Pipe Dreams(30)

"Thanks but no thanks."

"Can't blame a guy for trying."

She rolled her eyes in his direction. "Go nap, Michael. Your team needs you to be perky."

"I'm perky already."

She let out a little snort. "Right. Then can you watch my stuff for a second so that I can buy an iced tea?"

"I'll get it for you." He sat up.

She popped out of her chair first, though, and grabbed a wallet out of her shoulder bag. "Be right back."

Her long, bare legs sashayed away, and he groaned to himself. Her hair  swung back and forth as she moved, giving him glimpses of smooth  shoulders. If he went upstairs to nap right now, the image of Lauren's  perfect backside would probably torture him.

He heard a small thud and looked down. Lauren's shoulder bag had tipped  over, the contents threatening to spill onto the pavement. He nudged a  sunglasses case and a pen back into the bag. Just as he was righting her  bag, a prescription pill bottle rolled into view. He read the name of  the drug off the label before he could think better of it. Clomifene.  What the heck was that?

Right there in the Florida sunshine, a chill crept over him. It wasn't  long ago that he'd lived in a home overflowing with pharmacy bottles.  After Shelly's death, he'd filled a small shopping bag with them,  dropping off the last of them at the pharmacy for disposal. In fact,  Mike and the pharmacist in his Long Island town were on a first-name  basis by the time Shelly died.

What the hell was Clomifene for?

Easy, he cautioned himself. It could be nothing.

When Lauren reappeared at the other end of the pool a minute later, he  scrutinized her again. But this time he wasn't ogling her very appealing  body. He was looking for signs of trouble.                       
       
           



       

"What?" she said with a frown when she reached her chair.

"Nothing," he said quickly. He put his head back and closed his eyes again.

Lauren settled herself beside him. Before long he heard the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard.

He turned the name of the drug over in his mind, trying to decide what  it could be. Lauren hadn't taken any medication when they were together.  He tried to think of something a healthy woman might take, and came up  dry.

Maybe it's an antidepressant, his guilty mind offered up.

Now he was never falling asleep.

He slipped his Katt Phone out of his pocket and searched the name of the  drug. It came up right away. And the Wikipedia description was both a  huge relief and completely confusing.

Clomifene is one of the most widely prescribed fertility drugs in the world.

His chin snapped toward Lauren. And his gaze zapped right to her very flat, very beautiful belly. "Lauren?"

"Yeah?"

He opened his mouth and then shut it again. It was really none of his  goddamn business. None at all. It didn't matter if he was burning up  with surprise and curiosity.

"Oh my God, what?" she asked, staring at him. Then her phone rang. She  snapped her laptop shut and reached into her bag where it lay on the  ground, yanking out her own Katt Phone. "Nate? I'm by the pool." There  was a silence, and Mike fought against his interest to study the pill  bottle again. It was probably visible.

No. He wasn't going to look.

"I'll be right there," she said. "It's hard to concentrate out here, anyway." She gave him a sideways glance. "See you in five."

"Sorry," he said when she hung up. "I know you're busy."

"Go take a rest, Mike." She flung her things into the bag without  looking at him. Then she pulled a sleeveless knit dress over her head,  and his traitorous eyes followed its path down her sleek body. "See you  at the rink tonight."

Then she was gone, leaving him sitting there, Googling the heck out of a fertility drug and trying to decide what it might mean.





SEVENTEEN



Six hours later, Beacon had only one thing on his mind: a black,  six-ounce rubber disc. You don't get twelve years as a starting NHL  goalie unless you can concentrate when it counts.

It was the middle of a hard-fought second period and the score was still  zip-zip. Brooklyn was skating hard against Tampa, defending their zone  and taking shots, too. They just hadn't quite gotten lucky enough to  score.

Tampa was frustrated, too. Beacon could tell they were working harder  than they'd expected to. Their star forward was Danny Skews-a wiry dude  with an angry snarl. Beacon had never liked the guy. Tonight his face  was even redder than usual. Beacon thought he looked ready to crack  under the weight of his own frustration.

That's cool, he told himself. A rattled offensive player was easier to  read. Their opponents got a hold of the puck, and play moved down the  ice toward Beacon. He stayed loose, watching the whole zone at once.  That was his job-to see every possible outcome of the play, and to be  ready to backstop everyone else's errors. Skews passed to his wing, who  passed it back.

Then something beautiful happened. O'Doul got into Skews's blind spot,  and none of the Tampa players gave their man the heads-up. It shouldn't  have worked, but O'Doul leaned in at just the right split second and  blocked the next pass, getting his stick on the puck just long enough to  redirect it back to Trevi.

Skews got stripped while twenty thousand people watched.

The guy's response was to trip O'Doul, who went down grinning. And then  it got even better, because Skews got called for the trip. That's when  his composure snapped. "Fuck you!" he screamed at the ref, while O'Doul  openly laughed.

"C'mon." The ref pointed toward the sin bin.

"That was a clean check," Skews argued.

"Really? You want to fight it? We can make it four minutes," the ref offered.

"Fuck you," Skews spat again. "Bunch of little fucking faggots, all of you." He turned toward the penalty box.

"Classy," Trevi muttered as he skated past.

Beacon had only been a bystander to this little drama up until now, but  the gay slur instantly doubled his blood pressure. "Hey!" Beacon called  after the ref. "You can't let him say that shit! How many kids do you  think just heard that? Bet the network got it on camera."

The ref frowned, his eyes following Skews to the box, where the  red-faced player was still cursing under his breath. Beacon saw the  official think it through, his gaze snapping toward the television  cameras. He turned and skated toward the scorekeepers' bench. When he  got there, he leaned in to confer with the official, and the linesmen  skated over to join them.                       
       
           



       

Beacon fidgeted in front of his net, watching the confused faces of his  teammates. Although the delay was probably only ten or fifteen seconds  and counting, it was unusual in hockey.

A moment later, Beacon was stunned to hear the announcer call for  Skews's ejection from the game. "Unsportsmanlike conduct," the ref had  called. But instead of a bench minor, the guy was thrown the hell out.

There was a roar inside the stadium, as well as inside Beacon's head.  Holy shit. Holy shit, he repeated to himself. Players had been ejected  from play-offs games before, but it was rare, and Beacon couldn't think  of an instance that did not involve egregious bodily harm to another  player. Beacon was willing to lay odds that this would be the first time  in NHL history that a player was ejected for hate speech. And in a  play-offs game!

Holy shit. Their opponents were going to lose their ever-loving minds.

While the crowd continued to shout and stamp their feet-some in favor of  this development, but many against-the refs called for a face-off. All  his teammates were rested from their unexpected timeout, but their faces  looked tense as the puck dropped.

Tampa won the puck, and play transferred quickly to Beacon's end of the  ice. His attention snapped back to the game. "Trevi's open!" he barked  at O'Doul, who couldn't see the field as clearly as he could. "Man on!"  he shouted at Castro a moment later. His whole world was reduced to the  scrape of blades against ice and the slapping scramble of sticks and  bodies.

His boys cleared the puck before things got too crazy. They iced it,  though, so both teams went scrambling toward the other end of the rink.  And it was on like Donkey Kong for the rest of a very sweaty period.  Ultimately, the loss of their star center cost Tampa, though. And it was  Beringer who put one in the net for Brooklyn before the buzzer rang.  They all clomped down the chute into the visitors' dressing room for the  second intermission, awash in adrenaline.

"Well boys, that was interesting," Coach said, snapping his gum. "You  better lock this one up now. That'll really make 'em squirm. And you  need to show that whole goddamn arena you can clobber them with this  weird-ass opportunity you just created."