Rebel Glory (8 page)

So much for being a computer-like hockey player.

“I knew that,” I said. “Really.”

“Sure.” She smiled at me. I could get used to those smiles. “Now, give me your list of people who can get into the dressing room.”

I passed it across the table.

She hummed to herself as she studied it. “We’ll need photographs of each of them.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Trust me on this.”

As if I had a choice.

“Well,” I said, “some of them have their photographs in the Rebels’ program. You know, the one they sell at games.”

“And the others?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Unless you’re going to walk up to them and ask them to say cheese—”

“Good plan.”

I tried to tell her I had meant it as a joke, but she kept talking and I didn’t have the chance.

“You’ll have to take me to tomorrow night’s game,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said. “Somebody will recognize me. I’m supposed to be in Winnipeg for urgent ‘personal reasons,’ remember?”

She smiled sweetly. “No problem. I’m in the drama club. I’ll dress you up in a great disguise.”

chapter sixteen

It felt strange to walk into the Centrium to watch a Rebels game rather than play one. It felt even stranger to wear a wig.

“This won’t work,” I told Cheryl, “not in a million years.”

She was in blue jeans and a nice blue jacket, and she carried a heavy black purse.

“Relax,” she said, “you look perfect.”

Perfect? Cheryl had glued a false mustache into place. My wig had a ponytail, and I
was wearing a baseball cap. I wore greasy jeans with holes in the knees and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt beneath an unbuttoned red flannel hunting shirt. I had rolled the sleeves up to show the tattoos on my forearms. They were new tattoos, the kind you put on with water. In my shirt pocket I had a package of cigarettes.

“Try to walk more floppy,” she said.

“What?” I looked to see if anyone in the crowds around us had heard her. “Floppy?”

“You’re walking tight, like an athlete,” she said. “Headbanger rock-and-roll types don’t walk that way. Make your head and arms floppy, and walk with a slouch.”

“Like this?” I took a few goofy steps.

Cheryl giggled. “Exactly.”

We walked up the steps toward our seats. Halfway up we met a biker with a leather jacket and long greasy hair.

“Dude,” the biker said to me, “got a smoke?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke. It’s bad for your health.”

“Cool joke, dude,” the guy said. “Like, major irony. Mock the athletes of this world.”

I didn’t think I had been trying to make a joke until Cheryl kicked my ankle. I remembered the cigarettes in my pocket.

“Hey, man,” I said as I grabbed the cigarettes, “help yourself.”

He took half a dozen cigarettes from the pack and stuck it back in my pocket. Cheryl and I continued up the stairs.

“See what I mean?” Cheryl said. “Perfect.”

We sat in section VV, row 22, across from the players’ bench. I soaked in the music and the smell of popcorn and the feeling of nervous excitement in the crowd. Cheryl kept turning her head to look in all directions.

“This might be fun,” she said. “I feel like a kid at a circus. Maybe I’ll come to some more games later.”

“Wonderful,” I said, not meaning it.

“Only if you’re playing.”

“That’s better.”

At the other end of the ice, the Saskatoon Blades were skating circles to warm up. The Blades were usually a powerhouse team, but for some reason they had not been playing
well lately. We were expected to beat them easily tonight.

I watched the Rebels in our end. My chest tightened to see the guys. Mulridge. Shertzer. Mancini. Hog Burnell. And the rest of the team in the white, gray and black Rebel uniforms. I had missed hockey bad enough before, but I began to miss it ten times more now. It was killing me to just watch.

“Cheryl,” I whispered, “this has got to work. I’ll die if it doesn’t.”

She frowned at me. “Don’t be stupid. No matter how much fun hockey is, there are plenty of other things that are more important.”

I opened my mouth to defend myself, then changed my mind. She was giving me that kind of frown.

“The list,” I said to change the subject. She pulled it out of her purse. The list contained all the people who could get into the dressing room any time they wanted.

She had asked for everyone, and I had put down everyone, no matter how unlikely. Sam Radisson, the owner. Lucas Turner, the
general manager. Kurt Doyle, the promotions manager. Coach Blair. Assistant Coach Kimball. Teddy, the trainer. The stickboys. All the press guys I could remember. I even put down the zamboni driver because he worked maintenance and had a key to all the rooms in the Centrium.

“Hmm,” she said as she reread the list. “Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“I had a chance to speak to Robbie Patterson today,” she told me. She was whispering, and I had to lean closer to hear. Her perfume smelled nice.

“Robbie? Our goalie?”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s in my biology class. I asked him to tell me as much as he could about the dressing room after the second period of the last game.”

“Because if someone did something to his glove, it would have been then, right? His glove broke in the third period.”

“Right,” she said.

I was glad I wasn’t so nervous around her anymore. It gave me the chance to think.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You asked him who, besides players, were in the dressing room.”

“Exactly.” She looked at the paper. “That means you can cross everyone off the list except for Kurt Doyle, Coach Blair, Assistant Coach Kimball, Teddy the trainer, and the stickboys.”

“Kurt Doyle’s photo is in the program. Same with Coach Blair and Kimball. So you won’t need to take their photos.”

“Stickboys and trainer,” she said. “Can you point them out from here?”

I could. I looked across the ice and described what Teddy was wearing. Then I told her what the stickboys were wearing.

“Good,” she answered. She patted her purse. “I’ve got my camera in here. I’ll wander over to the other side sometime during the game and take all the photos I need.”

“Why?” I asked. It had been hard to hold on to that question as long as I had. “What good will their photos do?”

“Cockroaches,” she answered. “If we can find out where the cockroaches came from, we might have our man.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will tomorrow when you go to Calgary.”

“What? Calgary?”

She patted my knee. “Just relax and watch the game. I’ll worry about getting the photos. In the meantime, maybe you can explain some of the rules to me.”

I did my best.

The game opened with the Rebels scoring two goals in the first two minutes. By the end of the first period we were ahead by five goals. By the end of the second we were only ahead by three goals. At the end of the game, we won by a single goal in a 10–9 battle that was not very defensive, and I had winced every time a defensive mistake in our end cost us a goal.

Still, it could have been worse. We could have lost. Now we had to win ten games with thirteen to go. And I was hoping I could get back on the ice before it was too late.

chapter seventeen

After the game, Cheryl and I went to the Dairy Queen downtown. A milkshake for me. Diet cola for her.

“All right,” I said as soon as we sat down, “how about finally telling me what the pictures are all about.”

“Find the person who put cockroaches in Jason’s equipment,” she said, “and you’ll find the person behind all of the
strange things happening to the team.”

“Sure,” I agreed, “but how do we do that?”

“Go to Biology Supply Importers in Calgary. It’s the only company in the entire province of Alberta that sells cockroaches.”

Sells cockroaches?

She laughed at the look on my face. “Yes, they sell cockroaches. Alberta has cold winters—it isn’t like Mexico where you can find cockroaches anywhere. If you want cockroaches, you’ll have a much easier time buying them than trying to capture them. Lucky for us there’s only one place that sells them.”

“But why would anyone sell cockroaches?”

She dug into her purse and pulled out a small brochure.

“I hope this doesn’t spoil your appetite,” she said.

I moved my straw so that it wouldn’t get caught in my false mustache. I was worried some of the guys might stop by after the game, so I was still wearing my disguise. I took a good slurp of the milkshake, then read the brochure.

“What?” I said a few seconds later. “Preserved cats for ten dollars each?”

“Sounds gross, doesn’t it? My dad gave this brochure to me. He’s the one who suggested we try to track this down through the cockroaches.”

Cats weren’t the only animals in the brochure. There were frogs—sold by the dozen—snakes, earthworms, grasshoppers, squid, minnows and monkeys. Some were sold dead, others alive.

“Dead animals and live animals,” I said. “What’s the deal?”

“For science labs in universities, colleges and high schools,” she explained. “Animals like frogs and snakes and cats to dissect don’t just wander into the lab and ask to be experimented on.”

I put the straw to my mouth for another gulp of milkshake. I thought of slimy dead squid and changed my mind.

“I think I understand,” I said as I set the milkshake aside. “If someone bought the cockroaches to put in Jason’s equipment, that person had to buy them from Biology Supply Importers.”

“That’s the way Dad looked at it too.”

“And you think I should go to their office and ask them if they sold cockroaches to anyone in the last couple of weeks.”

“Yes,” Cheryl said. “Show them all the photographs too. Maybe the person didn’t use his real name when he bought them.”

“If he bought them,” I said. “This doesn’t sound like a sure thing.”

“It isn’t a sure thing,” she agreed, “but can you think of a better idea?”

I stayed in a motel again that night. I was glad to be able to take the wig and false mustache off, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, the tattoos stayed on my arm.

I fell asleep wondering about the cockroaches. Sure, you could dump a jarful into someone’s duffel bag, but how could you get them to bury themselves in all the cracks of a guy’s equipment? And how could you get them to sit still as Jason got dressed and then move as Jason began to skate? You couldn’t inject each cockroach with a sleeping potion and then push it into the equipment. Even if that were possible,
how would you know that the cockroaches would wake up at exactly the right time?

It was too much of a puzzle for me to solve. Thinking of cockroaches didn’t help my sleep much, either. I kept dreaming of giant ones chasing me around the ice.

I was tired, then, when I woke up the next morning. The drive south to Calgary took me and my old truck about an hour and a half. I should have enjoyed the view as I drove. The highway is mostly straight and flat, which some people might find boring. But a prairie sky is a pretty picture, with colors from the blue of a robin’s egg to the oranges and yellows on sun-streaked clouds. Plus for much of the way to Calgary you can see the jagged edges of the Rocky Mountains against the western horizon.

I couldn’t enjoy the view, though. I was too nervous, hoping that Cheryl’s plan would work. And what was I going to say once I got to Biology Supply Importers? Could I just march in and demand that they tell me what I wanted to know?

When I got to Calgary, the first thing I did was stop by a one-hour photo shop to get Cheryl’s film developed. There were photos of the stickboys and of Teddy, the trainer. There were also some photos of Cheryl and me together, making goofy faces into the camera as I held it in my hand and pointed it toward us. I sure looked weird in the ponytail wig, but she was pretty, even with her tongue sticking out.

After leaving the photo shop, it took me a half hour to find Biology Supply Importers at a small warehouse in the southeast part of Calgary. Not until I pulled into the parking lot had I decided how I would approach this. With honesty.

“Hello,” I said as I walked into a tiny office to see a woman at a desk. She was an older lady with hair dyed an unusual shade of red. She looked up from the
Calgary Sun
newspaper in her hands.

“Hello, sugar,” she said. She was chewing gum and grinning at me. “What’s a handsome guy like you doing in a place like this?”

I stared at the floor and tried to figure out what to say to that.

She laughed. “Don’t worry, sunshine. I’m just trying to have fun. You can’t imagine what it’s like answering the phone and taking orders for tarantulas or chimpanzees or squid.”

“How about cockroaches?” I asked.

“Cockroaches? You want cockroaches? Dead or alive? Of course, they’re so tough to kill, I’ll bet half the dead ones are still kicking by the time they get here.”

I tried not to think of how they had been crawling on Jason’s belly just before he fainted.

“Actually,” I said, “I wonder if you can tell me if you’ve sold any in the last couple of weeks.”

She stopped popping her gum and gave me a hard look. “That’s not information I would usually give out.”

“Ma’am,” I said, “someone played a nasty joke on a friend of mine. I’ve also been a target of some mean jokes. If I can find out who did them, the pranks might end.”

She lifted a cup of coffee from her messy desk and took a gulp. “How do these jokes involve cockroaches?”

I told her how Jason had ripped off his hockey equipment at the beginning of the game against the Lethbridge Hurricanes.

The woman laughed so hard that she began to cough. To stop her coughing, she lit a cigarette. “That’s a good story, sunshine. Good enough that I’ll do you a favor.”

She tapped the side of her head with her index finger, showing shiny, dark purple nail polish.

“I don’t forget anything,” she said, tapping her head again. “A mind like a steel trap. And it was less than three weeks ago I got an order for live cockroaches.”

“Really!” I couldn’t believe this was actually working.

“Yup. A Sam Jones. Came by to pick them up himself.”