Hitmen Triumph Read online

  Less than a minute later, we found the ball in the center of the fairway. Right beside a sprinkler head that showed it was only a hundred yards to the green.

  The crowd was buzzing. To me, the words weren’t clear; it truly did sound like buzzing.

  “Great shot,” Nate said. “Think you can hit the green from here?”

  “Going to have to,” I said.

  Nate yelled at Bob Jones, “Hey, buddy, I got another five hundred that says he’ll hit the ball closer to the hole than you can from here. Want to take the bet and try a shot after he hits his?”

  Nate shone the flashlight on Bob Jones’s face. Bob put up his hand to shield his eyes. It got very quiet as everyone waited for his answer.

  “Nah,” Jones finally said. “I’m already going to take enough of your money.”

  People around him laughed.

  “Nice try,” someone hollered. “Now who’s a chicken?”

  “Just hit the ball,” Jones snapped.

  So I did.

  chapter four

  It was a terrible swing. It didn’t feel right. As if I had hit the ball off the toe of the clubface instead of square in the center.

  “Go, buddy!” Nate yelled, slapping my back. “Great swing, Radar! You got him now! Yahoo!”

  I didn’t feel as excited. I was sure, by the way it felt, that I’d knocked the ball into the water by the green. I should have known something was wrong, but I was too worried to think about it.

  Nate marched forward to the green. We all followed, like he was the Pied Piper.

  And sure enough, six feet from the pin was my Nike golf ball, with the blue circle around the swoosh. Somehow, my bad swing had worked.

  Nate slapped my back again.

  There was applause from the crowd. I gave a fist pump. I’d hit three shots to get there. If I sank the putt for a birdie, I’d win. If I missed from that close, all I would have to do was tap it in for a par and a tie. Things were looking good.

  Until Mercedes joined me and Nate at my golf bag.

  “Hey,” Mercedes said to me softly. “I found your golf ball.”

  “What?” I said just as quietly. “It’s right there. On the green.”

  “I have one in my pocket that looks just like it,” she whispered. “A blue circle around the Nike swoosh. You better hope no one finds another one too.”

  “Please,” Nate said to Mercedes. “Keep it to yourself. I’ll give you half the money.”

  I finally understood what had happened. I understood why Nate had yelled every time I’d hit the ball so that no one could hear if it splashed. Why he’d told me to play a shorter club instead of going for the green in two. Why the ball that I thought I’d hit off the toe of my club had landed so close to the hole instead of dropping into the water beside the green.

  “Give me the ball,” I said to Mercedes. If Nate had been setting this up to rip people off, I wasn’t going to let him do it. “Trust me on this.”

  She dug it out of her pocket and handed it to me. I grabbed the putter and marched toward the ball on the green.

  I was mad. Very mad.

  So mad that I knew I was going to sink the putt.

  Nate shone the flashlight on the ball. I didn’t take any time over it. The ball clicked off the face of my putter and rolled into the center of the cup. Four strokes— birdie. We had won the bet. All twenty-five hundred dollars.

  Everybody roared.

  I put up my hand to silence them.

  “Guys,” I said. “It was fun tricking all of you.”

  The quiet got even quieter, if that was possible. A few frogs croaked from the pond to break that silence.

  “Nobody has to pay out their bets,” I said. “But in the spirit of the fun we just had, Nate and I would like to ask you to donate half of what you would have lost to the Special Olympics.”

  I turned to Nate. “Isn’t that right, Nate?”

  He was smiling through gritted teeth and spoke so that only I could hear him. “Nolan, I set this up for a good reason. Just let me explain.”

  Sure. Explain that he wanted to steal. All along, I’d thought he was trying to protect me.

  “So,” I said to the crowd, “if we can make you laugh about this, how many of you want to donate instead of paying out?”

  “What’s the deal?” someone in the crowd yelled out.

  I reached into the cup and pulled out the ball. Then I took the ball that Mercedes had found. I held both of them out for people to see.

  “Matching golf balls,” I said. I knew my words sounded funny to them, but I’d long ago decided not to let that stop me. “While we were still in the clubhouse, my brother ran out ahead and planted matching golf balls on the fairway and on the green. Then he ran back to meet me on the tee-box and hold the flashlight for me. All I had to do was hit a shot, then go to the next ball and hit another shot. Same with the third shot. All along there was a ball on the green, right by the pin, waiting for me to get there.”

  It took a few seconds for people to understand. Then they started laughing.

  Bob Jones stomped up to me, and the laughter stopped.

  “You cheated,” he said to me. “You didn’t win the bet. You owe me a thousand dollars.”

  “Everybody thinks it’s funny that we fooled you,” I said quietly. “Want to look like a sore loser? But if everybody sees you shake my hand and you put that thousand dollars back into the charity, they’ll think you’re a good guy and talk about it for years. How much is that worth in advertising?”

  Jones took a deep breath. Then he smiled. I could see it hurt him to put that smile on his face.

  He turned around and faced the crowd.

  “I’m in for donating my bet to the Special Olympics,” he said loudly. He put his arm around my shoulder while he spoke. Like we were best of friends. “Let’s have another big round of applause for these two smart young men and the entertainment they gave us tonight.”

  chapter five

  Some people like the fall when it looks like a postcard. Trees with brilliant orange and red leaves. Blue sky in the background. No clouds. No wind.

  Me, I hate the postcard look. It was on a day like that in grade five when I was called to the principal’s office. I got there ahead of Nate, who was in the other grade five classroom. All through school, they put us in different classrooms. Easier on the teachers. The only way to tell us apart back then was theway I speak. I don’t hear clearly and I speak slowly, like someone who’s learning a foreign language.

  The minister of our church was waiting for us on that postcard-perfect fall day. He was tall and bald and had a serious look on his face. Our principal, a short woman with gray hair, didn’t know where to look and kept rubbing her hands together. Even before Nate got there, I could tell something was wrong. My hearing is bad, not my brain.

  On that beautiful fall day, when Nate finally arrived in the principal’s office, the minister spoke slowly and told us that a big truck had gone through a stop sign and crashed into our car just as our mother and father were driving through the intersection.

  The minister had talked to us as if we were five years old, not boys in grade five. He had tried to make us feel better by telling us our parents would not have felt any pain when the cement truck hit them. He told us that they had gone to a better place. Nate didn’t—or wouldn’t—understand. I had walked out of the office and out of the school and down thestreet underneath trees with brilliant orange and red leaves, looking up at the clear blue sky and trying not to think about anything. I walked for five miles. I slept under a bridge that night. I didn’t go home for a day. When I got back, it wasn’t home anyway. Not without Mom and Dad. I didn’t care that the cops had been looking for me for twenty-four hours.

  So you can understand why beautiful fall days put me in a bad mood.

  It was that kind of day when I walked through the parking lot from my car—an old green Toyota Camry—to the Saddledome for our first game of the season, against the R
ed Deer Rebels.

  A month had passed since the charity golf tournament. Before the tournament, pre-season had gone well. Exhibition games too. I was left winger on the line with Nate, and he was center. He’d scored a bunch of goals, and I’d had plenty of assists. We’re twins. I can’t explain how, but I know where he’s going before he gets there. It was almost like passing to myself—except I rarely gotpasses back. Nate liked scoring goals. I liked winning games. I didn’t need the spotlight. He did.

  After the charity golf tournament though, things had not been too good. When it came to Nate, my radar had vanished. Thinking about it put me in a bad mood.

  Just like the postcard view. Behind me was the Calgary skyline against the blue sky. All the tall buildings. The Calgary Tower with the revolving restaurant. Yup, another postcard view. If you liked postcard views.

  As I walked, I kept my eye on the Saddledome so that I wouldn’t have to see a beautiful fall sky or the trees with orange and red leaves. Players arrived long before the game started, so there weren’t many people there yet. The parking lot was almost empty.

  Two guys in a new red Mustang drove into the parking lot. Both wore ball caps and sunglasses. I knew this because the driver sped toward me like he was going to run me over. I stared into the car’s grill and windshield until he swerved the car sideways and stopped right beside me.

  The driver grinned. He was a few years older than me. He had long blond hair. The passenger was about the same age, but he had dark hair that wasn’t quite as long. They were big guys. Really big. Like they worked out and used steroids.

  The driver leaned his arm out the window. He was wearing a black T-shirt. The sleeve had moved up his arm, and I saw the tattoo of an eagle.

  “Nate,” the driver said.

  It wasn’t the first time that I had been mistaken for Nate. It happened less these days, because I worked out and I had more bulk than Nate did. The extra muscles helped, going into the corners to fight for the puck. I was wearing a loose sweater though, and the driver probably couldn’t tell that I weighed twenty pounds more than Nate.

  I should have told him I was Nolan. But the driver was holding a plain white envelope out to me. In the month since the charity tournament, I’d spent a lot of time wondering about the cash that Nate had used for betting. I confess that was on my mind as I saw the envelope.

  “Here you are, dude,” the driver said, holding out the envelope. “Play a good game tonight. Don’t get hurt. We’ll see you tomorrow night. Usual time. Usual place.”

  I still didn’t say anything. I took the envelope.

  Yes, it was dishonest. I won’t pretend anything else. I won’t make excuses. It was wrong. I did it. I took the envelope that he thought was going to Nate.

  I nodded. Speaking would have let the driver know I wasn’t Nate. Nate wasn’t deaf.

  The driver grinned. Gave a thumbs-up. Then he burned rubber as he blasted out of the parking lot in the shiny red Mustang. Nice car. Expensive car.

  I opened the envelope. Nate’s envelope.

  It held one-hundred dollar bills. Ten of them. Clean, crisp and new.

  chapter six

  I found Nate in the dressing room with a few other players who had arrived early. When I stopped beside him, no one paid much attention to the two of us. A few other guys were already there. Some of them were sitting and rolling tape onto the blades of their sticks. Others were talking quietly, telling jokes.

  “Here, Nate,” I said, handing him the envelope. “Some guys just gave this to me. They must have gotten you and me mixed up.”

  This was about as much as I had said to him since the night of the charity golf tournament. After it ended, he’d found me at my car. Our argument had been short, and I remembered every word.

  “If Mercedes hadn’t found that other ball, would you have even told me what was happening? Or just taken the money? And what about all that extra cash in your pocket? What’s happening, Nate? Why are you keeping secrets from me?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he had answered. “Trust me, okay?”

  “Why don’t you trust me and tell me what’s happening?”

  “When I can, I will,” he had said. “

  “Then I guess we don’t have anything to talk about until then.”

  I was mad and I had walked away. I shouldn’t have. Now there was a big wall between us; it was going to stay there until he trusted me enough to tell me what was happening.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that we played on the same hockey team, I’m sure we wouldn’t have even seen each other again.

  Now Nate took the envelope.

  “Did you look in it?” Nate asked. His voice was cold.

  “No.” It was a lie. I was hoping he would tell me about the money in the envelope without me asking. Or finally tell me how he got all the money he was able to gamble at the charity golf tournament. Maybe then I could start trusting him again. Large amounts of cash delivered in plain white envelopes are very suspicious.

  “Next time,” Nate said, “open your mouth a little earlier and say something. That way there won’t be any confusion.”

  Had he just insulted the way I speak? Or did he mean I should have told them my name?

  “Whatever,” I said.

  He folded the envelope and put it in his front pocket. He stared at me. I stared back. The night of the charity golf tournament was a big wall between us that both of us pretended wasn’t there.

  Who knows how long we might have stared at each other. Fortunately, another player stepped into the dressing room and told us to stop blocking traffic.

  Nate moved toward his equipment. I sat down by mine.

  I dressed for the game in total silence. The silence of not speaking. The silence of being deaf. The silence of feeling like I no longer had a brother.

  chapter seven

  Three to three against the Rebels. Four minutes, ten seconds left in the game. I was in the players’ box, watching, as a Rebels forward got dinged two minutes for tripping. That gave us a one-man advantage on the upcoming power play.

  The crowd was roaring for the Hitmen. I knew that because I could see the hands clapping and the mouths moving. But I couldn’t hear it. My world was total silence. When I play hockey, I don’t wear the processor that delivers audio signals to the implant in my skull. I don’t wear the magnetic “spider” on my skull either. The spider is a flat circular device a bit bigger than a quarter. It is connected to the processor on my ear by a thin wire hidden by my hair. The equipment is too expensive and, on the ice, too easy to break.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. Jonathan Koch, our coach. Everyone just called him Coach Jon. He was in his early thirties, wide and strong, with dark hair. He could bench press three hundred pounds. We never messed with him.

  He held up a small whiteboard. He’d written out instructions for me. Coach Jon did that because he didn’t trust that I would always be able to read his lips and understand every word.

  Some people who have been deaf for a long time before getting cochlear implants learn sign language and lip-reading. I knew many of them called themselves “deafies” and were proud of how well they coped with their hearing loss.

  Others, like me, received implants when we lost our hearing as children. We learned to understand sounds through the implants. We weren’t forced to read lips or use sign language. Still, I was good at it. Good but not great.

  But all of us with hearing loss become very good at understanding the world by watching it. Deaf drivers are usually much better than hearing drivers because they concentrate on what appears in front of the car, not what’s on the stereo. I know it made me a better hockey player—everyone said it seemed like I saw everything that happened around me. Off the ice, I’d always concentrated on people’s faces as they spoke, and I could read lips.

  Coach Jon didn’t speak to me. He just held up the whiteboard with instructions: RADAR, MAKE SURE YOU DON’T GIVE AWAY THE PUCK!

  I nodded. I knew
what he meant. For the whole game, my passes from the left side to Nate at center had been off target.

  As the other guys on the line shift went onto the ice, Coach Jon wiped the words off the board. He quickly wrote something else down.

  GO GET THEM!

  He smiled and patted my back. I stepped onto the ice to join my teammates.

  We lined up in the Rebels’ zone, with the linesman dropping the puck in the circle to the left of the Rebels’ goalie. As left winger, instead of staying on the boards, I took a position above the circle, directly behind Nate, who stepped in to take the draw.

  The linesman snapped his hand down as he dropped the puck. Nate fought for it but lost the draw. The Rebels’ center kicked the puck toward the boards. From behind him, the Rebels’ right defenseman raced to the puck.

  So did I.

  I got there first. I chipped the puck ahead along the boards, past the defenseman, and I chased the puck into the corner.

  I knew where Nate would go. That’s why they called me Radar. Because I saw the entire ice and knew how all the plays would unfold.

  Yes, Nate was in a traffic jam in front of the net, but he knew what I knew: where the open ice was. Back at the top of the face-off circle, where I had just been. It would be open there. He’d have time to shoot.

  I glanced up the boards and saw the defenseman racing for me. The safe pass was to bounce it off the boards knee high, back to our defenseman at the point. But time was ticking. A goal this late in the game would almost guarantee us a win.

  I floated a pass to the top of the face-off circle.

  Except Nate wasn’t there!

  Instead the Rebels’ center stepped in and took my pass. He had some momentum and used it to peel away up the ice, toward our defenseman on the point.

  The Rebels’ center saw that our defenseman had come in a little too far, expecting my pass. With his speed, the center knew our defenseman was trapped. The center banged the puck off the boards past the defenseman and burst over the blue line.

  The center poured on the speed, breaking loose. All alone on the goalie.