The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(39)

The suite had been quite loud all afternoon but went quiet now.

“Okay,” Thomas said. “This shit just got very real.”

After Billy handed the ball off on first down, Joe Buck said to Troy Aikman on television, “So far so good. Nobody got arrested.”

Second and ten. It went back to being so quiet in the suite that I thought I could hear my own breathing.

“It’s a passing down,” Troy Aikman said. “I expect they’ll give him an easy one to get him into the flow of the game.”

It was exactly what Ryan, who had taken over the play calling, tried to do. Billy was supposed to straighten up once he’d taken the snap from center, then throw quickly to Calvin Robeson on the outside. In theory, the ball wouldn’t even have to travel ten yards in the air.

But the Eagles cornerback was expecting the same kind of throw, reading Billy McGee’s eyes the whole time, then stepping in front of Calvin and intercepting the ball and running sixty yards, untouched, for a touchdown.

Now it was all of Wolves Stadium that had gone into a stunned silence in response to how suddenly and disastrously the day had changed for the home team.

“Well,” Thomas said, “at least everybody knows he’s back.”

I said, “Remind me of something. Who took that shot to the head—my ex-husband or Money?”

The next time we got the ball, Billy was nearly intercepted again. By the time the Wolves punted the ball away, he still hadn’t completed a pass, at least not to anybody on our team.

I whispered to Thomas, “Plenty of time.”

Thomas whispered back, “I’m starting to wish he was still doing time.”

We were still behind 24–17 when we got the ball on our ten yard line with just under a minute left in the game. Billy’s first-down pass was batted down at the line of scrimmage. The next one he threw wildly out-of-bounds.

Third and ten.

If we didn’t get a first down, the game was over. The Eagles knew it, too, and blitzed Billy, chasing him back into the end zone. One guy nearly tackled him for a safety, but somehow Billy got away, running hard to his left.

Then a split second before he ran out of room and ran out-of-bounds, he stopped. And in that moment he seemed to remember the player he used to be. He had just enough time and room, before being hit from behind, to throw the ball as far as he could down the sideline to Calvin Robeson.

Who was wide open.

“Where’d everybody go?” Thomas said from the seat next to me.

We both watched then as Calvin, behind the defense by ten yards, caught the ball in stride and ran away from everybody for the ninety-yard pass-and-run play that brought us to within a point, 24–23.

Once we kicked the extra point, the game would go into overtime. Not quiet any longer at Wolves Stadium. Not even close.

Except that now there was a close-up on the huge television screen in Thomas’s suite of Billy McGee up in Ryan Morrissey’s face, pointing at his coach and then pointing back at the field, finally taking his helmet off as if he suddenly wanted to chuck it as far as he’d just thrown the ball to Calvin Robeson.

Billy’s back was to the camera when something rather amazing happened, almost as amazing as the crazy touchdown play we’d just witnessed.

The head coach of the Wolves smiled. And nodded. And then waved the kicking team off the field and the offense back on it.

It meant we were about to try a do-or-die two-point conversion.

“He talked him into trying to win it right here,” I said to Thomas.

“Or lose it.”

What happened next seemed to happen fast in real time. Billy dropped back to take the snap. But the instant the ball was in his hands, he went running straight up the middle, taking off from around the two yard line and launching himself into the air and into the end zone as if he were flying.

When he landed, the score was Wolves 25, Eagles 24.

It was the way the game ended. I realized I hadn’t moved from my chair since Billy McGee had run onto the field. But I did notice that I was breathing normally again.

I turned to my brother now and bumped him some fist.

“Money,” I said.





Forty-Six



CANTOR SAT OUTSIDE THE VIP entrance to Wolves Stadium and waited. He had been a cop for twenty years and a detective for the last ten of that. He was good at waiting by now.

Another young detective had asked him one time for any advice he might have, and Cantor had said, “Hang around and hope something interesting develops.”

Today he wanted something interesting to happen if he followed Jack Wolf.

He’d decided it was Jack’s turn to go back into the barrel today. Jack, the rowing guy. The one Cantor thought was the real prick of the family. Cantor had interviewed him once already, seeing if he could get a rise out of him. But the second Wolf son had dismissed the idea that he could have rowed out to the boat that night, tossed his father into the water, made sure his father didn’t come up, and rowed back to shore.

Wolf told him that he could go ask someone who’d been working at the Bair Island Aquatic Center if he’d taken his scull out that day—or night. Cantor didn’t have to be told. He’d already called over there.

Another box he’d checked, even though it didn’t mean Jack Wolf couldn’t have gotten another scull somewhere else. Or swum out there. Or that he couldn’t have been the one who stowed away.