The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(34)

I already knew that Thomas wanted to trade for anyone and everyone he thought might help us. But I needed to know which transactions we could manage, within reason. I also needed to know which available players might make sense for us and which ones were too expensive, even in the short run.

Thomas, I thought.

The one member of my family I knew I could trust, now that I had proof that I couldn’t trust my mother. If I ever really could trust my mother. But even though Thomas would have my back in the end, if for no other reason than how much he hated Danny and Jack, I didn’t know exactly how much I could trust my kid brother. And how far.

So who could I count on the most these days?

The answer to that one was easy.

I could count on my coach. I wanted him in the foxhole with me.

I read up on the salary cap for as long as I could. Tried to watch a movie, but by the time I was half an hour into it I couldn’t follow the story, about a rivalry between two sisters.

So against my better judgment I turned the television to the West Coast edition of SportsCenter on ESPN and watched and listened to various NFL insiders and pundits pundit away until they were blue in the face—Wolves blue? I asked myself—about our signing of Billy “Money” McGee, most of them acting as if his coming back to the NFL, even in a backup role, was the end of everything good and decent.

I was about to go to bed when the doorbell rang.

As late as it was, and not expecting company this close to midnight, I smiled when I looked through the peephole and saw who it was on the front porch.

“We need to talk,” Ryan Morrissey said.

“Any subject in particular?”

“I need to quit.”





Forty



DANNY WOLF SAT ACROSS the dining-room table that, when he was growing up, he always thought should have been covered by a steel cage. This rare breakfast together hadn’t been an invitation—more like a command performance.

It wasn’t yet eight in the morning, but his mother was already dressed as if for some kind of photo shoot at one of the ladies’ lunches she seemed to attend on a daily basis. This woman, bless her heart, still treated getting dressed up, and dining out, like full-time jobs.

Elise Wolf thought nothing of changing her outfits yet gave no thought to, or acknowledgment of, her advancing age. “I always wonder what it will be like when I’m old,” Danny heard her say from time to time, playing her imagined role as the queen in her own version of The Crown.

Except she’s queen of the House of Wolves, Danny thought, not the House of Windsor.

“You’re sure this will work?” Elise Wolf said to him now, sipping some of her special tea. “I assured John that you had assured me that it would work to our mutual benefit.”

“I presented things to our coach in a way that I’m sure John Gallo would appreciate,” Danny said. “One of those offers I frankly don’t think he can refuse.”

She gave him one of her withering looks, one he didn’t have the heart to tell her didn’t scare him the way it had when he was a little boy.

Well, maybe still just a little bit.

“I certainly hope you don’t make your Godfather jokes in his presence. John is a legitimate businessman.”

Sure he is.

“You need to give me more credit.”

She sighed theatrically.

“I try, Daniel. Lord knows I try my goddamn ass off.”

If only, he thought, the rest of the world could hear how the queen of the manor really talks, especially to him. He’d heard much worse language, of course, from both his parents, especially when they’d start to go at each other. Had heard it his whole life. The Wolf children joked that if they’d had a swear pot for their parents when they were growing up, they wouldn’t have had to wait to inherit their share of the family fortune.

“Jenny won’t let this happen to her handpicked coach,” Danny said. “I thought about going to her first. I decided to go to him instead. Told him that either he quits or I go public. He asked if there was a third option. I told him to ask my sister—she knows everything.”

“That would be the option of her giving up control of the team,” his mother said. She sipped more tea. It was a habit her “holistic adviser” had convinced her would extend her longevity, even though all her children were convinced she was going to outlive the earth. “Is there any point in me asking if these allegations against the coach are true?”

“Doesn’t matter whether they are or they’re not,” Danny said. “If they get out there, he’s through. That’s how it works with MeToo. And he’s already got that assault rap on his résumé.”

“I worry that we keep underestimating Jenny. Because it turns out that she has even more of her sonofabitch father in her than she ever let on.”

It almost made him laugh.

“Don’t you mean she’s got more of you in her, Mother?”

“Oh, spare me,” she said dismissively, always her default tone with him. “Are we going to start up with all that old happy horseshit about how I was your father’s Nancy Reagan? That is, as they say, such false news.”

He could have corrected her, but doing that always pissed her off even more.

“All I know,” she continued, “is that your plan better work. Things can’t continue this way for the family.” She shook her head. “Your sonofabitch of a father is gone now, but I’m somehow still cleaning up his messes.”