by G B Joyce
“Beckwith called me again and said he was calling an emergency meeting of the board at the arena,” she told me. “He says that he has a hard offer on the team and that there’s a deadline of … uh, I don’t know. I couldn’t take it all in. Anyway, he said that if I didn’t have someone there, Martin’s interest would just fall with the majority. It was a default something or other.”
I asked her if she was able to get Roth or Friesen to attend. She said that she couldn’t get through to either and that the meeting was within the hour. “I’d go but I just don’t understand all that stuff,” she said.
Although our scouting department’s budget spreadsheet looks like hieroglyphics to me, I figured I could tell if Beckwith was trying to pull a fast one just by sense of smell. He was a paid-up member of the Association of Small-Town Charlatans but he was used to running his games with rubes and hayseeds as marks.
When we pulled into the parking lot, it was easy to tell that a meeting of the board was going on: no pickups, just imported sedans. Beckwith had a Saab 9-3 sedan with BILDIT vanity plates. Chief and I made a dash from the car to the arena. The front door was locked and I pounded on it until a janitor came over and inched it open. I didn’t knock him over when I pushed the door open, but I could have. When we barged into the meeting, Beckwith had the floor and was about to push the last button. Every head that lined the conference table snapped toward us except Beckwith’s. We were in his direct line of sight.
“I have two sealed offers,” he said. “The first is from the interest in Alaska. The second is from another group.”
I didn’t like the ambiguity but no one questioned it.
“Who’s the other group?” I shouted from the back of the room.
Beckwith ignored me or at least tried to. He reached for the one envelope.
“Who’s the other group?” I brought it up to angry shout.
“A party that doesn’t want to be named,” he said. “I can assure you that the party has been talking to us since we first started looking into selling the franchise.”
“Your assurances are bullshit, Beckwith,” I said. “If you steamroll this sale through, who’s going to look after you? What’s in it for you, a nice signed cheque from ‘the party in Alaska’ or from the Player to Be Named Later?”
“The latter has asked to be left anonymous in the process but has been in active talks with us,” he said, still trying to clown me with a show of officiousness. On a point of procedure, though, he had me snookered. He asked for a show of hands of unsealing the bids. I dissented. I was alone because Chief didn’t have a vote.
“The Alaska bid,” he said and tore the envelope open. “A one-time payment of four and a half million dollars.”
That set off a buzz in the room and every board member turned to one another and expressed surprise and relief that the woes were winding down, as well as fast-acting nostalgia for a team that would be gone at the end of the season. It was a distraction that Beckwith fully utilized. He put on a show of disorganization. I walked from the back of the room and around to the front, where I saw him reaching into his briefcase. He had his hand on a stack of identical envelopes, all sealed, all unmarked. He fanned them like a crooked dealer would a deck, stopping at the one third from the top. That was the envelope he pulled out.
“The second bid,” he said and he tore the envelope open.
“What the hell was that? What the hell did you just do?”
Any attention I might have attracted Beckwith rediverted.
“The second bid is five million dollars,” he said with theatrical flourish. “And the bid includes a provision for local hockey in Swift Current. The team will stay in town.”
That last bit sounded just like a sentimental manipulation, a made-to-measure deal closer.
“Time out!” I shouted.
“You get one time out in hockey but none here,” Beckwith said.
“Okay, acting as proxy for Mitzi and the late Martin Mars, I move that we have a brief recess in advance of a vote of the board,” I said.
“You have the identification and paperwork to say that you’re acting as the Mars proxy?” the vice-principal asked.
“It’s in the car in the lot,” I said. “You want me to get it for you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Beckwith said unexpectedly. He didn’t have a gavel but his words fell and didn’t need further percussion. “The board will be in recess for five minutes. After the recess the board will vote.”
A few board members ducked out for a smoke, while others busied themselves over at the side table, where a hastily prepped cold buffet was laid out. Chief grabbed two ham sandwiches. I went over to Beckwith and tried to keep my voice down, mostly because I didn’t want any threat overheard. I planned to start with a threat of a legal paper-chase action and then an illegal purely physical one.
“What the hell are you trying to pull?”
“Hold on, I have a call coming in,” he said, putting his hand up, dismissing me as if I were the help offering him cream for his coffee. “Yes, I would say that it looks good. It’s safe. Yes, what time is your flight …”
“Beckwith, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Yes, it is him,” Beckwith said. “You want to speak to him? Okay, Mr. Shade, here.”
Beckwith handed me the phone.
“Hello?” I said.
“I thought I recognized that voice. Same temper, dude, take it easy on yourself. You can’t go ’round the world in a bad mood all your life.”
“Who is this?” I shouldn’t have had to ask. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have had it at “dude.”
“Shadow, it’s me, Stoner.”
His was officially the last voice that I expected to hear on the other end of the line. To me he was always that greasy little eighteen-year-old rink rat, the kid we dragged out of the steam bath in the Mercedes. He wasn’t, though. Every few months a story would pop up in the business section, a new venture, a new partnership, a new endorsement deal. His agent and business manager had managed to make him forty million on the ice and about five times as much off it. When he was an All-Star he jumped into charity work for colitis, and he had his agent and business manager park the sum of his savings in Big Pharma stock, saying it was just a matter of principle. Next thing you know, old Jed’s nearly a billionaire.
I was the rule, a guy who walked out of the game with less than he had expected as his career wound down. I was an extreme example of the rule but by no means unique, a guy who walked away with nothing to show for what passed for my prime. Stoner was the exception. Just the way the stars lined up.
“What the hell?”
“Dude, Whisper called me up and asked if I could help out with the team,” he said. “You’re out there for the funeral? Are you in on this deal too?”
“No, I’m not in on the deal,” I said. “I was in Regina scouting when I heard that Whisper died.”
“Yeah, I’m going to be flying up for the funeral,” he said. “I told Whisper that I was willing to beat any bid that he got for the team and I’d keep it in Swift Current. He said that having me involved would help them sell kids from B.C. and Alberta on the idea that going to Speedy Creek would be good for their development. The way that I figured it, we could tell them I was going to be on the ice with them in training camp and a few times during the year. I could set them up with jobs at my hockey schools during the summer. Top kids I could even bring down to L.A. to work out with my trainer. It would all be cool.”
“You stayed in touch with Whisper?”
“Dude, if he hadn’t rolled down the window I would have been a traffic fatality. ’Course I stayed in touch with him. Funny, I actually bumped into him at one of his stations. I was driving out to one of those sports banquets a few years back. We talked maybe once every month or two the last five years, I guess. He talked about you a lot.”
“So you went in on this deal because of Whisper.”
“Yeah an
d ’cause it’ll be good for my brand, y’know.”
He said it like he was parroting his agent and business manager when they spoke of his “transformation from hockey player to brand.”
“And what about Beckwith? How does he figure in this?” Beckwith didn’t turn his head. He pretended not to hear his name dropped.
“Beckwith, oh yeah, his company is going to do the construction. Part of me coming in is a private-public thing and I’m bringing in some money to grease a development around the arena. We got a company that’s designed that sort of thing around the world. Beckwith called me with the news about Whisper. That was awful. Anyway, he asked me if Whisper wasn’t around if I was still good with the deal and I was like, dude, for sure, stoked.”
Years in L.A. had sun-bleached his argot and cadence.
“Beckwith was worried that you’d drop out.”
“Oh, for sure. I mean he hadn’t been involved at all with me and Whisper at that point. But we came to an arrangement. I said, go to the market and see what anyone is willing to pay. I’ll beat it by half a mil and keep the team in Swift. He said that was what he was all about, keeping the team. I told the guy that if I landed the team, he could keep his job as veep and I could go out and get a really good coach and GM. I told him, look, dude, I’m gonna sign a bunch of blank offer sheets and you just fill in a bunch of amounts going up a half mil at a time. I wanted to make sure that the people there weren’t getting a haircut to sell the team to me.”
Blank offers: If Stoner’s business manager found out he’d need smelling salts.
Fanning the deck of envelopes, Beckwith was looking for the one that was five hundred thousand over the bid from Klondike Ike. You only have to be so slick to run an inside game in a small burg. But the fact was, Beckwith had been moving in concert with Whisper and not working against him. He had been worried that Whisper’s death might have killed Stoner’s interest and crashed the deal, and that would have been adverse to his financial interests. And with no team, he’d have had no choice box at games, no seat reserved at the head of the table for board meetings, and no title. Beckwith had reason to think that he needed Whisper alive for net worth and self-worth.
The conversation with Stoner wound down. We made promises to stay in touch, ones that at least he meant to keep. Before he signed off he threw something out there. To him it fell like a feather but it landed on me like a live grenade.
“Listen, buddy, I’ve got to run but I might want to talk to you about something I got going on with a minor-pro team I got a piece of,” Stoner said. “Probably need a coach and general manager. Might suit you. Lucky thing I talked to you. Wasn’t ’til I saw you on the TV at the draft last spring that I knew what you were doing these days. You gotta learn to network.”
I’ve always been a Hell Is Other People guy, but he had me weighing the inconvenience and pain of staying in touch against things I might have been missing.
I handed the phone back to Beckwith. A couple of minutes later, a show of hands. The Swift Current juniors had a new owner, a famous name. When he signed their cheques they wouldn’t know whether to cash or frame them.
The applause was still in full swing when my BlackBerry vibrated again. I pressed it to my ear and covered the other to shut out the background noise.
“A really bad idea staying ’round,” the voice said in a monotone that was more threatening than a shout. “Get your buddy’s car and get the hell out of here. You have one last chance to leave or you’ll be as dead as your friend. Could happen sooner than you think.”
The click cut me off before I could say a word.
Chief was watching the board members exchange handshakes and hugs. I heard what I thought was a two-by-four snapping and then realized that the Big Man had one fist in the other and was cracking his knuckles. It wasn’t a nervous habit. Chief had none. I didn’t think anything more of it because I was too preoccupied with the latest threatening call, another unneeded supplement for creeping paranoia. He hadn’t noticed me taking the call and he didn’t notice me checking the source. CALLER UNKNOWN again. I looked around the room. “Sooner than you think” had me wondering if it was already too late.
12
Chief and I didn’t stick around for the rest of the board meeting. Beckwith and the others were going to stay another hour to celebrate and sort out details like where and when the announcement would be made and who’d get to shake Stoner’s hand first. Later on, I found out that Beckwith had moved that a crest with MM in black would be sewn on to the sleeve of the Swift Current sweaters for the next game.
Chief and I walked out into the parking lot and were ready to make a dash out to our patiently waiting Bug. We didn’t make a backward or sideways glance when we went through the front doors. If we had we would have seen who was waiting for us out there: Butch and Sundance.
“Hey, Butcher, they’re still breathing,” Sundance said, limping forward. It was the same limp I had spotted at the casino.
“Breathing for now, little buddy,” Butch said.
“Shit, Butch, if you had been able to talk you would have been at the top of the card back in your day,” I said. “Oh well, that’s show business.”
Sundance had no idea what I was talking about. He compensated the way that dumb thugs always do, with profanity and inarticulate threats. I struck a nerve with Butch, though. He was a biker dishonourably discharged, a two-bit criminal, an ex-con but at heart a showman. Once you’ve stood under the bright lights and all that. Butch was pissed.
It wouldn’t have been too hard to spot Chief and me coming into town. Our yellow Bug was like a Kick-Me Sign slapped on our backs. How they tracked us down was no puzzle, but why stumped me. Chief and I had barely made it away with our lives that night at the Imperial, so you could toss out revenge as a motive. There was no score to settle. They shut us out. Likewise, the Loners had beat it before the Mounties arrived, so they faced no charges. We couldn’t do them any damage.
“We had to take it easy on you two last time,” Sundance said. “We were afraid that if we hit you too hard we might end up hurtin’ one of the kids. But now …”
Sundance’s words stopped rolling and his eyes started, some sort of weird delirium.
Butch picked up the slack. “The shit-kickin’ we laid on you and you came back,” he said. “You dumb mutherfuckers. They’re gonna have to ship you out of here now.”
And it was on. I wasn’t optimistic. The bikers spread out, either side of us, and so Chief and I had to turn our backs on each other to face our dancing partners. Again Chief drew Butch and I had Sundance.
Butch and Chief were first out of the chute and I could hear shots traded and grunts. Chief was more beat-up than he let on to me, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was going into this bout with a cracked rib or two or a little shoulder separation. Butch uttered a couple of unfortunate racist epithets, probably a requirement of his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood. It was a misjudgment. It flipped Chief’s switch and he waded in on Butch, grabbing his leather vest in his left hand and jackhammering the biker with the other. Chief’s reach was the difference maker. So long as he kept that arm straight, Butch couldn’t get inside to wrestle him. After eating a dozen shots that would leave his face a swollen mess, Butch made a belated move, trying to break the straight arm by bringing down his elbow. Mistake. That only brought Chief within his wheelhouse and he needed only one punch to reduce Butch’s nose to a single serving of calcium-fortified cereal dust. Chief doesn’t have much of a ground game and stayed on his feet, kicking Butch right in the chops. His jawbone snapped. I felt sorry for Butch. When he woke up he was going to be on a diet of milkshakes for two months and the Dairy Queen was closed for the winter.
It was an inspiring performance, I have to admit, the stuff that lifts the spirits of the team on the ice. It wasn’t inspiring enough for me to go head on with Sundance, though. I was still feeling the effects of our scrum Monday night and determined that it was better to go at
this technically and clinically. I kept dancing on the outside while Sundance limped forward with the balletic grace of a B-movie zombie. I was going to pick my spot and I did. I kicked the legs out from under him, a leg sweep that you’ll see in any respectable dojo. He landed on his back and snow cushioned his head from a hard bounce off the asphalt. He got back up and kept coming forward, this time with a knife that he had pulled from his vest pocket.
He took a swipe at my midsection. It was poorly timed, all windup and no payoff, like going for a highlight-reel slapshot when just a wrist shot would do. I couldn’t count on his bad judgment and my good luck to last, and the longer the fight lasted the worse it was for the home team. I’d only had an eyeful of him a couple of times but I’d logged my scouting report. He had one weakness. The next swing he took, another miss, I took my chances and ran him, stomping on his boot, the bridge of his foot. The steel toe offered some protection but any shot there would serve its purpose. He staggered backward and fell to the ground, about ten feet from where his knife came to rest.
“My fuckin’ gout,” he whimpered.
Not so helpfully I picked up the knife before he could stagger up. He froze as I pulled it closer to his grill. “Lie down, face down,” I said. Sundance should have been thankful that none of the boys in the cellblock or at the headquarters could see him now. I put my foot across his neck and gently pumped, like I was squeezing apple juice out of his Adam’s apple.
“Fuck off,” he said with a strangulated and sadly half-hearted rasp.
“You sound all choked up,” I said, putting my heel down in search of his C4 vertebrae. If I sneezed he was going to spend the rest of his life on a ventilator.
By this time, Butch had sat up but he was willing to be counted out of the ring.
“I believe in kismet and karma but I can’t imagine that this was a coincidence or something just destined to be,” I said. “What the fuck is this about?”
Nothing. He tried to grab my ankle. I pushed my heel down like I was slamming on the brakes and it had about the same effect. He came to a dead stop. His hands dropped and his eyes rolled back.