Page 9 of The Reckless Rookie

Something loosens in my chest. Stupid. Early.

I think, for about one second, that this is the part where he lets me go.

“And yet.”

He sets the file down.

“A man is in the hospital. And you are not a large person, Mr. O’Sullivan, but you are a trained one, and you wear a number this city pays to watch. A public man does not get to settle a parking-lot disagreement by putting somebody in an ambulance. Provocation is not permission. In Texas, it is not even close.” He folds his hands. “The fact that you were walking away is the only reason this is a third-degree felony and not the thing that ends your life at twenty-three. That you stopped walking is the reason it’s a felony at all.”

No heat in it. That’s what gets me. He isn’t performing and he isn’t doing me a favor. He’s saying it flat, in front of God and the clerk and Marcus. The exact thing I could not say to myself since the cuffs went on.

I was right to defend myself.

I went past it.

Both true. Neither one lets the other off.

My lawyer’s touch on my sleeve brings me up out of the chair, because that’s the rule. You stand when the man’s talking to you now, when it’s your turn to be measured. I get to my feet and grip the edge of the table and keep my face flat. I’ve had a lot of practice keeping it flat. Inside, something’s gone quiet.

“Six months.” He says it like a weather report. “Residential, at the Delgado Ranch, under the county’s placement program. You’ll live on the property and complete twenty-five program hours a week while your season is active. Those hours will be scheduled around mandatory practices, games, meetings, treatments, and team travel. You’ll answer to a county supervision officer, not to me and not to the family that owns the ranch. Complete it clean, and on the last day the charge is dismissed like it never happened.”

My lawyer sits, then thinks better of it, and rises again to object.

The judge lifts one finger. My lawyer sits back down as if the finger weighs forty pounds.

“The placement is not a courtesy, counselor. It is the disposition. And it holds only as long as your client does: one serious violation out there can collapse the whole thing and put him back in this room on the felony he earned, with the prison that comes with it. If your client would prefer a fine and a press release, he’s welcome to find a different judge and be somebody else.”

He can’t touch the league, and he says so. Not his jurisdiction, he says, plain. Then, for the record, he says a man like this one ought to keep working and keep playing rather than sit idle, because in his experience idle men don’t learn the things they’re supposed to learn.

Then he’s done with me. The clerk calls a number. Some other poor bastard slides up to take my chair, and that’s it, that’s the whole thing: six months and a felony and the rest of my life, and the room’s already moved on to the next guy.

That fast. That’s what fucks me up about it. You spend a week bracing for the biggest morning of your life, and it doesn’t crack the top five things that’ll happen in that room before lunch.

Marcus’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Hour. Bob wants you at the rink.”

I nod as if the nod belongs to someone else.

The courtroom wasn’t the sentencing.

Bob Hartley’s office is the sentencing.

Bob’s behind the desk. Sully in the chair by the window. Silas Vane stands with his back to the room, looking out at the practice sheet, because Silas runs how the team looks and a man like that would rather study glass than any face in the room.

I sit without being asked. Old habit. You learn to make yourself small in offices like this.

“Three games,” Silas says. To the window. “League came down this morning. Off-ice conduct. Three games and a fine you don’t want to hear the number on, effective immediately.”

I open my mouth.

“Don’t,” Sully says. Not unkind.

I close it.

“After the three, you practice and you play.” Silas turns around. He’s not a big man. He fills the room anyway, the way certain men do when their entire job is deciding what things mean. “Provided the ranch stays clean. One serious violation out there, one, and nobody’s managing anything anymore. You’ll finish the rest of it somewhere the court picks for a man who couldn’t hold up his end, and it won’t have a barn.” He lets that sit. “Do you understand the shape of what’s on the table?”

The shape of what’s on the table.

I look at the three of them and I finally get the thing I’ve been too busy being angry to see all week.