There's a Shark in My Hockey Pool (11 page)

The muffled roar of the #401 below spilled
upward over the railing. George's concentration wavered on a fine
line between nervous and exhilarant energy. His legs told his heart
that a decrease in speed would be welcomed. But his head reminded
his heart that the brunette watering her flowers, eighty yards
distant at 3 o'clock, might look up in an instant to admire his
rock hard biker calves. With that inspiration, Ackerman imagined
himself on the final leg of the Tour de France.

The man walking his Rottweiler was shouting
Ackerman’s name out, urging him on. A sports car driven by a little
old lady with bifocals passed him, assuming the pace car position.
The parked tow truck turned into a table with dozens of cups of
gator-ale. He'd better swerve to miss it. Not by too much though.
He was thirsty. He reached out to grab one of the many imaginary
cups.

"Leggo. There it is," said Donnie.

Dino saw Ackerman and released the tire.
Donnie tumbled backwards into the street, off balance. Clutching
the tire, he fell into the path of the hard charging Ackerman.

George's dreams of the yellow shirt were
dashed. He would later tell the orderly at Our Lady of Gusto
Hospital that he was sideswiped by a member of Lazy Bart's
Rust-Proofing team. The nurse bandaged up the six-inch wide snow
tire smudge on the side of his face.

"How long have you been racing dirt bikes?"
she asked.

Dino jumped forward, grabbed the tire that
loosely framed Ackerman's noggin and rushed over to the railing
with the rubber. He stared down at the traffic disappearing
underneath the overpass. He nodded his head up and down, getting
the timing down as Erskine's car approached. He and Donnie had only
been kidding before when they'd spoke about throwing tires at cars.
The intent was to have the tire land in front of the car and cause
a blow-out. Unfortunately they didn't have the cover of darkness.
But there were plenty of cars zipping by at 90 kilometres an hour
or better. For serious tow truck tire tossers, this was a catch-22
situation. More targets were available ... but there was a greater
chance of landing in the hoose-gow.

The stretch limo was two hundred yards
distant and approaching fast. A gap of sixty yards had opened up
between it and a station wagon ahead of it. Piece of cake, thought
Donnie. He hurled the tire over the side. He leaned over to watch
the radial drop like a rock. The limo ran into the tire the same
time as Ackerman's bicycle crash-landed on the hood of the car.

Dino turned to see his brother, twenty feet
to his left, further down the railing.

"It's my turn," said Donnie with a smirk.

A disgusted Erskine stood beside the smoking,
banged-up vehicle. Dennis pulled his tow truck in behind the car.
He hopped out of the cab, saw the bike and stopped short.

"Holy shit. Where's the guy on the bike?"

"There is none."

"Wow. That bad, eh?"

Dennis respectfully took off his baseball
cap.

"No, no," said Erskine. "I meant to say there
was no one riding it. It was just the bicycle and ... that."

Erskine pointed to the tire.

"Someone must have dumped them over the
railing," he said, pointing overhead.

Dennis cocked one eye.

"Kids probably. This neighborhood is bad for
gangs. Maybe they mistook you for a rival member."

"In a stretch limousine?" Erskine was
incredulous.

"Long, short ... old, new -- these kids will
steal anything. They sure as hell aren't riding ten speeds
anymore," Dennis said. They both looked at the mangled ten speed
imbedded in the grill of the caddy.

"They make sure of that," Dennis said as he
began to hitch up the chains.

Dennis unhitched Erskine's mangled car from
the tow truck. Nearby, Victor was in the middle of a cellular phone
call. The phone's state-of-the-art technology had difficulty
withstanding the heated conversation Erskine was having with a
local taxi dispatch.

"I want a fucking cab now! What word don't
you understand?"

Erskine slapped the flip phone shut and
stuffed it back in his sport jacket.

Dennis motioned to the garage.

"This guy's great. Good prices for good work.
He'll have you back on the road in no time ... no matter what you
hit."

Erskine started for the garage, head down ...
and almost bumped into Ray Marcotte. Neither man recognized the
other. Dennis climbed back into the truck and started the motor.
Ray nodded toward the damaged car and smirked.

"What's the other guy look like?"

Erskine looked around, weighing the tire and
bicycle story. Dennis pulled his tow truck up alongside the two
men. He waved to Ray and pulled out into traffic. Erskine turned
and started walking toward the garage. Ray walked with him.

"It was a single-car accident. I ran into
some ... uh, debris on the #401."

"City streets are filled with more crap than
the damn government," Ray said.

Ray lifted the mangled hood and inspected the
damage.

"When will it be ready?"

Ray squinted at Erskine.

"Humpty Dumpty ran into the bleedin' wall
here ... and only one of the king's horsemen is on duty."

"Look ... uh, Ray. Erskine finished the
sentence like he was swallowing a burp.

"I'm a very busy man."

"Twenty-five hundred. Add 15% to that if you
want a receipt."

Ray never lifted his head from under the
hood. He'd have no problem hiking the figure another $500 if only
to show this fruit-in-a-suit just how busy he was himself. The
mental battle waged on for a few seconds as Erskine silently chewed
on the estimate.

"Where's that damn cab? A pox on them
all."

"Hell, they're my best customers," said the
elder Marcotte.

"Perhaps we could cut short the small talk
and you could concentrate on my car?"

Ray slowly lifted his head out from under the
hood and wiped his dirty hands on a rag.

"Hard as it is to believe ... I'm working on
somebody else's right now."

The shrill scream in Erskine's head went
unnoticed as the meaty mechanic increased the thumbscrews another
half-turn.

A nearby horn honked. It was Erskine's cab.
He reached inside his pocket and produced a business card. He
handed it to Ray. Ray stuffed it in his pocket without looking at
it. He already had a severe hate on for the guy. He didn't want to
have to put a name to it, making it that much easier to
remember.

"Call me when it's ready," Erskine said.
"There's an extra $300 in it for you ... if you have it ready by
Friday."

Erskine walked over to the cab and
disappeared inside. Ray watched the taxi drive off and walked over
to the pop vending machine beside the door. He bashed out a can of
Peppy-Cola.

Marcotte took a slug and turned around to
admire a suddenly asshole-free afternoon. His stare followed the
passing M42 bus and the long billboard ad along its side. The ad
was a notice for relatives of soldiers who served in the War of
1812. They were organizing a class-action suit seeking financial
compensation from the government. Marcotte's eyes hopped off the
bus, settling on Erskine's car. His squint squared itself. The
limo's vanity plate, "ERSKINE" sneered back at him. He pulled
Erskine's card back out of his pocket for confirmation. Holding the
card in his left hand, he wiped the grease around his forehead with
the oily rag in his right.

"Oh, you'll pay extra, bastard ... you'll
pay."

... 7 ...

Derek looked into the ice cubes of his
Fountain Dew and Southern Contort whiskey. He'd heard how magazine
photographers in the '60s and '70s had snuck in pictures of ghouls
and ghosts in the ice cubes of squat and tall glasses of booze ads.
He supposed it was the print medium's version of satanic messages
played backwards on old LPs. Of course, if you looked at a banana
peel long enough, you could see Bobby Orr flying through the air
after scoring his overtime Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1970.

But Derek had looked into his drink long
enough. He twirled the swizzle stick, much like Barclay Plager had
done with his hockey stick, to upend Orr on the famous goal. When
Derek looked up to see his lunch date, Sylvie, across the table
from him, he blushed a goal-light red.

He'd scored alright. There was something
special about Sylvie. She'd passed the initial tests of naming the
junior teams for a half dozen NHLers ... and the team colors for
the past three expansion teams. But there was more to it. From the
til-death-do-us-part grip she held his hand with, in their headlong
dash across the street to beat the light ... to laughing in all the
right places while watching Slapshot ... her bubbly, contagious
laughter left his heart fluttering like a Gretzky centering
pass.

Sylvie hadn't taken her eyes off him since
they'd sat down. It was a subtle stare ... the female's
telescopic-vision surveillance. She watched the knife in his right
hand, her attention zooming in on the knife's serrated edges as
they pierced the surface of the roast beef. The unconscious switch
of the silverware soon found the fork in his right hand, stabbing
at the just-cut morsel. He dabbed the meat in the gravy and hoisted
it skyward. A glop of gravy threatened to jump off. Sylvie bit her
lip and became that glop, urging it to hang on. The fork closed in
on Derek's mouth. It paused. Sylvie held her breath, her eyes
widened. She was a glop waiting to drop. The utensil made a U-turn.
And another. Sylvie felt nauseous. Derek's fork was drawing figure
eights in the air with her riding a chunk of gravy-bathed meat
loaf.

Caught in the act, her eyes met his. He
stopped waving the meatloaf and held it in front of him. His
eyebrows asked her if she wanted it. She shook her head and finally
returned to her plate.

Toying with her own club sandwich, she knew
she was playing with fire. They'd been sitting at Chez Sam's for
twenty minutes and hadn't spoken twenty words. Their minds however,
were locked inside the cockpits of race cars entering the
grandstand stretch. It mattered little that he was married. He was
intelligent, charming, handsome ... and unhappy. He was hers. She
took a sip from her Heaven-Up to slake the quake inside her.

... 8 ...

A matronly woman looked matter-of-factly at
the wooden bench outside the offices of May-Ja-Look. The large ad
on its backrest read: "THE SERPENTS CAN BEAT THESE LEAFS."

Derek sat at his desk, warily eyeing his
father who sat before him in one of the fake-lizard leather lounge
chairs. Derek could count the number of times on one hand his
father had visited him at the office. Most had been colander
conversations. Relationships going in ... had come out
strained.

"Seems to me you're going to have a tough
time scouting players in Brockville, let alone B.C."

"Boston College or British Columbia?" Derek
smirked. He knew his dad meant the West Coast. What the hell was
his old man doing in his office? His father's lunch breaks were
usually spent spewing whole wheat crumbs from ham and cheese
sandwiches into carburetors. Derek's engine had been running just
nicely until twenty minutes ago. He was not in the mood for another
dressing down.

"We'll manage," Derek said.

"How?"

Derek shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

"We can probably get as far as Saskat--... I
mean, Manitoba." Derek would just as soon lie to his father as he
would play goal without a jockstrap.

"Is that before or after they take your
credit card away from you?"

"Dammit, dad. What the hell do you care?"
Derek bit his tongue. He hadn't spoken to his father like this
since he'd defended opening "May-Ja-Look" in the first place. His
father had wanted him to follow in his footsteps and eventually
take over the garage. If playing in the NHL had been Ray's first
wish for his son, then following in his steel-toed footsteps was a
close second. It would make for a soft landing if the dream didn't
come true.

Derek had been an NHL hopeful and wasn't
about to settle for option number two. He was not mechanically
minded. Ray Marcotte would never believe this. It was the sad truth
however, that when Ray's son raised the hood of his car, the repair
bill automatically jumped $200. When it was time to change the oil,
Derek changed his mind.

So he'd skipped the footsteps, but the shoes
were suddenly on the other feet. Derek was ready to gamble his
business away while his father was trying to save it.

Marcotte had traded in his hockey skates
after eight years. Would doing the same to his business be any
different? Would the sun come up tomorrow?

Beads of sweat rolled off Derek's nose and
were swallowed up by the sizzling sand of a Moroccan courtyard. A
nearby sheik, with a Pedro-Canada logo on his turban, gave the
thumbs down signal to the firing squad. The collection of
trigger-men raised their hockey sticks in full wind-up position. As
the final seconds ... and tenths of seconds ... ticked down on his
life's scoreboard clock, Derek peeked through one eye at the
snipers.

Bobby Hull ... his son, Brett ... and Uncle
Dennis ... all glowered menacingly at the puck before each of them.
Al MacInnis and Al Iafrate completed the fearsome fivesome. Iafrate
wiped a tear from his eye. He was thinking about an
ex-girlfriend.

Ray walked around Derek's desk and stopped
behind the chair. Derek kept looking ahead. The next thing he felt
was his father's hand gripping his shoulder hard ... the kind of
grip signalling Family Channel headline news.

"If you're gonna go through with this, son
... do it right."

Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out
the silver-plated Niagara Falls souvenir money clip he had found on
a tour boat there during his and Irene's honeymoon. The clip had
been empty then ... but today it claimed a thick fold of fifty
dollar bills. Derek checked his reflection in one of the windows to
make sure his tongue wasn't hanging out.