Forty Days To Testify

The Three A.M. Rink

"Just tired," I'd told Roz.

She'd said, "Mm-hm," and let me walk out with the cup still in my hand.

That was the part that kept me awake. She let me go.

At 2:30 a.m. I gave up on Marcy's good pillow. The motel ceiling had a water stain shaped like Florida. I'd counted its edges twice. Down the hall, a door slammed, and I was on my feet with my back against the wall before I knew I'd moved.

Nobody came. Just a drunk with bad aim.

"Great," I told Florida. "Very relaxed."

I put on the blazer. I took the folder. I told myself the books were why.

The arena was colder at night. The cold sat in the seats like it paid rent.

I heard it before I saw it. A blade, hard on ice. Then another. A long scrape, a stop, a spray of shavings, and the whole thing again. No music. No voices. Just someone skating like the ice owed him money.

I stopped at the top of the stairs.

Kane was alone on the rink. Black shirt, no pads, no helmet. He took the length of the ice in six strides, cut hard at the boards, and came back faster. His breath showed in the work lights. Every turn looked like it hurt and he did it anyway.

I should have left. I'd decided that on the stairs.

I sat down in the third row instead.

He saw me on his next pass. His head came up and his stride didn't break. He circled once more. Then he slowed and drifted to the boards right below me, one glove-less hand resting on the rail.

His knuckles were split. Old scar, fresh scrape, a white seam running straight through two of them. I looked at it a second too long and made myself look somewhere else.

He didn't ask why I was here.

"Cold up there," he said.

"I like cold."

"Nobody likes cold."

"I like it better than quiet."

He thought about that. "Rink's not quiet."

"It's quiet enough."

He pushed off the rail, did a slow lap, and came back. "There's a blanket in the penalty box."

"Is that an invitation?"

"It's a blanket."

I went down. The penalty box smelled like old rubber and cedar-scented soap. The blanket was gray wool, and somebody had folded it with corners. I wrapped it around my shoulders and sat on the bench with the door open.

He didn't skate away. He leaned on the boards three feet from me, breathing hard, watching the ice.

"You do this every night?" I asked.

"Most."

"Doesn't the team notice?"

"They think I'm training."

"Are you?"

"No."

I waited. He didn't fill it. That was something I was starting to figure out about him. Silence wasn't empty for him. It was furniture.

"What time do you usually sleep?" I said.

"Don't."

"Same."

"Since when?"

I almost answered. The truth was right there, four months deep. "A while."

"Yeah." He rolled his shoulder. "Me too."

That was all. He didn't ask what kept me up. I didn't ask who split his hand. We sat in the hum of the Zamboni with a sheet of ice between us and nothing said, and it was the first quiet in a year that didn't feel like waiting for something to break.

Somewhere in the building, a door banged shut. The vent. The wind. Something.

I flinched. My hand jumped to the bench rail.

He flinched too. A small thing. His whole body stopped, like a wire pulled tight, and his eyes went to the far doors.

We both saw it.

Neither of us said a word.

"Wind," he said finally.

"Probably."

"Doors in here are old."

"Right."

He let go of the boards. His hands opened and closed once at his sides. Big hands. Careful, for what they were. They'd split someone's lip, I'd bet money, but they'd also folded this blanket.

I looked away before he caught me.

He caught me.

"You count them?" he asked.

"Count what?"

"Exits."

My stomach dropped. "Occupational habit."

"Three," he said. "Two on this side. Loading dock behind the Zamboni room."

"I know."

"I know you know." He tipped his chin at the north end. "You've looked at that one four times."

"It's a nice door."

"It's a bad door. It sticks." He paused. "Use the east one."

I stared at him. He stared at the ice, as if he hadn't just handed me a way out of his own building.

"Why would you tell me that?" I asked.

"Seemed useful."

"That's it? Useful?"

"You want a better answer?"

"I want a true one."

He was quiet a long time. Then he said, very low, "I'd like you to have a door."

The cold got in under the blanket. I pulled it tighter.

"I should go," I said.

"Okay."

"I have files."

"Okay."

"You're not going to stop me."

"No."

I stood. My knees weren't entirely mine. "Thank you for the blanket."

"Keep it."

The office was dark except for my phone. I left the lights off. Habit.

I'd brought the maintenance folder with me, and I hadn't opened the back. Four million dollars in invoices, and behind them a thin stack of bank confirmations stapled at the corner. Wire transfers. Out of an account called Hartford Arena Operating.

I read them standing up.

Three months of wires. Round numbers again. The receiving account was a holding company called Larkspur Ridge Capital.

I knew that name.

I didn't know it like a vendor. I knew it like a face in a crowd. A name on page forty-one of a binder I'd built myself, in a windowless room, with a pencil behind my ear and a judge's signature on the cover sheet.

Larkspur Ridge. A shell. One of eleven. Every one of them pointed back to the same parent, and the parent had a family name.

I flipped to the last page.

Beneath the routing number, small and neat, was the line I'd been looking for in every ledger for four months.

Marchetti Holdings Group, Beneficial Owner.

I stopped breathing.

The people I was hiding from weren't hunting this team. They were paying it.

My hand didn't shake. That was what scared me. It was perfectly steady, the way it gets right before something falls.

I photographed the page. Once. Twice. I slid it back behind the invoices and began, very slowly, to close the folder.

Too slowly.

The door behind me had no sound. I knew that now. It never made one for him.

"Whatever you think you found," Kane said behind me, soft and quiet, "put it down."