I looked at Tennessee on the ceiling and couldn’t sleep.
Chapter five
Rook
Iset the phone face-up on the desk and waited.
I had the Do Not Disturb hanger on the door. My gear hung dripping over the bathroom door.
The back of my collar was still damp. I’d come straight from the morning skate without showering at the rink. I wanted the forty minutes of Kovac’s interview call to myself.
I timed it precisely. When it was over, I had the bus ride to the arena. It was a hard wall on the far side, so the talk couldn’t sprawl or drift. It couldn’t get comfortable enough to wander into unexpected territory.
I couldn’t hand a careful man space. I had to give him a clock and make him work against it. On the ice, I’d have called it gap control—get up in a guy’s face before he has room to move.
It was a lot of planning for a phone call about a defensive system, but I had my reasons.
Two doors down, Luki’s room would look like a crime scene: chargers loose on the carpet, a coffee cup he’d carried around until it was cold, and the book he wasn’t reading splayed openon the bed. He’d texted me at a quarter to twelve.You back?I’d writtenI’m back. Goodnight.
After that, I lay on my bed, unable to sleep. I’d never gotten used to separate rooms on road trips. I wanted to be across the hall with his head on my chest.
I hadn’t told him more about Kovac. Once I knew what he was, I’d know how to share. It would be a clean story with the proper context.
The call arrived two minutes early. I let it ring twice before answering.
“Daniel. This is Mattias Rook.”
“Mattias, thank you for taking the time.”
It was the same warm, unhurried voice that had asked me, six years ago, across two empty barstools on Queen Street, what it was like to play the way I played and go home to nobody.
“You’ve got me till noon,” I said. “Then they put me on a bus.”
“Then I’ll be quick. Tell me about the backend this year.”
I shared my view on the Ironhawks’ defense.
He asked good questions, and he’d done his research, asking how the third year of a system felt different from the first. He wanted to know whether the younger guys played looser now that the structure was in their legs and not just their heads.
I gave him genuine answers.
Then he moved on to the rest of the team. “Tell me about Cross,” he said. “I keep trying to write the guy, and I can’t get a handle on him. Help me. How does a room organize itself around a captain who never raises his voice?”
“The way he works isn’t obvious from the outside,” I said. “It’s the same as not noticing a floor that’s holding you up. He sets the pace, and everybody else falls in line.”
“That’s perfect,” Kovac said, pleased. “I can see it like I’m in the room with you.”
“Don’t tell Cross I gave you anything. He’ll think I talked.”
“You did.”
“Just barely.”
He laughed, and I eased back into my chair, putting my feet up on the bed. He asked about Mikkelsen, and I said the kid didn’t know yet how good he was.
I told him that Mikkelsen was twenty years old, with soft hands, and he answered every question as if he were talking to Markel’s mother. I told Kovac the scariest thing about him was the politeness. Kovac laughed.
I thought about Varga calling the rookie a specimen, a Saskatchewan biologist on skates, and I came close to smiling into the phone at a man I’d spent two days fearing.
