The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(29)

“We going somewhere?” Money McGee said.

“We are.”

“And where’s that?”

“High school.”





Thirty-Three



I’D GOTTEN PERMISSION FROM Joey Rubino to pull half a dozen of my players out of lunch and work them out with Billy McGee.

“I don’t expect to keep this quiet for very long,” I said. “But for now, I’ll just have Billy waiting at the far end of the field when the kids get out there. And worry about my dear friends in the media later.”

“With friends like those…” Joey said.

He said all six of the players were in the same history class. He’d meet them when it let out and walk them down to the locker room himself, then out onto the field.

“Only one condition,” Joey said.

“Name it.”

“I get to come watch,” he said.

Now we were all down at the far end of the field, Ryan and Joey Rubino and my four best wide receivers and two defenders, just to make things interesting. And me. By now the kids had finally stopped losing their minds that they were on the same field and using the same football—even breathing the same air—as the infamous Money McGee. It really was as if their favorite rapper had suddenly appeared and asked them to hang out.

And they had all realized, quickly, the receivers especially, that they better get the stars out of their damn eyes or risk one of his passes hitting them in the face.

Davontae Lillis came over to me after he’d managed to hold on to half a dozen passes and whispered, “Coach, I can’t tell you how much my hands hurt. Just no way I’m letting him know that.”

Tayshawn Pratt was there, too.

“I thought Chris’s passes were tight,” he said. “What we got goin’ out here? That is what you call a whole different situation.”

Then McGee was motioning to them and telling them to get their asses back out there, as Caleb Mortimer was taking a break, his eyes big.

He was the one keeping his voice low now, as if afraid Money McGee might hear him.

“You see that ball I dropped a couple of minutes ago?” he said. “When I ran back to where he was throwing from, he told me that if I dropped another one on him he was gonna follow me home after school.”

He looked at me. “He was kidding, right, Coach?”

I shrugged.

“Why don’t you hold on to the ball from now on, just to be on the safe side?”

Billy McGee sent out two receivers at a time, telling them what patterns he wanted them to run against the two defenders. Most of the time he had at least one guy open. Even when he didn’t, even when he had to put a little extra on the ball, the pass would end up in increasingly sore hands.

The whole time, Billy McGee was trash-talking a bunch of high school kids, almost like he was still one of them, like he was having more fun than any of them.

When the ball wasn’t in the air, McGee spent a lot of time talking about the kids’ mamas.

“We didn’t bring him in to be a role model,” Ryan Morrissey said to me.

Billy McGee heard him. At which point he turned around, tugged his jeans about halfway down his butt, pointed at it, and, grinning, said to Ryan, “Kiss this if you brought me in here to act like I’m running to be these dudes’ class president.”

The Hunters Point Bears out there with him howled with delight.

When we finished, after one last fifty-yard strike to Davontae, my players crowded around their man Money McGee for a selfie festival. He still seemed to be enjoying himself more than anyone. But I was aware that he’d been full of good intentions before.

Ryan pulled me aside.

“What do you think?”

I grinned. “He looks like he’d be able to kill it if he was starting for us against Galileo next Saturday. Now we need to see how he acts when he’s back on the field with grown-ups.”

I saw his head whip around. I’d figured out by now that Billy McGee had almost mutantlike hearing.

He called over to us and said, “I plan to treat those grown-ass players y’all have the way I always did.”

“How?” I called back.

“Like the bitches that they are.”





Thirty-Four



EVEN I HAD TO admit the next morning that the Tribune’s front page was inspired. There was Billy McGee bending over and pointing to the half of his back end hanging out of his faded jeans at Hunters Point High under the headline:





ANOTHER ASS





The feature was accompanied by other photographs shot at Hunters Point High School of Billy McGee working out on the field there with some of my receivers and running backs.

The pictures had to have been taken either by a student or a faculty member, but the column had been written by Seth Dowd. McGee’s previous transgressions, Dowd said, included just about everything except storming the US Capitol that time.

Dowd also quoted Ted Skyler as saying, “Apparently Money really lit it up with the prison team in its big game against Alcatraz.”

I watched from my office at Wolves Stadium now as Ryan Morrissey put McGee through one passing drill after another with a handful of our wide receivers and defensive backs. They’d only been out there for about thirty minutes when Ryan turned, knowing I was watching, and gave me a thumbs-up.