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One Hundred Seven

IT FELT LIKE THEfirst good news Ben Cantor had received since he’d been suspended.

“They banged the little creep just like that?” he said when Jenny called. “And he had no warning that he was in trouble with them?”

“Somehow they found out he was in it with Michael Barr and Gallo,” she said. “I don’t know how they did, but they did. And they knew damn well that he’d hired Bert Patricia to follow us instead of using NFL security, which is the protocol. But it was being in business with Barr that took him down.”

“Lie down with dogs,” Cantor said.

“Frost finally told the commish that if he was going to be this kind of whore to make sure he got his money up front next time,” she told Ben Cantor. “And then he laid into him all over again about pimping the league out to somebody like Michael Barr.”

“Pimpandwhore?”

“What can I tell you? The old boy was on a roll at that point.”

Cantor said, “I thought commissioners like Abrams make more money than most players. You’re telling me it still wasn’t enough?”

“Apparently not. John Gallo didn’t think he had enough, either. Nor does Michael Barr. My father was probably the same way.”

“How’d he leave it with them?” Cantor said. “The commissioner, I mean?”

“He said they’d given him no choice but to retire, now that they’d betrayed his trust in this manner.”

“No shit,” Cantor said. “Histrust? Like they betrayedhim?”

He laughed.

“I’m almost positive I read somewhere that karma is a bitch.”

“I saved the best part for last,” Jenny said. “Before Abrams left, he turned and pointed a finger at me, like he was still the most powerful guy in the room, and said that this wasn’t over between us.”

“Him and you,” Cantor said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And how did you respond to a terrifying threat like that?”

“I told him that he probably knew league rules a lot better than I did,” Jenny said, “but I was pretty sure that when you got your ass kicked the way he just had, they didn’t let you play overtime.”

They spoke for a few more minutes more about the scene in A. J. Frost’s suite after Abrams had left and about Jenny’s riding to the commissioner’s party with Frost and the rest of them in one of those giant-size party limos.

“Like we were all going to the prom together.”

Eventually she got around to asking Cantor how he was doing, the two of them not having spoken since she’d gotten to Miami. He told her that he was not just suspended without pay, he’d also been asked to turn over all his files relating to the deaths of Joe Wolf, Thomas Wolf, and John Gallo and ordered to stay away from the ongoing investigation being conducted by the new detectives assigned to the cases.

“So they’ve completely shut you down,” Jenny Wolf said.

“Well,” Cantor said, “they think they have.”

Then he asked her to check in with him later—he had another call coming in that he needed to take.

One Hundred Eight

CANTOR HAD BEEN WONDERINGwhen he would call.

He’d been following him off and on for a couple of weeks and doing almost nothing to hide the fact that he was. He’d done the same thing with Danny Wolf and his brother Jack, just not as often. He wanted them all to know that he was still on their asses, maybe for no other reason than that he was going crazy with boredom.

But there was a through line, he knew, from the night Joe Wolf went into the water to the night John Gallo did the same, a line that ran directly through the Wolf brothers and the guy now speaking to him at the other end of the line.