Page 51 of Thin Ice

The line went dead. I walked the rest of the way down the hall to the living room and sat on the couch, making an entry in my notebook: 21:40 — inbound, Tierney, second call, his initiative. Contact agreed: post–Cup Final. Conditions logged. Duration 6:12.

I opened my phone's log. The Guardians issued it, and the number attached was a shell that resolved to a Seattle answering service. Michael's people rotated services every ninety days. On my end, the calls didn't exist.

On Tierney's end, he answered the first call on a landline.

It was a landline in a rural house owned free and clear by a man who'd stripped himself out of every other database he could reach. The landline was the one wire he couldn't strip. The calls would live in the carrier's records, part of the billing system of a company that sells its logs to anyone with a subpoena.

He'd bought a second phone to call me from a gas station, which meant he understood it all better than I did. The burner was an attempt to quarantine the damage from the first call, but it was a call I placed.

At 5:15 that morning I had rung a number that connected to a house I'd never seen, and the ring existed now, permanently, at his end of the wire.

Who else might know that number had been dialed? Would it be someone who sat under a sweetgum tree in a car, doing nothing in the middle of the night? Would it be someone who read the labels on every bottle in Nolan's medicine cabinet? I turned the question over the way Misha turned his locks, and it didn't open.

Chapter fourteen

Nolan

Iwoke up in the gaming chair with the screens gone to standby and no idea what time it was.

The chair had done what I paid for. My hip sat cradled with zero pain. The center screen held a paused frame of Boston's penalty kill, and I had no memory of having paused the tape.

Elias stood in the doorway with a glass of water, watching me wake up.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Little after eleven." He came in and set the water on the arm of the chair. "You went down while I was on the phone. I stopped the video and let you sleep."

"Their goalie cheats," I said.

"Cheats how?"

"Not that kind. He guesses early. When the puck moves side to side down low, he drops before the pass even arrives. He's giving up the top of the net on purpose, betting that by June nobody's got the hands left to lift one over him. He's been right for four straight games."

"Are your hands too tired for that?"

"Ask me tomorrow after the game."

Getting out of the chair after sleeping in it was a two-stage business. Elias didn't reach for me. He let me do it on my own.

He waited until I was standing, then knelt without a word and pressed his thumbs into the band of muscle down the outside of the thigh, working the sleep-stiffness out. I gripped the top of the chair for balance and leaned into it.

When he finished, he kept his hand there. It rested flat on my hip, and he slid it slightly to the inside.

He looked up at me from one knee. He'd just finished another call that I'm sure he'd identify as boring. No man's calls are always boring.

There was a question on my tongue. Who do you actually work for?

I ran it ahead. Whatever he answered would change things between us. If the answer was the same he'd already given me, I was a man who'd made an accusation before a game we could not lose. If it was hiding something, then the past few weeks had been built on a lie.

There wasn't a winning posture. I decided to give it two weeks. The run would be over by then, and Elias's return to Minnesota might render it all moot.

I let go of the question. It was easier than I suspected it would be.

"Let's go to bed," I said.

In the bedroom, I undressed him slowly while he stood before me. First was his shirt, and his breathing changed under my knuckles at the third button. By the last one, he was holding my hips in his hands and pressing his hard cock against me.

He was gentle as long as it took to get my naked body down onto the bed, sliding a pillow under my left side. Then he raked his fingers into my hair and held tight, pulling my mouth up to his.