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He smiled.

“Ah, your father’s daughter.”

“You’re happy about this, aren’t you?”

“You want me to lie?”

I said, “My dad always told me that you lied to stay in practice.”

“Your dad always said the last goal he had was to outlive me. Catch me up: How did that work out for him?”

“You really do still think you’re going to end up with the Wolves, don’t you?”

“What makes you think I’m going to stop with the Wolves?” he said.

Then he put his hand on my shoulder, quickly leaned over, already whispering in my ear before I could back away from him.

“Did he fall?” Gallo said. “Or was he pushed?”

Before I could answer, he was the one to walk away first, smiling at me one last time over his shoulder.

Shit,I thought.

The asshole had gotten the last word after all.

Six

JOHN GALLO SAT INthe back seat of his limousine as it pulled away from the VIP entrance to Wolves Stadium.

Usually he liked the kind of scrap he’d just had with Jenny Wolf. Lord knew he’d had enough of them with her father, going all the way back to the time when they’d had an agreement to go in on the Wolves together, until somehow Joe and his brother, the drunk, had found enough money to go it alone.

It really is true,Gallo thought.In the end you really do forget everything except the grudges.

But something bothered him about the girl. Teaching and coaching, even though she had a law degree from Stanford. How adorable. Even the other paper in town, theChronicle,had done a big story on her a couple of weeks ago. Joe Wolf’s daughter, coaching Hunters Point High. They acted like it was going to end up being a TV movie.

People might start to think that I’m the asshole,she’d had the nerve to say to him.

The only person who’d ever talked to him that way and gotten away with it had just washed up on Crissy Field East Beach.

Gallo picked up the phone on the console next to him, punched in a number that by now he knew by heart. Made sure to push a button and raise the window between him and his driver. John Gallo hadn’t made it this far by being a careless man.

He could hear the noise of the party—he thought of it as a party, anyway—in the background behind him.

“Is your sister going to be a problem?” Gallo said.

He didn’t wait for an answer, just ended the call right there. They both knew it wasn’t a question, it was an order. Make sure she wasn’t a problem.

Gallo hadn’t gotten this close to the prize—for all of them—by not sensing trouble. Somehow he knew this girl was trouble. And might eventually have to be taught some manners.

There wassomething about her that bothered John Gallo. He didn’t just hear her father in her voice. It was also in her attitude. Something in her eyes, the way she looked at him with contempt.

The father’s daughter.

He picked up the phone again and called a man he knew didn’t like surprises of any kind.

“We need to put somebody on the daughter,” Gallo said.

Seven