The Code (33 page)

“Upside all-star.”

“Upside franchise player, trophy winner.”

“Potentially the best player to come out of the draft.”

They kept at it for five minutes. Hunts took the back seat. I tried to be inconspicuous and would have liked to hide behind the lonely rubber plant by the window, but I wasn't about to get away easy.

“Shadow, you saw him more than the rest of us. He was your assignment. What do you have to say?”

I had a lot to say, but this wasn't the time or place.

I sat down and opened my computer. I went to the team's database. I called up my files. I counted the dates.

“Twelve views this season. He was the best player on the ice ten times. He was the best player on the Canadian team at the summer 18s … best in his birth year. He's smart … wins the league award for academics. He interviewed well at the combine. He did well in personal interviews. Spotless record off the ice …”

“What next? You gonna tell us that he's a member of the glee club? What he has for breakfast? Favourite movie? Are you going
to read from the team's media guide or tell us what you think of this kid?”

Hunts was a runt among goaltenders. He's maybe five foot ten. He found ways to compensate. He walked around the dressing room on his tiptoes to give the illusion of being at least a passable size. In the net he made any guy who skated too close to his crease look up his navel. His trademark wasn't a fast glove, a kick save, a sprawl across the net. What he did with his stick was criminal. One hard slash across the back of the knees took the skates out from a trespasser and usually left him writhing on the ice. Hunts led all goaltenders in penalty minutes because of a wicked stick and a fast mouth. Here in the dressing room he didn't have a stick, but he ran his mouth like he would have on the ice. He was out to humble me since I didn't come out with a strong opinion about Mays and because he suspected that I might have been talking to another team about a job, a violation of my contract, and, worse, betrayal of a friendship. “All that points to us taking Mays,” I said without looking up.

I didn't lie. I just held back as much as I could.

“Well, thank you for that. The amateur scouting director has spoken. Thank you.”

I tried to not get bothered but Hunts's yap got under my skin like a hypodermic needle. Deep breath. I reminded myself that it would all come out in good time.

I stood up and went back to the erasable board.

“Sorensen,” I said.

“Not gonna come to that,” Hunts said. “It's a four-deep draft.

If Mays is gone at four we're taking one of those top three guys on the board. It's not that complicated, Shade.”
He had never called me Shade, not even when we first met.

I hoped that the mood would change. It didn't. Hunts belittled me at every turn and the rest of the staff lapped it up. All the established scouts thought they had a shot at what looked like my soon-to-be-former post.

I sucked it up but it was a long ninety minutes until we wound down to a cluster of guys we expected to see when our third pick,

rolled around.

I logged each of the names in as we went. Our list had eighty-seven names on it. I would print it out and get it copied for each guy who'd be sitting at our table Friday night and Saturday. I wasn't about to send it as an email because, well, who knows? One of them might let it leak out. One of them might lose his computer, leaving it in a cab or on a bar or something. Someone from another organization might pinch it. It has been known to happen. It's bound to happen when you're working against guys who spent their entire lives playing with their elbows up, charter members of the same subculture.

T
HE OTHERS FILED
out of the room with what they thought were knowing backwards glances over their shoulders. They figured that whatever it was that was going down was bad for me and good for them. Probably very bad for me and very good for their job prospects. Ultimate
schadenfreude
.

“So, Shade, what's this all about? You've got something to tell me …”

“I had to do it this way.”

“So who is it?”

“Mays.”

“We've been through this. If the first three picks go the way it should—it will—then we're taking Mays. You were a little less sure of that in our meeting an hour ago but thanks for chipping in. Let's cut the shit. Who is it? Who is it you're going to work for? Not that I can blame you. No, because you're like me. You have no idea if your job is going to be here July first. It doesn't look that way, does it? Why wait? You …”

He kept going on. He was wound up and unravelling like a ball of string. One recrimination after another. He had nothing to go on but his gut instincts, this time all wrong, and he was casting me as Judas, betraying the team and, worse, him.

“Back the fuck off. I'm not trying to protect my job. I'm trying to protect yours,” I told him.

Left unstated was that by protecting his job I was protecting mine, but no matter.

“It's Mays,” I said. “We can't take him.”

Hunts rolled his eyes.

“It's done. We're taking him if he's there. If you had something to say you had a chance to say it in the meeting. You didn't have to wait till now.”

“I couldn't say it in the meeting. I had to wait. I want only you to know. I have to do it this way. It's Mays. He's never going to play a game in the league.”

“Maybe not this year, though I see him stepping right into the lineup in the fall.”

“I'll bet my testicles that he won't play a single game in the league. Ever. He can't. It's medical.”

“The shoulder has been checked,” Hunts said impatiently, packing up his computer and notes, getting ready to head out the door.

“It's not his shoulder. It's his heart.”

“What the kid has no problems with is his heart.”

“You should ask a cardiologist for a second opinion.”

Hunts stopped packing up. He couldn't get off the idea that I was questioning the kid figuratively rather than literally. He took a breath and tried to make sense of it all.

“The only reason I'm telling you this now is that I only found out the other day. I thought something was up … something wasn't right about this all along, and I couldn't put it together.”

Hunts leaned back in his chair. He was still skeptical.

“The kid didn't do his testing at the combine but nothing showed up on his physical. He got a green light.”

“'Cept that his resting heart rate was in the low forties …”

“Which means that he's as fit as an Ethiopian marathoner.” Hunts was proud of the reference, even though he couldn't have found Ethiopia on a map.

“I don't know any marathoners who take beta blockers before their combine physicals.”

Hunts didn't say anything, but we had known each other almost twenty years, so he didn't have to. His look said: How the fuck do you know that?

“Something bugged me right from the point when Hanratty and Doc shut him down from off-ice training. His shoulder was on schedule in rehab, but even if it wasn't, why couldn't he ride the stationary bike? Had to have nothing to do with his shoulder. Had to be something else was up.”

Hunts didn't say anything.

“The mono thing bugged me,” I said. It was a messy, complicated deal, but this seemed to be a decent entry point. “They shut him down before they put out the word that he had mono. A week before. I didn't believe it.”

“That's all covered in the medical reports from his agent.”

“Yeah, it's on there that it's mono, but doesn't it strike you as strange that those reports are from Bones II?”

“Bones the father's not around to do the physical.”

“But the old man wasn't his doctor of record. He had a GP in Toronto, the guy with the complete medical history. But he gets his physical from Bones II.”

“Who just happens to be a big doctor, bigger than his father was,” Hunts said. He sighed impatiently. “So we're going to pass up a possible franchise player—no, a likely franchise player— because you have suspicions.”

“I got into the medicine cabinet at the billets' house,” I said. “I saw the pills. The kid's on drugs to regulate his heart rate. I talked to a cardiologist, gave him the names and dosages of the pills, and he told me that they could keep him in regular rhythm for a while, enough to get through his physical at the combine—never mind that Bones II is overseeing the physicals at the combine. I don't know exactly how bad it is that this kid is taking heart meds. That they're not coming clean about it tells me that it's most likely to be a big deal.”

Hunts leaned back in his seat.

“Jeezus.”

“There's more. There's a lot more.”

I told Hunts how William Mays had walked out of the Ol'

Redhead's office with medical files that he disposed of. How he had tried to get at Sandy and probably planned to snuff her. How there was plenty of reason to suspect that he had broken into Sandy's office.

Hunts drank it in.

“You know all this how?”

Item by item. The break-in at Sandy's office. Mays assaulting Sandy. The beat-down and unmasking after the chase scene. “If William Mays jumped Sandy, why wasn't he charged?”

“Because I didn't want him charged.”

“He attacks your fuckin' girlfriend and you don't want him charged?”

“He's going to get his day in court. I don't just believe it, I know it. If the attack on Sandy is part of it, great. He's going to go away for the murders of Hanratty and Bones …”

“What? You're fuckin' kidding me?”

“… so the assault on Sandy is something that I want to keep buried. I don't have everything on him, but I know where the police can get everything. But I wanted to wait until after the draft.”

“What's the draft got to do with it?”

“It's about what we know and what others don't.”

Hunts puzzled over this for a minute. I didn't wait for him to catch up.

“You asked me to sit on Billy Mays. I did. The more I sat on him, the more suspicious it all seemed. Some things didn't add up. Then a lot of things didn't add up, too many to be a coincidence. And then the more I sat on him, the clearer it seemed. They were conspiring to keep some sort of medical issue out of sight. A major medical issue. Not a normal sort of injury, because even if this kid was out a season it wouldn't fry millions. This had to be that big.”

Hunts was taking it in. He was going from didn't-want-to-know to had-to-know-more. I still hadn't given him enough to trust the dope.

“Look, we might be done no matter what goes down,” I said. “We could be dead men already. Fearless Leader might already have a handshake with Grant Tomlin or someone else for your job, and that means my job is fried like the breakfast buffet's bacon. We need to do something big to save our asses and I don't see any way of moving up. We've got to move off the fourth pick or we have to take someone other than Mays if he hasn't gone.”

“It's worse than you think,” Hunts said.

“Howz it get worse than this? We're in a dead heat with Getting Audited While You're Having Root Canal right now.”

“No, I was out to dinner Wednesday night,” he said. “Japanese place, high end …”

“A boy from Morden, what did they have, trout sushi?”

“You might not be making jokes if you saw what I saw. I saw the guy who signs our cheques—maybe our last cheques—out having dinner with the kid and his father. Seems like Galvin wants Mays's old man to do some motivational speaking or something. He wants all the employees in his corporation to read his books. I told them that we were looking to take Billy Mays at number four. Galvin even invited the old man to come up to his box before the lights go up tonight. The father told him that he's gonna drop in but that he has to sit with his son and their family and friends at eight. For all I know he's in there right now.”

“Okay, we've just inched ahead of Tax Work at the Dentist's Office.”

“We're gonna get killed,” he said, his head bowed down. Thank God there wasn't a bottle in the room or all those clean and sober years would have gone out the window. “We're gonna get buried by the reporters, by Grant Fuckin' Tomlin. He might be sitting as the GM at our table at the start of the second round the way we're going to get trashed. This is one helluva spot we're in. What are we gonna do?”

It was bad for all of us but me in particular. I had a stabbing feeling in my back: William Mays burying me to Galvin.

I had an idea. It wasn't going to guarantee our ongoing gainful employment. We could hope that it would buy us a few days' grace. I was never what you'd describe as a finesse player, but this time I showed a sleight of hand that would make Gretz green with envy.

A season in scouting leaves you on your own for hundreds of hours at a time and with thousands, no make that tens of thousands, of miles behind you. You work unnoticed if not quite undercover. Fans in the stands know your team and might even know your name, but they don't recognize you. You work if not in the dark then with the house lights down. You're peripheral to the action. You're part of a team but always apart from it. You're low-profile. You're anonymous.

And then there's the draft, the last act of the league's season. Bright lights. Teams sitting at their tables on the arena floor. Television cameramen snaking through the narrow aisles between the tables. Some nights you feel like you're making a contribution to your team, like you're
making
it. A lot of nights you don't, knowing that the report won't factor in any decision and might even go completely unread. And then there's the draft, the weird spectacle where the famous GMs and big names are flanked by hockey's working stiffs, guys like me. It's not exactly
our turn to shine. It's the one time that we're out in the daylight and held accountable.