The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)
James Patterson
For Jack P. Go, Badgers! Go, Brown Bears!
—J.P.
For the Lupica boys, Christopher and Alex and Zach. The best seat for watching pro football has always been with them.
—M.L.
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One
ALONE ON HIS BOAT and half drunk, the Golden Gate Bridge off to his left and Alcatraz dead ahead, Joe Wolf started to sing about having left his heart in San Francisco.
Then he suddenly threw back his head and laughed, remembering the last time he’d belted out the song, with his second wife out here on The Sea Wolf, both of them knowing the marriage was over.
“What heart?” she’d said.
Oh, he had heart, all right, and brains and balls to go with it. How did she think he ended up with his own football team and his own newspaper—by winning the goddamn lottery? He apologized to nobody, not even for the deals he’d had to cut to get what he wanted, especially when he felt, as he did tonight, as if he owned the whole city.
Did he have secrets? Who the hell didn’t have secrets? And regrets. He never talked about his biggest secret, but his biggest regret was his family. It was the way his three sons had turned out, the way they’d disappointed him. His fault? Or theirs?
Then there was his only daughter.
She was the best of them, the rising star of the family. Only she’d turned her back on him. And in that way became the biggest disappointment of all.
“I’m not like the rest of you!” she’d said the last time they fought.
Was that fight earlier this year or last year? There were so many he’d lost track. But that was when she told him she was walking away for good, and she meant it this time.
No, he thought. You were supposed to be better.
He drank Grey Goose out of the bottle. The good stuff. But worth it because he was.
Hardly any wind tonight, though. No other boats anywhere in sight, just the smell of the water and the occasional screech of California gulls, the night shining with starlight—bright enough, Joe Wolf thought, to light Wolves Stadium.
His stadium, even if it was too old now, the way they said he was.
He raised the bottle to his lips, realized it was empty, was about to go below and open another one when he heard a noise behind him.
Turned and saw who was standing there.
Shit.
Had to have been hiding below when Joe boarded.
“You?” Joe Wolf said.
“Me.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“To ask you a question.”
“So ask.”
“Simple question, really.”
“From you or him?”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“Then get to it already,” Joe Wolf said. “I’m not getting any younger.”
“Did you think we’d wait forever for you to give up?”
“That’s it? You came all the way out here to ask me a question you should already know the answer to?”
“Pretty much.”
The boat had been at rest, rocking gently, the night suddenly still except for the lap of the water against the hull, the gulls having gone silent.
Joe Wolf turned toward the wheel now, ready to start the diesel back up and head back, his evening shot just like that.
“I’ll give up when I’m dead.”
Suddenly the voice was right behind him.
“Fine with me.”
Two
MY STAR QUARTERBACK ROLLED to his right and faked a pass, faked the closest linebacker out of his shoes and nearly his pants, then ran twenty yards untouched to the end zone. If he’d decided to keep going, he could have run untouched all the way to Sausalito.
I blew my whistle and walked toward Carlos Quintera, the linebacker who’d just blown the play. By now the varsity team at Hunters Point High, in the section of town between Hunters Point and Bayview, knew that they weren’t playing on one of those teams that ended the season with participation trophies.
I felt a smile forming on my lips. Undergrad at Cal. Stanford Law. And about to read an eighteen-year-old kid the riot act because he’d messed up at a high school football practice.
If I didn’t love football as much as I did, I would have asked myself what in the world I was doing here.
“Carlos, we’re going to need to get back to basics after that effort. Would that be all right with you?”
“Sure, Coach Jenny.”
Still smiling, I held up the ball.
“This,” I said to him, “is a football.”
“You need to stop right there, Coach,” Chris Tinelli, quarterback and captain of the team, said. “Pretty sure you’re going too fast for him.”
They all laughed. Even Carlos joined in, at least until I told him that we were going to hit the Pause button on today’s practice while he ran five laps around the field.
By now all my players had long since put their teenage male egos, and their jockness, in check enough to allow them to be coached by a woman. And they had been made completely aware, really from our first practice together, that I didn’t let shit go.