Page 58 of Pipe Dreams
“Go take a rest, Mike.” She flung her things into the bag without looking at him. Then she pulled a sleeveless knit dress over her head, and his traitorous eyes followed its path down her sleek body. “See you at the rink tonight.”
Then she was gone, leaving him sitting there, Googling the heck out of a fertility drug and trying to decide what it might mean.
SEVENTEEN
Six hours later, Beacon had only one thing on his mind: a black, six-ounce rubber disc. You don’t get twelve years as a starting NHL goalie unless you can concentrate when it counts.
It was the middle of a hard-fought second period and the score was still zip-zip. Brooklyn was skating hard against Tampa, defending their zone and taking shots, too. They just hadn’t quite gotten lucky enough to score.
Tampa was frustrated, too. Beacon could tell they were working harder than they’d expected to. Their star forward was Danny Skews—a wiry dude with an angry snarl. Beacon had never liked the guy. Tonight his face was even redder than usual. Beacon thought he looked ready to crack under the weight of his own frustration.
That’s cool, he told himself. A rattled offensive player was easier to read. Their opponents got a hold of the puck, and play moved down the ice toward Beacon. He stayed loose, watching the whole zone at once. That was his job—to see every possible outcome of the play, and to be readyto backstop everyone else’s errors. Skews passed to his wing, who passed it back.
Then something beautiful happened. O’Doul got into Skews’s blind spot, and none of the Tampa players gave their man the heads-up. It shouldn’t have worked, but O’Doul leaned in at just the right split second and blocked the next pass, getting his stick on the puck just long enough to redirect it back to Trevi.
Skews got stripped while twenty thousand people watched.
The guy’s response was to trip O’Doul, who went down grinning. And then it got even better, because Skews got called for the trip. That’s when his composure snapped. “Fuck you!” he screamed at the ref, while O’Doul openly laughed.
“C’mon.” The ref pointed toward the sin bin.
“That was a clean check,” Skews argued.
“Really? You want to fight it? We can make it four minutes,” the ref offered.
“Fuck you,” Skews spat again. “Bunch of little fucking faggots, all of you.” He turned toward the penalty box.
“Classy,” Trevi muttered as he skated past.
Beacon had only been a bystander to this little drama up until now, but the gay slur instantly doubled his blood pressure. “Hey!” Beacon called after the ref. “You can’t let him say that shit! How many kids do you think just heard that? Bet the network got it on camera.”
The ref frowned, his eyes following Skews to the box, where the red-faced player was still cursing under his breath. Beacon saw the official think it through, his gaze snapping toward the television cameras. He turned and skated toward the scorekeepers’ bench. When he got there, he leaned in to confer with the official, and the linesmen skated over to join them.
Beacon fidgeted in front of his net, watching the confused faces of his teammates. Although the delay was probably only ten or fifteen seconds and counting, it was unusual in hockey.
A moment later, Beacon was stunned to hear the announcer call for Skews’s ejection from the game. “Unsportsmanlike conduct,” the ref had called. But instead of a bench minor, the guy was thrown the hell out.
There was aroarinside the stadium, as well as inside Beacon’s head.Holy shit.Holy shit, he repeated to himself. Players had been ejected from play-offs games before, but it was rare, and Beacon couldn’t think of an instance that did not involve egregious bodily harm to another player. Beacon was willing to lay odds that this would be the first time in NHL history that a player was ejected for hate speech. And in a play-offs game!
Holy shit. Their opponents were going to lose their ever-loving minds.
While the crowd continued to shout and stamp their feet—some in favor of this development, but many against—the refs called for a face-off. All his teammates were rested from their unexpected timeout, but their faces looked tense as the puck dropped.
Tampa won the puck, and play transferred quickly to Beacon’s end of the ice. His attention snapped back to the game. “Trevi’s open!” he barked at O’Doul, who couldn’t see the field as clearly as he could. “Man on!” he shouted at Castro a moment later. His whole world was reduced to the scrape of blades against ice and the slapping scramble of sticks and bodies.
His boys cleared the puck before things got too crazy. They iced it, though, so both teams went scrambling toward the other end of the rink. And it was on like Donkey Kong for the rest of a very sweaty period. Ultimately, the loss of their star center cost Tampa, though. And it was Beringer who put one in the net for Brooklyn before the buzzer rang. They all clomped down the chute into the visitors’ dressing room for the second intermission, awash in adrenaline.
“Well boys, that was interesting,” Coach said, snapping his gum. “You better lock this one up now. That’ll reallymake ’em squirm. And you need to show that whole goddamn arena you can clobber them with this weird-ass opportunity you just created.”
“We didn’t create it,” Beacon spoke up. “Skews did with his punk-ass mouth.”
“Excellent point, sir.” Coach put a hand to his chest. “My mistake. But your game better follow through. Capitalize on this disruption. Don’t let ’em get their shit together before you get your shots off.”
There were murmurs of agreement while everyone slugged back water and tried to stay loose. Beacon did some stretches, and then it was time to get back out there.
As everyone predicted, their opponents were downright pissy about the ejection. Things got chippy right away, and the game devolved into a hairy melee with a lot of artless potshots taken all around.
Beacon watched Leo Trevi get slashed in the back by a Tampa stick when the refs weren’t looking.
