Today's Reading
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Jimmy wakes to a pinging sound in his head.
And the smell of blood.
He sits up, too quickly, and pain blazes up from the base of his neck and wells inside his skull like a fist forcing its way out. He shuts his eyes, trying to squeeze it away. The high-pitched pinging ebbs but the throb persists.
He opens his eyes. He's sitting on his kitchen floor in the dark. He checks the clock on the microwave: three fifty-three. He's still wearing the black-and-silver IceKings jacket he wore to the hockey rink and then to the Lost Loon Tavern. A draft of winter air cascades over his face. He sees his back door is open six inches and trembling on its hinges. He gets up to close it and notices he's wearing only one boot. He hobbles outside on his booted leg. The security light blinks on. Jimmy's other boot is lying on its side on the porch step. As he squats to pull it on, he spies a ragged path of packed-down snow leading away from the porch. As if someone dragged in an animal.
He goes back inside, closes the door, and flicks on the lamp hanging over the kitchen table. Still smelling blood, he lifts his left hand to his face. 'Jesus,' he says. The hand is spackled with dried blood, the knuckles a hash of shredded skin and exposed bone a shade of rust. Blood spatters the silver sleeve of his jacket from wrist to elbow. As he stares at it, the hand begins to ache like it would after pounding some guy's forehead and cheekbones in the middle of a hockey game. What did he do to himself? Or, God forbid, to someone else? He's seen his hand like this before, but it's been a long time, when he was still playing in the minors.
The thrum in his skull is deafening. He can't think straight. He goes to the sink, splashes water on his face and neck. It doesn't help. He gazes out the window over the sink. Outside is black all the way to the tree line several hundred yards away. All Jimmy can see is his reflection in the glimmer from the overhead lamp. A strawberry of a lump has risen on his right cheek. He touches two fingertips to it. It stings.
He turns the water on hot, squirts dishwashing liquid on the hand, and washes the blood off as best he can, the soap tingling in the spots where the knuckle skin is shorn. The hand comes clean enough, but he'll have to put his jacket in the wash and wear something else to work. That's not ideal because it's a game day and everyone, especially Jimmy, driver of the Zamboni, is expected to be in IceKings gear.
He checks his back pocket for his wallet it's there but, patting himself, finds no cellphone. Maybe in the truck. He goes to the garage. It's empty. He hits the garage-door opener. As it rattles upward, he sees his truck parked at an odd angle across the two-tire drive that bends through a span of sparse woods to his house.
Why is the truck outside? Did his garage-door opener malfunction earlier? He can't recall. Did his one drink keep him from parking properly? Or was someone else driving? None of this is right. But he can't remember how it got wrong. His stomach clenches. He feels afraid but doesn't know what he feels afraid of. Which frightens him even more. And, man, it's cold. Must be twenty below. He wraps his arms around himself and walks to the truck, shivering.
Whenever Jimmy's driving, he stuffs his phone in one of the coffee cup holders on the center console. It's not in either of those. He leans across the driver seat to check the passenger side, grabbing the steering wheel for balance. The wheel is tacky on his palm. More blood? Holy shit, he thinks. Somebody got hurt.
His breath billows white around his head. He checks the glove box, searches under the seats, rummages through the back seat. No phone. Goddamn. His boss will start texting him at seven and won't stop till opening puck drop twelve hours later. He sits in the back seat, hands gripping his knees, trying to think: Did he leave the phone at the Loon? He doesn't remember using it there; he usually turns it off before he goes in.
Memory loss is an occupational hazard for a former hockey fighter who took a slew of blows to the head while delivering more than his share to other heads. If a doctor opened up his skull, Jimmy suspects they'd find tangles of that CTE stuff that supposedly blots out memory and drags its bearers to an early death. Still, this morning's full-blown blackout is peculiar, more like the sort that plagued Jimmy when he was heavy into the booze, after the lawsuits and the publicity and the divorce and the child custody fight. Basically, the whole damn night from the time he left the Loon is missing.
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