Page 178 of Rising Heat

tyler

The Fire–Police charity game is technically for charity and realistically for bragging rights, which everybody involved understands and pretends not to. Eight years of firefighters and cops treating one Saturday a year like legally sanctioned combat has turned the whole thing into its own ecosystem—everybody talks shit, everybody plays harder than they claim they’re going to, and then afterward everybody drinks together like none of it happened.

I come off after a hard shift, breathing hard and grinning a little, pulling one glove off with my teeth while Coop watches me as if I’ve suddenly become interesting.

“You’re awfully chipper today.”

“We’re up.”

“You almost smiled while checking Reyes into the boards.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“Bullshit,” He nudges my shoulder with his elbow. “I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“If your sight’s so good, check the scoreboard,” I say, pointing toward center ice.

The whistle cuts him off before he can keep interrogating me. Mack buries Gallagher into the glass on the next shift hard enough to wake up both benches, strips the puck away, and casually starts the breakout like he didn’t just knock a few years off the poor guy’s life.

Marco watches him skate back by.

“Aggressive.”

Mack shrugs.

“He was in the way.”

“We’re already up three,” Marco points out.

“Then he should play better defense.”

“Your logic concerns me.”

Mack shrugs like Marco’s the unreasonable one.

“Worked, didn’t it?”

Marco turns to me.

“Scoreboard,” I shrug.

Mack drops onto the bench a few seats down, peeling off his gloves while he catches his breath as Coop and Marco hop over the boards on the line change. I glance back toward the stands. A little girl pounds on the glass every time her dad skates past, her mother laughing beside her.

Mack follows my gaze.

“She would’ve liked today.”

He doesn’t ask who.

“Yeah,” he says. “She would’ve.”

The horn sounds for the half before either of us says anything else.

By the time the Zamboni doors roll open, Coop’s already squeezing himself between us.

“We talking about Darcy? What I miss?”

“Nothing,” we say at the same time.