Page 42 of Thin Ice

I grabbed a water bottle, but I didn't go back to my seat.

Misha moved his pick, and I heard a small, dry clicking sound.

"Tarn," I said. "At your card game, Elias said the name, and you watched me freeze. You knew something. What do you know?"

He stopped working on the lock and looked up at me.

"Tarn," he said. "Bad. We do not use them in Russia."

"Bad how?"

He turned the lock over in his hands.

"In Russia," he said, "everybody knows story about company that fixes everything. Old story with different names." He set the lock back down on the tray. "When I am young, coach from national program tells me: some people, when they fix you, you are not the one who is fixed. You are the part." He picked up the pick again. "Tarn came to my club in Yaroslavl one time. Made presentation. Very nice slides. Old men in the room said no before slides finished. I was nineteen. I ask why. Nobody answers me." The lock popped open in his hands. "Now is my answer for you. Nobody answers you. That is the answer."

"Misha—"

"Okay," he said.

That was the period at the end of the sentence. He set the open lock on the tray table next to two others, took a fresh one from his bag, and started picking again.

I stood there for a few more seconds, in case. Then I carried my water bottle back up the dark aisle, past twenty sleeping teammates, and settled again by the window.

Elias was two rows up on the aisle with his laptop open. He was working.

I got into my seat and leaned the side of my head against the cold of the window. Somewhere thousands of feet above dark fields, a slice of memory came back.

Navy polos.

That was all it was. I saw navy polos in the Carolina training room, with a little stitched word over the pockets. There were three guys with clipboards and soft voices who showed up partway through my first full season there and never left.

They weren't team staff. Everyone knew they weren't team staff, and nobody said so. They had a corner of the room with a folding table and a laptop. On Tuesdays they measured things: grip, balance, and how long you could hold a wall sit. They always said "good" regardless of the numbers.

Tarn. The word was on the polos and paper cups, too. I'd read it a hundred times.

The cups. They were little pleated paper cups, the kind you get at an office water cooler, set out in rows on the folding table with a number Sharpied on the side. Mine said 17. They told us to take the cup and drink.

I knocked it back. For recovery, they said. I did it for two years. Thirteen years later, I still didn't know for sure what was in it.

It wasn't like they said it was a secret. I never asked. The team handed us so many things—uniforms, equipment, parking spaces. My teammates drank it, too. Asking would have been weird, and I was too young, at twenty-one, to afford being pegged as difficult. I just wanted to keep playing hockey.

Ty's cup said 9.

There he was in my head at the folding table with his cup, grinning at something one of the polo guys said. Then another thing came back. It was Ty across the aisle from me in a charter plane, asking whether what they gave me was the same as what they gave him.

I had a magazine on my chest. I was half-asleep. I said I assumed so. I asked him if it was working.

Yeah, he said. It's working great.

Then he looked out the window for the rest of the flight.

Tarn. Misha's old men in Yaroslavl walked out before the slides finished, and somebody let themselves into my home, picked up every bottle of pills and put them back wrong.

There were ordinary reasons for that. A rival team plays games in a Final; it's uglier than people think. Somebody could've been after pills to sell, or after a story—veteran star, cabinet full of prescriptions—it writes itself.

Any of those was likelier than what stuck in my chest. I didn't have a thread from that cabinet to a folding table in Raleigh. I just couldn't get the two of them to stop rolling around together in my head.

Four rows up, Elias's screen glowed against the dark. He was the man the team sent. He was also the man who had a Tarn tour within the first two weeks of landing in St. Louis. Elias asked better questions than any bodyguard I'd ever had, and he knew about the heating pad when he shouldn't have known. A question began to take shape inside my head.