Page 7 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

She’s there at seven because she’s always there at seven. Camel-colored coat over the back of the chair. Silver hair up. Reading glasses on a chain.

“Marek.” She doesn’t look up. “Sit down. How is he?”

“Contained. He accepted the manager structure without amendment—full visibility, calendar, medicals. Nothing about the brother beyond the standing arrangement.” I wait for her to ask. She doesn’t. “He didn’t threaten to call anyone.”

She takes off the glasses, folds them, and lets them fall against her chest on the chain.

“Then he already knows how bad it is,” she says. “Good. That saves us four months.” She turns the monitor on her desk a few degrees, not toward me, just enough to occupy her hands. “Here’s what I want. Hear the shape of it before the parts, because the shape matters even when the parts change. He’s not a debtor to me. A debtor is a bad quarter. He’s a position. He plays sixty or seventy games a year, and every one of them has a market on it. Men in other cities price those markets from the same public information everyone else sees. What I want from you is the information that’s not public.”

“Which information?”

“His body. His sleep. Whether that hip is holding. Whether he’s playing Thursday or the boy is playing Thursday, and I want to know it on Tuesday, not when the lineup goes up an hour before puck drop.” She puts one finger on the desk. “None of that is a secret worth anything to anyone but me. That’s the beauty of it. There’s nothing illegal about a man telling his employer that his client slept badly.”

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” I say. “There’s nothing legal about the loan it services, either.”

“Which is why you’re on my payroll and not a bank’s.” She almost smiles. “You’ll file weekly. Eleven minutes past midnight on Sunday into Monday, as always. Balance, schedule, condition, projected earnings.”

“Understood.”

“And Marek.” The glasses come off the chain into her hand, which she only does when the next point matters. “He’s worth nothing to me frightened. Frightened men change agents, change accountants, hire lawyers, go to their league office at two in the morning to get out in front of it. Your job isn’t to collect. Your job is to be the reason he never does any of that. Keep him cooperative. Keep him comfortable, if comfortable is what it takes.”

“That’s understood.”

“Is it?” She puts the glasses down on the desk between us. “You’ve never worked an account that lasts a season. You’re very good at the ninety-day version. This is going to be a long winter.”

“He has one brother. No father on the birth certificate. A mother who left twelve years ago, no contact since. No relationship anyone has photographed in nine years,” I say. “There’s nobody to run to. I’ve read the file. He’ll hold.”

“I didn’t ask whether he would hold,” she says, courteous as a hostess, and goes back to her screen.

Suze Okafor runs me on Thursday.

I know she runs me because a service alerts me whenever my registration is pulled. It goes off at 9:14 while I’m in the arena parking structure. By ten past eleven, she’s called three of my four references, leaving a voicemail for the fourth.

The references are real. That’s my professional life in one line: everything about me is legitimate except the reason I’m here. I’ve held the license for nine years. My clients include dentists and a man who owns four car washes. Their books are immaculate. If Suze Okafor calls any of them, they’ll tell her Marek Brandt is boring, thorough, and returns a call inside the hour.

She calls me at 11:40 and doesn’t introduce herself for the first four seconds because she’s finishing a sentence to somebody else in her office.

“—no, tell him Friday, Friday or nothing. Mr. Brandt. Suze Okafor, I represent Kieran Doyle.”

“Ms. Okafor.”

“You’ve been retained privately.”

“In November. He let a couple of statements go unopened, and it embarrassed him. He wanted somebody to make the mail stop being a problem.”

She laughs, one syllable. A keyboard keeps clicking in the background. “That’s the most Kieran sentence anybody’s said to me all year. All right. Your papers are clean. Your people like you. I’ve been telling that man for six years to let somebody look at his accounts, so I’m not objecting the week he finally does it. I’m adding you to the team sheet. Copy me on anything structural. Anything with a signature, anything that touches a contract, I see it first.”

“That’s how I want it.”

“Good. Don’t make me regret the speed of this.” A pause exactly long enough for somebody to read one more line on a screen. “He’s a private person. He’s been private since he was eighteen years old. I’ve never gotten a straight answer out of him about anything that wasn’t hockey. If he’s telling you about his mail, he’s telling you more than he tells me.”

“He isn’t telling me much.”

“Then you’re doing your job,” she says, and hangs up without saying goodbye.

Kieran calls me himself that afternoon.

That’s not in any plan of mine. I’m in my office with the licensing renewals for a car wash spread out on the desk. My phone rings. I look at it for two rings before I answer.