Page 37 of Thin Ice

City Museum announced itself before I understood what it was. It was a hulking old shoe factory downtown with a school bus cantilevered off the roof, the skeleton of a plane bolted to steel scaffolding, and a Ferris wheel on top of the building.

"Wait till inside," Nolan said.

My jaw dropped. Inside, reclaimed girders, stones, and salvaged terra-cotta had been turned into tunnels, slides, and staircases that went nowhere and everywhere. It was impossible to know where to look.

I recovered and did my job, checking exits, sightlines, and who was watching Nolan and why. I clocked a family, a school group, and two staff members. Nobody watched the way the wrong kind watches. I could give him twenty minutes.

Nolan pulled out a pair of season passes. "Hannah loves this place," he said. "So do I."

After being waved in, he led me to an outdoor pit of plastic balls. "We're going in," he said.

He climbed down carefully. Then he was chest-deep in red and blue and yellow, thirty-four years old, an alternate captain who should have been napping at home in the dark.

"You getting in or scouting it?"

I got in.

A plastic ball hit me in the chest, and I looked up. In his face, I saw pure joy as he bounced a ball off my head.

"In the fall we'll come back and do the fire pit, roast marshmallows. It's nice on a cold evening."

In the fall.

Then he was on the move again. Our twenty minutes were up. He climbed out of the pit and took my hand. A couple of fans spotted him on the way out. I was instantly between Nolan and them, but they only wanted handshakes and personal greetings. I let them have that.

Within minutes, Nolan disappeared back into his routine, and I was left with a smile I couldn't clear off my face.

***

By the eight-minute mark of the first period, I knew Boston had spent their day off working out a new strategy.

They'd stopped chasing. In Game One, they'd hunted the puck in packs of five, and the Steamers bled them on the counter. For Game Two, they sat back in a 1-3-1 arrangement. Passing through the neutral zone was like navigating a toll plaza.

From the tunnel mouth, I had a sightline to the bench and most of the lower bowl. Doyle's people murmured through my earpiece. It was the usual chatter about conflicts in the stands and misread seating assignments.

Boston had made a second adjustment. They finished every check on Nolan. It wasn't dirty; officials wouldn't look twice. It was complete.

For every puck he touched along the wall, a body closed in on him. It was a common tactic: target a veteran player and make him work twice as hard. By the third period, his body would register the extra attention.

"Ward. Camera well, south, guy's got a bag that didn't come through my mag."

I missed it. Nolan had gone down against the boards and gotten up in two stages. For half a second, the earpiece was just noise. "Say again," I said, and Doyle's man said it again.

It turned out to be nothing. The bag held a credentialed photographer's spare camera body.

Boston drew first blood. Their fourth line won a battle in front of the crease, and the puck was in the net before Misha could react. The second came on a power play. The Steamers got one back in the third with a beautiful show from Jamie, but then Boston hit the empty net with ninety seconds left, and that was the game. Three–one.

Postgame, Nolan was the last veteran out of the room. He gave Boston full credit. A national guy asked whether, at thirty-four, he felt the window closing on nights like this, and Nolan said the window's open until it isn't.

We drove home through a subdued city, with blue lights in windows looking less like a celebration than a vigil. My phone buzzed at a red light on Lindell.

Frey: Watched the game. Your guy ate a lot of wall tonight—they finished everything. Tell me somebody iced him down.

It was a thoughtful contact. He'd watched the game.

I typed back before the light changed.

Elias: They're on it.