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Jones muttered a few choice curses and shook his head. “My career is so screwed.”
“You fucking baby.” It took everything Cal had not to skate over and smack Jones upside the head. How could someone so talented—if he could start actually playing again—be so fucking dumb? “Astrid isn’t the reason why you can’t stop a puck to save your life, why your teammates and the fans hate you, or why the front office is ready to trade you for three nickels and a box of peanuts just to get you off of their payroll.” The clueless jagoff opened his mouth as if to argue, but Cal skated over and flicked him in the middle of the forehead hard before he could get any of his bullshit out. “It’s because of you.” He flicked him again, not quite as hard this time. “This is it, fucknuts. You either start doing your job and stop being such a dickweed or you kiss hockey goodbye.”
Jones got that pissy look on his face again, the one that meant that absolutely epic dumb shit was about to come out of his mouth. However, Cal was done listening. Jones had everything that everyone who ever picked up a hockey stick dreamed about and so few actually ever got—and he was pissing it away blaming other people for his own failures.
“Stop wasting everyone’s time and—” He flicked the goalie’s forehead again. “Make.” And a second time, even harder. “Your.” And a third time extra hard for emphasis. “Choice.”
His face all squished up, Jones rubbed the bright red spot on his forehead. “Have you had therapy or do you have sisters?”
“Both.”
“Do your sisters—or your therapist—live close by and,” he shook out his flow, “do they like hockey players with great hair?”
Despite everything, Cal chuckled. The guy bounced back, he had to give him that—which was something they could work with.
“Get in the fucking net,” Cal said as he picked up his stick from the ice and lined a puck up. “Let’s see if you can stop these pucks before I drill you in the head with one.”
For once, Jones did what Cal asked without bitching about it first.
Chapter Eighteen
No one should have ever given Andy the power of the blower.
Really, the man shouldn’t have any power at all, but when it came to Tuesday night bingo at The Flying Sow, he really was the worst. He made people wait on the edge of their seats before calling out the numbers on the balls the blower sent up through a shoot like he was the eleven o’clock news teasing the segment coming on after the commercial break. He took what he called the bingo caller cut out of the cash pot given to the big winner at the end of the night. Plus, he always found time to go through his set of cringe jokes that he said were killing it on his social media. If that was even close to the truth, Astrid figured there really was no hope for humanity.
“Oh God,” Nola said with a groan. “He’s wearing the shirt again.”
“I thought your aunt was going to ban him from wearing that,” Thea said as she took her to-use markers and her backup markers out of a gallon-size plastic bag with at least half a dozen extra just-in-case markers.
“Like I could get that lucky,” Nola said with a sigh.
Andy’s black shirt was decorated with a trio of brightly colored bingo balls and the phrase MY BALLS MAKE ’EM ALL HOLLER. Not surprisingly, all of the balls had the number sixty-nine on them, which didn’t even make sense. There was only ever one ball with the number sixty-nine in the bingo ball set, plus it would be his tongue and mouth making people holler during a sixty-nine, not his balls. Really, was a little logic too much to ask for in a dirty joke?
“She told him to trash the shirt,” Nola continued, “but then he sold a bunch of the extras to some frat boys from Harbor U for one hundred percent profit. You know, since my uncles got them from the same guy who found the bingo blower.”
“You mean they also fell off a truck that was mysteriously left unlocked while the driver—who just happened to be the cousin of a cousin of yours—got a cup of coffee?” Astrid asked as she set her lucky green marker down next to her perfectly arranged set of six bingo cards.
“Pretty much,” Nola said with a shrug. “And the bar needs all the money makers it can get to make ends meet until my aunt finally finds a buyer for it. So the shirt stays.”
“What else went missing from the truck?” Astrid asked.
“Enough Diet Coke that whoever found it could fence it for a nice stack of cash. Allegedly,” Nola said. “Which reminds me…” She reached into her giant Get Booked tote and pulled out two six-packs and handed one to Thea and the other to Astrid. “I got such a good deal on these that I had to get some for you.”
“Is this…?” Thea’s eyebrows went up higher than the rims of her glasses as she looked from the Diet Coke to Nola’s uncle Mikey and uncle Petey, who were both in their seventies and nursing cranberry juices at the bar, before her gaze slid over to Nola. “Do I want to know?”
“No,” Astrid and Nola answered at the same time.
Thea pursed her mouth as if mentally debating the possibility of accepting goods that “fell off a truck” compared to her love of Diet Coke. “It’s just one six-pack,” she said as she reached for the soda and put it in her tote adorned with a pink dinosaur holding a steaming mug with “Tea-Rex” written under it.
Astrid had no compunction about sticking her gifted six-pack under her chair so she could take it up to her apartment after bingo. Life was hard and short. If a six-pack of caffeinated heaven happened to fall off a truck and into her fridge, she wasn’t going to stress about it.
Her phone buzzed on the table with a two-one-eight area code accompanied by the name Do Not Text. Butterflies went off in her stomach like they’d been shot out of a can of shaken-up Diet Coke, and she flipped over her phone, but it was too late. Both of her friends were giving her the eye.
“Why shouldn’t you text whoever that is?” Nola asked, propping her chin in the palm of her hand and doing her best I’m-just-asking expression.
Like Astrid was going to fall for that. Until she’d walked out on her job as a corporate attorney to work for peanuts at the family pub, Nola had been among the scariest contract attorneys in the city. Now she was one of the scariest bartenders on this side of the harbor.
“Just a guy,” Astrid said as she rearranged her already perfectly ordered bingo cards.
