Page 112 of The House of Wolves

His head fell back down. He tried to lift it again but couldn’t, as if doing it once had already exhausted him. For a moment I thought he had passed out.

Then his lips were moving, barely.

“…set me up…”he said.

There was a back window in the apartment, if you could even call it an apartment. Cantor went to it, stared down. I walked over and stood next to him and saw that we were both looking down into an alley.

“If somebody could set up Thomas,” Cantor said, “they could certainly set up this jamoke.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“We can’t take him out the front,” Cantor said. “Once he’s on the street it will be like begging people to take pictures with their phones.”

“What are we going to do?” Ryan said.

“Jenny,” Cantor said, taking charge, “you bring my car around. Ryan, you and I will get him down the back stairs.”

Ben Cantor handed me his keys.

“The Wolves cap you gave me is in the back seat,” Cantor told me. “Have it ready to slap on his head when you pull around.”

I ran back down the front stairs to the car, eased it away from the hydrant, and made a left into a narrow opening, just wide enough for the car. Then I made another left and saw that no one was in the alley, at least for the moment.

I pulled up and opened the door to the back seat. Cantor and Ryan half carried and half dragged the quarterback of the Wolves to Cantor’s car. Ryan got into the back seat with him. I went around to the front passenger seat. Cantor got behind the wheel.

“Where to?” he said.

“The stadium,” I said. “I’ll call our team doctor and tell him to meet us there.”

As Cantor drove even more quickly than he had on the way over here, I turned around and looked at Billy McGee, head resting against the window. Ryan had somehow found a way to clean the blood off Billy’s face, so I could see the cut over Billy’s left eye, which was swollen to nothing more than a slit.

“Call my wife,” Billy said. He winced as he started to cough. “Tell her I didn’t let her down.”

“When we get to the stadium,” I said, “you can tell her yourself.”

As we pulled into the players’ lot at Wolves Stadium, I saw Dr. Ron Barnes waiting for us near the entrance.

Cantor and Ryan got Billy out of the car, placing his arms around their shoulders.

“You need help?” Ron Barnes said to them.

I said, “We all do.”

I walked behind Cantor and Ryan as they helped Billy toward the Wolves’ locker room.

Once we had him inside, my phone made the little jingle noise it makes when there’s a news alert.

Eighty-Four

THE IMAGES OF BILLYon that bed, exactly as we’d found him, blood all over him, the drug paraphernalia next to him and the tequila bottle at his feet, were already splashed across the home page of Wolf.com under the headline:

CRACKED AND SACKED

Amanda McGee arrived about fifteen minutes later. Barnes had Billy stretched out on one of the training tables while he stitched the cut over his eye. He had bandaged the wound on top of his right hand and said that he’d only given Billy a cursory exam but that there seemed to be no broken bones.

Amanda, a beautiful redhead, turned to the rest of us and said, “May my husband and I have the room, please?”

The rest of us walked back out into the locker room. Ryan was thinking out loud by then, almost stream of consciousness, saying that the way he understood the collective bargaining agreement, the league had the right to suspend Billy if it wanted to, but it wouldn’t happen before Sunday’s game once Billy appealed any suspension through the players’ union.