Page 5 of Thin Ice

We took the back way down at seven-fifteen.

"Car's coming around the back," he said, thumbing his phone as the elevator dropped. "Called the team last night and had them drive around to the delivery street. Front of this building's a fishbowl at game time."

It was. It had been for three years, and not one of the polite men with earpieces the team had sent before had ever thought to do anything about it. They let me walk out the front into whatever was waiting.

The elevator let us out near the trash room and the cleaners' carts. It was the gray concrete guts of the building.

We exited the building onto the rear loading dock. The day's heat was already rising out of the pavement.

As I walked through the door, Elias's hand pressed flat against the small of my back. He was steering, but then the fingers pressed, curling slightly inward. It had to mean nothing, and it was over in two seconds.

The car was at the curb, a black SUV idling. Elias opened the rear door and stood beside it, waiting.

"All set," he said.

I got into the car. He settled in beside me, and the driver eased us away from the curb.

The SUV turned onto a side street, and Elias watched the building slide past his window, then looked back at me.

"Five tonight," he said. "Series even."

So he'd done his reading. Most of the men the team sent couldn't have told you who'd won last night.

"Even," I said.

"Win it, you can close on the road. Lose it, the next one ends your year." He said it flat, like he was reading the weather forecast. "How's that sit?"

"It sits like a Tuesday," I said. "You play the game in front of you. Tonight's a game. Tomorrow there's another one."

"That's the media answer. Is there more?"

"It's the only answer there is." I watched the medical buildings go by, the early shift in scrubs bunched at the crosswalk waiting for the light as we rolled to a stop. "If you start doing math on a series, you stop playing. I've got one job tonight, and it's the same one I had in October. Be good for every shift they give me and don't cost us anything."

"See, that I don't buy." He said it easy, almost warm, like we were two guys killing time. "Not the philosophy, the philosophy's airtight. I mean you believing it's just a Tuesday. You're thirty-four, and what, fourteen seasons in? You've done the math, whether or not you wanted to. Everybody's told you the window. You know exactly how many of these you've got left."

I looked at him. He looked back, open and interested, no edge to it at all.

"How many've you got left?" I asked. "Whatever it is you do."

"Fair." He smiled, conceding the point. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

"Nobody's told me a window."

"Somebody always tells you the window."

I didn't answer that. The traffic light changed, and the scrubs moved off the curb in a loose pack, holding coffee cups while somebody laughed at something. The SUV rolled forward.

"You always do this?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"Talk. Before eight in the morning."

"Pretty much." He didn't sound sorry about it. "You'd rather I didn't?"

"I'd rather most people didn't."

"Noted." He settled back against the seat.