Page 130 of The House of Wolves

“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.”

“And you, Erik.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Another loose end,” Gallo said. “Thomas Wolf, I mean. But it’s not as if he gave anybody a choice.”

“He wasn’t just another loose end,” Erik Mason said. “More like a loose cannon.”

Gallo drank, staring out at the sky and the water. It had struck him again tonight how well he continued to fool most of the people he encountered, how they still feared him the way they always had. How they still thought he possessed the kind of power that Michael Barr had.

“We’ll do what we need to do,” Gallo said to Erik Mason.

“As always,” Mason said. “When the situation on the ground changes, adjustments have to be made.”

“Do you think the girl will be the last loose end?” Gallo said.

“One of them,” Mason said.

“You’ll handle it,” Gallo said.

“Of course.”

Gallo turned to Erik Mason, extending his glass, saying they should drink to that. But Mason was no longer standing next to him.

Mason was behind John Gallo now, his arms around him, effortlessly lifting him into the air before Gallo realized what was happening, carrying him the few steps to the edge of the bluff before letting him go.

Ninety-Seven

A WOMAN WALKING HERdog found John Gallo’s body trapped by the rocks below his property in the late morning, before the current could carry him away. By the middle of the afternoon, Ben Cantor was in my office at Wolves Stadium, wanting to know what John Gallo and I had talked about when he had been with me here the previous afternoon.

“How’d you know he was here?” I said.

“Knowing stuff is kind of a hobby with me,” Cantor said.

I told him as much of the conversation as I could recall and what I’d said to him before he left.

“And that’s it?” Cantor said.

“Yes, Detective. That’s it.”

It was the first time I’d seen him since I walked out of the restaurant that night, right before Cantor and I had been turned into San Francisco’s fun couple by the media.

“You’re not leaving anything out this time?”