Sugar and Ice - RJ Scott Page 0,26

trip early in the season was going to be a wakeup call for the team.

I packed my bag efficiently, left it by the door, rolled my shoulders, then took my phone to bed with me. It was cold comfort, considering I could have been having sex with a hot Russian, but I scanned Twitter and it wasn’t long before I found my first mention of Colorado.

“Hockey Player Holds Exotic Pet Emu Hostage,” I read out loud, and followed links to discover that Animal Control, backed up by Tucson’s finest, had liberated the emu from a very sad-looking Colorado. The way the scene was lit it was obvious that there were arc lights from above, possibly a helicopter? As the emu was led from the scene, I switched to the local television channel.

Colorado was on his doorstep, remonstrating at length with a cop, and then I saw Vlad, well, I saw his hand, as Colorado was yanked back into his house. Cops went in as well, and the feed ended, although both Colorado and Kricker were trending on Twitter when I went to sleep.

It remained in the news the next morning. Lots of codes were mentioned regarding prohibited wild animals, and it didn’t seem to matter that Colorado’s claim that he’d rescued the bird from a drug dealer sounded reasonable. Mainly because the words drug dealer were anywhere near his name or the team, and also that with his long hair and tattoos and his rangy body he could pass for a bad guy in a cop procedural. They interviewed management on breakfast news, and then Vlad, and he was stony-faced, but reassuring, firm, but sincere, as he explained it was all nothing and just a huge misunderstanding.

By the time I was ready to leave for the small private airport we flew from, the whole event had become a joke, with ten new memes in the past hour. Only I didn’t think it really was over, because when I arrived at Flying Diamond Airport, Colorado was nowhere to be seen, and our backup goalie, Andre, was onboard with everyone huddled around him, chatting about the incident.

“He’s off the team for sure.”

“Tell me again about the naked bit—”

“Was the emu naked?”

“Not the emu, idiot, all emus are naked, I mean the girls—”

“I bet management is pissed—”

“If we lose him though—”

“How did he not know that—?”

Everyone fell silent and I glanced over my shoulder to see Vlad had arrived and behind him was a contrite Colorado. Well, as contrite as a smirking Colorado could get.

“There will be no talking about emus on this flight,” Vlad ordered.

We all nodded, and behind his back, Colorado was biting his lip. He wasn’t taking the not-to-be-spoken-about-incident seriously, but I doubt there was anything that would make him take things seriously in any kind of genuine way. Music, sex, and hockey, that was his life, and I didn’t know how he was even still alive. I did know his drug tests always came back clean and he was sober, but if all you have to live for were hockey, music and sex, then what kind of future did you have?

Vlad glanced around the cabin and our gazes locked for a millisecond, nowhere near long enough for me to send him a reassuring smile, or to do anything to make him feel better.

“Sit!” he ordered Colorado, and pointed at the seat next to him.

“Iceman, hell no, I need to be in my lucky seat.”

Vlad reared up over him, and then shoved him none too gently into the seat before taking the one next to him. “You don’t need luck if you’re not playing,” he snapped. I’m not sure he meant for the entire plane to hear him, but we did.

Were we really going to face Calgary with Andre in goal, who was barely out of diapers in a hockey-goalie sense, when we could have had Colorado and maybe pulled a win out of our asses?

“We’re fucked,” Andre groaned under his breath, but Ryker elbowed him in the side.

“Dude, we got this,” he reassured him.

We so hadn’t got this.

Four goals against and we’d fought back, but their goalie was better than ours and that was just in the first period. When the horn sounded after that first twenty minutes I’d never been so relieved. The JAR line had tried, my line had tried, our third and fourth lines had pushed hard, but we couldn’t get anything by the big Czech in the Calgary net, and Vlad’s defense pair were on