Page 88 of Triplets for the Pucking Playboys
He smirks. “Spicy. You sure you wanna see that?”
“Just pull it,” I say, but with a wink, and he laughs like we’re both in on some secret.
It takes a minute for the drives to mount, so I kill time by spinning in the chair and checking the monitors. Two show game replays, but the other four are live feeds: one for the player entrance, one for the press room, one for the empty ice, and one for the staff corridor outside the medical suite. Even at midnight, the place never really sleeps.
Drew loads the footage and drops the first file onto the left-most screen. It’s the treatment room, shot from a ceiling cam, the time stamp running in a red bar at the bottom. Sage is in frame, kneeling by a player’s leg, taping an ankle while talking to someone off camera. I watch her hands, precise and fast, barely looking down. Then she glances up, frowns, and points straight at the camera.
“She hated those things,” Drew says, not taking his eyes off the screen. “Used to flip us off all the time.”
I laugh, then settle back as he clicks through the files. The footage gets jumpier, the angles more creative. Some are from chest high, others from behind supply cabinets or inside the utility closet. There’s one from what looks like the inside of the fridge, pointed straight at the worktable. The audio is garbage, just a muffled murmur, but you can see the tension in every frame.
“Who’s setting these up?” I ask, trying to sound casual.
Drew shrugs. “Usually the AV guys. Sometimes Talia drops by, tells us to get more coverage on staff. Says it’s for insurance or compliance or something.” He scrubs forward, and the camera shifts to a new day. Sage is alone, moving between cabinets, clearly hunting for something. She stops, lifts a bottle of sanitizer, and glares up at the lens. For a second, she just stands there, staring. Then she mouths something—hard to tell what, but it’s not “thanks”—and flips the bird again.
“Does she know about all these?”
“Hell if I know. But Talia’s the only one who ever reviews the whole set. Coaches barely look. She’s got a folder just for staff compliance stuff. Big on liability, I guess.”
I lean in. “Mind pulling up the folder?”
Drew hesitates, then shrugs and clicks into a shared drive. There it is:STAFF_SURV, a string of subfolders for every employee. Sage’s is top of the list, three times as big as the others. Drew opens it. The screen floods with video files, each labeled with a date, time, and a short string of numbers.
I point at one near the bottom. “That one. The day she collapsed.”
He opens it. We watch in silence as Sage preps recovery packs, wipes her forehead, and stumbles. There’s no sound, but her legs go loose and she drops behind the counter, out of sight. Thirty seconds later, players rush in. I see myself, then Beau, then the medics. None of us look like heroes.
Drew shakes his head. “Sucks, man. Hope she’s alright.”
“She’s tough,” I say. “Always is.”
I scan the time stamps again, then check the logs. Talia’s name is everywhere—opening files, copying footage, setting permissions.
“You ever get weird requests?” I ask, turning to face him. “Stuff that’s not for TV?”
He laughs, but it’s a nervous sound. “Sometimes. Last month, Talia wanted us to dump every second of her one-on-one sessions. Said it was for an HR thing, but…I dunno, man. She creeps me out.”
“Did she ever ask for, like, specific players?”
“Only staff. Never the team. If she wants dirt, it’s always on the trainers. Sage, mostly.”
I let that sit.
On the screen, Sage is back in frame, lips pressed tight, a look in her eyes I’ve never seen in real life. The camera follows as she paces the room, stopping every few seconds to check the corners, the ceiling, the cabinets.
“She knew,” I say, mostly to myself.
Drew leans back, folding his arms. “Hey, can I ask you something? Why do you care so much? Not judging, just…You know the rumors, right?”
“I know,” I say, and leave it at that.
I stand, stretching, and pat his shoulder. “Thanks, man. You ever need tickets, let me know.”
He beams, then goes back to the monitors.
My next destination is the AV closet. I find Hector in his usual uniform—cargo pants, Storm quarter-zip, and a beard that could double as insulation if he ever had to survive a nuclear winter. He’s hunched over a field monitor, soldering a busted HDMI port with a focus that looks religious.
I knock on the metal rack with a knuckle. He doesn’t jump; just sets down the iron and grins up at me, teeth impossibly white for a man who lives on black coffee and vending machine jerky.
