The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(76)

“You stupid chump,” Jack said.

When Danny turned around, Jack was standing just a few feet away from him, and when he took half a step forward, Danny flinched, unable to stop himself. But then he’d been in a defensive crouch with Jack pretty much his whole life, more afraid of him than he was of their father, just because he knew the kind of violence his brother had always carried around inside him.

“You didn’t even have the guts to tell me yourself,” Jack said. “But then you never did have any guts, did you, Danny boy?”

Danny boy.

It’s what Joe Wolf had called him as a way of belittling him, even when he was still a boy.

“I’m not staying long,” Jack said, clenching and unclenching his fists as he paced in front of Danny. “I just want you to explain to me what the holy hell you were thinking.”

“There’s no point,” Danny said. “I knew you’d react this way. And Gallo, too. I decided this on my own.”

“You don’t decide shit on your own!” Jack screamed at him, sounding exactly like John Gallo as he did.

He faked a punch now. Danny jerked back, staggering into the door. Remembering another time when he’d seen his brother this full of rage, not even trying to contain himself that time.

It was when they were teenagers. He and Jack had come back from a pickup basketball game in the park. There had been a beef with the other team over a foul call. Jack had ended up on the ground. When he got up to complain, the biggest kid on the other team had broken his nose with one punch. When Danny tried to step in, he’d caught an even worse beating.

When they told their father what had happened, he called them little girls for walking away. Telling them again—the same old song—that he kept forgetting he had three other daughters.

But it turned out to be the day when Jack decided he’d had enough and proceeded to give his father so much of a beating that Elise Wolf finally called the police because she was afraid Jack might beat Joe Wolf to death.

“I put this team together,” Danny said. “I have a right to see things through.”

“Do you know how pathetic you sound? You’re willing to throw everything away to win a few goddamn football games?”

Jack shook his head. “Maybe our father,” he said, “maybe he did have more than one daughter. Except that even she’s got more balls than you do.”

The words just came out of Danny then.

“Maybe you should just kill us, too. Jenny and me both.”

Jack stopped pacing now.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“What it means is that you hated Dad more than the rest of us put together,” Danny said. “You hated Thomas for taking Jenny’s side after she got the team and the paper.” He paused. “And you were the one who nearly killed Dad when we were kids.”

“You accusing me of something?”

“I’m just tired of Gallo telling me what to do,” Danny said. “I’m tired of you telling me what to do.”

Jack laughed at him.

“So what—you’re going to let our sister tell you what to do instead?”

“I have to get to the office,” Danny said. “Do what you have to do, Jack.”

No holding back now.

“Even if it means acting like John Gallo’s bitch.”

Jack hit him then, threw a punch with his right hand that just exploded into Danny’s face, catching him under his left eye and knocking him hard into the front door.

Then he was on him, hitting him again, harder this time, squarely on the nose, and putting Danny down.

When Danny put a hand to his face, he saw it was covered in blood. Jack just stared down at him, eyes still full of rage.

In that moment, Danny felt as if he were looking up at his father.

Or their father’s killer.





Ninety-One



“YOU CAN’T RUN THESE pictures on the front page of the paper,” I said to Megan Callahan in her office at the Tribune. “Or on our home page.”

We had been going at each other, her door closed, since she’d called and asked me to come over, telling me there was a situation we needed to address immediately. I said that didn’t sound good. She said it wasn’t even close to being good and that she’d explain when I got there.

The situation involved a series of photographs of Ben Cantor and me at Harris’ steak house. One had me leaning down to kiss him on the lips. Another had the two of us leaning across the table, my hand covering his. There were similar pictures from the night we’d eaten at Fogata, where Cantor had said the paparazzi wouldn’t find us.

So somebody has been following me all along.

“If we don’t run them,” Megan said, “you can explain to the next managing editor of the Tribune why we didn’t run pictures that everybody except Stars and Stripes is going to have within the next hour or so.”

I heard a ping from her phone. She was on the other side of her desk. She hit some keys on her huge laptop screen, then swiveled it so I could see the home page of Wolf.com.

“Annnnnnnd,” she said, “we’re off.”

They’d gone with the one of me kissing Cantor when I’d arrived that night, headlined:

UNDERCOVER(S) COP