The Code

by Gare Joyce

  Hunts didn’t say anything.

  “The mono thing bugged me,” I said. It was a messy, complicated deal, but this seemed to be a decent entry point. “They shut him down before they put out the word that he had mono. A week before. I didn’t believe it.”

  “That’s all covered in the medical reports from his agent.”

  “Yeah, it’s on there that it’s mono, but doesn’t it strike you as strange that those reports are from Bones II?”

  “Bones the father’s not around to do the physical.”

  “But the old man wasn’t his doctor of record. He had a GP in Toronto, the guy with the complete medical history. But he gets his physical from Bones II.”

  “Who just happens to be a big doctor, bigger than his father was,” Hunts said. He sighed impatiently. “So we’re going to pass up a possible franchise player—no, a likely franchise player— because you have suspicions.”

  “I got into the medicine cabinet at the billets’ house,” I said. “I saw the pills. The kid’s on drugs to regulate his heart rate. I talked to a cardiologist, gave him the names and dosages of the pills, and he told me that they could keep him in regular rhythm for a while, enough to get through his physical at the combine—never mind that Bones II is overseeing the physicals at the combine. I don’t know exactly how bad it is that this kid is taking heart meds. That they’re not coming clean about it tells me that it’s most likely to be a big deal.”

  Hunts leaned back in his seat.

  “Jeezus.”

  “There’s more. There’s a lot more.”

  I told Hunts how William Mays had walked out of the Ol’

  Redhead’s office with medical files that he disposed of. How he had tried to get at Sandy and probably planned to snuff her. How there was plenty of reason to suspect that he had broken into Sandy’s office.

  Hunts drank it in.

  “You know all this how?”

  Item by item. The break-in at Sandy’s office. Mays assaulting Sandy. The beat-down and unmasking after the chase scene. “If William Mays jumped Sandy, why wasn’t he charged?”

  “Because I didn’t want him charged.”

  “He attacks your fuckin’ girlfriend and you don’t want him charged?”

  “He’s going to get his day in court. I don’t just believe it, I know it. If the attack on Sandy is part of it, great. He’s going to go away for the murders of Hanratty and Bones …”

  “What? You’re fuckin’ kidding me?”

  “… so the assault on Sandy is something that I want to keep buried. I don’t have everything on him, but I know where the police can get everything. But I wanted to wait until after the draft.”

  “What’s the draft got to do with it?”

  “It’s about what we know and what others don’t.”

  Hunts puzzled over this for a minute. I didn’t wait for him to catch up.

  “You asked me to sit on Billy Mays. I did. The more I sat on him, the more suspicious it all seemed. Some things didn’t add up. Then a lot of things didn’t add up, too many to be a coincidence. And then the more I sat on him, the clearer it seemed. They were conspiring to keep some sort of medical issue out of sight. A major medical issue. Not a normal sort of injury, because even if this kid was out a season it wouldn’t fry millions. This had to be that big.”

  Hunts was taking it in. He was going from didn’t-want-to-know to had-to-know-more. I still hadn’t given him enough to trust the dope.

  “Look, we might be done no matter what goes down,” I said. “We could be dead men already. Fearless Leader might already have a handshake with Grant Tomlin or someone else for your job, and that means my job is fried like the breakfast buffet’s bacon. We need to do something big to save our asses and I don’t see any way of moving up. We’ve got to move off the fourth pick or we have to take someone other than Mays if he hasn’t gone.”

  “It’s worse than you think,” Hunts said.

  “Howz it get worse than this? We’re in a dead heat with Getting Audited While You’re Having Root Canal right now.”

  “No, I was out to dinner Wednesday night,” he said. “Japanese place, high end …”

  “A boy from Morden, what did they have, trout sushi?”

  “You might not be making jokes if you saw what I saw. I saw the guy who signs our cheques—maybe our last cheques—out having dinner with the kid and his father. Seems like Galvin wants Mays’s old man to do some motivational speaking or something. He wants all the employees in his corporation to read his books. I told them that we were looking to take Billy Mays at number four. Galvin even invited the old man to come up to his box before the lights go up tonight. The father told him that he’s gonna drop in but that he has to sit with his son and their family and friends at eight. For all I know he’s in there right now.”

  “Okay, we’ve just inched ahead of Tax Work at the Dentist’s Office.”

  “We’re gonna get killed,” he said, his head bowed down. Thank God there wasn’t a bottle in the room or all those clean and sober years would have gone out the window. “We’re gonna get buried by the reporters, by Grant Fuckin’ Tomlin. He might be sitting as the GM at our table at the start of the second round the way we’re going to get trashed. This is one helluva spot we’re in. What are we gonna do?”

  It was bad for all of us but me in particular. I had a stabbing feeling in my back: William Mays burying me to Galvin.

  I had an idea. It wasn’t going to guarantee our ongoing gainful employment. We could hope that it would buy us a few days’ grace. I was never what you’d describe as a finesse player, but this time I showed a sleight of hand that would make Gretz green with envy.

  59

  * * *

  A season in scouting leaves you on your own for hundreds of hours at a time and with thousands, no make that tens of thousands, of miles behind you. You work unnoticed if not quite undercover. Fans in the stands know your team and might even know your name, but they don’t recognize you. You work if not in the dark then with the house lights down. You’re peripheral to the action. You’re part of a team but always apart from it. You’re low-profile. You’re anonymous.

  And then there’s the draft, the last act of the league’s season. Bright lights. Teams sitting at their tables on the arena floor. Television cameramen snaking through the narrow aisles between the tables. Some nights you feel like you’re making a contribution to your team, like you’re making it. A lot of nights you don’t, knowing that the report won’t factor in any decision and might even go completely unread. And then there’s the draft, the weird spectacle where the famous GMs and big names are flanked by hockey’s working stiffs, guys like me. It’s not exactly our turn to shine. It’s the one time that we’re out in the daylight and held accountable.

  The first three picks of the draft went as we mapped it out on the erasable board in the war room hours earlier. Vancouver selected Galbraith, the hometown hero. He was on billboards outside the team’s arena before he had played a game or even signed a contract. Oakley was scooped by Minny. Meyers was going to Colorado. The head scout in Denver was an old Quebec league guy. If it had been close between Meyers and Mays at number three, then local knowledge tipped the balance.

  I had said nothing over that stretch and just neatly ran a black magic marker through the names atop the list in front of me at our table. I tried to distract myself by thinking deep thoughts. I’m in the afternoon of life like everyone on the floor of the draft. Like them, I’m just trying to believe that what I do is significant and not just a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

  Hunts had no time for deep thoughts. He had spent the last half-hour before the draft started and the first half-hour on the arena floor in a dead scramble. None of the teams were interested in letting us move into the top three slots. Hunts offered bundles of picks. First and second didn’t get it done. First, second, and third didn’t get it done. Even first, second, and next year’s second didn’t. No one was budging. Hunts then
scrambled from table to table trying to trade down, trying to get someone to give us a useful player for the fourth overall. No dice.

  I could tell he was steaming. He was steaming about the hand he’d been dealt: A lot of GMs could count on the support of their owners. It just happened that those GMs were with winning teams and their owners stayed out of hockey ops, one of those chicken-and-egg propositions with regard to cause and effect. He was steaming at me: Even if I had let him in on everything at breakfast I would have given him a better chance to talk to teams and float trades out there. He was thinking that I could have told him more as the stuff unfolded. He might have been right. Still, I had to close the circle with Bones II.

  After Calgary’s management team walked off the stage with their pick at number three, Meyers, the commissioner gave a wooden reading to the customary line:

  “The fourth pick of the first round belongs to Los Angeles. Los Angeles, you’re on the clock.”

  All our fans in their L.A. sweaters cheered.

  Hunts was on the clock and in a flop sweat. It was 8:30 P.M. I called our runner over to our table. A runner is one of those kids, ten or twelve years old, who wears a team sweater that dangles down to his knees and runs notes and messages and paperwork from one table to another on the draft floor. It might be a note that has to be run from a team’s table to the league overseers, to let them know that a trade is going to be announced. The runners are like pages in Parliament or Congress. I had always wondered how much those kids understood about the importance of the stuff they held in their grubby little hands. In Ottawa or Washington the stakes in those envelopes might be billions of dollars and lives. Here in L.A. it was just millions and our jobs.

  I was hoping that our trusted runner would be a kid heading to a military school, a kid who would soon be heading off to science camp, or a kid who was spending every waking hour either playing hockey or committing to memory the names of every player in the league. No such luck. Our kid did not instill a lot of confidence. The twelve-year-old assigned to our table looked like he might skateboard from one table to another. His greasy hair fell in front of his eyes and down to his shoulders. He was less likely to address us as “sir” than “dude.”

  I handed the kid an envelope and he took off on a dead run.

  He climbed over the boards and ran up a flight of stairs to the concourse; ran through an obstacle course of fans carrying hotdogs, popcorn, and beers; and made it to the elevator that went to the luxury suites. He went up to the 600 level, ran past a security guard who recognized him, and, flagging a little, knocked on the door of the owners’ suite, which opened. He brushed past a bunch of D-list freeloaders and had to duck under a few pairs of silicone breasts to the front-row throne where our owner sat. He handed him the envelope and said, “Here, Dad.”

  At 6 P.M. I had walked the preadolescent slacker through what I wanted him to do. I had walked through the steeplechase course. I had slipped the security guards up in the 600 level a couple of double sawbucks to make sure he had safe, unimpeded passage. And I had driven home the message to the kid that he had to hand the envelope to his father personally, not to his third-and-counting stepmother, not to any of his geek elite. To his father only. And with the side that said URGENT— EMERGENCY facing up. I had told the kid to be insistent that his father get onto it right then and there.

  Our owner opened the envelope. It carried a message that we couldn’t have delivered sooner and wouldn’t have trusted he’d read on his email. He might not have answered his cell. We needed the equivalent of draft-floor registered mail.

  Mr. Galvin,

  Our scouting dept., headed by Brad Shade, has found out that Billy Mays Jr., the player we would have selected at number four, has major medical issues. Not just a shoulder injury, which is well known, but a problem that threatens his career and makes him too risky to take anywhere in the first round. We will be criticized by the media when we don’t pick him. I want to let you know about this in advance. I would have told you about this earlier, but Brad has spent the last few days confirming this and we had to wait until this last hour to let you in on it.

  Hunt

  The kid ducked out momentarily as I’d instructed and dialed me on his cellphone. I had programmed in my number.

  “Okay,” he said, breathlessly.

  “You did it?”

  “I did. Gave him the envelope. He read URGENT and he opened it.”

  “Okay. Stay there. Wait.”

  At that point I nodded and we started to head up to the stage.

  60

  * * *

  “This is way outside the box. A terrible pick for L.A. I have no idea what Hunt is thinking with that pick. Billy Mays Jr. isn’t just going to be a great player, but he’s a kid with star quality. He’s not just a player who might have put Los Angeles into the league elite two or three years from now, but he’d probably get this team a profile in a competitive sports market where the team struggles to sell tickets. How you pass up a talent like that …”

  Grant Tomlin was in high dudgeon and thrilled. We looked up at the Jumbotron and could see him jumping out of his seat on the network’s set, pounding the desk. His diatribe would have played out on the owner’s wide screen up in the box but he was shouting loud enough to be heard unamplified all the way up in the rafters. He was shovelling dirt onto Hunts’s casket and, by extension, mine.

  “… Gord, you got to wonder about who’s running the show with that team …”

  Hunts and I exchanged looks. Hunts had bought into my story 99 and 44/100 percent sure of the dope on Billy Mays Jr.

  Tomlin’s verbal beat-down was enough to make the .56 percent leave him trembling. The disbelieving looks of everyone at the L.A. table couldn’t have helped. Even they were sure Hunts was going to call out Mays’s name when he stood at the mike.

  “… Gord, there are teams that don’t have this Swedish kid in the top ten …”

  We were back at the L.A. table and, yes, Stefan Sorensen, Stockholm’s own Andrew Ridgely, was sitting between Hunts and me, looking stunned. Sorensen looked uncomfortable in his L.A. sweater—it was a generic one, no name across the back, and we were keeping one that had Mays stitched above the number one in a box out of view. Poor Sorensen. I looked at him and thought he’d look so much better in a Choose Life T-shirt. At that point my phone rang again. It was the voice of our errand boy, our runner, a kid who was never asked to be patient.

  “Can I come down, now?”

  “Stay there,” I told him. If it had been another kid, I could have paid him to carry out the task and been confident he’d follow through. How do you buy the commitment of a twelve-year-old who carries a platinum card? Thankfully the back end of his duties were not quite as time-sensitive.

  New York was on the clock.

  “… Gord, I’ll be shocked, shocked if New York goes with anyone other than Billy Mays Jr. I have it on good authority that they were trying to move up into the top four to secure a chance to take him …”

  This was in direct conflict with the facts. Hunts had spent fifteen minutes at the New York table pitching a trade of our pick, number four, for New York’s first, number five, and their second, number thirty-five. Just a small consideration. And I had overheard Anderson make his case to pull the trigger on the trade. The conversation on the flopped picks went nowhere.

  Number thirty-five was a non-starter. New York’s hard-assed GM didn’t even offer number sixty-five. He must have been in cigar withdrawal to let a sweetheart deal like that slip by. He hadn’t even offered a pick from next year’s draft—sort of like putting the deal on a line of credit. It wouldn’t have flown anyway. Hunts wasn’t about to make a trade for a pick that would be exercised by his successor as L.A.’s GM.

  The New York staff followed draft etiquette. They waited until our staff had made it back to our table before heading up to the stage. When they did go, though, it was in something close to a dead sprint. They couldn’t believe their luck. In the fir
st round general managers usually announce the first picks, a little face time for some healthy egos, a chance to remind their owners who’s in charge. On this occasion, however, the New York GM didn’t exercise his honours. Frankly, he never thought much of the draft and never had seen Billy Mays Jr. He must have been still stinging from a small embarrassment from the year before when, standing at the podium, he had looked at the mike and forgotten the name of the kid they’d end up selecting. This time he had delegated the task to the guy who’d given him the facesaving cue: Anderson.

  “We would like to thank Los Angeles for putting on such a great event this year and for their generosity …”

  Normally that pre-pick patter is supposed to repel booing, but Anderson wasn’t delivering the line to the fans but rather us sitting at the L.A. table. We were directly in front of the podium. He smirked at me and seemed to laugh at our pick, who by his reckoning had no future as a hockey player but possibly one as a male model.

  “… New York is pleased and proud to select from Peterborough of the Ontario league Billy Mays Jr.”

  At that point almost an entire section of seats, maybe upwards of two hundred, went to their feet and cheered in full throat. Theirs was the largest delegation at this convention. Mays was dead centre, befitting the nucleus of the gathering. His father was on one side of him, DDoris and Ollie Buckhold on the other. The father was smiling with his usual self-satisfaction. DDoris wrapped Ollie in a hug that was more meaningful than her son, her ex-husband, her husband of the moment, and everyone in the business could have known.

  It was handshakes, hugs, and air kisses all around. Mays the Elder had brought along a troupe large enough to stage a Billy Jr. edition of A&E’s Biography. His atom, peewee, and bantam coaches were among them. His teammates from his minor midget team were in one row, from the Peterborough juniors in another, though Markov couldn’t attend because of an expired visa.