Bury the Hatchet

Chapter Fourteen - Bury the Hatchet

HUNTER

"All right, boys, let's get some business out of the way," Gary Asher said. He was the team's general manager, and we'd just come out of the gym following our final preseason workout session before the first exhibition game tomorrow. All I wanted to do was hit the showers and get the fuck out of here, but now we had to sit through a meeting. Although, if Gary was running it, at least we weren't talking about systems and other shit like that. It was sure to be pure business.

There were still about fifty guys in camp, all of us currently milling around the big, open locker room at Thunderbirds headquarters. They would have to cut us down to twenty-three before opening night in a couple of weeks. I knew I was going to make the cut, along with about a dozen of the other guys I could name off the top of my head, but several of the slots were still very much up in the air. That meant a lot of the men in this room would be trying to show off as much as possible over the next ten days or so, hoping to make an impression and—ultimately—make the team.

I remained at a loss as to why anyone would want to be part of this ragtag team, but I kept that thought to myself. I supposed I was finally learning to keep my trap shut, to think before I spoke. At least I hoped I was.

They'd set up rows of chairs, so I took a seat in the one nearest to me close to the aisle, guzzling my Gatorade. No matter how much time I'd spent in the gym over the summer, these preseason workouts were always grueling.

Ray "Razor" Chambers—a guy I knew from his days with the Storm organization back before he'd been traded to the Sabres—took the seat on my right, grumbling something under his breath about fucking long-winded speeches. We weren't exactly friends, but I didn't hate the guy. So there was that. I supposed he felt the same way about me or he would have sat somewhere else.

There were a number of other familiar faces in the room, but I couldn't say I knew any of them well.

Like Zee. Maybe I should know him well, but I didn't. Eric Zellinger took a seat in the front row, much as I would expect. He'd been the captain of the Storm the whole time I'd played in Portland, but we'd never exactly hit it off. Probably because he was just too fucking perfect, and I was about as far from perfect as you could get. He was on the wrong side of thirty now, though, and his age was starting to catch up with him on the ice. I wasn't sure how many more years of hockey he had left in him. But he'd been claimed in the expansion draft, just like I was.

Branislav Reznik was another guy I halfway knew. Bran, a Slovakian winger around my age, was a guy I'd played against in the minors quite a bit before we got called up to play for our NHL clubs. I'd never liked him. The last few days of training camp hadn't changed my mind on him. He talked too much and focused too little, always shooting off his mouth with nothing to back it up. He sat down on the opposite side of the room from me, keeping his distance.

Dmitri Nazarenko took the seat on my other side, flexing his right hand until I glanced down at it to find another tattoo, this one some Russian phrase in Cyrillic letters, so I didn't know what it meant. The boys all called him Dima. He was a hotshot left wing the T-Birds had picked up from the Kings. He'd always had my number, so in a way it was good that he'd be a teammate now instead of an opponent. Still, his skill was the only thing he had going for him as far as I was concerned. He'd won the Cup with LA a few years back, and he'd gotten drunk and crashed his car in the aftermath, ending his best friend's career. I didn't like the guy on principle based on that alone, and I wasn't inclined to give him the chance to win me over. Not only was he covered in tattoos but he had a piercing in his nose, and his hair was even longer than mine. His beard put his hair to shame. He never said much, so at least he had that going for him. He just ducked his head and went about his business. I could admire that, even if I didn't have an ounce of respect for him otherwise.