The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(86)

“Like destiny brought them together.”

“Or a bunch of murders.”

Before the call ended, he asked how I was holding up.

“Just trying to figure out a way to win one more game for the local football team.”

By then the stories about the two of us had finally run their course, absent any new information or photos. The public was even starting to lose interest in the death of John Gallo.

There had been a couple of days when the media had revisited the death of DeLavarious Harmon, the narcotics division of the San Francisco Police Department having concluded after a thorough investigation that his death had not been the result of foul play but an accidental overdose and that no member of the Wolves organization had been complicit in it.

Michael Barr hadn’t reached out again. Neither had Mason. I’d never heard of Barr having expressed an interest in buying the Wolves. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want them. I sometimes thought every rich guy in America wanted to own his own football team.

And I had found out firsthand how much some of them were willing to do to get one and gain entrance to the club.

How much do I still want to be in the club?

Now, there was a good question, one maybe I wouldn’t answer until the season ended.

Maybe as soon as tomorrow night.

I finished my wine. Turned off the Saturday night game between the Dolphins and Jets, which I’d been watching without really watching. There had been a missed call a few minutes ago from Ted. When I saw his name on the screen, I’d let it go straight to voice mail. I had no interest in speaking to the quarterback of the opposing team the night before a big game, whether I’d been married to the bastard or not.

It almost scared me how much I wanted this game. Not because it would mean he lost. Just because it would mean we won.

It’s like my father used to say when he told us all to hush and listen, that he had something important to say.

“You never understand how much you want the game until you have skin in it,” Joe Wolf said.

It was a little after midnight when I heard the loud pounding on my front door, heard somebody yelling for me to open up.

When I did open the door, I saw Billy McGee standing there, grinning at me, weaving from side to side, clearly drunk out of his mind, taking another swig from the Champagne bottle in his hand. He had sworn to me, up and down, that he would stay clean and sober. He had told me one day in my office that it was as if I had thrown him a life preserver.

Now this.

But why?

“You have got to be shitting me,” I said before he stumbled past me and fell face forward on the floor.

As if somebody had just tackled him from behind.

At that moment I felt exactly same way.





One Hundred Two



THE ONLY BREAK THAT we caught, if you could call it that, was that it was the Sunday night game, which meant that it didn’t start until five thirty San Francisco time, not the usual one o’clock.

I checked in with Ryan Morrissey an hour before kickoff.

Billy McGee had spent the night at my house, after I called his wife to tell her I had him and not to bother coming to pick him up. He was going to sleep it off right where he was. Ryan had come by to collect him in the morning and driven him straight to the stadium, where our medical staff had spent all morning and all afternoon with him, even putting him on an IV drip at one point. Our head trainer told Ryan that it was a good thing Billy hadn’t been driving the night before, simply because his blood alcohol level probably would have registered at around a million.

“Is he well enough to start?” I said.

“He’s going to start,” Ryan said. He sighed. “You know why I never ask players how they’re feeling? Because they might tell me.”

“But is he well enough to play in an NFL game?”

“It doesn’t matter, because he’s going to.”

Ryan paused.

“This kid has been acting like a punk and letting people down his whole life, starting with himself. We’re just the latest.”

Then he told me about another McGee—Max McGee, a wide receiver with the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl ever played. According to Ryan, Max stayed out all night in Los Angeles the night before, not arriving back at the team’s hotel until eight in the morning. He didn’t think he was going to play that day. Then the starting wide receiver got hurt, and Max McGee caught seven passes and scored two touchdowns and the Packers won.

“Some people, when they knew the whole story, called him the greatest Super Bowl hero of them all,” Ryan said. “Max said he was fine once he started figuring out which of the three balls he saw coming toward him was the real one.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“At least Billy’s stopped throwing up,” the coach of the Wolves said about his starting quarterback. Then he said he had to go; it was time to coach his team.

Then Billy McGee went out and played the first half as if he were still drunk.





One Hundred Three



WHILE BILLY MCGEE WAS still stumbling around, Ted Skyler was playing as if I had been crazy to ever let him go.

Billy threw interceptions the first two times the Wolves had the ball. Ted threw touchdown passes after both of them. Just like that, it was 14–0.