I sloshed my way through the water and into the machine room. A guy in damp coveralls was explaining to Monaro that the dehumidification system was leaking.

  “Obviously,” said Monaro.

  I could feel the warm humid air filling the room, as if I’d hit a southerly in a sailboat on the Gulf Stream. I felt a sensation in my ears like they wanted to pop.

  “Is it turned off?” said Monaro.

  “Yes, boss,” said the guy in coveralls.

  Monaro sloshed out of the room and into the concourse. He spoke into his radio: “Let’s get the loader in here, right now, and tell the floor gang to get ready.”

  “We’ll need the whole team,” said the voice on the radio.

  “I’ll call them in. I’ll call them all in.” Monaro turned back to the guy in coveralls. “Get a sump pump in here. Let’s get this water out.”

  I stepped over to Monaro and said, “What’s happening?”

  Monaro took a long slow breath deep into his guts and let it out slowly.

  “We’re losing the ice.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next hour was organized chaos. The guys at the far end of the arena floor doubled their efforts and pulled the remaining black insulation off the ice. I watched a bank of bleachers get rolled back into the maintenance concourse and out of the way to make a wide path from the ice rink floor to the large external doors of the arena. The huge space looked like a missing tooth in a boxer’s mouth.

  I was sitting in the stands with Ron, watching the ice steam like a New England morning, when I heard a loud bang. A glow of light came up from the gap in the stands. I leaned over the opening and looked back and saw that the wide doors had been thrown open. Then I heard a deep mechanical rumble. The silhouette of a massive front-end loader filled the doorway, like a gunslinger coming into a saloon.

  It chugged its way in, drove straight up onto the ice, dropped its front bucket down, and scraped the rink into large chunks. It was like watching an act of vandalism as the front-end loader tore up the ice, then swept up large scoops of it and moved it outside. It returned and continued smashing and unloading ice.

  Between trips I walked outside and stood next to Francisco Monaro. The driver deposited the load into a large dumpster, where the chunks started melting in the sun. Perhaps the dumpster was just to keep the mess contained. It seemed a crude way to break down an ice rink.

  “You can’t just let it all melt inside?” I asked Monaro.

  “No, it’s too slow and too messy. Water is hard to control, ice not so much, as you can see. We can get this ice out in an hour and cleaned up in two. It gives us at least a fighting chance of getting the boards back in place before tonight’s game.”

  “There’s a game tonight?”

  Monaro nodded.

  “You can do it that quick?”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  “How do you hold a game if there’s no air-conditioning?”

  “We can’t. But as soon as we get the water cleaned up, we should be able to route the air around the dehumidification system. It won’t be super cool, not enough to lower the dew point, but it won’t be too uncomfortable for Floridians.”

  We went back inside and watched as Monaro’s team scraped the smaller and wetter bits of ice off the concrete surface below. Then a guy in an FPL uniform finally turned up.

  “It’s like getting a beer delivery after the bar has burned down,” I said.

  The guy gave me a look like he’d eaten a bad pickle, or maybe he just didn’t get my sense of humor. Either way, it felt like he was at least a day late.

  Monaro said he’d take him to the electrical room, so they walked back down into the dim light of the maintenance concourse. I had nothing better to do, so I followed.

  When we reached the door labeled Electrical Room 1, Monaro handed his keys to the FPL guy, who unlocked the door. I noticed a small pink flamingo hanging from a chain on the key ring. The colorful bird seemed at odds with Monaro’s serious demeanor. Perhaps it was a gift from a child. Sometimes you just can’t read people.

  We passed a series of five-foot-tall free-standing electrical units. The man headed for the back wall, where he unlocked a series of cabinets, each housing panels of switches and buttons and fuses. He took his sweet time, methodically checking each fuse, switch, and button. Perhaps it was the kind of diligence required in the situation, but it just felt slow.

  We were watching the guy checking the fuse boxes in the second cabinet when Amanda Swaggert rushed in, out of breath.

  “Cisco,” she said, “what on earth is going on?”

  “He’s checking the electrics,” said Monaro.

  “Not in here,” she said, panic rising in her voice. “Out there.” She gestured with both hands toward the stadium interior.

  “The AC system is down. We gotta get the ice out,” he said.

  “You need Mr. Gelphert’s permission to remove the ice.”

  “Is Mr. Gelphert here?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  Amanda frowned at me. “No, but that’s not the point.”

  “Does Mr. Gelphert know anything about building ice rinks?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But, Cisco, you still need permission.”

  “Look, Miss Amanda,” said Monaro, “I left him a voicemail, but he’s not bothering to call back. I need to get this ice out of here now. Otherwise, we won’t just be canceling tonight’s game. We’ll be dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. You gonna cover that? Is he?”

  Amanda didn’t seem to have an answer for that, so she glanced back down the concourse then returned her gaze to Monaro.

  “I’m going to call Mr. Gelphert,” she said.

  “You do what you gotta do,” said Monaro.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After Amanda had dashed away, I told Monaro that I would be in the stands with Ron if he needed anything. I had no idea what he might require of me, and the expression on his face suggested that neither did he, but I was bored watching the guy from Florida Power & Light examining what looked to be perfectly fine electrical fuses.

  Monaro was right. It took them just under an hour to get the bulk of the ice removed with the front-end loader. Then men appeared from parts unknown to scrape and sweep and clean up the rest. The concrete base was clear of ice by the time Monaro walked out to the edge of the playing surface. He looked tired as he glanced at his watch. I wandered down from my perch in the stands.

  “Why do you have to rent the front-end loader?” I asked.

  “To get the ice out,” he said.

  “Yeah, I can see that. What I’m saying is, why don’t you have your own loader?”

  “Because we’re only supposed to need it once a year.”

  “And you don’t ever take the ice out the rest of the time?”

  Monaro shook his head. “We build the ice up over a few weeks before the season. Then during the year we just cover it in the thermal underlay, then put the basketball boards over the top.”

  “So why don’t you take it out?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve done this pretty quick.”

  “Because, like everything, it’s about time and money. We can rip it out fast enough, but laying it again takes time. It’s not just one big block of ice. It’s done in a series of sheets, layer upon layer. Building and smoothing and then letting it set, then laying another sheet on top. Even the week or two at the start of the season is pretty quick.”

  “I didn’t realize it took that long.”

  “People don’t. But the thing is, we’re not just trying to freeze water; we’re trying to create a strong, sturdy, smooth playing surface. It’s not the same as making ice cubes in your freezer. Did you know that for the Sochi Olympics, the ice maker in the speed-skating arena put the ice down eighteen months before it started?”

  “Eighteen months?”

  “Yep. Like hockey, speed skaters want a solid, hard surface. It’s different from the ice dancing events, where they want things just a little softer on top. The guy in Sochi even played classical music to the ice.”

  “Was he a kook?”

  “I don’t know,” Monaro said with a shrug. “Never done it myself, but he said the vibrations of the music helped get the air bubbles out of the ice. Air bubbles are the enemy in our game. That’s the risk we run when we have to re-lay the rink quickly. That and the cash.”

  “What about the cash?” I was thinking about my client’s policy.

  “To get the ice in and out fast, with the loader and the extra manpower, you’re looking at about twenty-five thousand dollars to remove it and replace it. But we can cover the ice with the underlay and floorboards for only about four.”

  “That explains why Amanda was flipping out.”

  “I wouldn’t do it that way if I had another option. But this thing melts and damages the court? That’s hundreds of thousands. You gotta pick your poison.”

  The guy in the FPL uniform emerged from the concourse and called Monaro over. I stood by the rink, which was now nothing but a large concrete space, and watched the guy hand Monaro his keys with the pink flamingo. The guy offered him a nod then walked away, and Monaro headed over to me.

  “They’ve got the rink’s cooling system back online,” he said.

  “So all this work was just a waste?”

  “No, we can’t do anything without the AC. Right now the humidity just keeps rising, remember?”

  The guy in the damp coveralls, who had been in the AC machine room, appeared on the other side of the arena and walked slowly across the concrete playing surface, leaving damp footprints in his wake.

  “So, boss. The precool pipes have been damaged.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Monaro.

  “No, I mean they’ve been cut.”

  “Cut?” Monaro and I said at the same time.

  “What about diverting around the dehumidifier?” asked Monaro.

  The guy nodded. “As soon as the sump pump gets the surface water out, we can get that done. But someone’s gonna need to fix the damaged pipes.”

  “I’ll call the dehumidification guys to get them out and repair them.”

  The guy in the coveralls shrugged like he didn’t care either way, then turned around and walked back across the concrete floor.

  I thought about how things had definitively moved from a curse or a series of random but disconnected events into sabotage territory. I still wasn’t sure why anyone would want to do what they were plainly doing, and I was equally unsure if there were any ramifications for my client. I was mulling all this over when I heard the bellow come from above.

  “What in God’s green earth is going on here?” screamed Con Gelphert.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gelphert stood on the public walkway that separated the lower tiers of seats from the upper tiers, his face crimson, as if he had spent too much time on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. He came charging down the steps toward us at the arena floor, ranting all the way.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelled.

  I assumed he was talking to Monaro but couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.

  “What have you done? Do you know how much this is going to cost? Are you trying to shut us down?” By the time he got to us, he was panting like a thirsty Labrador.

  “The AC system went out,” said Monaro, not bothering to raise his voice a single decibel.

  “Are you insane?” said Gelphert.

  “Do you know what a high dew point does to the crystallization of ice?” asked Monaro, with a look that suggested he was well aware of what Gelphert knew about making hockey ice.

  “I don’t care about that,” said Gelphert. “You have just cost us tens of thousands of dollars.”

  “No,” said Monaro. “I’ve just saved you hundreds of thousands of dollars by not having to replace the basketball floor.”

  Gelphert looked at the expanse of concrete. “What basketball floor? There is no basketball floor.”

  “That’s because we pulled it up when the AC system went down. If we didn’t, the ice would’ve melted and warped all the floorboards.”

  “We have backups for all those systems.”

  “You know full well that the backup generator failed yesterday.”

  “Yes, I do. Another maintenance failure by you and your team, so called. You can’t hide your incompetence anymore.”

  I thought Monaro might slug him one, because the thought had crossed my mind, and I wasn’t even involved. But Monaro seemed to be one of those truly unflappable guys, the kind for whom the phrase water off a duck’s back doesn’t even begin to explain the even keel under which they sail.

  “My team and I know exactly what we’re doing. But you ignored the curse at your peril.”

  “Curse?” said Gelphert. He let out a deep and throaty laugh that sounded somewhat forced. “You are all excuses.” He dropped the faux mirth on his face and got serious: “And you’re fired.”

  If Monaro was going to go off like a firecracker, I figured this was the moment. But all he did was slowly shake his head.

  “My contract is with the management company and the county. You can’t fire me without county approval.”

  “Oh, I assure you that will be my next call.” Gelphert turned on his heel and headed for the maintenance concourse. He suddenly stopped and looked around—perhaps he didn’t know the way back up to his lofty perch from down here, where all the work seemed to get done. He turned around and stormed back past us, then up the steps in the stand. At the top of the first section he met Amanda and fired a few quick but inaudible words her way. The two looked back in our direction for a moment before Gelphert marched away. Even at that distance I could see sadness in her face, like a child who realizes that her family is breaking apart and there’s nothing she can do. Then she, too, turned and walked away.

  Monaro refocused his attention on the concrete surface, where the team was bringing out the thermal underlay sections on their racks. I watched him for a moment. He wasn’t even breathing heavily.

  “Will he get what he wants?” I said. “Will he get the okay to fire you?”

  “Maybe.” He took a step forward and yelled across the arena. “Start from both ends. Two teams, double time.” Then he said directly to me, “But I won’t get fired because I don’t know my stuff. I’ve been doing this a long time, well before this place was even some politician’s dream. I know what I’m doing, my boys know what they’re doing.” He glanced back up in the direction of Gelphert’s office. “Not everyone can say the same.”

  More men appeared and started putting down the underlay from both ends of the floor. I figured Monaro must have a list of freelance workers he could call on in a crunch. Or maybe he just did a drive-by of the parking lot at the local big-box hardware outlet and picked up a truck full of day workers.

  I heard Ron quietly call out my name, and when I turned, he directed my attention to the walkway where Gelphert had first appeared. I saw Devon, the security guard, standing there. He didn’t look his usual chipper self. Perhaps Ron had been right that Devon suffered from being cooped up inside the arena, like a sunflower. But I could see a slackness to his shoulders, slumped like he had something to do that he didn’t want to. He just stayed there, his radio in his hand, as if awaiting word from the king that the execution should proceed, that the pardon was not coming.

  I noticed that Monaro had seen him too.

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  “Until I hear different, I’ll do my job.”

  It didn’t take long. Devon got a message on his radio, which he then clipped onto his belt as he slowly made his way down the stairs. He ambled up next to us and, in a voice I can imagine him using with his grandmother, said to Monaro, “I’ve been told to escort you out of the building.”

  Monaro, still serious but a little less confident, looked to me. His eyes seemed to be asking me what he should do.

  “You should go,” I said. “Making a scene just gives them ammunition. Do the right thing, and as soon as you’re out of here call an attorney. Fight them.”

  Monaro yelled out some final orders to his crew and nodded to Devon. Together the three of us walked back up the steps, out through the public concourse, and outside. It was a spectacular day, warm but not blistering, the kind of picture-postcard day the tourism folks in South Florida love so much. The kind of day that just didn’t fit with what was actually happening.

  Devon and I stood by the entrance door and watched Monaro walk to his car.

  “This isn’t right,” said Devon.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “But a lot of things have gone wrong. Things that Francisco was responsible for preventing.”

  Devon shook his head. “It’s not his fault.”

  “You’re not talking about this damn curse, are you?”

  “No, but something about this whole thing don’t smell right.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he turned and looked at me. “You hunt?”

  “You mean like out in the wild, with a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I used to hunt, with my dad. And you learn something when you take an animal down. Sometimes out there in the woods an animal might already be sick. It might have a disease or a wound or something. You don’t know what it is exactly, you just know there’s something wrong. Like something just don’t smell right.”

  It wasn’t exactly the way I would have put it, but I knew exactly what he meant.

  Monaro drove away across the never-ending parking lot. Then another vehicle pulled out from the side of the arena and tailed him. I recognized the outline instantly and the color of the logo on the door: an FPL truck. But I couldn’t see the unit number on the side as it sped through the vacant lot.