Panic in Pittsburgh (6 page)

Where had it come from?
And then he remembered.

He went into the washroom and checked the garbage can. In the bottom was a little paper parcel, and wrapped inside the paper were the jagged pieces of a broken water glass.

Another memory exploded in his brain. He got up and almost ran to the dresser to pull out the lowest drawer.

It was filled with chocolate bars. Nish’s stash. But one had been eaten: a Mars bar wrapper was off to the side. Travis knew he’d eaten that bar, and he knew when.

The chocolate bar, the glass he had used to listen in on the strange conversation in the next room. It hadn’t been a dream. He really had heard it. The men really had been planning something.

But what?

It was Saturday, the second-last day of the Peewee Winter Classic, and the Screech Owls were one game away from the final. They had played exceptionally well, even without Travis Lindsay in the lineup, but now they were about to meet the Portland Panthers to decide who got to play for the Winter Classic championship.

The Owls knew the Panthers well. They had beaten them and been beaten by them in past tournaments. They had even got to know some of the
players – Jeremy Billings, the slick little defenseman, and Stu Yantha, the tall and powerful center – and had come to like and respect them.

Sarah was wearing the
C
. She had worn it before, so this was nothing new. She’d been the Owls’ first captain, but the
C
had gone to Travis when she went to play for an all-girls team, and it had stayed with Travis after she returned. They were
both
team leaders, and if there could have been two
C
’s, Sarah and Travis would have been the two Owls wearing them.

She was beside Sam, the two of them dressing quietly in the huge football-team dressing room at Heinz Field. The other Screech Owls were scattered about, none of them – not even Nish – talking while they readied themselves for what they knew was going to be a very tough, hard-fought game.

Most were fully dressed and finishing up tightening their skates when Muck came in and stood at the center of the room. It seemed he was about to make one of his special “speeches” – always using as few words as possible, always seeming slightly taken aback that he had to say anything at all. Muck wasn’t
one for inspirational speeches. He also believed that players decided games, not coaches. He was unusual in that way, and the Owls loved him for it.

Muck cleared his throat.

“It’s a big game, kids. You know that. You don’t need to be told what to do or what to think. You know what to do, and if you haven’t already been thinking about this all day, you’re not hockey players. You don’t need any more coaches than you already have – but this game we’re going to add one, if you don’t mind.”

“Who?” Fahd cried out.

Muck gave him a withering look. He then turned to the door, where Mr. Dillinger was standing with a grip on the handle.

Mr. D opened the door and in walked Travis. He was wearing his Screech Owls tracksuit and he was smiling through a deep blush.

The Owls’ dressing room burst into cheers and screams of “
Travis!
” They rushed their red-faced little captain, high-fiving and fist-rapping with him, all of them so excited to see him back he couldn’t get a word in himself.

Mr. Dillinger put his fingers in his mouth and blew his trademark shrill whistle.

“Listen up, now!” he shouted. “Travis will be on the bench this game, but he won’t be able to play until we get back home and he gets cleared. But he’s feeling good enough to be out, and the doctor here checked him over and says he’s doing just fine. So, let’s get out there and get into the big game, okay? That’s what we came here for!”

“For Travis!” Sam shouted.

“
Travis!
” the other Owls screamed.

Travis made his way to the visitors’ bench and sat in his usual place. He stuffed his hands in his tracksuit pockets and took in the sights. There were thousands in the stands, but they still looked empty. The rink in front of him looked tiny, shrunken, out of all proportion to the football stadium surroundings, but he knew it was just an optical illusion. The rink was regulation size. It was the stands that were Olympian.

The Owls were flying about the ice in a quick warm-up. Travis wished he could be out there with them. He watched Sarah take the far corner so fast her jersey snapped like a flag in the wind. He watched Nish dancing forward, backward, forward, backward in quick succession – the Iceman making sure his pivot was good and the edges of his skate blades right. Mr. Dillinger had done his usual perfect job of sharpening.

“Hey, Travis!” someone called. Travis looked toward the home bench and saw little Billings making his way along the boards.

Billings stopped in front of the Owls’ bench. “I heard you got hurt,” he said. “Okay now?”

Travis nodded. “I’m good.”

“Good man,” Billings said, reaching his stick out to tap Travis lightly. “See you back on the ice soon.”

Travis just nodded. He was so struck by Billings’s little gesture with the stick that he could hardly swallow, let alone speak.

The officials called for the game to start. Sarah came in opposite big Yantha at the face-off, and
Yantha, just as Billings had done, reached over and gently tapped Sarah’s pads.

“Good game,” he said.

“You, too,” said Sarah.

And it was a fabulous game, the puck moving fast all over the ice, the crowd much louder than Travis had expected, given the size of the stadium and the distance they were away from the action.

Billings and Yantha combined on the first goal when Billings joined the rush, and Yantha simply dropped the puck in the slot and used his size to plow through Fahd and Lars on defense. Billings’s quick, accurate shot beat Jenny five-hole. She got up fast and swung her stick hard against the far post. But it hadn’t been her fault. No one could have stopped such a quick, hard shot.

With the Panthers up 3–2 heading into the final period, Dmitri knocked down a pass from the Portland defense and broke in alone, his familiar forehand-backhand move twisting the Panthers goaltender out of the crease, and his backhand sending the water bottle flying.

With five minutes left on the clock, Derek Dillinger and Andy Higgins broke away on a two-on-one, Billings the only Panther back. Derek had the puck and went to pass to Andy, waiting to onetime his shot, when Billings made a brilliant play by suddenly lunging forward between the two Owls and blocking the pass.

Unfortunately for Billings, the pass hit his shin pads and bounced right back to Derek. Because the Panthers’ goaltender had also played the pass, anticipating a shot from Andy, Derek was left with a virtually empty net, and he easily fired in the goal that put the Owls up 4–3.

Travis felt sorry for Billings. It had been a brilliant defensive play, but as so often happened in hockey, the bounce went one way rather than the other. “Puck luck,” Muck liked to call it. There were some things in hockey that no amount of skill could make happen and no amount of coaching could prevent. Puck luck.

The next five minutes Travis found harder than if he’d been playing. He tried to be useful by opening and closing the gate for the forwards,
but most of the Owls were so pumped up they leaped the boards to get on and leaped them again to come off. He felt useless. But he was sweating harder than if he’d been playing. The tension was huge.

The Owls had only to hang on and they’d have their trip to the championship game. Though Muck had said in his speech that there wasn’t much coaching he could do in a game like this, Travis thought that Muck was the key.

Muck kept sending out Nish with Lars, using his top defenders to keep the Panthers at bay. And he had Sarah staying back on her own side of center, always ready to back-check if necessary.

When those three tired to the point where none of them could go on, Muck called his time out. Though Muck had called it, however, he never said a word to his players. No lecture. No chalkboard to design a play. Nothing. Over at the Panthers’ bench, their coach was taking the opportunity to do all of these things, rapidly drawing up plays and wiping the board clean and then trying another plan.

Travis laughed to himself. You would never have known it was Muck who called the time out.

He looked at Nish, bent almost double on the ice, gasping for breath. His tomato face looked about to explode. How could Nish be the most thoughtless, ridiculous person on earth, Travis wondered, and also be the most dependable, most determined defenseman on the team? It was as if he were two different people. And today, in fact he was: “Nishikawa” might have been the name on his jersey, but underneath was the Iceman T-shirt.

The time out over, the referee blew his whistle and called the teams back to the face-off circle. It would be Sarah against Yantha. She looked up, waiting for the linesman to drop the puck.

Yantha winked.

They both knew this was a great game. They both knew that one team would go on and the other would go home. But there was no dislike, only admiration. If the Panthers won, Sarah would cheer for them; if the Owls won, Yantha had just
told her without saying a word, the Panthers would do the same.

Yantha won the face-off and got away a quick shot that rang off the crossbar behind Jenny and into the glass and out of play.

They faced off again, and this time Sarah won, sliding the puck back to Nish, who calmly took it behind his own net.

He was killing time, staring up at the clock, which seemed, to Travis, to be moving slower than a snail.
Hurry up!
he said to himself.
Hurry up!

Nish worked his way out of his own end, carefully protecting the puck. He dumped it in, and the Owls waited at center for the attack, led by little Billings.

The Panthers came on strong. Billings had a good shot from the point and Yantha a second chance on the rebound, but Jenny was acrobatic in the Owls’ net and kept both shots out.

With a minute and a half to go, the Panthers pulled their goalie. He raced off as another Panther rolled over the boards.

With a player advantage, the Panthers pressed
even harder, but a combination of Nish blocking shots and Jenny stopping them meant they couldn’t score.

Finally, Billings drove a hard shot that a falling Nish took off his shin pads.

Even falling, Nish was able to sweep the puck out over the blue line, where Dmitri, with his blazing speed, was able to gobble it up. He got it across to little Simon Milliken, who skated in all alone and dropped the puck into the Panthers’ net.

A 5–3 victory for the Screech Owls.

The Owls mobbed Simon, and when Simon came to the bench, Travis thought the little guy was almost in tears. Tears of joy.

It crossed Travis’s mind that it would have been him out there, not Simon, if he hadn’t been hurt – that he would be the hero being mobbed. But he shook off the thought. He was glad for Simon.

The clock ran down quickly after the final face-off. When the buzzer sounded, Travis watched as Yantha went over and tapped Sarah’s shin pads and she tapped his back.

They lined up to shake hands, and when the handshakes were done, Billings led the Panthers over to the Owls’ bench, where each of them in turn leaned over the boards to shake Travis’s hand.

“Next time,” Billings said with a smile.

“Next time,” Travis smiled back.

“I need to talk to you.”

Travis had taken Sarah aside as soon as the victorious Owls had returned to Station Square. They had been singing and laughing on the bus, but Sarah had noticed that Travis sat quietly on his own, staring out at the river as the shuttle carrying the team crossed the bridges and twisted through the streets. She figured it was for good reason – he was better, but not completely recovered from the concussion. Besides, Travis was naturally quiet. As
her father often said of those who spoke little, “Still waters run deep.” And that pretty much summed up Travis Lindsay in her mind.

But now he wanted to talk.

“Shoot,” she told him, but he shook his head.

“Not here.”

“We can walk down along the river,” Sarah suggested. “I’ll get my coat and meet you in the lobby.”

“Bring Sam,” he said.

Sarah nodded and headed for the elevator. What could all this be about? she wondered as the elevator doors closed.

Travis went up to his room for his own coat. He pulled his bulky team jacket over his tracksuit and was just leaving again when Nish – the Iceman – came running along the hallway so as to make the sheet with the big
I
on it fly out behind him like a real cape. The sheet was frayed. Nish had clearly been working at it with scissors, trying to get it to a size where it wouldn’t trip him up on his skates.

Nish stopped, and the cape fell around his shoulders and dangled as far as his knees. He was puffing.

“Wazzup?” he asked.

“I’m just going down to meet Sarah. We’re going for a walk.”

“Can I come?”

Travis swallowed. He had originally thought to tell only Sarah. He imagined that the two of them, as captain and assistant, might go to Mr. Dillinger for advice on what to do. But he’d already told Sarah to bring Sam along.