The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(33)

“Is that understood?”

“Understood,” Jack said.

Then John Gallo slapped his palms together and said, “What about some dessert?”





Thirty-Eight



DANNY HAD JUST GOTTEN off the phone—again—with the commissioner, explaining to Joel Abrams that because he was no longer calling the shots with the Wolves, there was nothing he could do to prevent Billy McGee from suiting up on Sunday, and to keep suiting up.

“First she brings in an ultimate fighter to be her coach,” Joel Abrams screamed at him. “Now she hires this skid-row bum to be one of her quarterbacks. What’s next—she tries to find out if O.J.’s got any life left in his legs?”

“There’re three weeks or so until the league meetings,” Danny said. “Her signing McGee actually helps us. She just drove one more nail into her own coffin.”

There was a pause then. When Abrams started speaking again, he seemed to have calmed down.

“When does your brother drop the story about the tox screen?” Abrams said. “He’s got to do it before the medical examiner releases it.”

“He says soon. Right now, he just wants to ride Money McGee’s rap sheet for a couple more days.”

“And what about Thomas being in the trainer’s room with Harmon that day? Is that true?”

“It is.”

Danny had turned his chair around to look at the way the stadium appeared when it was empty at night. It would be all his again soon enough. This and a lot more.

Jack thought he had his plans?

Danny had his.

I’m through being pushed around by my father. I’m certainly not going to get pushed around by my brother. And I’m not going to get pushed around by my sister for much longer.

“Hey, you still there?” Abrams said.

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“I said that just because your brother was alone with him before the game doesn’t make him some kind of pusher.”

Danny felt a brilliant smile cross his face.

“And it doesn’t mean he’s not,” he said.

He spun his chair back around.

“And that’s not even the best part,” Danny said. “The best part is that Jack has a couple of sources who will say that Jenny knew about Thomas being alone with the kid that day before she made Thomas general manager.”

“Is that true?” Danny could hear the excitement in Abrams’s voice.

“All due respect, Commissioner?” Danny said to him. “Who really gives a shit?”

“I thought your brother Thomas was off drugs,” Abrams said, “and everything else except girls.”

“All guys like my brother are off until they’re back on. So it will look as if a guy who used to hook himself up was hooking up one of our players.”

Danny ended the call and walked down the hall. For a change, Jenny wasn’t working late tonight. Sometimes he wondered if she stayed around as long as she did just to show off. He occasionally wondered what her life was like when she wasn’t here or off coaching her little high school team.

But Danny knew who’d still be here.

He took the elevator down to the field level and walked down the silent runway toward the Wolves’ locker room. He went inside and made his way across a space twice as big as it once had been—and about a hundred times more lush—after he’d spent a small fortune improving it.

Just to let the players know how much he cared about them, of course.

He saw that the door at the other end of the room was open.

Danny walked down there and gave a slight rap on the outside wall and said to Ryan Morrissey, “We need to talk.”

Ryan pointed the remote at the flat screen on the wall opposite him and froze the coaches’ film of the Wolves’ defense.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Danny said.





Thirty-Nine



I SAT THERE IN front of the house for a long time after John Gallo’s car was gone.

I knew enough about him to know that he had been a widower for more than ten years. I knew that he had briefly pursued my mother after my parents’ divorce. My father had believed she’d merely gone out with him a few times to get even, knowing my father would find out about it. All I knew is that their relationship—Gallo and my mother’s, if you could even call it a relationship—had gone nowhere, at least at the time.

Until he’d come to the house tonight and kissed her hand in an old-fashioned way before he got into his car and then disappeared into the night.

I would ask her about the visit eventually.

Just not tonight.

I called ahead to Venticello, just a few blocks away, and ordered a pizza and salad and circled back to pick it up. I brought it home and reheated the pizza and poured myself a glass of red wine and ate at the counter in my kitchen while trying to educate myself about the Wolves’ salary cap situation, which was about as easy to understand as the federal tax code.

The trick in pro football is to spend as much money as you can while managing to stay under the salary cap so as not to get killed with penalties if you spend too much. It’s why all teams now employ a SWAT team of what are known as capologists, people whose understanding of the numbers is as important as the coaches’ understanding of X’s and O’s.