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Third and ten.
If we didn’t get a first down, the game was over. The Eagles knew it, too, and blitzed Billy, chasing him back into the end zone. One guy nearly tackled him for a safety, but somehow Billy got away, running hard to his left.
Then a split second before he ran out of room and ran out-of-bounds, he stopped. And in that moment he seemed to remember the player he used to be. He had just enough time and room, before being hit from behind, to throw the ball as far as he could down the sideline to Calvin Robeson.
Who was wide open.
“Where’d everybody go?” Thomas said from the seat next to me.
We both watched then as Calvin, behind the defense by ten yards, caught the ball in stride and ran away from everybody for the ninety-yard pass-and-run play that brought us to within a point, 24–23.
Once we kicked the extra point, the game would go into overtime. Not quiet any longer at Wolves Stadium. Not even close.
Except that now there was a close-up on the huge television screen in Thomas’s suite of Billy McGee up in Ryan Morrissey’s face, pointing at his coach and then pointing back at the field, finally taking his helmet off as if he suddenly wanted to chuck it as far as he’d just thrown the ball to Calvin Robeson.
Billy’s back was to the camera when something rather amazing happened, almost as amazing as the crazy touchdown play we’d just witnessed.
The head coach of the Wolves smiled. And nodded. And then waved the kicking team off the field and the offense backonit.
It meant we were about to try a do-or-die two-point conversion.
“He talked him into trying to win it right here,” I said to Thomas.
“Or lose it.”
What happened next seemed to happen fast in real time. Billy dropped back to take the snap. But the instant the ball was in his hands, he went running straight up the middle, taking off from around the two yard line and launching himself into the air and into the end zone as if he were flying.
When he landed, the score was Wolves 25, Eagles 24.
It was the way the game ended. I realized I hadn’t moved from my chair since Billy McGee had run onto the field. But I did notice that I was breathing normally again.
I turned to my brother now and bumped him some fist.
“Money,” I said.
Forty-Six
CANTOR SAT OUTSIDE THEVIP entrance to Wolves Stadium and waited. He had been a cop for twenty years and a detective for the last ten of that. He was good at waiting by now.
Another young detective had asked him one time for any advice he might have, and Cantor had said, “Hang around and hope something interesting develops.”
Today he wanted something interesting to happen if he followed Jack Wolf.
He’d decided it was Jack’s turn to go back into the barrel today. Jack, the rowing guy. The one Cantor thought was the real prick of the family. Cantor had interviewed him once already, seeing if he could get a rise out of him. But the second Wolf son had dismissed the idea that he could have rowed out to the boat that night, tossed his father into the water, made sure his father didn’t come up, and rowed back to shore.
Wolf told him that he could go ask someone who’d been working at the Bair Island Aquatic Center if he’d taken his scull out that day—or night. Cantor didn’t have to be told. He’d already called over there.
Another box he’d checked, even though it didn’t mean Jack Wolf couldn’t have gotten another scull somewhere else. Or swum out there. Or that he couldn’t have been the one who stowed away.
No matter how hard he tried, Ben Cantor couldn’t make Jenny Wolf for murder, even if she was a strong enough swimmer to make it to Oakland and back. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t just because he was attracted to her—it was that he honestly didn’t believe she had it in her.
Could he ever see the two of them together when this was over? Maybe. Provided she wasn’t the one; provided she and her kid brother weren’t in on it together.
Could it be Thomas, who Rachel Wolf said had talked about wanting his father dead? Sure. Except nobody else he’d talked to had mentioned Thomas ever saying anything like that. Just wife number 2.
From the start, Cantor had been skeptical that Danny Wolf had the guts to do it, as much as he’d lost once the will was read. But Cantor knew better than to assume anything in cases like this, had learned the hard way not to always trust his gut. As far as he was concerned, at least for now, Danny was just a weasel with daddy issues.
Jack Wolf continued to be the one who interested Cantor the most. The one Cantor saw as being the lone wolf in all ways, even as he’d teamed up with Danny to ruin their sister’s life.
