The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(43)

He’d never been much of a drinker, even in college. The strongest drug he’d ever used, as far as I knew, was weed. No, the real drug to which he’d always been addicted was power, maybe over everybody except Joe Wolf when he was still alive. Thomas had at least wanted to kick his habit for hard drugs. But as a career bully, Jack didn’t see any need to change. He liked himself just the way he was.

“This must be important,” he said when he answered the phone.

I told him then, letting him know I’d read the story about Thomas and what garbage I thought it was and with whom I was replacing him. He didn’t seem remotely surprised about Megan, just saying, “I always felt as if actually screwing me wasn’t going to be enough for her.”

There was a pause then at his end.

“You’re really doing this.”

“Not doing,” I said. “Did. Done. Past tense. You’re gone.”

“And let’s say I choose not to accept this decision because of the way my contract is written, and show up for work tomorrow morning.”

“At that point, you will be escorted out of the building by security.”

He laughed.

“Something funny here?”

“Just to me. But that happens a lot.”

There was one more pause before my brother said to me, “What the hell took you so long, you silly cow?”





Fifty



TWO DAYS LATER, I was in my office looking over the scouting reports for our Sunday game in Denver when Thomas came bursting in. He often treated Andy Chen’s desk as nothing more than a speed bump—more manic sober than he was when he was still using.

“Remember how Dad always said that the most dangerous wolf was a wounded wolf?” he said. “Well, he was right.”

He came around my desk and asked me to clear my laptop screen, which I did, then he leaned over and began hitting some keys.

“Any particular destination you’re looking for on the old information highway?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The gutter.”

He stepped back and pointed. There, taking up most of my screen, was an image of a wolf, teeth bared, looking a lot more ferocious than the one we used for our team logo.

Underneath the illustration ran a few lines of jagged red type:

Welcome to Wolf.com, where you can come to find all the news that the rest of them don’t want you to see. Starting now, the only ones who need to be afraid of wolves are the ones who are afraid of telling you the truth.



Thomas reached past me again and clicked on the arrow, and then we were in.

“Jack,” I said to Thomas, as if that explained everything.

“Unleashed,” Thomas said.

“Like he wasn’t already?”

“Take a good look at the home page and decide for yourself,” Thomas said.

He moved aside. I leaned closer to the screen, though I quickly realized I could have seen the two biggest headlines from my outer office, or maybe outer space.

One was about Thomas and DeLavarious Harmon. I clicked on it and saw it had been written by Seth Dowd, “Content Manager, Wolf.com.” It was basically the same story for which I’d fired Jack and fired Dowd himself about an hour later. He’d told me over the phone that I hadn’t heard the last of him. At least he’d been right about something.

The second one was about Ryan and Donna Kilgore, also written by Dowd. I read the first several paragraphs and saw that Dowd had placed her original allegations, and statement, up much higher in the story than her second statement, the one in which she’d denied everything after we’d confronted her.

This version included a quotation from Danny Wolf.

“It’s pretty clear,” he said, “that after I presented Donna’s story to my sister, and our coach, money changed hands. I’m guessing quite a lot of it.”

Donna Kilgore was unavailable for comment. Dowd had written that Ryan and I were, too, though he’d never reached out to me. I could check with Ryan but assumed that Dowd hadn’t reached out to him, either. There were clearly about as many journalistic rules at play here as there would have been in dogfighting.

I looked briefly at the rest of the site. There was a story about a married city councilman and a teenage girl one year out of Convent & Stuart Hall—where she was a classmate of the councilman’s youngest daughter—including a text-message exchange. There were naked pictures of one of the city’s longest-tenured eleven o’clock anchors that someone had shot in her dressing room at the station.

And there was the promise of a message board, advertised as a page that would be required reading for all San Francisco once it was up and running by the end of the day.

I pointed to that and said to Thomas, “Another reason to live.”

I reached over and closed my screen, feeling as if I still needed my bottle of Purell from back in the COVID days.

“In the end, they got these stories out there,” I said to Thomas.

Thomas put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Like they took us both out with one shot.”





Fifty-One



CANTOR LIKED TO SURPRISE PEOPLE. Get them out of their comfort zone. Off their game, if he could manage, which he usually could. It’s why he rarely set up appointments for interviews when he was working a case. Just show up and flash his badge, like he was shining a light into their eyes.