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“I’ve learned that only opens me up to heartbreak. Or opens you up to heartbreak. Or both of us.”

“He act like somebody who might go home and jump?” Cantor said.

“Because of a football team?”

“Somebody threw your father into the water over a football team,” Cantor said, “and someone threw your brother out a window. Maybe the same person threw Gallo off a cliff.”

“Let me know when you figure it out.”

“Is this the way it’s going to be with us from now on?”

“I’m not really sure, Detective. But if you don’t have any further questions for me, I have a team meeting to attend.”

“With the Wolves?”

“The Hunters Point Bears, as a matter of fact.”

Cantor went down the hall to talk to Danny Wolf about the death of John Gallo. I drove over to the high school. Chris Tinelli, my quarterback, was the one who’d emailed me earlier and said he and the other players wanted to meet with me in the gym before practice.

The Bears’ first playoff game was scheduled for Saturday, against Archbishop Riordan. If we won, the championship game would be in two weeks. I’d already arranged that it would be played at Wolves Stadium, whether the Bears were in it or not.

The players were waiting for me when I got there, already suited up for practice. They were seated in bleachers that had been pulled down off the gym walls, as if this were some kind of assembly. When I walked in, it occurred to me how good it was to see them. I’d missed three consecutive practices last week and then been in Seattle when we’d nearly suffered our first loss of the season.

I looked up at them and grinned and said, “Why don’t I make a few opening comments and then throw it open to questions?”

Nobody laughed.

Crickets.

Chris Tinelli had been sitting in the bottom row of the bleachers. He got up now and walked up to me, his face serious, his rubber cleats sounding loud on the gym floor.

“What’s going on, Chris?” I said to him.

He took a deep breath, looked up at his teammates, and then said, “We don’t want you to coach us anymore.”

I looked at him as if I hadn’t heard him correctly.

“I’m sorry. What did you just say?”

“We feel bad about it, Coach. We really do. But we’re kind of firing you.”

Ninety-Eight

“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS, CHRIS,”I said. “You know how important you are to me. How important you all are.”

But everything about him, everything in the air we were all breathing, told me he wasn’t joking at all. And neither were his teammates.

“Well, you sure don’t act like we’re all that important lately. We don’t know when you’re going to be around and when you’re not going to be around. And we nearly lost the other day because youweren’taround.”

Carlos Quintera stood now, halfway up the bleachers.

“You’re always talking about choices. It seems to us like you’ve made yours. And it’s not us.”

“But you guys reallydoknow I’ve had a lot going on, right?” I said, and I knew how lame that sounded almost before the words were out of my mouth.

“We’ve got a lot going on, too,” Chris Tinelli said quietly. “And our stuff matters just as much to us as your stuff does to you. Maybe more.”

And I knew he was right.