by G B Joyce
ALSO BY G.B. JOYCE
The Code
Every Spring a Parade Down Bay Street
G.B. JOYCE
PENGUIN
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First published 2013
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Manufactured in Canada
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Joyce, Gare, 1956–
The black ace / G.B. Joyce.
“A Brad Shade thriller”.
ISBN 978-0-14-318760-8
I. Title.
PS8619.O957B53 2013 C813’.6 C2012-905938-2
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* * *
For Trent Kresse,
Scott Kruger, Chris Mantyka and
Brent Ruff and their families
1
SUNDAY
A hangover laced with dread had Derek Jones in a crushing headlock and drenched in a cold sweat as he crawled and lurched across the empty streets of Swift Current in an F-150 that had rolled off the dealer’s lot sometime late in the previous century. It was minus twelve outside and the truck’s heater sighed uselessly. Jones’s blood had thinned over four years of waiting tables and banging waitresses on a Caribbean cruise ship and it hadn’t thickened since coming home six weeks before. His breath, redolent of mouthwash, frosted the windshield and his lone working headlight left the world ahead a black void. At every stoplight and stop sign he worried that his truck would conk out and strand him. He needed this job like he needed the other two just to get by, and if he was fired for showing up late and half in the bag, his old man would kick him to the curb.
Jones wiped a tiny porthole on the windshield to peer out. It was about the size of a bar coaster, and when he wiped his dripping nose afterward on the sleeve of his lumberjack jacket he thought he could smell Jack Daniel’s and his last pack of duty-free Marlboros. His head and eyelids dipped and he drifted into the wrong lane, a couple of raced heartbeats away from a head-on with an oncoming car. He swerved hard and took a deep breath. Ice pellets bounced off the windshield like a thousand rounds of frozen machine-gun fire and reassured him that he was, in fact, still alive, even if under siege. It could have ended right there, he thought, and he let himself be buoyed by the notion, previously unimaginable, that things could be worse.
Jones was the morning man at the full-service gas station at the town’s easternmost exit on Highway 1, and he was twenty minutes late to open up. Six A.M. Sunday wasn’t a quiet shift like it would be in other jurisdictions. He could count on the Sabbath rush, locals who had morning appointments with redemption at one of the thirty-two churches in Swift Current, locals who were going to be awaiting his arrival with their pickups idling and righteous indignation revving. He meditated as his one-eyed rustbucket fishtailed around the last corner: If the parishioners were as righteous as they played it, they wouldn’t complain to the proprietor. They’d just say a prayer for him that might land him once again and forever after in tanning butter.
When Jones finally pulled into the station, he didn’t have to touch the key in the ignition, the motor intuitively stalling just as he skidded into his parking spot out front. Three pickups were sitting by the pumps, engines running and windows fogging up. Three farm families in their Sunday best watched Jones jog across the lot with his collar up against the wind and unlock the front door. The wind howled, but he wasn’t worrying about what was blowing so much as the blowback. If he had been on time, 5:50, he’d have done a quick check of the premises, just to make sure that the night man had left the washrooms in acceptable shape and the back doors were shut. And he would have counted out his till in the station’s main building. In that time inside the station, the little space heater in the booth out by the pumps would have kicked in and made it almost fit for human habitation. This was a routine that had been instituted with good cause, and the boss insisted on compliance to the letter and minute. But Jones was only getting used to it. He skipped the warm-up. His customers’ reserve of patience was about to hit E.
It was 6:40 before a window opened for Jones to make his rounds. The first thing he did was hit the lights for the sign out front. It glowed red. Six storeys tall, it was Swift Current’s highest free-standing structure. The second thing he did was turn on the radio in the station. The singer sounded familiar but before his time, he figured. He didn’t know it was another Jones, George, and didn’t recognize “Still Doin’ Time.” He was thankful that the gospel stuff wasn’t going to crank up until the top of the hour. He listened to a couple of verses and started to go about his rounds. Only then did it occur to him that the guy who closed the night before had failed to set the alarm. Jones was going to have to call it in to the security company and his manager. Someone else was going to land in the shit, he thought, and for that he felt a sense of undeserved relief.
Flush with this wishful schadenfreude, he worked through the checklist. The washrooms were acceptable. Everything seemed to be in its place up at the front desk. There were a couple of coffee cups in the sink in the closet that passed for the lunchroom. A Taurus had been a guest for the night on one hoist in the two-car repair bay. The other hoist was down and unoccupied. That figured. Saturday was overtime for the guys wielding the wrenches and grease guns. Overtime was done in half days. The mechanics had checked out and there’d been no one in the bay since noon Saturday. Jones checked the back door. It was secure. He unlocked it and peered out into the snow drifting around the dumpster and old wrecks left to rust out back.
There were three other cars parked close to the door, out of sight from the road. The nearest was a snow-covered Volkswagen microbus of a Summer of Love vintage. It needed some TLC and STP and maybe even an EKG. Farthest from the door was an old Impala that was acned with rust. The microbus and the Chevy had been there since Jones worked his Friday night shift, left in auto-repair limbo while their owners mulled over the costs versus benefits of throwing more money into their geriatric rides. Between
them was a car that had only a thin sheet of ice over the trunk. First impression, it had been on the empty hoist, had been serviced, and had been left in the back for the owner to pick up after hours, the keys under the visor or floor mat.
The keys weren’t in either place, though. They were in the ignition and the engine was running, eight cylinders on a low rumble. Jones didn’t realize that right away. He couldn’t see the exhaust. The wind would have been blowing it down the Trans-Canada and across the prairies at the speed limit. Even if his toque hadn’t been pulled down over his ears, the wind drowned out the low, finely tuned hum. Jones recognized the car. It was his boss’s ride. Jones dry-heaved. Busted for showing up late, for sure.
On closer inspection, though, looking through the thoroughly defrosted and even sweating window, he took faint hope. His boss’s head was tilted back, like he was asleep. Jones walked over to the driver-side door and tapped on the window. His boss didn’t respond. He tapped a little harder. Still nothing. Not even when Jones opened the door. And only when Jones opened the door did he notice the hose running into the passenger-side window. And only when Jones walked around the back of the car did he see that the hose was hooked up to the exhaust.
Fifteen minutes later the snow was speckling a corpse as the pair of medics lifted it into the back of the ambulance and Jones was telling a couple of veteran Mounties exactly what happened, right down to the song on the radio, even though he couldn’t name the singer and didn’t recognize the song. He tried humming a couple of bars. He was a good-looking kid, too good-looking to be smart. Looks didn’t deceive. He had smoked enough dope to leave behind a dozen IQ points at various Caribbean ports of call.
But he was telling them what they already knew. They would have recognized that old Mercedes 280SE anywhere.
So would I.
2
It was five hundred bucks I would have earned the hard way: buck-naked in the back seat of that Mercedes, steaming up the windows. It was broad daylight and we were pulled over on the not-so-soft shoulder of a freeway in plain view of passing cars and risking charges of gross public indecency, a hard thing to do in Orange County.
It was September ’91. Martin Mars was behind the steering wheel. The Benz was his single indulgence. It was all he could manage on a one-year deal paying him the league minimum, a two-way contract that kept the threat of a return to the minors hanging over his helmet like the sword of Damocles. He never said anything to me about his plight, even though I was his roommate on the road. Then again, he never said much about anything. He had suffered a crushed larynx years back. His nickname was Whisper. It seemed like it physically hurt him to talk, and days would go by without much more than a shrug or a wink or a wave out of him. I never saw his eyes redden when he’d walk into the dressing room before a game and see his name among the night’s healthy scratches. It was hard to make out his eyes behind his thick horn-rims.
Ivan Borzov was sitting beside Mars. He was twenty-six but this was his first trip to North America so he was still just a rookie. He had a haircut from a Red Army stylist and a head so big that the trainers didn’t have a helmet to fit him. He had the grill of a Moscow watchdog that had kissed the bumper of a speeding Volga. He would have beaten out Dolph Lundgren for the part of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Normally I would have had my choice of seat as the veteran in our little group, but Borzov was about six foot six and as stiff as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. I volunteered to sit in the back.
Beside me was Van Stone. He was called Stoner, of course, and the epithet fit, on looks anyway. He was just eighteen, but with his stringy mullet he looked like a greasy fifteen-year-old skipping class to hang out in the poolroom. On the ice he had the hockey sense of a ten-year veteran. This was his first pro camp. We all knew that he was going to be sent back to junior in a couple of weeks but the team had signed the Next Big Thing to a deal over the summer. He had his bonus, endorsement deals for sticks and skates. If his agent had been sharp he would have had his picture on tubes of Clearasil or packs of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Didn’t matter. Stoner was already worth seven figures and didn’t even have his driver’s licence. He was a good kid. Didn’t mean we didn’t envy him.
It was a ritual every September, first week of training camp. On the first really hot day I’d set up a bet. Everyone throws in fifteen hundred dollars. Driver turns off the air conditioning and cranks the heat with the windows up. First one to open a window loses his stake, five hundred to each of the survivors. I always made sure that I brought along a six-pack, well chilled.
I figured Boris Badenov would be easy to beat. He took every shortcut on the ice and I predicted this was going to be the same.
Not even close.
We had been in the car for almost an hour and Borzov hadn’t even blinked, staring straight forward, not making a sound. Stoner and I had split the six-pack but it didn’t help. The kid and I were pressing our faces to the windows, the only relief from the heat in this German-crafted rolling steam bath. Mars had to be even warmer under a beard that was as dense as an SOS pad and ran uninterrupted from his chin to his shag bath mat of chest hair. We had sweated right through our clothes. We had taken them off. We were going to leave butt prints on the black leather upholstery. No one had ever gone this long on the bet.
Stoner looked woozy. His eyes rolled back in his head.
“I think we’re going to lose this kid,” said Mars, whose glasses were densely fogged.
“He’ll be okay,” I said. I figured his contract was insured against cataclysmic injury or illness. The risk was even greater than we knew. I had, in fact, served Evan Stone the first and last beers of his life. I didn’t read The Hockey News. How was I supposed to have known he was an evangelical Christian? Or that he had ulcerative colitis?
It was at that point that Boris lit a cigarette, a Russian dart with the aroma of raw sewage. He looked into the back seat with menace and blew smoke in my face. I coughed. And then he held the smouldering butt like he was going to grind it out on his seat.
“Is burn?” he said.
“You win,” Martin Mars rasped, powering his window down. “Throw it out.”
The next day, the Russian bragged to our teammates. “Is easy,” he said. Martin Mars was a laughingstock at practice. He had to fork out five hundred to Boris. I told Martin Mars that I didn’t want his five hundred dollars. Stoner did the same thing. I told the kid it would help us if he didn’t say anything about the bet to the coaches or reporters. If it ever got out that Mars and I were corrupting a near minor who happened to be the Future of the Franchise, we’d be in deep shit with management. Management would try to trade me and Mars would be exiled to the minors without the faintest hope of ever being called up again.
Mars was our Black Ace. He wore the black sweater in practices on game days and had to stay on the ice after we came off. While we were hitting the showers, our Black Ace was out on the ice, doing hard time, pushed through drills and miles of hard slogging by a coach who had no use for him, who actually had it in for him. Martin Mars did his best to conceal what had to be existential despair, but for all he knew back in training camp in ’91 he might have already played his last game in the league. Whenever I looked at Mars in his black sweater I thought of my classics class at Boston College and reading The Iliad: “The goal of all men is to be the first and superior to others.” The Black Ace, he was the guy in sandals chasing after the chariot, left behind as the heroes headed off to war. I couldn’t have taken his money in good conscience.
Stoner said he trembled all night long, drank gallons of water, and hadn’t pissed in thirty-six hours.
Mars thanked us and told us he’d pay us back someday.
Funny thing, Borzov was back in Moscow a week later. Boris didn’t want anything bad enough on the ice. He just went through the motions in camp and he definitely wasn’t sticking around to get sent to the minors. He went back home with five hundred bucks, a third-degree sunburn, and a thousand Aeroflot points to show for
his cameo in Hollywood.
It was Martin Mars who spent the season in the game’s gulag.
3
Derek Jones was still taking the Mounties’ questions when I stepped off the plane in Regina.
Scouts enter a few assignments with guarded enthusiasm, like a mid-winter date in Vancouver, my previous stop on a ten-day swing through the West. Occasionally an excursion dovetails with real life. For me that was two weeks away, when I’d head off to Minnesota for a few days of college and high school games. That would be my chance to reconnect with a goaltender at a boarding school in a town near the Twin Cities, the goaltender being my daughter. But this was going to be two nights in Regina. In February. While I waited to get my keys at the car rental desk I checked my BlackBerry for my departing flight Tuesday. Out at 11 A.M. Forty-seven and a half hours couldn’t pass fast enough.
I checked into the Hotel Saskatchewan. I’ve stayed there on each of my trips to Regina.
My first time I was in grade seven and was with my family. My mother, the Queen, liked nothing better than entering contests and finally landed the grand prize: an all-expenses-paid trip by train across Canada. We stayed in the old railroad hotels at each stop, even at the Banff Springs. We had to pose for some publicity pictures and, as patriarch, Sarge did some interviews with newspapers as we went down the line. At the Hotel Saskatchewan I dropped a postcard down the slots that were beside the elevator on each floor. I remember it was an old-fashioned glass shaft and the lettering in brass said CULVER MAIL DELIVERY SYSTEM. I waited by it until I saw other people’s cards and letters drop down, like it was raining Wish-You-Were-Heres.
Regina Trip number two was even more memorable. I was on the Ontario team that went to the national Junior A championships in Regina. We beat a team from Vancouver in the final and I started to get calls and letters from U.S. colleges the week after. I didn’t get a goal in that game, but I did manage to score that night with a tall blond cowgirl who was in town on her high school’s tour of the university. I told her I was two years older than I really was. That’s what I told the bartender too, and I had the fake ID to prove it. She flashed her card and she ordered a tequila sunrise, something she picked up from a movie. She had freckles and I asked her if she’d show me all of them. She said she didn’t do that sort of thing, but she did that sort of thing with me all night long.