off. I was something of a pisshead about it, wasn’t I?”

Holly doesn’t want to say yes or no, so she just seesaws her hand in the air.

Kate smiles. “Good in a crisis situation, knows Shakespeare, also diplomatic. A triple threat.” She hands over the room service menu. “Now what do you want?”

Holly orders a chicken club, knowing she won’t eat much of it. It’s almost time to start earning her keep.

5

By the time Trig gets back to work, the numbing agent Rothman used—Novocain or whatever has replaced it these days—is wearing off, and the socket where his molar used to be is throbbing. Rothman gave him a scrip for painkillers, and he stopped on the way back to pick them up. Only six tablets; they’ve gotten sostingyabout that stuff.

Maisie asks how he feels. Trig tells her not so hot and she says, “Pooryou.” Trig asks if there’s any biz he should attend to or calls he should return. She tells him there’s nothing she can’t deal with, justthe current agenda he already knows about. She suggests he go home. Lie down. Maybe put an icepack on his cheek.

“I think I will,” he says. “Have a good night, Maisie.”

He doesn’t go home; he goes to Dingley Park.

There’s a small lot for park personnel near the rickety silo shape of the old Holman Hockey Rink. He parks there, starts to get out of his car, then rethinks and takes the .22 from the center console. He puts it in the pocket of his sportcoat.

I’m not going to do anything with it, he thinks. Which reminds him, perhaps inevitably, of his drinking days. Going into the Three-Ring on the way home from the office and telling himself he’ll only have a Coke.But this time I mean it.

Which makes the ghost of his father laugh.

The old rink is surrounded by pines and spruces. There are picnic benches and food wagons off to the right—Frankie’s Fabulous Fish, Taco Joe’s, Chicago Dogs & Pizza—now closed and shuttered for the afternoon. Further off, Trig can hear men shouting as they practice for the big cops vs. firemen charity game. He hears the clink of aluminum bats and laughter.

The rink’s sagging double doors are flanked by paintings of ghostly, barely-there hockey players. A sign reads HOLMAN RINK CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF CITY COUNCIL. Below this, someone has chalked BECAUSE JESUS DON’T SKATE! Which makes no sense to Trig.

He tries the doors. Locked, as he expected, but there’s a keypad, and the red light at the top tells him the batteries are still putting out juice. He has no idea what the passcode might be, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get in. His father was an electrician, and when he wasn’t yelling at Trig, or beating the shit out of him, or taking him to this very place, he sometimes talked about his work, including certain tricks of the trade.Always take a picture of the breaker panel before starting work. Keep zip ties handy; they have all sorts of uses. Don’t stick your finger where you wouldn’t stick your dick.As a boy, Trig had encouraged these sermons, partly because they were interesting and mostly because when Daddy was talking, Daddy was happy.Hockeymade him happy, especially when the players would drop their gloves on the ice and goat it—whap-whap-whap. Sometimes he would even put his arm around Trig and give him a careless hug.Trig, he’d say.My good old Trigger.

Sermons and instructional talks at the Holman Rink usually lasted eighteen minutes, no more, no less. That was the length of the breaks between periods.

Trig looks around, sees no one, and plants his fingernails beneath the keypad’s cover. He levers it up, pulls it off, and looks inside. Printed there is PC 9721. The PC stands for Plumber’s Code, but his father told him that was just a holdover from the old days. All kinds of service people—rink maintenance guys, electricians, the Zamboni operator—used the PC.

Trig puts the cover back on the keypad and pushes 9721. The yellow light turns green. He hears the locking bar clunk as it withdraws, and then he’s inside. Easy as pie. He crosses the lobby, where an abandoned popcorn machine stands guard over an empty snackbar. Yellowing paper posters of long-gone Buckeye Bullets hockey players hang on the walls.

He walks into the rink itself. The slowly disintegrating roof is split with blinding lines of light. Pigeons (Trig guesses they’re pigeons) flutter and swoop. Unlike the sturdy metal bleachers at the soccer and softball fields, the ones in here are wooden, sagging, splintery. Fit for ghosts like Trig’s daddy instead of people. The ice is long gone, of course. Creosoted boards, twenty-footers, crisscross cracked concrete, making tic-tac-toe patterns. Hardy weeds sprout from between many of them. There’s surprisingly little trash—no snack bags or busted crack vials, no discarded rubbers. The druggies have been kept out in the surrounding trees, at least so far.

Trig walks to what was once center ice. He drops to one knee and runs his hand over one of the boards—lightly, so he won’t pick up a splinter and add a throbbing palm to his throbbing mouth. He has no idea what these boards are doing in here. Maybe they’re supposed to discourage skateboarders, or somebody just wanted to get them out of the sun and rain, but he knows one thing: they’d burn fast and hot. The whole place would go up like a torch. And if certain innocent people were in here—some perhaps famous—they would also go up like torches.

I wouldn’t be able to put the names of the guilty ones in their hands, he thinks,because they’d be burned to cinders.

But then an idea strikes him, one so brilliant that he actually rocks back a little on his knee, as if from a sudden blow. Putting the names of the guilty in the hands of the innocent might not be necessary. There could be a better way. He could put their names in a place where everyone in the city would see them. All over theworld, once the TV news crews descended.

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