“There’s someone here for her,” she says.
“Prisoners don’t get visitors,” he says, shaking his head with glee. “You’ll just have to tell them to wait.”
“It’s, uh—well, he says that he’s waiting on her, and that you know him?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Oh, do I?”
“Coach…Victor Lawson. Of the Milwaukee Frost.”
Mustache is on his feet so fast he nearly knocks over the chair in front of him. “…TheCoach Vic? What the hell are you talking about, Darlene? What the hell is he doing here?”
I watch all this with moderate interest. I know that the Milwaukee Frost fan base was growing—I did research on the franchise the moment I was hired for the position—but I didn’t think it was like this.
Only four years after the team’s inception, and this security guard is reacting to Coach Vic’s name like he’s Bill Belichick. I’ve never really enjoyed watching sports, but sports gambling was a huge part of what dad and I got up to. So I know the basics of what makes a team good. What could predict a win.
In fact, I got so good at predicting wins that it led to our eventual arrest. First in my dad’s entire history as a professional conman.
“He wantsher,” Darlene says, coughing a bit from nervousness. “He said we’re holding her up and that he might call…the FBI?”
Mustache’s eyes go large, and he grabs his belt, adjusting it, glancing at me as he harrumphs out of the room, presumably togo talk to Coach Vic. I whistle while I wait, and Skinny eyes me like I might secretly be building a bomb.
“Alright,” Mustache says, returning a moment later and looking chagrined as he waves me out of the room. “Come on, you’re free to go.”
“Thank you,” I say, giving him a little curtsy as I pass. Just to piss him off.
In the hallway, the Milwaukee Frost’s head coach is waiting for me, my pink, stickered suitcase looking odd at his side. Thank god he managed to find it—everything in there might be from the Target bargain bin, but I can’t afford to replace it.
“Wren Beaumont,” he says, not smiling as he watches me approach. He’s on the taller side, which makes sense since he was once a very famous and successful hockey player. Now, he’s older and rounder, but maintains the same stern expression I recognize from his photos.
“Well hi,” I say, coming to a stop and tilting my head at him. “Pleasure to see you again, Uncle Vic.”
***
The Milwaukee Frost arena training complex and administrative offices are actually pretty impressive. Uncle Vic leads me from building to building, showing me around the newest facilitiesin the NHL. Players pass occasionally, and I wave to them, watching them register me with their coach, consider me.
We zip around through the parking lots on a golf cart, hopping out so he can show me the different areas. The locker room looks glossy, perfect—every stall exactly the same, a jersey for each player hanging front and center, skates propped up on the wall. Vic leans down to show me the fans in each little cubby—temperature controlled and providing air flow to dry the jerseys when they’re clean.
In the center of the ceiling, hanging ten feet above our heads, is a massive, baby blue Milwaukee Frost logo that illuminates the rest of the room. It fights with the LEDs and bathes the room in gentle light.
After the locker room is the player lounge, where a wall of TVs show hockey news and recaps of last year’s season in which the Frost made it to the play-offs, but didn’t take home the Stanley Cup.
A full-time chef waves to me from behind a shining stainless-steel counter. “You want anything? I can whip something up for you, honey.”
“No time,” Uncle Vic says.
But I cut in, raising my eyebrows at the guy. “Can you make Italian beef?”
Ten minutes later, I’m back in the golf cart with my sandwich, and Uncle Vic is shaking his head. “Of all the things that guy can make, you choose a sandwich.”
“I love these,” I say, quickly catching grease from running down my chin. “Have you ever had one in Chicago? To die for.”
“I think you’ll find Milwaukee has its ownto die forfood,” Vic says, cutting his eyes toward me. I feel something between us softening, years of tension relaxing slightly when he says, “Maybe I’ll have to show you. We could do a food tour.”
I’m not a sentimental person, but the last time I saw Uncle Vic was during my court case. At the time, he’d said he understood I was just a kid, but there was hurt in his eyes.
Now, I swallow and look away from him, pushing down the feeling that tells me I’ve already ruined this. I’ve come to realize that the negative voice in the back of my head is usually just my dad, my brain coming up with what I think he might say.
You can’t trust Victor, he would say, shaking his head at me.The guy just wants to take you away from me, Wren.
