Page 4 of Hard Check
The silence landed harder than it should have. Leo felt his posture shift, his spine straightening, the armor thickening the way it always did when someone wasn’t buying what he was selling.
“How long have you been in town?” Leo asked. He wasn’t sure why he was trying to get the guy to talk to him.
“My whole life.”
“And you just…stay?”
Dawson’s jaw tightened. “Some people like where they’re from.”
Leo finished his vodka soda and tried to imagine fitting in here. It was hard to picture himself in a town with tiny grocery store and casserole welcome wagons. He stood and pocketed his phone.
“I should find my hotel. The, uh…” He checked the screen. “Lakeside Inn?”
“Take Main Street to the water, hang a left,” Gunnar said. “You can’t miss it. Come back on Friday. The guys usually start showing up for informal skates the week before camp. I’ll introduce you around.”
“Yeah.” Leo pocketed his phone. “Thanks for the drink.”
“First one’s on the house. After that, you pay like everyone else.”
Leo pulled his sunglasses back on and walked out. He could feel someone watching him through the window. He didn’t turn around to check who.
The Lakeside Innwas two blocks from the bar. Two stories, white siding, flower boxes in the windows, and a couple of rocking chairs on the front porch. It looked like the kind of place that probably had a guest book and a basket of mints at the front desk. An older man on the porch watched Leo park and didn’t look away.
The woman at the front desk handed him a key—an actual metal key, not a card—and pointed him down a hallway that smelled like Pine-Sol and lake water.
The room was clean. Small. A queen bed with a quilt that looked handmade, a window unit AC that hummed at a frequency designed to prevent sleep, and a framed photograph of a lighthouse above the dresser. He dropped his bag on the bed and stood at the window. The lake was right there—closer than he’d expected, and bigger. Waves rolled in and broke against the shore, white-capped and restless, more ocean than lake. He hadn’t expected that from Wisconsin.
His phone had nine texts from his mother, two from Phil, and one from a teammate. Scratch that, aformerteammate. It sucked that it had taken so long for anyone to reach out, but maybe that’s what his former coach meant when he’d talked to Leo about being a team player.
Leo reached back, pulled off his shirt from the collar, balled it up, and dropped it on the chair. From the window, Port Haven was a parking lot, a streetlight, and a lake that didn’t care he was here.
Cozy, Deluca had called it. Leo looked at the empty parking lot, the single streetlight, the lake stretching into nothing. Quiet was the word. Too quiet.
He brushed his teeth using the toothbrush from the travel kit he kept in his bag. He stared at the good toothpaste, the serum for the skin under his eyes, the toner his aesthetician in Orlando had special-ordered. Would he be able to get any of these products without having to order online or drive to Milwaukee?
His self-care routine was the same whether he was in a five-star hotel or a beige box on a lake in Wisconsin. Today, it grounded him in a way he hadn’t known he needed. Reminded him that he was still the same man, even if he was starting to question everything he thought he knew about himself.
Two days of driving and he could feel all of it now—the adrenaline gone, his body heavy with the kind of tired that sleep wouldn’t fix. He stripped and got into bed before the sun had finished setting. The sheets were stiff but cold, and the quilt was heavier than he expected. The AC hummed. A cat yowled once outside, then went quiet.
His phone buzzed. His mother. He turned it face-down on the nightstand.
He’d had two days to think about what Briggs had said. Two days of highway and silence and nothing to do but turn it over.Think about whether you want to be part of a team.He’d been angry at first. Then defensive. Somewhere around Indianapolis, the defensiveness had worn thin enough for the question to get through, and the worst part wasn’t that Briggs had said it. The worst part was that Leo couldn’t name a single team he’d been on where the guys would’ve fought to keep him.
He stared at the ceiling. The sun had gone down while he wasn’t paying attention, and Port Haven was quiet in a way that pressed against his eardrums. No traffic. No bass from a neighbor’s speakers. No sirens, no laughter from the street, no evidence that anyone under sixty was awake within a mile of him.
He pulled the quilt up to his chin, closed his eyes, and told himself this was temporary. Phil would make calls, find an interested team in a real city, with a real scene, where Leo could walk into a bar and not be the only person in the room who’d ever used an exfoliating mask.
Temporary. He just had to wait it out.
His phone lit up on the nightstand. His mother again. He reached for it, then stopped. Pulled his hand back and stared atthe ceiling instead, listening to the waves hit the shore through the thin walls, over and over, like the lake was trying to tell him something he wasn’t ready to hear.
CHAPTER TWO
Dawson heard the F-350 before Wyatt pulled it into the bay—a ticking from the engine that got worse as the truck warmed up. He knew what it was before the hood was open. Wyatt popped it anyway, ran through his whole checklist while Dawson kept working under the Silverado in the next bay.
“Lifter,” Dawson said.
Wyatt kept checking.
