Page 22 of Thin Ice

He fell in beside me on the sidewalk, sleeves shoved halfway up his arms.

"You got the full tour," he said. "First impressions?"

"Honestly? The force-plate lab made me a little sick with envy. I fought a dean for two years and got half of that."

"Everybody says that." He smiled. "That's the nice thing about private money. You ask for the good rig, and somebody buys the good rig. Nobody forms a committee."

"What's the catch?"

"The catch is that the committee exists. You just never see it." Half a block passed. "What'd you make of Reis?"

I gave him my honest answer. "He was brilliant, and he asked me better questions in twenty minutes than my last hiring committee managed in an hour. He was recruiting me the entire time, and I enjoyed it."

Frey laughed. "Yeah. That's him. During my six years of working with him, I've watched him do that to skeptics much more difficult than you."

He lowered his voice.

"Look. You're not in the industry, so you're not a competitor, and you wrote the one paper in my field I never tired of. So I'll say something I probably shouldn't." He put a hand on my shoulder. "This company wasn't always float tanks and supplements at Costco. In the early days, before me, they ran embedded programs inside pro teams. They enlisted the entire team. It was early in the two-thousands and lasted into the twenty-tens. Then it stopped. When I onboarded six years ago, I found out that the legacy files from that era are sealed, blocked by legal contracts."

"Sealed how?"

"Sealed like a pharma company in litigation, but we're not that. We sell recovery boots." He reached up and brushed his hair off his forehead. "I asked about it once. They told me not to worry about it."

I was quiet for a moment.

"Why tell me?"

"Because you asked about longitudinal data, and I gave you the company's stock answer. It's been bothering me since." He stopped at the corner where his route bent back toward the clinic. "I don't know anything, but every company has a drawer they don't open." He put his hand out, and the shake was the same as the first one: brief and firm. "If you're in town through the Final, let's get a drink before this city loses its mind entirely. I haven't talked shop with anybody who isn't selling me something in years."

"I'd like that," I said.

He walked back the way we'd come. I turned toward the Colchester. Instead of going up, I got in my car and drove to the rink.

The morning skate was long over by the time I got there, but most of the team was still around. Doyle's man at the players' entrance knew my face and waved me through without a word.

The locker room smelled like I expected: cut tape, liniment, and the wet-rubber reek of gear that never fully dries. Nolan was at the stall that used to be Vern Danaher's, still in his base layer, methodically taping a stick.

Jamie Loughlin, the rookie, dropped onto the bench beside him. "How's the shoulder?" Nolan asked.

"Good. It's good." The kid rolled it to prove his point.

Nolan looked at him for one second and went back to the stick. "Get Petey to look at it before the flight."

"It's really—"

"Before tomorrow's skate, Jamie."

The kid left. Nolan finished the tape, spun the stick once, and set it in his stall. Then he saw me.

"You lost?" he asked.

"Came to see where the magic happens." I nodded at the ice buckets and the general carnage. "It's very glamorous."

"It's a spa." He stood. "Give me ten minutes. You can drive me home and tell me how boring the clinic was."

***

Nolan heated two trays from the meal service in the microwave. "It's salmon," he said. "The service is providing meals for two now."