The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(48)

Does winning make everything I’m going through worthwhile?

I followed it up with what I thought was a very solid question:

Am I happier now than I was before the reading of the will, when the only wins and losses I had to worry about involved the Hunters Point Bears?

At least I hadn’t had to worry about my high school players this weekend, because we’d had an open Saturday in our schedule. I was glad to have the day off, as much of a safe place as the team and the school and the kids continued to be. And I was secretly relieved that I didn’t have to face the kids and answer their questions about slugging my brother until practice on Monday. I constantly stressed to them that they had to keep themselves under control on the field, no matter what the situation, and now I had hauled off and done what I did to my brother because I was the one who’d lost her head.

No matter how hard I tried to clear the image—not just my fist connecting with his face but also turning around and seeing Dowd pointing his phone at me like a gun—I kept going back there. Tomorrow I would hold my nose and formally apologize in public for hitting Jack, as I had promised Bobby Erlich and Thomas I would.

Like a good girl.

It just wouldn’t change how good hitting him had felt. No. It had been even better than that. It had felt awesome when I’d connected. Why not? He’d been throwing punches at me for weeks.

Only now I was being forced to apologize, as if I were the bad guy in this story. I still wasn’t happy about that, even though I knew Bobby Erlich was right.

Screw Jack, I thought now.

Screw him and the little rowboat he rode in on.

Probably the vodka starting to speak up.

It was near halftime of the Sunday night game when Thomas called. I could hear what sounded like a party going on in the background, laughter and loud voices and the occasional shout. I knew he’d invited a bunch of people to his suite at the stadium to watch our game. Maybe he’d decided to keep the party going and have everybody stay around and watch the Sunday night game with him. One more thing that hadn’t changed: the more people Thomas had around him, the better he liked it.

“I’m still at the suite,” he said.

“I can tell,” I said, then told him he had to speak up because I could barely hear him over the fun in the background.

Thomas said he would step outside. Even after he did, he kept his voice low, as if afraid somebody might be listening to him.

“Where are you?”

“Home celebrating,” I said. “Was that a win or was that a win?”

“It was all that,” Thomas said. “But that’s not why I’m calling.”

I could hear him tell somebody he’d be right back in.

“I need to see you tonight,” he said. Still keeping his voice conspiratorial. “I may have found out why they’re so desperate to get rid of us and what’s really going on here.”

His voice faded out: “…need to talk to somebody.”

I knew what cell service could be like at Wolves Stadium.

“Who’s they, little brother?”

“All of them,” he said, his voice not much more than a whisper now. “I’ll tell you the rest when I see you.”

He still hadn’t arrived when the game was over, but that wasn’t even slightly unusual with Thomas Wolf. He’d gotten a lot more reliable since rehab. It was why I trusted him enough to make him general manager. But he was still Thomas. Punctuality still wasn’t his strong suit. You invited him to dinner at a restaurant at your own peril.

I called and got the same voice mail message as always: “This is Thomas. You called my phone. You know what to do.”

Then I promptly lay down on the couch, thinking I would watch some of the highlight shows from a horizontal position, and proceeded to close my eyes and go right to sleep, as if the past few days—or the past month—had finally caught up with me.

It was the doorbell that awakened me. I reached over and found my phone on the coffee table and saw that it was past eleven. Nice going, Thomas, I thought. I pulled myself up off the couch and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, prepared to tell my brother that this was a new record for being late, even for him.

But when I looked through the peephole, it wasn’t my kid brother.

It was Ben Cantor standing on my front porch, about to reach for the doorbell again. And even though the image was distorted, I somehow knew, maybe instinctively knew, that this wasn’t Cantor the cute guy.

This was Cantor the cop.

When I opened the door he said, “It’s about Thomas.”





Fifty-Six



“THOMAS WOULDN’T KILL HIMSELF,” I kept saying to Cantor, when I could get the words out.

We were on my couch. I had collapsed into Cantor’s arms when he told me where Thomas’s body had been discovered at Wolves Stadium: in the stands below his suite. Back up in the suite, they’d found the syringe and the baggie filled with what they were sure was heroin and an empty bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

The crying was starting and stopping by now; there was no way for me to control it. Cantor had found the whiskey in the kitchen and poured me a glass, and I managed to choke it down. I told him I wanted him to drive me over to the stadium. Cantor said not yet, not when I was like this.

“Like what?”