I Burned The Hockey Star Down novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Every Tape

Beau drives Greer home in the rain, and on an untranscribed memoir tape Dane admits his agent paid him to take Beau's knee.

I stared down at the text before the elevator hit the lobby.

Cut the assistant loose before the book.

She's sat through every tape.

Every tape.

I had forty hours of Dane Hollings on a little silver recorder in my bag, right next to his phone.

I took a picture of the screen with my own phone.

Then I sealed his phone in a hotel envelope and wrote his name on it in big block letters.

The ballroom doors were wide open.

Music thumped out into the lobby, and somebody had poured champagne into the Cup.

I had to walk past the whole party to reach the front desk.

Two defensemen were dancing on a table.

A trainer I liked waved at me, then saw my face and stopped waving.

Grady stood near the bar with his arm around a network producer.

He lifted his glass to me.

I didn't lift anything back.

"For Mr. Hollings," I told the desk clerk, and slid the envelope across.

"Should I say who it's from?"

"His assistant," I said. "Former."

Outside, it was pouring.

Real Portland rain, the kind that comes sideways off the river in June.

I didn't have a jacket. I didn't have a car, either. I'd come in the team van.

I sat down on the wet curb under the hotel awning and put my head on my knees.

A pickup truck pulled up in the loading zone.

The window came down.

"You're sitting in a puddle," Beau Callister said.

"I'm aware."

"Is it a protest puddle or a regular puddle?"

I laughed, and it came out wrong, half a sob.

He put the truck in park.

He got out in the rain, came around the hood with his slow, uneven walk, and opened the passenger door.

"Get in, Brecken. I'm not asking twice. My knee hates this weather."

I got in.

The cab smelled like coffee and rink rubber.

There was a bag of kids' practice pucks on the floor and a granola bar wrapper on the dash.

Beau turned the heat all the way up and pointed every vent at me.

"Where to?"

"Foster Road. Over the laundromat."

He pulled out into the rain.

For six blocks, he didn't say anything at all.

That was the thing about Beau. In five years, he'd never once made me fill a silence.

"You saw," I said finally.

"Twenty thousand people saw."

"You knew. Before tonight. You knew about us."

"I've known for about four and a half years." He kept his eyes on the road. "You laugh at his jokes a half second before anybody else does."

"That's humiliating."

"It's not. It's just loyal." He glanced at me. "Wasted, maybe. But loyal."

I stared out at the wet streetlights.

"He shoved me into a men's room, Beau."

His hands tightened on the wheel.

"Which one?"

"Why?"

"So I know which door to take off its hinges."

"You can't take a door off its hinges. You have one working knee."

"I'd use the good one."

I laughed again, and this time it came out right.

"I quit," I said. "In his suite. Skye was in the bathroom."

"Good."

"She was wearing his shirt."

"The gray one? With the holes?"

"He never let me wash it."

"Then she can have the smell." Beau turned onto Foster. "That's a fair trade, honestly."

He pulled up in front of the laundromat.

The dryers were still glowing behind the steamed-up windows downstairs.

I didn't open the door right away.

"Hey," Beau said, quieter. "You did nothing wrong tonight. You know that, right?"

"I spent five years in service elevators."

"That's on him. Not you."

I looked at him then.

His hair was dripping into his beard. His quarter-zip was soaked through at the shoulders.

He'd left his own team's victory party to drive me home in the rain.

"Thank you," I said.

"Eat something. Sleep. Don't read your phone."

"That's three things."

"I'm a coach. I give drills."

I went upstairs.

I did not eat anything, sleep, or stay off my phone.

I sat on my kitchen floor with my laptop and the silver recorder and every light on.

Grady didn't want me gone because I was a liability.

He wanted me gone because of something on these tapes.

I opened the folder.

Forty hours. Ninety-one files.

I'd transcribed every single one for Clean Ice, Dane's memoir about the good kid from Saskatoon who played the game the right way.

Every one except one.

The file was dated last July. I'd labeled it in all caps. DRUNK. SKIP.

I remembered that night only in pieces.

Dane had come to the rink after a charity golf thing, three beers past his limit, wanting to "do a chapter."

I'd turned on the recorder to keep him happy.

He'd rambled for an hour. Then he'd passed out, and I'd never gone back to it.

I put my earbuds in and pressed play.

Dane's voice came in loud and slurred.

He talked about his dad's truck. He talked about Saskatoon winters. He talked about a girl in tenth grade who'd dumped him at a bus stop.

Forty minutes in, I almost turned it off.

Then I heard my own voice on the tape, sleepy, asking about his rookie playoffs.

Dane laughed.

It wasn't the media laugh.

It was the real one, the ugly one he only used at home.

"You want to know the truth about the playoffs, Greer? Write this down."

Ice clinked in a glass.

"Grady paid me ten grand to take Callister's knee."

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