The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(58)

Danny wanted to tell Gallo to ask Jack himself. But he didn’t.

By now he knew that Gallo prided himself on not raising his voice, as if doing that would be a show of weakness. But he was raising it now.

“You know how this is going to play out!” Gallo snapped at him. “Oprah will make your sister seem more sympathetic than that actress the prince married!”

“May I speak?” Danny said.

“By all means.”

“I have been talking to the other owners since I got here,” he said. “I spoke to at least a dozen today. I’m telling you that she doesn’t have the votes. She may think Oprah can drag her across the goal line. But I’m telling you, it can’t happen. This is all about the numbers now.”

Gallo offered a thin smile. It was a gesture that always made Danny feel as if he were being knifed.

“You’re telling me,” he said, clearly mimicking Danny.

He makes my father, Danny thought, seem more lovable than Oprah.

“Are you suggesting that this interview isn’t going to change any minds?” Gallo said. “Or any votes?”

“It’s a goddamn television interview,” Danny said, “not a presidential address!”

Suddenly he was shouting, too.

Gallo stared at him.

“Conducted by a powerful and influential woman who most people probably like more than the president,” Gallo said.

“You don’t even know what she’s going to say.”

Danny knew it sounded as if he were whining, probably because he was.

“You occasionally come across as a bright boy, Daniel. So see if you can figure out how your fellow owners might react if they get the idea that Oprah might begin to think badly of them—and that she might tell all the people who hang on her every word that she thinks badly of them.”

“This vote is just business,” Danny said.

“Precisely,” Gallo said. “And they may very well make the determination that it’s bad for business if a group largely comprising wealthy and powerful men comes across as bullying poor Jenny Wolf.”

There was something else going on here today with John Gallo besides his obvious anger and frustration about the interview. Danny found himself wondering what it took to make Gallo afraid.

But of what?

Or of whom?

“She doesn’t have the votes. I’ll be back running the team by next Sunday’s game.”

The house phone next to Gallo rang. He picked it up, listened, said, “Tell him to come up,” then put the phone back down.

“I have another appointment,” he said to Danny. “Now, you get back over to your hotel and get your ass back to work.”

Talking to Danny like he wanted him to go pick up his shirts.

Danny was in the elevator, the doors about to close, when he saw someone he thought he recognized step out of the next elevator bank.

Danny waited until the little guy passed by him, then he poked his head out and watched him walk down the hall and knock on Gallo’s door.

“Mr. Gallo,” the guy said.

“Well, well, well,” Danny heard John Gallo say. “The famous Bobby Erlich.”





Sixty-Six



THE INTERVIEW WITH OPRAH was scheduled for eight Eastern time and would run three hours later on the West Coast.

I was scheduled to have a drink in the bar downstairs with Bobby Erlich around six o’clock, right before the owners’ reception, but he had called to say he was running late and might not show up at all.

“It’s Hollywood, baby!” he said, as if that were all the explanation he needed. “It’s when I turn into Bobby Erlich on steroids!”

The Oprah people had just sent me the link to the interview, which I was about to watch on my laptop. I remembered the one she’d done with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a couple of years ago, remembered watching along with everybody else in America that night. Only now I was the one sitting across from her in a huge house overlooking the ocean that her people had rented for the occasion, the backyard behind us seeming bigger than the field at Wolves Stadium.

“Go big or go home,” Oprah had said when we’d arrived and I’d been properly blown away by the house and the view.

Oprah got me to open up about my difficult relationship with my father and how I’d walked away from him and the family. She asked me about Jack and Danny, and I told her that my relationship with them now hadn’t changed much since our growing-up years. I managed to hold it together, barely, when she asked about Thomas.

Fun shots of me coaching the Hunters Point Bears lifted the mood.

“You can take the girl out of football,” I said, shrugging. “But I discovered that you can’t take football out of the girl.”

Oprah didn’t pull any punches or go easy on me. She’d let me know going in that no subject was off-limits. She asked about Ted and the decision to release him from the Wolves, joking that since I was the one who’d filed for divorce, it was technically the second time I’d fired him. She wanted to know if I was motivated by business or vindictiveness.

I asked her if she’d ask a man that question. She smiled an Oprah smile and let out a shriek and said, “You got me!”

Then she focused on my trying to punch Jack Wolf’s lights out.