The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(81)

“She told you to leave her office?” Barr said now. “As if she were the one giving the orders?”

“There was no point in the two of us continuing the conversation,” Gallo said. “But I assure you, it’s a temporary setback.”

“There seem to have been a series of those,” Barr said, “ones that have frequently turned out to be permanent rather than temporary.”

“They won’t matter in the end when we get what we want,” Gallo said.

“Ah, yes. Another assurance about what you continue to tell me is an inevitable conclusion to all this. But you also assured me that her brothers would have her under control by now. Only now you don’t even have both of them on your side, do you, John?”

“But we still have time on our side,” Gallo said. “We knew from the beginning that nothing would happen with the team until after the season, even if the other owners had voted her out of their little club.”

Barr tilted his head slightly, his mouth nearly, but not quite, curling into a grin, as if Gallo had said something amusing.

“Essentially, you’ve failed me again, haven’t you, John?” Barr said. “Remember when you told me how if we backed Jack Wolf with Wolf.com, he would weaponize the site even more than he ever did with the newspaper?” Barr leaned back, briefly closed his eyes, then focused them once again on Gallo. “Please show me how that has worked out for us, John.”

“There’s more that I can do,” Gallo said. “That we can do. We can still play the long game here and still get what you and I both want in the end.”

“No more games,” Barr said, shaking his head. “You were the one who convinced me that modern warfare was fought through the media, that we would destroy her there. You were the one who convinced me that because of your history with her father, as contentious as it was, you were the perfect lead man on this. That no one would question your aggressively going after the team with him out of the way. And yet? And yet she is still here, isn’t she, John? And she just threw you out of her office.”

Every time he used Gallo’s first name, it felt as if he were being slapped.

“Her brother is thrown out a window, and she is still here,” Barr said. “She goes to Los Angeles for a vote you tell me she cannot win.”

He smiled now.

“And yet she is still here,” Barr said again.

Gallo started to speak. Barr shook his head.

“You understand better than I do what the stakes are here,” Barr said. “You understand that I have a chance to control a city in a way that no private citizen ever has in all the city’s history. It is all right there for me. And now you let this cow continue to stand in my way.”

“Tell me how I can make this right,” Gallo said.

“Get rid of her,” Barr said.





Ninety-Six



JOHN GALLO HAD LIVED in the Belvedere section of San Francisco—just over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the big house overlooking the bay—since before his wife died.

It was a spectacular property, with a view that seemed to take in the entire bay at once and an expanse of yard in back that was the size of a football field and stretched to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the beach and the water below. Gallo had loved this place from the time he bought it, imagining it as his own personal version of Lands End Lookout.

But the house was too much for him now with his wife gone. He had decided that when he had concluded his business with Michael Barr, when Barr ended up with the football team, as Gallo knew he inevitably would, he would move back to the city, or even out of it—perhaps finally build a smaller house for himself on property not unlike this that he owned in Monterey.

Perhaps Elise Wolf would be willing to visit him there. She had never hated him the way her husband had, hated him the way her daughter now did. Gallo still held out hope that there was a chance for something to happen between them.

Erik Mason drove him back to Belvedere now. Gallo sat in the back of the Mercedes and poured himself a glass of Irish whiskey.

He told Mason about the last thing Barr said to him.

“There’s always one more loose end, isn’t there?” Gallo said.

“This time it will need to look like an accident,” Mason said. “But there are ways.”

“There are always ways,” Gallo said. He put his head back and closed his eyes. “You just have to be willing.”

“We should probably start talking about possible options right now,” Mason said. “It sounds as if Mr. Barr’s patience has run out.”

They went inside the house, and Gallo poured them both whiskeys. Then he took off his jacket and put on a sweater, and the two of them walked outside, across the back lawn toward the water, lit brilliantly tonight by the moon and stars on a rare cloudless night in San Francisco. Gallo once thought he might transform the city the way Michael Barr would when he got the Wolves.

“It was supposed to be simple once the father was out of the way,” Gallo said. “Then he gave the team to her.”

“No one could have seen that coming,” Mason said. “Certainly not you, sir.”

“She’s even more stubborn than her father was,” Gallo said, “as impossible as that is for me to believe.”

“Look what it got him,” Mason said. “His stubbornness, I mean. And look what it got her younger brother when he wouldn’t stop pushing until he found out things that only you and Mr. Barr were supposed to know.”