Page 18 of Thin Ice

"Nolan." Elias stood three steps away with my jacket folded over his arm. Brick was behind him, pulling on his own. "Brick's heading down," Elias said. "We can follow him."

"Yeah." I pushed off the corner, good side first.

"Special game when we win Cup," Misha said. "My deal again."

***

The condo was dark except for the small desk lamp on the side table by my recliner. It was past midnight. I should have been in bed with the pad on. Instead, I felt wide awake.

"Come here," I said to Elias. "I want to show you something."

My media room was at the end of the hall, past the guest room. I couldn't remember whether Elias glanced inside on his first walk-through. If he did, he didn't say anything.

I hit the panel inside the door, and the room lit up into a low glow, with a wall of screens waking in sequence.

"This is the only room in this place I kept away from the interior designer," I said. "I hired an entertainment guy for this. It's my space."

Elias walked in, scanning the chairs, racked controllers, and black acoustic panels on the walls.

"The sound treatment isn't for watching movies," he said.

"Guy who did it works on recording studios. You could fire a gun in here and the retired bond trader downstairs would sleep through it." I dropped into my chair, the left one, adjusted to cradle my hip, and pulled the second controller off the rack. "Sit. You're learning something tonight."

"Am I?"

"You spent all night reading the card table. Now, you can let down. This is my turf."

He sat. I put a controller in his hands and fired up a game on the center screen. It was the shooter I ran with Brick on road trips, with a solid easy mode for beginners.

Elias walked his guy into a wall. Then he stared at the ceiling for six seconds, unable to figure out how to look anywhere else. He turned in a circle, stopped, and turned back the other way, slowly, as if taking it slow would help.

"Thumbs," I said. "Left stick moves you, and the right stick moves your eyes."

"I understand the principle."

"You're looking at your feet."

"I'm aware of that."

It was the first time he sounded frustrated in my presence, and I liked him better for it. I leaned over and put my hand on top of his right hand, moving his thumb a half-inch down the stick. "Lighter. It's not a wrench. You're turning your head, not steering a truck."

"That," he said, "is the first useful comment you've made."

He was bad for about ten more minutes. Genuinely awful, and it made me laugh out loud twice. He took it the way good rookies do, with no sulking, just resetting and trying again.

"Why three screens?" he asked, eyes forward, thumbs working the controller.

"Center's the game. The wings run tape. I can put one on each side and watch while I play."

"So you built a film room and hid a game in it."

"Other way around."

He glanced at me for a second and went back to the screen. "And the chairs? Those aren't off a showroom floor."

"A guy in Austin builds them one at a time. He has an eight-week waiting list."

Around the fourth run, Elias's guy stopped looking at his feet. Around the sixth, he cleared a room in one pass, and I realized he'd stopped fighting the sticks and started treating them like extensions of his body.