He’d insisted that every man on the squad pick a social cause or a community organization and give it at least ten hours a week of volunteer time. It had been part of the playing contract and Tom had made the rounds, checking to make sure the players were where they said they’d be and when. No one had ever gotten away with shirking their charitable commitments. For Tom, giving back had been important.
And when the local paper mentioned the good works, Tom had posted, filed and sent those clippings home, too. Logan’s mother had saved them all. He and his sisters had found them in a box in the bedroom closet after her funeral. Along with them had been cards from her bridge club ladies congratulating her on having raised such a good, caring, talented man.
Logan swallowed down the lump in his throat and rose from the chair. He needed another drink, he told himself as he headed for the liquor cabinet below deck. He didn’t need to feel guilty or the least bit obligated about a damn thing.
Chapter Two
There was the good, the bad and the ugly. And then there was the Wichita Warriors. They had exclusive claim to the deepest pit of god-awful that Logan had ever seen. He gazed out over the sparse crowd, mentally calculating the gross. Unless the concession contract was a good one, Catherine Talbott was going to be paying expenses out of her own pocket this week. What did it cost her per game to rent the Kansas Coliseum these days? Public venues seating nine thousand didn’t come cheap. It had cost a fortune when he’d played here and odds were the rent hadn’t gone down in the past twenty years.
Arena rent, office rent and overhead, hockey equipment, insurance, travel expenses… Add in the player salaries. Minor leaguers—especially those in the west—didn’t make huge amounts of money, but considering the Warriors’ performance in tonight’s game, hell, if they were pulling down five bucks an hour they were being overpaid.
The ref brought the puck to the face-off circle in the Warriors’ own end and Logan watched the players slide into position. Wheatley, the center and a left-hand shooter, stood at the dot with his back to the goal. Vanderrossen and Stover fell in on either side of him and opposite the Austin Ice Bats’ wingers. Andrews and Roth, the Warriors’ defensemen, slipped in behind their teammates, checking over their shoulders to make sure they weren’t blocking their goalie’s view. Rivera nodded and set himself at the outside edge of his crease.
The ref did his quick visual check with the linesmen, and Logan drew a breath and held it. The puck dropped. It was still in midair when Vanderrossen flung his stick and gloves to the ice and himself at the opposing winger. Stover did the same on the other side. The whistle came in the next second—but about a half second after the puck ricocheted off Andrews’s shin guard and wobbled through Rivera’s wide open five hole.
The Ice Bats bench didn’t put up much of a celebration for the goal. Apparently the previous ten had pretty much used up all their enthusiasm. The players on the ice were too busy trying to de-sweater and break each other’s noses to notice the score. The fans obviously didn’t care that the tally had just gone to eleven-zip; they’d come for the fights. And to jeer the refs, Logan decided a few seconds later as the officials sent all four of the brawlers to the locker room with ten-minute game misconducts.
Logan glanced at the clock suspended from the arena ceiling. Three minutes, eighteen seconds left in the third period. An eternity by hockey standards. The way things were going, the Ice Bats could easily double the score before the final buzzer. There was no hope for the Warriors in that amount of time, though, and everyone knew it. What there was of a crowd was running toward the exits while the players set themselves up for the face-off at center ice and the Ice Bats’ goalie did push-ups in his crease.
With a hard sigh, Logan scrubbed his hands over his face and closed his eyes. He’d been insane to even come look, to so much as entertain the notion that coaching the Warriors might be a more productive use of his life than drinking the days away on his boat and feeling sorry for himself. So much for nice thoughts. Basking in the sun and polluting his liver was a slow road to hell. Coaching the Warriors would be like getting there on the bullet train.
Logan checked his watch. Ten o’clock. They’d already rolled up the ramps and shut down the airport for the night, so he was stuck until the first morning flight to civilization at six. How to kill eight hours in the middle of a Wichita night had always been a problem and from what he’d been able to tell on his trip from the airport to the Coliseum, no one had come close to solving it in the fourteen years he’d been gone.
The options tonight were the same as they’d been from October through April for almost all of his adult life: go back to the hotel, drink in the bar until they closed it down, leave a wake-up call request, crash a couple of hours and then stumble to the terminal gate with a raging headache so he could do it all over again the next night in another town. The beauty of his boat was not having to do all the stumbling between point A and point B.
Snagging the overpriced, too glossy program from the cement floor, Logan rolled it into a tube, shoved himself up out of the hard plastic seat and headed toward the exit just as the final buzzer sounded. He paused and turned back to check the scoreboard—12–0. He was thinking that the Ice Bats had shown the Warriors some mercy when his gaze slipped past the scoreboard to the sky boxes along the east wall.
Only two were lit. One was the press box with a pair of announcers undoubtedly trying to wrap up a dismal show. The other contained a single, slim figure with blond curly hair. Catherine Talbott stood alone in the owner’s box, her arms folded across her chest and her head bowed as though she were praying for a miracle. She needed one, he knew. Just as he knew that he wasn’t going to be it.
Logan shook his head and was turning away when his conscience squirmed. With a wince, he stopped again. He’d already given her offer way more time, money and consideration than it deserved. And he’d told her yesterday before she’d walked off his boat that he wouldn’t take the job, that he didn’t want or need it. There was no reason for her to hear it again. It would be cruel to go up to that sky box. It’d be like rubbing salt in an open wound; she had to feel bad enough already.
Cool reasoning didn’t settle his conscience. It prickled and then clenched tight like some long neglected, suddenly over-exercised muscle. With a growl, Logan eyed the sky box again, wondering just what the hell he could say to her that might be anywhere near encouraging or optimistic. Hey, at least you didn’t have to call an ambulance. Cheer up, they won two of the fifteen fights. Lady, if someone wants to buy this loser franchise, sell it!
Logan blinked, and in that same second the lights in the owner’s booth winked out. The scoreboard went dark in the next. He considered the now silent arena and the scarred, shaved ice below. Wichita had never been a great hockey town; it was too far south, too far north and nowhere near cosmopolitan enough to bring in transplants from the parts of the country where hockey was a way of life. It didn’t matter how bad or how good the Warriors were; it had never made a difference and never would.
Tom Wolford had spent his life swimming against the tide. And from the looks of things, he’d been pretty well swept out to sea for his effort. If Catherine Talbott didn’t know that the odds were stacked against her, then someone needed to be bluntly honest about it. It didn’t have to be him. It wasn’t like there was some big ledger book that said he owed her anything.
Aw, hell. Who was he kidding? Getting the hard stuff done had always been his job.
Cat leaned back against the grille of her ancient Jeep and crossed her ankles. The team’s just as ancient bus idled on the far side of the private parking lot, its running lights glowing bright orange in the crisp autumn night, the storage doors open, the driver standing beside them, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the team to file out and board. A good fifty feet separated the bus
