DANNY HEARD HIS DOORBELLring a few minutes before eight. His brother Jack was shouldering his way inside almost before Danny had the door all the way open.
“You chump,” Jack said in the form of greeting.
Danny had been expecting a visit like this since he’d gone back to the Wolves.
“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.”