Page 3 of Hard Hitter
“Uppers.” Hammer closed O’Doul’s hand over the pills. “You’ll love ’em. Only one a game, though, okay? And you won’t get hooked.”
O’Doul wasn’t proud of it, but he’d hidden those tablets in a bottle of plain aspirin. Parsing them out over the next three weeks, he’d taken one pill before each game. The results were even better than Hammer promised. The drug made him feel energetic and invincible.
But then they were gone. So he’d taken the risky step of buying a dozen more from a guy in a nightclub in lower Manhattan. For a few short weeks they provided exactly the lift he needed. When his stash was depleted again, he missed the fearlessness they’d granted him. But buying that shit was both embarrassing and tricky. So this month he’d gone without.
Consequently, tonight’s game lasted eighty years. The score was still 1–1 in the third period. For what felt like the hundredth time that night, Patrick’s coach tapped him on the back. Fifteen seconds later he leapt up for the line change. Again. And just as quickly, the other team’s enforcer turned his back. His Twitter taunter wouldn’t ask for the fight. The fans wanted it. The teams wanted it. But this dick was making everyone wait.
Fuck. Mind games were the worst. They distracted him from the business of blocking shots and scoring goals. And that, of course, was the point.
Now O’Doul accelerated backwards at top speed, face to face with Adam Hartley, Boston’s youngest left wing, blocking the kid’s path and being a general nuisance. The kid wasn’t going to get a shot off if he had a say in it.
Meanwhile, his man Castro got the puck back on abreakaway and gave it a good try. But Boston’s goalie got a lucky save and thwarted Brooklyn’s attempt to break the 1–1 tie.
The shift ended without a score, and without incident, goddamn it. Trekowski stayed as far away as it was possible to do on a 200 foot sheet of ice. Bastard. Not all of the league enforcers were good guys like Hammer. This one was a real piece of work—the kind who’d insult his own mother on Twitter if it made him look tougher.
At thirty-two, Patrick felt too old for this shit. And he was keenly well aware of how obnoxious it sounded to claim to be too old for anything at thirty-two.
He sat back down on the bench, sweating, and reached for a water bottle only because it allowed him to surreptitiously stretch his hip for the hundredth time.
“You want me to draw him out?” Leo Trevi asked from beside him on the bench. “Don’t know what Trekowski is doing over there. Posting your picture on Instagram, maybe.”
When Patrick looked up, he caught an unmistakable look of concern behind the rookie’s face shield.Fucking great. The whole stadium could probably tell he was on edge. Though Leo—or College Boy, as O’Doul liked to call him—was awfully smart. “Naw,” he said, swilling water. “I’ll get ‘im soon enough.”
The game dragged on, with Patrick’s hip aching as the clock ticked down. When he was younger, pain was just pain. It was something to live through until you could have a nice whiskey and a couple of painkillers. Even now it wouldn’t bother him so much if it weren’t such a harbinger of doom. The Bruisers needed to make the play-offs. They had a new coach and some new blood and a decent record. The owner wanted it. Badly.
Competition—the good kind—had always fueled him. So he leaned into it now, taking the ice once again. They only needed one more goal tonight, and it would happen. He could feel it.
But first, a fight.
Trekowski gave him an opening, finally. It happened when the fool slid into Brooklyn’s goalie a little too carelessly. It wasn’t the worst offense Patrick had ever seen, but the crowd made a noise, and he went for it. Instead of campaigning the ref for a penalty, he got in Trekowski’s face. “That’s enough bullshit, big man. I’m done with you.”
The enemy gave him a toothless grin. “You want to go right now?”
Do I have a choice?That was his last conscious thought. Fight mode was always a blur. His gloves fell on their own accord as he circled Trekowski, sizing him up, looking for the first attack. His opponent’s arms were about as long as Sasquatch’s. O’Doul was only six feet tall, two hundred pounds. He wasn’t huge, and he wasn’t heavy.
His only advantage was bone-deep grit.
To win against Trekowski, he’d have to yank him in hard and keep him close. So he faked a grab and the guy ducked. Patrick lunged forward on his good side and grabbed the guy’s sweater with his right hand, throwing a punch with his left.
That was exactly the opposite of his usual move, and the surprise actually worked. Patrick landed two punches before he took one himself, right below the ear. It hurt like a bitch. But surprise was still working for him, so he presented that side of his head again, as if asking for another, then swapped his hands as fast as lightning. His next three punches landed in quick succession on the guy’s ribcage. Not the most sensitive spot, but you had to go to war with the grip you had. And it kept his strained muscles away from this jerk’s flailing limbs.
The crowd might have been chanting,Fight! Fight!Or maybe that was just the pounding of his own heart. Patrick’s vision tunneled down to only the set of Trekowski’s mouth—it was tight, meaning these punches were felt.
Patrick was taking blows to his shoulder, but they barely registered. It was his good side, for one. And the angle wasn’t too intense. But time was slipping by. He needed toend this before the goon changed tactics. It was risky as hell, but Patrick tried a one-footed stance to knee the guy in the thigh and unbalance him. Then he gritted his teeth and landed one good punch a little higher up, right in his chest.
Trekowski went down, and Patrick narrowly avoided landing right on top of him. He tore himself out of the guy’s grasp and righted himself just as the ref rushed in to pull him back. They always ended things when someone went down.
The crowd’s roar—silenced before by adrenaline—now echoed in his ears. They screamed his name and waved foam fingers. Or jeered, depending on attitude, level of drunkenness, and team affiliation.
A few minutes from now a video of the fight would be up on a website where fans would vote on it. He’d earn an 85 percent or 90 percent win rating for this one. Crazy job he had. When the night went well, he felt relief first and then pain later. When a fight went badly, he got stitches and curses from fans.
He was a side show, like one of those circus freaks who used to bite the heads off chickens in front of a jeering crowd.
It worked, though. The energy in the arena shifted in Brooklyn’s favor. Two minutes later his man Beringer scored a goal, bringing them into the lead.
Boston wasn’t able to answer it in the remaining six minutes of play, and the Bruisers would go back to the hotel with two game points. So nobody could say his contribution didn’t matter.
And nobody did.
